I heard you were asking about whether or not people can just like Kanye West for his music. Objectivism alarms ringing aside; that's like asking whether or not people can just like pizza for its taste. Sure people like music and highly controversial performers "just for their music". But they also can only understand that music in the cultural and personal contexts that they come from. You can't just say, "Well this is music and there's no connection to the culture around it." Just like you can't say, "I love pizza but I hate the smell of it. And the feel. And the price it costs to purchase it." There does not exist a single attribute, like "just his music", that exists outside of the expansive and infinite context it is born and operates within. Because as long as you're focusing on what "the music" just is, you're taking into account and excluding every other function that that music performs. "The music" exists with "the culture" and "the economics" and "the politics" just off in the periphery.
You also have to ask if the performers themselves want to be understood just for "the music". If their image-related aspects (Kanye's twitter, "George Bush doesn't care about black people", etc.; Odd Future's... everything) are so important to their presence as artists, then they have to have an impact and bearing within the music. Focusing on "just the music" means, ultimately, you aren't listening to the the music. If you're just focusing on "the music", you might as well be listening to the same song over and over and over again by one artist because cutting out the cultural signifiers behind "the music" makes it meaningless on the artistic end.
I guess, ultimately, your question simply is: is it possible for people to judge cultural artifacts without contextualizing them. The answer, just like the answer to the pizza question, is no.
Asked by
redneckzilla
Oh I started writing you a long Ask, and then I decided I wasn’t into it. Let me start by addressing this first thing (to my mind) which comes before this, but this comes before mine because I saw it on your Tumblr, but only after I ceased writing my long Ask.
It doesn’t make sense to me to talk in an academic way about the bigger isms with regard to someone like Syd saying “I’m not a feminist” because it comes from an entirely different area of knowledge. It’s like, I imagine, sending someone a letter in Italian when they don’t read Italian. Why talk about one feminism as if there’s one feminism? Well, because that’s why we have words. Otherwise, we’d talk by throwing printed matter at each other—it would be more violent, but would play out very slow like. But there is a large idea of feminism that I think is in the air, not one that everyone shares, but enough of one that when someone says the word, it makes a bit of sense within almost any context. And from there, you can talk it out with them and see where the edges of it are and where its hinges are and you can start to have a meaningful exchange of thoughts and ideas. But saying 1) It doesn’t make any sense at all to talk about a concept called feminism, or 2) you’re not allowed to talk about it until you read all the syllabuses in all the possible worlds is not really something I’m interested in.
There is such a thing as listening to music while you’re running or dancing or at a party, and there are connections you make between yourself and the music and between yourself and the world, which are spurred on by the music. And these non-intellectual connections can be analyzed in various ways. But—
The thing about Kanye West is this: I Do Not Trust Anyone Talking About Kanye West Unless They Talk At Least As Much If Not More About His Music (The Stuff He’s Ostensibly Good At And Famous For) Than How Much They Talk About What They Think “Predominantly White Males” Think About Things.
End.
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Story.
