tapesongs:
The mostly white audience’s response to the actual black frustration before them? They laughed it off. So much so that Phoenix New Times music writer Martin Cizmar called the experience a “turnoff.” “[I was] unsettled by how the mostly white crowd related to Odd Future’s angry music,” Cizmar wrote in his review of the show. “Something about wealthy white yuppies laughing and smiling as black teenagers pour out their rage at an unfair world through hip-hop didn’t sit well with me … [T]here’s something unseemly about white people getting a big kick out of it.”
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Ike Turner, Mike Tyson, Chris Brown — all black men whose anger went from latent to gruesome, and whose reputations were shattered irrevocably in the process. Because the fetishization of black aggression has its limits. And while white people love to hear you say you’re going to beat and rape some women, God help you if you ever actually do it.
and from this article (+ review of their show in SXSW):
I was a little sick standing behind (edit: former as of this month) Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers — she knows next to nothing about hip-hop and mostly ignored it on her pages despite representing a city with an incredible scene, including this group — as she laughed and smiled, drinking everything in.
One of the Odd Future guys looking out at the bemused crowd put it best: “Ain’t Shit Funny.”
Shortly thereafter, they bounced, giving the crowd a big fuck-you and heading for the door.
The response from people like Powers? She gave a 10-second review of the show on NPR, calling the group “very insolent,” and saying, “I thought they needed to go to bed without their supper.”
Those are interesting words coming from a wealthy white lady who should, presumably, take this group as seriously as anyone considering she’s the big-time music critic at the daily newspaper serving their community. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but treating Tyler and his crew like “insolent” children or, worse, a joke, makes me queasy.
