Miley Matryoshka?

Today I voice my outrage at the outrage over Annie Leibovitz’s Vanity Fair photographs of Miley Cyrus. Lewd smut, a youngster taken advantage of, the making of a future Britney – all in one photograph. And the defense: “but these are merely classical artistic conventions that have been around for hundreds of years,” and, “no one understands the art here.” When I finally saw the Vanity Fair photographs, I was appalled. Not because of a naked shoulder, or because the American media was failing to understand art. No, I was horrified at the emerging debate over this photograph because, clearly, Miley Cyrus is possessed by the devil. You thought Miley was just an actress/singer/model playing a normal girl, playing rock star, on a Disney Channel television show? Holy postmodern mindfuck, Batman, did America ever drop the ball on this one!

If you put Leibovitz’s photograph up next to a shot of Regan from The Exorcist, you’ll see what I mean: the pale skin, the fierce eyes, the chubby cheeks and long brown hair. Let’s not even get into the hidden work of Mercedes McCambridge, a three-in-one identity is enough for a minor whose entire fame is premised upon a character within a character within character. But what we learn from this debate is that America wants an extra layer, that no one wants to confront the reality of this woman’s possession. No one has noticed that Disney has been selling a product, an image, an icon, a reified mass of nerves and tissue, who, between songs, and episodes, and red-carpet events, probably projectile vomits pea soup? I know we’ve become used to the idea of young American celebrities puking after every meal, but am I the only one who sees the need for a priest here? Atheist, schmathiest, we need a spiritual cleansing when it comes to Miley Cabana-Satana, and I recommend we grab the nearest crucifix, some pure, mountain spring holy water, call Max von Sydow’s agent, and tie Miley to a bed. Unfortunately, given our pomo desire for total persona saturation, I can only imagine her exorcism as a live, two-hour media event. To make sure we keep everything legal, we’ll just have to wait another three years to fully exercise her demons. Oh, the poor child!

This critique isn’t all fun and games, I have a point: this woman might as well be possessed by the devil when, in the article accompanying the photograph, she channels Miley Stewart in order to react to this image of Miley Cyrus. Her appearance in that photograph challenged many people’s conception of who this person is, who the real person behind the character behind the character might be. And, ultimately, we imagine that this girl will one day “grow up,” but we can’t imagine that she already has. At fifteen years old, we’re ambivalent as to whether or not this semi-nude photograph of her is acceptable because we feel guilty for wanting her to drop the cloth just a little bit more. But Cyrus isn’t Natalie Portman in The Professional, a role that turned half of America into pedophiles; she’s actively using sex to sell herself, and she knows what she’s doing.

Which brings us to back to Disney, which said, in a press release: “…a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.” Uh huh, that same woman was also “manipulated” into performing at dozens of teeny-bopper concerts as Hannah Montana, and into earning millions of dollars a year. But who is the manipulator here? I think it can all be traced back to whatever demonic presence has inhabited this oh-so-innocent child. Look closely, and you can almost see the outlines of “Help me,” written from within, appearing on her stomach. If you can’t see it, wait five to ten years and it should be completely visible. But mark of the devil or not, let’s not deprive her of the agency and intelligence necessary to see that America craves these kinds of photographs from every female celebrity two or three years older than her. Her only sin is not realizing that she was supposed to be the antidote to this cultural “malady,” not another symptom of it. So if we are going to believe that this girl didn’t understand what was going on at an Anne Leibovitz photo shoot, I think someone should look into the matter. I want to propose an examination and an exorcism, but don’t take my word for it, just wait. Maybe her next bubblegum pop song will feature an artist named Captain Howdy and a chorus of backwards Aramaic curses. I can’t wait to see how Disney spins that one.

Civil War Favorites

From the Richmond Daily Dispatch, July 1861. These are the oddities:

Sad. July 13, 1861
--Ellen Bibbs, about twenty-five years of age, good looking, of polite and engaging manners, committed suicide in Memphis, Tenn., on the 8th instant, by taking laudanum. Cause — unrequited love.

How to save your life., July 24, 1861
--In the war of 1812 every soldier was advised to carry a string, to be tied around a bleeding limb and be twisted tight by a stick or ramrod until a surgeon could be found. Let our soldiers remember this, and when wounded try the remedy.

Biting off a man's nose, July 18, 1861
--Two Sullivans — John and Frank — otherwise known as "Black" and "White," got into a fight yesterday afternoon in a flat-boat just below the Navy-Yard, when "Black" bit off the end of "White's" nose! Both parties were arrested--Memphis Bulletin, 13th.

Rope Dancing in France. July 13, 1861
--Three Polish rope dancers, performing at the Hippodrome, were recently precipitated to the ground, by the breaking of a rotten rope. The father and son were killed on the spot; the other son had his legs broken. The widows of the two men brought an action against the Director for damages, and was allowed 26,000 francs. The Director then turned upon the rope maker and obtained the same amount from him, The French laws are very stringent in regard to all accidents of this kind.

Why, How Hampton Writes

Fictional Criticism: Howard Hampton, Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Howard Hampton was born on November 22, 1958 at Riverside Community Hospital, in Riverside, California. His mother, Ann Hampton, is currently living in Apple Valley with her son; his father could not be identified. Although she’s never admitted it to anyone, Ann Hampton isn’t really sure who Howard’s father is, but she has narrowed down the possibilities over the years. So, little Howard was raised solely by a single, working-class mother. Unable to secure affordable daycare for him during his earliest years, Miss Hampton – who by that time was spending up to four hours a day commuting to and from her work as a garden manicurist in the posh neighborhoods of Laguna Canyon – was forced to take her son along with her on jobs. He didn’t socialize with other children his age until kindergarten, and so Howard suffered what is now understood as “attachment issues”; he cried whenever his mother wasn’t around.

Howard’s earliest memory is of his 5th birthday party, which only three other children attended. The Cowboys-and-Indians-themed celebration was interrupted, after only 30 minutes, by their television set and the subsequent crying of all their mothers (which caused the children to cry, which caused him to cry). And so his playmates were quickly whisked away, leaving him with nothing but four half-drawn kiddy doodles, melted ice cream, and a tail-less donkey. Only years later did he come to understand that it wasn’t his fault the President had been shot. But because he had been gripping his brand-new Johnny Eagle Red River™ cap-rifle all morning in anticipation of the party, and the fact that this toy bore such a strong resemblance to a Mannlicher-Carcano, Howard came to identify himself with Lee Harvey Oswald. This was but one of many childhood misunderstandings that have made Howard the man he is today.

Howard was eleven when his grandfather died, and was inconsolable when he heard the news. No one had ever told him he had a grandfather. As it turns out, he also had a grandmother alive enough to meet Howard and his mother at the Lincoln Municipal Airport, and drive them to his mother’s childhood home in a podunk Nebraska town called Malcolm. He didn’t wonder why his mother had left. Yet, it was during the week of his grandfather’s funeral that Howard first began to realize his own need for a father. He began to envy all those inane Boy Scouts in his classes; he wanted to play baseball just so he could have a father to play baseball with.

His time in Nebraska not only led him to the realization that he lacked a definite masculine presence in his life, but he also began to gain an understanding of the power of words. Howard inherited, from his grandfather’s library, two Ogden Nash books and an almost brand-new, unabridged masterpiece of descriptive lexicography, the Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary. While stuck in Malcolm for an entire week, Howard set out to read the entire dictionary, but only made it to “obiter dictum” before he had to return home. He still uses his grandfather’s fifteen-pound tome to this day, and has vowed to resume his reading at “obitual,” and continue uninterrupted until he reaches “zyzzogeton,” sometime in the near future. Howard read both of Nash’s books twice on the plane back to California, moving from beginning to end and immediately starting them over again. He would later repeat this process with just about everything else Ogden Nash ever published.

