Let’s explore a hypothetical. Say you’re an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they’ll call you “The New Music That’s Best” or something.
Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I’ve ever seen. At Oslo’s Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens’ song “3’s and 7’s.” But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn’t seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned the whole time he was being escorted out).
The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it’s easy to find on YouTube if you search for “Josh Homme” and “Norwegian Wood”), but highlights include repeated use of the word “faggot” coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?
Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he’d likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme’s personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?
– August Brown
Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times
There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice’s video for “Stress”: when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice’s hit “D.A.N.C.E.” on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.
It’s a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West’s blog. The clip’s merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.
This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice’s is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video’s violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the ‘05 riots in many of Paris’ far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.
The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media’s vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the “Stress” video can’t be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.
But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn’t need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video’s willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.
The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, “Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?” smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that’s all it does. The questions of “Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?” have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn’t probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid’s question in regards to its own motivations here.
The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.
With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it’d be a shame if Justice’s only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say, ”OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we’ll give you a freakish caricature that you’ll probably eat up,” is Justice the right band to do that?
The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that “we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues.” If that’s truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes “Stress” a powerful but truly failed piece of art. “Opening up debate” is a good start for a piece of art’s goals — it’s the height of laziness to call it an end point.
But if it’s primarily entertainment and there is no “meaning,” or even an admission that Justice can’t help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. “We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other,” the statement concludes, “in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment.”
That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It’s not the violence itself that’s the most upsetting quality in the “Stress” video — it’s the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.
– August Brown
This week’s announcement that Shania Twain and hubby-producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange are splitting up is sad, if not utterly a shock. After all, if anything is part and parcel of country music tradition, it’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
Nevertheless, it’s always hard to hear about a marriage that’s failed, doubly so when there are kids involved. Of course, celebrity splits are practically a daily occurrence, the baggage that comes with fame and fortune astronomically amplifying the challenges every couple faces in trying to nurture love over the long term.
Yet what immediately went through my mind when I heard the news was her 1998 hit “You’re Still the One.”
Look how far we’ve come my baby
We mighta took the long way
We knew we’d get there someday
They said, ‘I bet they’ll never make it’
But just look at us holding on
We’re still together still going strong
When it went to No. 1 on the country chart, it was a quintessential crystallization of country’s shift away from songs that grapple with life’s struggles to those that are eager — perhaps overeager — to revel in its victories.
