H.P. Lovecraft Vs the Modern World

I'm occasionally characterized by others as having very strong opinions on various things in popular culture.  Some of this charactization is accurate--if it wasn't accurate, I probably wouldn't write these blogs, after all--but I don't think I hate as many things as people think I do; this being mostly an illusion caused by my devoting more time to talking about what I find negative.  Positive things, in my opinion, simply don't need to be discussed as much; they should just be experienced.  Overall, my opinion of most popular things is best characterized as ambivalent.  The vast majority of cultural things I don't care enough about one way or the other to say or write much.  However there is one writer, well-known as the creator of one very popular fictional universe, on whom and which I've said little because my feelings on them were not dispassionate, but rather conflicted.  That writer is the late (and during his life, barely recognized) Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and after my most recent encounter with his work, I've decided that now is the time to organize my thoughts and share them.
People reading this likely assumed, when they got to the part about my conflicted feelings, that I was about to say something like "He was a wonderful writer, but a horrible racist, so I feel bad enjoying his great stories."  In actuality, my opinions on both aspects of the man and his work are more nuanced.

First, the controversial parts of Lovecraft's mentality run deeper than racism.  Racism back then was part of culture, and it was easy for someone to get away with being casually racist--at least among readers of the same race!  However, Lovecraft's work reflected a deeper psychological factor, which he self-identified as "Fear of the Unkown".  It's this fear that his work ran on, and would have still run on if prohibited from discussing race, but even absent that most controversial manifestation, I'm not convinced many people actually share this phobia--particularly to as great an extent.  So this calls into question whether Lovecraft's ideas are really as scary as his most passionate promoters allege.  Second, the claim that Lovecraft was a wonderful writer is a hard one to quantify by most metrics available.  The most likely validation people would give for his writing quality is that his work is still celebrated today, despite its problematic content.  However, as argued in my last point, the "problematic content" runs deeper into his writing than just outdated racial opinions and into a controversial opinion of what is actually pleasant or unpleasant; leading to potential creator and audience dissonance.

That is not to say that none of Lovecraft's sentiments have aged well.  On the contrary, growing up in an era of rapidly advancing science regarding the nature of the cosmos and prehistory had a big effect on Lovecraft's fiction.  His stories often star curious explorers and researchers delving into the unknown, and discovering that humanity and its values are unimportant in the grand scheme of things.  Many find this revelation maddening, if they even survive the journey.  Lovecraft's constant assertions the geocentric (and as a result, human-centric) views that animated much of history were in fact, naive, have since become widespread scientific consensus.  At the same time, there is something of a moral component to his stories, albeit subtly.  The notion that scientific progress could undermine values and spell disaster for humanity was not a new one even in his day, but while many reactionaries like the Christian Apologetics proposed the retention of values out of a belief that their underlying historical sources were to at least some degree true, Lovecraft offered arguably a more flexible, nuanced argument: Even if you can prove that the underlying historical sources of those values aren't true, perhaps you should hold onto them anyway.  A lot of culture, careers, and related things have been built upon them, and even if the collapse of them all is ultimately inevitable, it could behoove you not to do things that hasten that collapse. (Note that for a time, Lovecraft considered himself both an atheist and a conservative; a combination of traits many modern Americans would find odd--though he abandoned the latter attitude toward the end of his life.) This message, much like the haunting cosmic philosophy Lovecraft framed it in, remains tremendously valuable to many people writing many stories (as illustrated by the future statement of Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes, "I'd advise you not to look for answers; you might not like what you find"), though of course there will also be many who hold that scientific progress has helped far more than it has hurt.

Yet if the worrisome philosophy Lovecraft espoused towards delving deeply into things remains pertinent even now, likewise even during his time it must have seemed odd for a man to draw on inherently unpleasant notions to write stories meant to bring readers pleasure. I observed last post that stories get awkward when awkward contradictions underly their narrative; particularly when the show must go on despite the intended message.  Such an issue arguably runs deep in Lovecraft's work; the message is that people shouldn't go looking for the truth about the world and beyond, such as defined in his canon, but for anything interesting to happen, they must, with contradictions alternately constraining what can happen and sending mixed messages about what can happen.  When putting humans up against overwhelming odds to inspire fear, there's a bit of a balancing act writers have to figure out.  If humans can just defeat, or at least escape (sometimes a bit of both) the cosmic horrors, they really aren't too scary.  If humans stand no chance against these horrors, then there is no real suspense either, since people will know how it ends, which also lessens the incentive to become invested in a story.  In practice, on occasion a hero in Lovecraft's stories will beat the odds and survive a daunting encounter with the cosmos, but more often the inevitability of an unhappy outcome constrains the plot to a character simply finding out about the cosmos, either ending before it's too late or ending just as it becomes too late.  Whether the story in the process contained much or any action or intense, quickly escalating scares, seemed less important to Lovecraft than to most other horror writers.

As to the actual prose by which Lovecraft advanced his alien-themed horror stories, it can certainly be said to display his erudition, but how well this lends itself to horror stories is quite up for debate.  Lovecraft's penchant for long-winded descriptions, not just of that which was alien but also of any familiar things he found picturesque, adds tremendous artificial length to his stories.  This can be particularly galling in the aforementioned stories that deal more with revelation more than resolution, as they then come off as killing time and ending abruptly just as they're getting good; almost as though Lovecraft ran out of time.  Worse still, to returning readers whose appetites have been whetted by the promise of fascinating alien entities beyond the threshold of what we regularly perceive, it can be irritating just how many stories spend an unnecessary amount of time bringing a whole new protagonist to that threshold.