While doing some hands-on learning about alienation during high school, Howard met Lester Bangs, a writer who’d almost certainly endured a similar regime of being laughed at by girls, stuffed into trash cans and lockers by jocks, and generally ignored by everyone else. Though it was always a one-way conversation, Howard’s love of Lester’s writing led him to the Riverside Public Library in search of more. When he asked the queer, spracked librarian where he could find more of Bangs’s work, the speed freaky bookworm instead rattled off a long list of great cultural critics at him. Howard checked out a couple old copies of Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, along with what he could find of the work of Manny Farber. And, unsurprisingly, Manny soon became Daddy. After searching out other voices and consuming their work as voraciously as he consumed Tab (at least four cans a day), he began to fantasize about the lives of Nick Tosches, Mark Foster, and others. Pauline Kael became the mother who didn’t have to go to work all day and instead sat around with him discussing what things meant and how they looked and what people thought of them and why; she became the mother who took him on adventures in thought, language, feeling, and sensibility. Once, Howard even imagined that Kael was his real mother, that his biological father was Andrew Sarris, and that their every argument stemmed from the seething resentment they felt toward one another over Howard’s drunken conception, birth, and subsequent adoption.

Fantastic imaginings aside, this world of arguments and unanswered – but always explored – questions sustained him through four years of popularity contests, pep rallies, procrustean English teachers, and failed attempts at normality. He even used one of Bangs’s articles to work up the nerve to ask Mary Beard to the prom, planning to make the point that she was “out of this world.” But halfway through, the pick-up line became muddled, and ended up as an explanation of the etymology of the word “Oriental,” and a compliment of her Converse sneakers. It was fine, though; he didn’t want to go to the prom anyway.

Howard finally received his college acceptance letters in April, 1977: he received one small envelope from Scripps (three months passed before he realized why he’d been rejected), and three large ones from Hampshire, Evergreen State, and Pitzer. Applying to “alternative” colleges had been a priority for Howard, given the degree to which he had suffered after four years of high school English. Though his first choice had been Hampshire College, he decided against making the journey back East after envisioning his diploma and future resumes: “Hello, I’m Howard Hampton from Hampshire College.” Simply too alliterative. The deciding factor for Howard was the distance he’d be living from his mother, so he chose Pitzer, the closest to home, and matriculated that fall.

On the first day of a Neopatriarchal Narratives seminar, he met a hippie chick named Cordelia and they bonded after class over three coffees and two glasses of wine during a nine hour discussion of Gabriel García Márquez. She was skinny, with a slight overbite and the body of a twelve-year-old boy: little tits, no hips. She always wore her hemp belt high, squeezing her patched pants around her waist so they’d stay up. Her long brown hair was curly when he first met her, but when he awkwardly complimented her for it she promptly shaved her head, thus beginning her worship by half the Scripps campus as an unattainable goddess.

They soon spent entire weeks in one another’s presence without a single day apart, as Cordelia’s friends became Howard’s friends too. There was Susan, who was about 150 pounds overweight and smelled faintly of a two-week buildup of plaque, and Gregg, who always introduced himself along with the spelling of his name and often doubled as Cordelia’s fuck buddy. When Gregg disappeared halfway through sophomore year, leaving behind all of his stuff in his dorm room, the campus police opened a missing persons case. Given that a band of nomadic Hare Krishnas had just passed through the five college area – and that his typewriter contained a half-written paper about the “Paradigm of Consensus in the Bhagavata Purana” – it was ultimately decided that Gregg had left with them. Her friends were great, but it was with Cordelia that Howard felt as though he’d finally met someone who could understand him; finally he’d met someone who felt the way he did about the Mekons, Wire, and David Thomas. She read every paper he wrote for every class before he turned it in, and he did the same for her; they took classes together just so they could make fun of their fellow classmates, weaving their inside jokes through a perverse patois only they understood; she advised him on how he should approach women, while he listened to her never-ending complaints about the available men in the area; they even attended the infamous Claremont Halloween party as Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas, (with Susan tagging along as a hauntingly apt Brigid Berlin). And although he was about 30 minutes away from maybe asking a woman dressed as Elvira to dance, he had willingly left early to carry Cordelia home after she’d downed about ten too many Mai Tais (at which point she might as well have been his Edie). But most of the time they just studied together and communicated in puns:

“Reading the news can be so frustrating sometimes Cordo,” he’d say. “I don’t understand why they can’t just let Saigons be Saigons over there.”

