The question as to the value of art is of the greatest
significance to our society. Great men over the millennia have known this, and
sought to shape our view of truth and beauty according to their own agendas,
which were often as misguided as their judgments were wrong and their writing
style weak and lame. For wisdom, listen
not to me but to the word of Kool Keith, Chief…you been out two weeks,
while he has been following this discussion since before Black Man created Civilization
itself, and, while prone to going off on fascinatingly bizarre tangents, he has
nonetheless hit on the truth.
A brief summary of the aesthetic
prejudices he has had to overthrow, before we turn to the monument of his
achievement:
From the foggy origins of Western
art criticism, amid the homoerotic decadence of Athenian empire, arise the
proto-iconoclastic illusions of Plato and the stale faulty rationalism of
Aristotle. These will get us nowhere. It took over a thousand years for
European artists to melt asunder the shackles of Hellenistic dogma that
Alexander unwittingly let loose on the ancient world. (And just briefly, if I
may address those of you who have already written me off as some sort of
priggish homophobe, the Renaissance returned a more pure, luminous homoerotic
focus to European art that had flourished in archaic Greece but was abused by
self-serving pederasts until Plato, perhaps a little sore from Socrates’ aggressive instruction, tried to wipe it out!)
But at that time Western artists
were still dependent upon the Catholic Church and wealthy, aristocratic patrons
for their livelihood, and basically the taste of these employers were what
prevailed, without much academic devotion to the theory, rather than practice,
of art (which was why their painting was so damn good.)
Humanism in Italy appeared as
antidote to this situation, although the corruption from Lutheran iconoclasm and
Dutch morbidity cancelled out whatever gains may have been made at this time.
Slightly later, the famed figures of the “Enlightenment” were to completely
misunderstand the value of art, just what we should expect from such pompous, bourgeois
plebians! Somebody get these eggheads a woman!
Finally it
was the Romantics who began to set things right again. Heinrich Heine, perhaps
Germany’s finest poet, wrote competently on Delacroix, advocating the
importance of meaning in art. The countervailing trend against romanticism
manifested in many ways, for example the 19th Century Frenchman
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Social-Rationalist gibberish, in which he essentially
utilizes criticism as theft of intellectual property, which remained largely
the norm into the 1960’s.
Fellow
countryman and near-contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, in his ‘What is the Good
of Criticism?’ put us back on a better track. (Notice the [probably accidental]
similarity of the opening question, and title, of Baudelaire’s tract, with
dGabe Evau’s 2018 pamphlet ‘Prejudices of Rock Critics’.) Baudelaire had a direct
influence on the greatest art critic/aesthetician prior to the 20th
Century, Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Nietzsche may not have been the first thinker
to take aesthetics seriously (see the intellectual poverty, in this matter at
least, of Burke and Hegel.) He was, however, the first man since the days of
the Reformation to recognize the religious significance of art, and in fact the
first since those Athenian fools we mentioned earlier to relate it to the
Olympian and mystery religions of Ancient Greece. Which brings us quite close
to the subject of this article.
Then all the DaDa, DooDoo, overall
degeneration of Art in the 20th Century. There were still pockets of
brilliancy, above all the contributions of African Americans to the highest Kultur
attained thus far by humanity. Music, of course being the highest art, we move
past the primal lament of the blues, the jubilation of early jass and the
sensuality of swing (sometimes watered, or white-ered, down; always retaining
the erotic buoyancy of the rhythm) and the cult of rock n’ roll to the most
philosophical of all the arts: Hip-Hop.
Initial efforts were primitive, to
say the least. In the words of the Master:
They use a simple back-and-forth, the same old rhythm
that a baby could pick up and join right with ‘em.
This from the debut recording by Keith’s original group
Ultramagnetic MCs, appropriately entitled Critical
Beatdown. In the 90s Keith went solo as Dr. Octagon, patenting a unique
blend of off-color verbal humour, cartoonish horror-core and
turn-of-the-millennium individualistic sexual liberty, all while sharpening his
axe against the grindstone of homogenous rap-star clones dancing around on MTV
and BET in shiny jumpsuits at this time, this last phenomena though a complete
atrophy of hip-hop culture at the same time introducing much of the world to
rap music, this author included. Some of us went further to learn the Four
Pillars of Hip-Hop, but never refuse the head cornerstone, the Boogie Down
Bronx, where a young Keith Matthew Thornton witnessed and participated in this
final Testament of the Kreators.
Rap moves on to the year 3000…
Under a
variety of pseudonyms Keith has continued to attack the mainstream of rap
poetry, offering cutting polemic as Dr. Dooom –
Look in the mirror, kid: your shit is wack.
– satire of bloated white
rockstardom as Black Elvis, a hilarious reversal of the white boy’s
appropriation of the stylings of black innovators such as Little Richard and Bo
Diddley – while still continuing to degrade the juvenile pretenders in the rap
game:
I’ll be the man, watch your backpack,
pen and pencil, school today:
Grown man, I don’t play…
Of course, there were still a few
other incredibly powerful artists with commercial success at this time in the
late 90s, who were both creative and relevant, but to those who were truly
listening Keith put them all to shame with the preternatural lyrical brilliance
of his near-flawless record Matthew.
The (respected?!) music journal Rolling Stone, commonly used for wiping
shit and jissom, once upon a time published a good piece, albeit an imbedded
half-column at the bottom of the page, back in I believe it was 2003 or
thereabouts, giving Kool Keith a chance to review three new albums, each with
just two or three sentences. I no longer ‘live at home with my Mom’ where the
article was taped to my bedroom wall, but I will try to remember those sharp,
penetrating analyses, honed to perfect aphorisms.
Of a
release by The Used, Keith muses, “This group is called The Used? They sound used
and over-abused. What are they so unhappy about?” What a sad truth about the
emasculation of white rock since the early 90s – to go back and quote Dr.
Octagon once again,
Kurt Cobain was here
but Doc Oc has Novocain.
One of the other two artists Keith reviewed was some young
white female pop singer, I can’t recall which one or tell you if she has faded
to oblivion or found new employment on some reality TV show, but I do remember
Keith quipping, “in mock valley-girl voice” that he totally loved this music and could see himself taking out the trash
to it.
Apologies if I have misquoted a lyric, my only reference
source was, naturally, my memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment