underclass pop cult

[Robert V. Scheetz]

m- writes:
>The question is: does aesthetic quality constitute a value that is
>in and of itself, in some semse, revolutionary, progressive,
>visionary, in complicity with the forces of Light rather than
>Darkness.

In contrast to Art, popular culture for the under-class has always
been a critical part of the apparatus of pooression: in its classic
licit -religion and sports- forms, and illicit: the culture of
narcosis; brutalizing, debasing, stultifying. Its consumer capitalist
form, commercial pop cult, differs only in being exponentially more so.

Mass production/marketing and its iron law of lowest-common-denominator
inevitably target the culture product at adolescents, formulating
it of the standard LCD adolescent tropes and themes: from Rambo to
Michael Jordan to MTV all super-heroes strike phallic poses and
riot in a seemingly endless dionysiac orgasm of violence.

The underclass "Gangsta Rap" genre utilizes the old standard
"Jailbird-Nigger" mythos: the black boy so "bad" the Man has
to emasculate him, put him in chains.  This provides the psychical
grounds for the ensuing unchained melody of violence -obviously
recapitulating the classic adolescent Oedipus.  So inner-city 
kids shave their heads and wear jeans 10 sizes too large (and
of course, no belts in super-max), and vibrate the hood (jailhouse)
with intensely provocative lyrics -soliloquy which functions as
metaphorical mayhem against Authority.

Bourgeois Liberal patronage of Black lumpen pop cult:
Gangsta Rap, Jazz cum heroin, thug athlets cum hGH and
cocaine,...and all stripes of born-agin lumpen secular preachers,
is a given.  Like all pimps, it sentimentalizes the squalor in
order to sanitize its profits.  And, for purposes of social
control, pop cult functions to diffuse energies that might
otherwise be put to challenging the statusquo.  Frederick Douglas
tells how the Slavers encouraged brutal sports and hard drink
on Sundays and holidays.

But the "Jailbird-Nigger", along with its correlate, Black Rage
(Fanon's, "Burn, baby, burn!") was upon a time taken up by
Institute'rs.  Despairing of the revolutionary potential of
the industrial working class, they turned to the underclass
lumpen to supply the "forlorn hope", like the enrage' of the
Fr. Rev.  But, Marcuse & co. had even less luck than Old
Potawatomie; the "rage", as in Spike Lee's "Do the Right
Thing", tended inexorably and with the excruciating logic of
diabolical irony to be directed -husband against wife,
child against parent, young against old, Black against White,
against Korean,...a "bellum omnium" except, never against
the Oppressor.  And the Cleaver's and Mandella's, etc. seem ever,
as with Thurgood Marshall, to turn out double-agents.  It is
the crowning outcome of oppression that, in reality, the Poor
love the Rich.

So, even tho there is no expectation from this quarter, Left
analysis should be clear on the nature of commercial popular
culture and how it functions vis a vis the underclass.

Bob Scheetz