And she’d retort, without missing a beat:
“I know right? It’s just so Hanoing!”

After two years of friendship they decided to get an apartment together junior year, leaving Susan to live alone in the dorms with her cat Agnew. On the first day back from Summer break, he had already begun moving his things into their small two-room loft when Cordelia arrived. They hugged and welcomed one another back, but as she began to tell him about her life-altering vacation he looked into her eyes, and KaBOOM – just like that he realized he was in love with her, and began to cry. Her earnest attempts to comfort him only made him more hysterical. It was so unexpected a realization, it hurt to even think about it. Eventually he pulled himself together for an hour or so, but as they sat down to eat their first pizza together, and he looked at her through the smoke of her spliff, the tears began all over again. He couldn’t help it. His eyes became puffy and swollen, so he got up and without a word went to sleep on the floor of his room. The next morning his eyes were glued together with snot and dried tears, but Cordelia’s laugh pulled him out of bed and into their new kitchen. Not realizing, nor caring, that his already salt-and-peppered hair was so disheveled it was practically standing straight up, Cordelia entered with a man she introduced as Waldo, her boyfriend.

“Howard, meet Waldo. My boyfriend. We met in London in July, and he’s in the band Midnight Fulcrum,” she announced. “They’re playing at Claremont tonight, you should come.” Waldo was taller than Howard, with tan, toned arms, high cheek bones, serious eyes, light blond hair – cleanly askew, a cuttingly sexy British accent, and a mole just under his bottom lip on the right side. Howard threw a spatula at them, grabbed his toothbrush, and left. Briskly wandering around campus he ran into Susan, literally, knocking Agnew’s kitty carrier to the ground. As he was about to start yelling he recognized her, and collapsed, sobbing, into her arms. She took him in and listened to him cry, rubbing his arms and offering him comfort food every ten minutes.

“Listen, Howard,” she finally told him. “I know Cordelia had no idea you felt this way about her when she left for the summer.”

“I didn’t know until yesterday,” Howard replied.

“Well. Get over it, Howard. You have to realize what I realized years ago. That the few people you’re ever going to really fall for in life are going to disappoint you. Because lust will beat out intellect, discriminating taste, and meaningful emotion almost every time.” And he never forgot those words. Still, at the time he needed to let loose, so he found a nearly full bottle of warm Parrot Bay Coconut Rum – the only liquor in her dorm room – and chugged it.
It didn’t help.

He can’t write about her, even the thought eats away at him. So writing criticism has become his Cordelia, and it gives him the authority, the power to shake her and tell her, “I love you, I loved you. I hate you.” In his criticism, he can make her say that she loves him back. His criticism began on that smoggy hot Pomona day even though he didn’t start writing it for years afterwards. When the hole in his heart, begging for a father to hold him, was widened by his loss of her, he bled brooding all over pages that were then still trees, growing hundreds of miles away.

Wanting to revel in the numbness of his exclusion, Susan ended up getting drunk that night too, and they had ugly sex on her living room floor. They fucked one another’s pain away that night, then never talked about it again. He woke up with the worst headache of his life, his mouth feeling like it was full of cotton ashes, packed up what he’d left at Cordelia’s place, and moved in with Susan and Agnew. That was the first and last time he ever truly got drunk. He doesn’t let go anymore.

During his senior year at Pitzer, Howard completed his honors thesis in Philosophy and Semiotics an entire month early. Entitled The Vermillion Door: Prestructuralist Discourse and Posttextual Desituationism in the Works of Pynchon, it was 90 pages too long and – taking a stylistic cue from a new trend in academic literature – was completely unintelligible. Of the four professors he’d arranged to be “readers” for his work, only one actually read his entire thesis; none, however, understood a word of it past page fourteen. Upon graduation in May, 1981, Howard moved back in with his mother, who by that time was living in her current home in Apple Valley. He took a job as a host at the Victorville Denny’s off of Historic Route 66, but, subjected to musak during business hours, and Keith the dishwasher’s hair metal mix tapes and Carlos the busboy’s Ghost in the Machine album every night after closing, he didn’t last more than eight months. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he found a more relaxed job working the counter at a Chinese “market” down the road, selling smutty magazines, porn videos, and those little one-shot liquor bottles you usually only find on airplanes. Every Thursday night he worked the projector in the back room, screening classic Hong Kong cinema for three or four dedicated patrons; he did the same on Sunday nights except with hardcore porn films, playing for a dwindling audience of men who could not yet afford VCRs.

