If I was inclined to chose a moral surrogate for the wrongs of misogyny , violence, racism… I would choose the jokey power plays of a Jay-Z over the confused insanity of a Tyler, the Conqueror.
Art may only have to answer to its own mores but we have to answer elsewhere. The picture above is taken from Kubricks film of Anthony Burgess' novel "A Clockwork Orange". Burgess positions an old adage and a self-evident one, free will is the will to do bad. free will to do good is irrelevant. But great art will question the ramifications of the act. The woman above is violently raped in what is considered a lasciviously filmed sexual assault. her husband is tied up and forced to watch.
Now, if this was pornographic that would be it. But the movie revisits the house a couple of years later and the woman is dead, the husband, who is paralyzed from the waste down, blames the rape.
If the scene is sexual titillation from rape and violence, the result certainly isn't.
Jay-Z's "Nigga What, Nigga Who" is an undoubted masterpiece but it is a moral horrorshow and Tyler, The Creator and Anthony Burgess isn't. Here is a verse:
"Got a condo with nuttin but condoms in it
The same place where the rhymes is invented
So all I do is rap and sex, imagine how I stroke
See how I was flowin on my last cassette?
Rapid-fire like I'm blastin a Tec, never jam though
Never get high, never run out of ammo
Niggaz hatin n shit cause I slayed your bitch
You know your favorite, I know it made you sick
And now you're, actin raw but you never had war
Don't know how to carry your hoe, wanna marry your hoe
Now she's mad at me, causer Your Majesty, just happened to be
A pimp with a tragedy
She wanted, us to end, cause I fucked with friends
She gave me one more chance and I fucked her again
I seen her tears as she busted in, I said, "Shit..
there's a draft, shut the door bitch and come on in!"
There is no confusion here, there is no ambivalence, there is just ego without a price.
I don't CARE CARE. It is great rapping, great rhyming, great, great flow. It made Jigga, Jigga. But if you want to take moral umbrage, take it with this. Not with the confused schitzo teenage insanity of Tyler, The Creator. Tyler, the Creator is all confusion, all loosened hormones. There is no joy in his sex and bitches, whereas Jigga is like Peter Pan crowing on the top of his lungs.
Take another look:
"She wanted, us to end, cause I fucked with friends
She gave me one more chance and I fucked her again
I seen her tears as she busted in, I said, "Shit..
there's a draft, shut the door bitch and come on in!"
This is so seductive in its reductive, vicious cynicism. Does anybody want to be Tyler? Anybody at all. Tyler wrote it and he stacked the deck against himself. Tyler makes it difficult to empathize and impossible to envy him. The door slams shut on him.
And this is what GLAAD is complaining about?
Pathetic.