Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I couldn’t possibly comment.
You’re the lucky one. I’ve been stuck in an increasingly weird Twitter exchange about all this with an ex-cop. Gah.
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
It was absolutely clear to me, from evidence presented by the victim and witnesses (the accused didn’t testify) that there was no way any reasonable person could believe they had consent after physically overpowering someone and detaining them.
Like I said – one of the most disheartening experiences of my life.
Shit, it was dispiriting just reading about that ...
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Someone on Twitter (I saw it retweeted) talked about all the criticism coming from “vested interests”.
Does this person understand English?
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Emma Hart,
I was really heartened to see a couple of people criticise Jones whom I’d seen run the ‘sensible precautions’ line themselves in the past. People change their minds between arguments, not during them. OTOH, I just had a guy on Twitter call me ‘silly’ for not telling my daughter not to walk at night. I love it when men lecture women about rape, like we’ve never really thought about it before.
Oh yes. And Jones did plenty of that.
It was beside the point of the column, but Albert Park isn't unlit, it's a common thoroughfare and it's right in the centre of town. I also suspect he pulled his claim about the rate of rape of tourists here out of his arse along with all his other factoids.
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Nat Dudley has helpfully rewritten Jones’ column for him.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Lilith __,
And can he really have hated the EP but liked the album? Trolling for attention?
His original review slagged 'Royals' and 'Tennis Court'. His new one, two weeks later, says they're standouts and it's a shame the rest of the album isn't as strong. Confused? He certainly is.
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Very good Erowid backgrounder on the risky NBOMe drug series which has filled the psychedelics gap since the authorities managed to make LSD too hard to obtain.
It also says this:
The best hope on the horizon for stopping this recurring cycle of drug criminalization and new drug development comes from New Zealand. A new "Psychoactive Substances Bill" has been developed through a collaboration between the New Zealand Ministry of Health, law enforcement, and Stargate International, a harm-minimization organization that began as a commercial "legal highs" distributor. If implemented as expected, this unprecedented law will create a framework by which vendors will be allowed to distribute products containing novel, not-yet-controlled, recreationally-used substances to those 18 and older. Vendors will be required to pay an initial registration fee, demonstrate the basic safety of their products, and track adverse reactions after sales begin.
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Simon Sweetman has pulled himself together and written -- apart from its repeated fits of sulking -- a reasonably sensible review of the album. It's not his kind of music, but that's okay. Note that he now thinks 'Royals' is a "standout".
I did think this line was funny:
But fuck the hype, let’s look at the music this time right?
Um, yeah.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Well, that was a remarkably pretentious, flatulent way to tell the uppity bitch to STFU while the menz be talking. Isn’t tertiary education grand?
It's actually a middle-class white woman lecturing a young white woman on behlf of black men ... but, yeah.
Another of many very silly things in it is the declaration that harmony and tonal quality = white privilege. Um ... waiata?
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Did it occur to them that the song could simply be what it says on the tin. How did they go from a girl singing about the disconnect between the music she hears and the life she and her friends actually lead all the way to racist anti hip hop agenda?
For the sake of completeness, here's that Marxist one:
Lorde and her followers don’t crave the buzz of rattling bass, wobbly drops, or maxed-out textures. The “buzz” this song asks us to crave is vocal harmonization. The musical climaxes of the song are built by layering in more and more harmonizing female voices to the ends of lines in the chorus. If mainstream, hip-hop influenced pop has made traditional tonal harmony obsolete (rejecting it in favor of soars and drops), Lorde’s “Royals” re-centers it. (Again, I’m not saying that tonality is absent in contemporary pop--I’m arguing that from the perspective adopted in “Royals,” that appears to be the case.) In this way, “Royals” offers us white female bodies vibrating in harmony, not synths or AutoTuned vocals. Its musical pleasure is (supposedly) “in the flesh,” whereas mainstream pop is, like diamond engagement rings, an inherently screen/tech-mediated experience. (Obviously, it takes a lot of bad faith to buy “Royals” argument--it’s no less mediated or more “in the flesh” than any other song on the radio or YouTube.) So, the use of harmony and harmonization--which can and has been thought of as stereotypically “white,” especially when contrasted with stereotypically rhythm-oriented Afro-diasproic music--is a way to dis-identify with two different aspects of mainstream pop music: its blackness, on the one hand, and its tech/capital alienation, on the other. One implication here is that some kinds of black culture are vulgar and unruly because they can’t sufficiently moderate the use/effects of technology.
In the song, some precious ueber-femmy white girl singing about how “we” disidentify with mainstream hip hop culture and its blinged-out aesthetics. (Insofar as hip hop culture is stereotypically hypermasculine in a distinctly racialized way, the singer’s performance of white femininity is itself a dis-identificatory gesture.) Here, implicitly black (often masculine) hip hop culture represents mainstream bourgeois society, its norms and values. So the way to critique The Man is by situating yourself in opposition to representations of blackness. This gender and race dynamic flips more traditional scripts, in which white guys disidentify with mainstream white bourgeois culture by identifying with black subcultural aesthetics (from blues to bebop to rock to hip hop to jungle).
“Royals” shows that this disidentificatory work is now women’s work. It’s not prestigious work, like conventional male hipsterism (think of Mailer’s “White Negro” essay); it’s “second-shift” style feminized labor, like cleaning up messes always is. White women, in performing their white femininity, do the political work of multi-racial white supremacy. They devalue and reject the aspects of blackness that are still too unruly to be folded into multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy.
So there.