One of the comments in yesterday’s item struck me as
particularly relevant to the death of arts criticism in general: “Mass marketing requires a reductive
concept of the human. The aesthetic values of global capitalism by necessity esteem baseness.”
Anyone with the slightest cognizance of pop culture knows this by now. But back in 2000,
when Steve Dollar wrote a piece called “Cracker-rap losers” in Salon, it
was not so commonly recognized. Go read the piece. It’s a great (and entertaining) example of
criticism that captures the reductive core of the culture. The writing is like a surfer tucked into a
50-foot curl. Here are a couple of sample paragraphs:
Sometimes it’s hard to know whether Fred Durst really is the angriest dog in
the world or just another high school loser getting the last laugh. His lyrics may be dumb, but the
joker knows that commodified rage is the surest route to rock star success — if not a spot on the
permanent guest list at the Playboy Mansion. The frontman for Limp Bizkit has become one of
pop’s most public icons, instantly flagged by his backward, red Yankees baseball cap, his chinful
of goat scruff and his ever-present arm candy (today Carmen Electra, tomorrow the
world).
And:
Though Durst seems convinced that everyone hates him — everyone but the
fans, man, and the dudes at Napster — he deserves some kind of due, if only for having the brains
or moves to make the music industry work overtime to accommodate one more mediocre
blowhard. And he has gotten it: Along with Eminem and Kid Rock, he’s part of the wigga holy
trinity, even though his straight-outta-the-sandbox raps make Slim Shady sound as eloquent as
Shakespeare, and his streak of Puritan misogyny makes Rock’s early-morning stoned pimpin’ seem
like a feminist conspiracy. Like his fellow Caucasian rappers, who each have made bank emulating
hip-hop style, Durst belongs to a neo-cracker elite, contributing to a national trailer-park zeitgeist
whose prime movers include Howard Stern, a bunch of those bone crushers in the World
Wrestling Federation and Wisconsin truck driver Susan Hawk from “Survivor.” There’s probably
no better time to proudly call yourself “a redneck fucker from Jacksonville.”
Postscript: My staff of thousands tells me the San Francisco Chronicle picked
up the AP story about the folding of the National Arts Journalism Program,
which the staff thinks AP picked up from yesterday’s item. This thrills the staffers because it
makes them feel useful.
