Ragtime has got me thinking about social class in America today, and the many nuances that it includes. There are obviously countless examples of these, but in this post I will focus solely on the phenomenon that is Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. OFWGKTA is a L.A. based hip-hop collective, composed of young male rappers and producers. Their unofficial frontman is a rapper that goes by the name Tyler, the Creator.
In Tyler's raps he, often very graphically, brings up topics such as doing drugs, having both consensual and nonconsensual sex, and how growing up without a father has affected his upbringing, often including a use of copious amounts of obscenities, misogynistic, and homophobic slurs. The fact of the matter is, like many members of Odd Future, Tyler, the Creator is an angst ridden young man who grew up in a bad neighborhood, and saw music as his way out. Whether you like they're music or not, lyrically Odd Future songs are often incredibly complex lyrically. There is an undeniable level of irony in the whole Odd Future phenomenon though.
The demographics that have embraced Odd Future music is complex and in many ways confusing. Odd Future has appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (video: http://en.musicplayon.com/play?v=473675&Odd_Future__Sandwiches_On_Jimmy_Fallon__Live__2011__English__Lyrics__lyrics_Ringtone), and garnered attention from media outlets including Pitchfork, NPR Music (http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/06/21/132283971/why-you-should-listen-to-the-rap-group-odd-future-even-though-its-hard), and even a piece in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_sanneh).
Even with all this attention, though, Odd Future is not playing the game by anyone's rules but their own. They signed with Sony last April...sort of. Basically they were allowed to create their own label under the umbrella of Sony Music and have managed to maintain complete artistic freedom in the process. In response to the attention Odd Future has been given by Pitchfork, Tyler, the Creator raps in the song Yonkers "I'm stabbing any blogging faggot hipster with a Pitchfork" then went and was invited to perform at Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this summer.
In Odd Future you find some of the most unusual social class paradoxes available today. Here is a group that is screaming out against a world that they feel has done them wrong, and some of the very people they're yelling out against are paying them to keep right on screaming. They have crowds of well educated, usually pretty well off fans yelling "Kill People, Burn Shit, Fuck School" at they're shows. Maybe this is telling of some deeper social rift present in American culture today, or maybe it's people embracing what Odd Future really is: a bunch of kids messing around and having as much fun as possible regardless of what other people think.
And for anyone that's into Odd Future already, here is a clean version of Sandwiches they did for BBC...which is just hilarious really.
Brian, Indeed there is something different a work by the mid-20th century which may have some odd foreshadowing in Ragtime. Think of that poverty ball. Shabby chic is another, lesser, manifestation of the so-called upper-class adopting characteristics of the so-called lower-class as fashionable. LDL
ReplyDeleteThat's actually exactly the scene I had in mind, and the passage I picked for class Wednesday. "...Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity."
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