During college and his “post-graduate employment,” as he liked to call it, Howard remained fascinated by criticism, reading and re-reading Lester Bangs, Manny Farber, Greil Marcus, Pauline Kael, and that guy who wrote movie reviews for the Victorville Daily Press until 1984. He worked and read until one day, when all his feelings about music, Ronald Reagan, and the emotions Cordelia had left him with could not be contained in his then-eight-volume journal, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. He was soon looking at a seven-page letter to a man he didn’t even know, but there were so many men in his life that he’d never known that he sent it off without a thought. When a reply arrived he sent another, and another; those letters soon became the one thing in his life he had to look forward to besides the newest Pere Ubu album. Though he never expected it, this led to a job as a freelance critic, but performance anxiety took over him. It was a curse. Unlike writing letters to his pen pal, he feared that it was Cordelia who would read his most personal thoughts, and so he became timid, reserved; he was impotent in the face of his own opinions.

Then one day the Village Voice asked him to review one or two of the more commercial albums they'd just received, and, scanning the list, Howard saw...Sting. He obtained the record – Nothing Like the Sun – and leaning the album cover against his wall played the music over and over, letting his rage gather inside him. He wasn’t hearing Sting, and he wasn’t staring at Sting’s face. His resentment of the trite, commercial music had turned Sting into Waldo, and so the words began to flow, uncensored, from his fingertips to the keys of his typewriter and onto the page. Soon he had produced a review so scathing that it gave his editor a start – finally Howard had lived up to what the Voice had been promised, finally he was a writer with real potential. “Bring Me The Head Of Gordon Sumner” had been published only three days when Howard got word from his editor that Sting had responded. At first he felt a pang of anxiety, but it quickly bounced off of his new, confident, critical shell. This is going to make me famous, he thought to himself as he read Sting’s misspellings and insults. But when he read the postscript, he felt a little cheated. “PS – I hope this makes you famous.”

And it did, Mr. Sumner. It did.

* * * * * * * *

Okay, listen, Mark, I can’t go any further. I understand the limitations of my critical ability, and I’ve reached a point where I’m simply not capable of going any further. I can write a decent record review, can’t I? And I can write a deep think-piece on the limits of the American conception of freedom. And didn’t I make you think critically about pornography when you refused to believe that anyone could? Come on, man.

I can’t write about myself, Mark. I can’t write anything autobiographical. I couldn’t even write a decent undergraduate thesis in college, or a simple high school English paper! The only thing that I’ve ever been able to write is criticism, and I do it well, don’t I? I know you think I could be even better, you tell me practically every fucking day. But making me write 4,000 words, about myself, because you think it will help me be “more comfortable” with writing from my own “personal experiences” – it just isn’t fair. I may never write from my heart, from my own life, from the places of my deepest scars and greatest successes. Or, I may do it tomorrow. I just know that I can’t do it now. So maybe one day I will learn to write that way, and will become “acclaimed,””renowned,” and whatever else as you said, but for now I’m content with my relative anonymity, authority, and distance. Please don’t make me do this anymore, I can’t write about myself – I’ve known me too well, for too long. And I don’t even fully understand who that “me” is yet.

