Praise be to hamtunes for linking to the (the link to) this Salon piece.

I stand by what I wrote about Odd Future last year, namely,

Odd Future is poised to blow up, and the music community can exploit them for the sake of thrills, or they can help nurture their talents.

How the critical community can “help nurture their talents” is maybe the big question. It’s not really the critical community’s task to nurture anyone’s talents, per se. But as Nir Rosen may tell you, your job opportunities contract and expand in proportion to how much of an asshole you are and how willing people are to smooth over your being an asshole.

Matthew Perpetua tweeted,

The thing about the Odd Future performance is that it proved that they’re great when they cut out the rape rap and have a great drummer.

a sentiment I agree with 100%. In a lot of ways, I think Tyler is simply “better than” rapping about rape-kidnap fantasies. He’s very talented, and funny. He and his group also spin a lot of twisted, horrifying fantasies. Kanye^3 type stuff.

As far as the Salon piece goes, I think it’s great. Drew Grant, a woman, expressing huge misgivings about a rap group known primarily for, again, its well-fleshed out rape fantasies, is something we probably need to see more of. It’s like on the Internet, if no one talks about it then it doesn’t exist. But in Real Life, people are getting raped all the time, whether they’ve heard of Odd Future or not. I know it seems unrelated, but it’s not.

There are a few funny confluences here. For one, she grilled Foster Kamer about how we got here with Odd Future. Kamer, who tweeted and wrote up a storm yesterday equivocating mob rapists with mob, uh, anti-rapists. Who earlier today linked back Tom Scocca’s piece that denounced him (I was going to say “called him out,” but Scocca does call Kamer “unbelievably, monstrously wrong”). I don’t even know what to make of it, except that rape apologists tend toward the unrepentant, and pro-rape music is largely just fine as long as it’s got lots of SWAG.

Maybe Odd Future is Justin Bieber through a glass darkly. I made a point yesterday that what a teenager thinks about rape and abortion isn’t as important as how influential that teenager is. That was a case of a super-popular musician making a pretty large public blunder. It’s wrong and stupid—but it makes sense. You can’t make a public blunder like that unless you’re already popular. Odd Future is an obscure rap group who’s getting major attention despite (or because of?) its stance on rape. This is like if Bieber’s “Baby” were a pro-abortion, rape-just-happens type of song. And still became a huge smash hit. I’m not really sure what I’m missing here.

Again, I think Tyler and Earl could and maybe should be huge rap stars, and I’d love to see that happen. But if they’re going to rap about slapping faggots and raping bitches, then I don’t want to be a part of it.