criticizm

I wanted to buy a playstation this year but now I've got to spend all my $ on the ACLU.

Of course, there are outcasts who really are intimidated, silenced, and oppressed. They tend to be nonwhite, queer, fat, or disabled — the four groups that are the most consistently and widely bullied in American schools. In other words, the “nerds” who are bullied are being bullied for other things than being a nerd. Straight, able-bodied white boys may also have been bullied for their perceived nerdiness — although the epithets thrown often reveal a perceived lack of masculinity or heterosexuality — but the statistics on bullying do not report “nerdiness” as a common factor in bullying incidents. Nevertheless, the myth of nerd oppression and its associated jock/nerd dichotomy let every slightly socially awkward white boy who likes sci-fi explain away his privilege and lay his ressentiment at the feet of the nearest women and people of color.

As Detroit techno moved beyond its early (Juan Atkins-dominated) phase in the mid- and late-eighties, particularly with the release of Derrick May’s Nude Photo in 1987, Europeans consumed the music in much more substantial quantities than audiences in Detroit, New York, or Chicago. Simultaneously, rap gained increasing prominence if not validity in the music industry. Techno and house had a few top-40 hits and dedicated local audiences, and for many musicians it was possible to make a living in the American Midwest. However, neither genre was ever commercially comparable to hip hop in the United States. For techno and house artists, larger crowds and higher record sales were increasingly likely to be reached abroad. Atkins, May, and others have attributed this to two factors. The first is the reluctance of the media to showcase black music which its commentators and editors perceive to prioritize intellectualism. The second is the general disbelief among American audiences which greets the idea that Detroit, a “devastated” area, is the center of an artistic movement. According to Anthony Shakir, “When people think of black kids, they don’t think of computers and books. For me, I’m a black guy and it’s black music to me. But I couldn’t tell that to people [who] just hear what’s on the radio.” Thus Shakir connects the media to the promulgation of an ideology in which intellectual thought and blackness are disjoined. Derrick May further links such tendencies in the media to the deeply ingrained acceptance of devastation in Detroit:        Detroit’s not supposedly one of the forefront leaders of ideas and creativity. So people tend to discount it in the media. They don’t really say ‘Okay, well, Detroit is the focus of the music in America.’ They’ll never let that happen. They’ll never say that a city like Detroit, that is going through so much economic strife, that is a city full of illiterates, at one point, at one level, is the focal point of electronic music, period. They won’t let that happen. They will constantly discount it, and they will act like this didn’t happen.

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