Oh, one more thing. Please tell that asshole at Harvard UP that I’m going to kill his Art Director. The cover of my book is horrid – how will this ever sell?! Worst of all, it makes my work seem meaningless. Maybe it is. But I don’t know, Mark, if I can take your advice (and get assigned a better graphic designer), who knows…maybe my next book will make me…legendary.
--HH

You had me at “Kalashnikov”

Record Review: Immortal Technique, "Revolutionary Volume II"

It isn’t often that a song, let alone an entire album, has the power to make me listen to it from start to finish and then play it over again. This may be because I have really bad ADD, but then again, who doesn’t these days? As someone who acquires most of her music when it’s convenient, trading 20 gigs at a time with friends and acquaintances, I was uncharacteristically faced with a certain degree of imperative last month when I received a CD in the mail from a friend back east. “Listen to this – NOW” was the only note, scribbled on a Post-It, that accompanied the album. I don’t remember what I was doing at the time, because whatever it was faded away as soon as Mumia Abu Jamal’s voice came on to introduce the artist and the album: “You’re listening to Immortal Technique, and this is ‘Revolutionary Volume 2’, bringing you the Truth in the form of hip-hop.” For the next hour I sat completely still, floored by what I was hearing. Then, like a chain letter, I made 6 copies for friends and rushed to distribute Technique’s “Truth.”

The album is a revelation. Unlike any hip-hop I’ve ever heard, Technique rhymes from the head and the gut. Traversing the rocky, often cavernous American political landscape, his songs are precision-guided bunker-busters targeted at the lies of American leaders, ideologies, and institutions. In “The Point of No Return” – the first song of album – Technique plays upon the dual meaning of the title: his eyes have been opened to the political crises his country faces and he refuses to forget what he has seen. In the song’s hook he repeats, “From now on it can never be the same as before, ’cause the place that I’m from doesn’t exist anymore.” With this imagery of a gentrified, ghettoized urban America, he launches an attack on American capitalism, class warfare, and racism, which he is able to sustain – in rhyme – throughout the album. From the beginning of this first song we begin to understand the extent of Immortal Technique’s creative, political consciousness as Nat Turner, Elijah Muhammed, the Templar Knights, and Mary Magdalene join hands and encircle the pyre of his “murderous methodology,” while violins violently pump in apocalyptic accompaniment. Now, if that doesn’t interest you, maybe this will:

Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal.
This is the last time that I kneel and pray to the sky,
Because almost everything I was ever told was a lie.

Forget religion, anyone who has ever been to public school can identify with that, I think.

As this album played through, I stayed AWAKE and alert because this album lacks a cohesive thematic unity, and so each song must stand on its own, declaring itself as a new, unique flavor. From beneath the “Harlem Streets” runs a not a subway but a “multicultural slave ship” transporting workers home not from work, but from “corporate sharecropping.” Immortal Technique performed this song on Sunday night at the Fillmore in San Francisco without musical accompaniment and it was even better than on the album; it was poetry, poetry slammed unencumbered by the dictates of musical meter. In “4th Branch,” Condoleezza Rice morphs into Sally Hemings as Technique describes what isn’t being said by the corporate news media. In this song, more than any other on the album, poetry and message merge: Technique is angry, and he tells you that you should be angry too. Competing with this outrage at the world is the outrage he seeks to inspire in his audience. After the bacchanalian romp of “Obnoxious” – in which he takes aim at everyone from Cuban Americans to fellow rappers to members of Alcoholics Anonymous – if he hasn’t pissed you off yet, you haven’t been listening.

“Peruvian Cocaine” is this album’s epicenter, and it shook me. Immortal Technique lifts both the beat and the song’s introduction from the 1983 remake of Scarface, and in this story of the political implications of the drug trade we are introduced to a cast of characters at various stages from the production to the consumption of, you guessed it, Peruvian cocaine. The song becomes a tragicomic performance starring Immortal Technique, Crayz Walz, Pumpkinhead, Loucipher, Tonedef, Diabolic, and Poison Pen, in which we follow the drug as it moves from the peasant forced to cultivate it as coca (done brilliantly by Technique in a mix of Spanish and English) to the paranoid consumer of crack confined in an American prison. Reminiscent of historian Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, in which the cultivation of sugar by slaves in the Caribbean is paralleled with its consumption by near-starving factory workers in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, this song does Latin American agricultural commodity economics better than most academics.

