With the talk lately about The Decemberists, I decided to Google around a bit, and I came across that few months old article about the Decemberists with the gang raping, and I was kind of struck by this question asked:

Can we imagine, for a moment, what this song would be like if Meloy hadn’t couched it in elaborate language and a pseudo-historical setting? Suppose “A Cautionary Song” were set in a modern-day housing project or a trailer park instead of a 19th-century port city; suppose Meloy asked the crowd to yell “PUSSY!” instead of “MAIDENHEAD!” Do you think The Decemberists would be able to get a crowd of pretentious white indie kids in Portland to cheer and clap for that song?

It sort of seems like the question was answered just a couple months later:

“Bitch is a stripper!” he yelled, and lots of people cheered and laughed at the prospect of the bitch being a stripper. “Why come to an Odd Future show if you gon’ get mad?” he asked. “Pussy musta got like five licks. Bitch is a fuckin’ stripper, yo. You can go home if you don’t like it.”

I think the moral of the story is that maybe everybody is terrible, patriarchy tends to span race, and social-economic meanness exists wherever capital is king.