So why is it, then, that when I shared this album with my friends I received such a mixed response? Those who weren’t blown away were appalled that I would dare to give them this album, as though I’d engaged in some egregious assault on their consciences. Well, it seems that some people are offended by the word “nigger.” While I don’t want to dump on the outrage this word inspires – because its use should offend people – I think it is important to understand why this word is frequently used in hip-hop. While some rap is blatantly and unapologetically racist, Immortal Technique and other underground artists have seized and retrofitted this racial epithet in such a way that it could be substituted with “comrade” and retain the same meaning. Before you reject this interpretation, let me note that I contacted Technique’s publicist yesterday, inquiring about the reasons for the artist’s use of the word “nigger” in almost every one of his songs. Technique himself responded: “On the East Coast when Hip Hop started the word was used to express comradery between people in the Black and Brown community. It is not said…with the purpose of disrespecting.” He then followed up with a comment about Berkeley, which, though I find somewhat fair, I’m not going to repeat. The use of this word by an Afro-Latino artist in this context is excusable, especially when he uses his craft to take aim at Christian and Muslim racism…oh, and “racist motherfuckers” like Bill O’Reilly.

This doesn’t mean, however, that this is a politically flawless album. At his concert on Sunday, Immortal Technique told his audience: “You can either be a rock star or a revolutionary,” implying that he has opted out of being a “rock star” because he has shunned the corporate music establishment in favor of revolutionary principles. Besides the fact that I think calling yourself a revolutionary is like calling yourself a genius – i.e. it is something best left for others to say about you – I myself have a problem with this self-described “revolutionary” hip-hop because there is nothing revolutionary about homophobia. And homophobia, it seems, is ubiquitous among both revolutionaries and rock stars. Consider this, from “Obnoxious”:

Nigga’s trying to be hardcore, you fucking homo thug!/ And don’t be sensitive and angry at the shit that I wrote,/ ’cause if you can take a fucking dick, you can take a joke….

Now, compare Technique’s justification of his homophobia with Eminem’s “White America”:

So now I'm catchin’ the flack from these activists when they raggin’/ Actin’ like I'm the first rapper to smack a bitch or say faggot, shit!

At least Ann Coulter recognizes she shouldn’t use the word “faggot” before she does.

All this lyrical homophobia leaves me a little confused about what “revolutionary” really means to Immortal Technique. It seems that if he wanted to really be revolutionary he would shun homophobia, right? To be revolutionary can mean two, not necessarily mutually exclusive things: it can mean doing something that has never been done before, which I think applies to much of Technique’s work. Or, a revolutionary can be someone who wants to overthrow the current, established power structures in their society and institute their own – think Fidel Castro, who suppressed homosexuality in Cuba and imprisoned those who refused to do the same. So, if Immortal Technique aims to do both, to change the face of hip-hop and overthrow the political regime in the United States, I don’t think I can get behind him with his current values. But if he wants to change the way that hip-hop functions, and what the majority of hip-hop communicates, he has my raised fist. So, to come out and say homosexuality isn't something he actually despises, and that it is one of the things that Americans focus on bashing, protesting, vilifying...rapping about...because we don’t want to actually confront our terminally ill democracy, would be taking a revolutionary stand in hip-hop culture.

Of course, to this Technique has already prepared a retort: “How dare you niggers criticize the way that I spit/ You coffee shop revolutionary son-of-a-bitch.” But listen, Tech, don’t get mad about this, all I’m saying is that you need to take that extra step, and I know you’re afraid, but I got your back. I’m really in love with how you do what you do, all I’m saying is that what you say reflects upon what you do, and if you are really a revolutionary then you need to act like a REVOLUTIONARY and confront hip-hop and our society by changing the terms of American political discourse.

Still, all the political implications of these words aside, Immortal Technique’s poetry is eloquent if not earth shattering, and set to music it takes on a life of its own. It becomes ART, and for this reason “Revolutionary, Volume 2” is going on my bookshelf, not my hard drive, because any man who rhymes “Holocaust” with “Kalashnikov” has won my heart.