All things considered, then, speaking as someone who read a lot of his work back around 2004-2008, I am going to express the possibly controversial opinion that HP Lovecraft was not a particularly good writer; frequently falling prey to his own ego and putting his stories in a bind with a cosmology whose scope made it hard to wield well, but somehow despite all this, he managed to create a few great things that saved his legacy.  Every time I attempt to revisit his work, I find much of it tedious, but reaffirm that The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are great stories.  Actually, as I'll go on to explain, there's some evidence that this opinion isn't controversial.

It's no secret that the most famous thing Lovecraft created is Cthulhu, the giant, octopus-faced, bat-winged humanoid monster imprisoned under the ocean but always preparing for his apocalyptic return with the help of his sociopathic cultists. His name has, since the death of Lovecraft, become the name for the mythos in which Lovecraft's stories were set, and even is featured prominently in works that actually have little to nothing to do with him.  It should be noted, for example, that The Call of Cthulhu is the only story Lovecraft wrote in which Cthulhu personally appears, though he is referenced in many of Lovecraft's other stories.  Why, then, is Cthulhu such an enduring--and at times, even endearing--icon of his work?

I would argue, and I am not alone, that Cthulhu's appeal, rather unique among Lovecraft's entities, owes to being highly and rapidly conceivable upon description.  A tremendous advantage The Call of Cthulhu has over many of Lovecraft's stories is that its titular monster is described near to the beginning of its narrative; in the form of a statue.  Moreover, he has fewer features than many Lovecraft monsters, which allows readers to visualize him easily based on the description--an especial bonus considering how long it takes Lovecraft to describe details!  Too many other Lovecraft stories feature a protagonist moving towards the revelation of an otherworldly entity, inevitably at a pace that at least seems slow given Lovecraft's tendency to over-articulate everything.  Then the entity can underwhelm when it finally appears, due to the same over-articulation crawling over such a mess of features that it takes a great attention span to visualize.  However, The Call of Cthulhu's namesake is teased early on, and kept constantly on the readers' minds from the start, building suspense up for when he appears live.  While the murderous occultists that also feature in the story can be scary on their own, it's the epic creature that holds it all together.  Also, the story has multiple action scenes, with police trudging into the woods to confront Cthulhu's cult, a pirate battle, and finally the harrowing encounter with Cthulhu himself.  The framing device of the first-person narrator piecing this all together also comprises something of a story arc; while the theme of a character coming to regret his curiosity is common to Lovecraft, here it feels like actual character development.

In sum, The Call of Cthulhu is a great story, but its greatness often feels in-spite, not because, of Lovecraft's infamous tendencies. (Though it does have a lot of racism, but more on that in a moment.)  Lovecraft was afraid of alien and incomprehensible things and fond of longwinded prose, thus he conceived many overly-detailed monsters based on both.  Yet it's his rare monster who hits close to home by drawing on a few things most humans recognize and not much else, that has been his biggest success.  Lovecraft's penchant for longwinded prose is present, but Cthulhu's a classic design that even his longwinded prose can't render dull to many readers.  Cthulhu has a long, complicated occult history attached to him, but he can work just fine as a standard, rampaging kaiju, and does get the chance in the climax of the story.  There is an arc, with a setup and a resolution.  Lovecraft often rebelled against standard expectations of what makes a good story, and when his most-loved story is an anomaly that conforms more closely to said expectations, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel quite right to see it as a mark of true brilliance.

The second most famous thing Lovecraft created, I would argue, is his dark and under-explored version of New England, dubbed "Lovecraft Country" by his successors, and featuring dilapidated, creepy and broadly shunned towns such as Innsmouth and Dunwich.  There is an autobiographical component to this setting, as it is where Lovecraft spent most of his life.  The other notable place he lived for a time was New York City, whose multi-ethnic population constantly triggered and intensified Lovecraft's xenophobia, ultimately inspiring him to move back to his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island.  While his unpleasant time in New York City inspired him to write the stories, He and The Horror Of Red Hook, ironically it was the rural New England setting, which he found more comforting, where he set most of his horror stories.  It was dark at night, the extensive tree cover made it easy to get lost there, made the few outposts of humanity seem remote from one another, and provided potential cover for places where bad things could happen without outsiders knowing.  This, blended with old Puritan worries about evil supernatural forces, made the region a good microcosm for Lovecraft's worries about the whole world, and beyond, where civilized people--which to him meant those of Northern European descent--were outliers against savage peers.

Such underlying xenophobia has aged terribly, yet Lovecraft Country has survived its demise.  The aforementioned story, The Call of Cthulhu, was not set primarily in Lovecraft Country.  Instead, in more ready reflection of Lovecraft's fears of the foreign and exotic, it visited many more locations, Louisiana, Scandinavia, Australia, and the Oceanic Pole, where Lovecraft set Cthulhu's home of R'lyeh.  However, despite the ensuing popularity of Cthulhu himself, he tends to get folded back into Lovecraft Country, or at least gets his name applied to it for publicity's sake.  For example, the video game The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, is in fact based mostly on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, set in and around that haunted town.  There is also called a movie called Cthulhu, also based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  Cthulhu himself doesn't actually appear in either!  We've read why Lovecraft himself saw Innsmouth and similar thinly-populated New England locales as good places to set horror stories, but why has this setting endured so much for modern audiences?

Once again, I would argue that it is in spite of Lovecraft's propensities rather than because of them.  Modern popular sentiments do not consider foreign countries necessarily scary, nor cosmopolitan cities with people from those foreign countries; many find these places romantic, instead.  What can scare people of these sentiments, then, are essentially the alternatives.  If foreign countries and big, (multi-)cultured cities are romantic, then logically more rural, less-traveled, less (multi-)cultured regions of the United States, passed over by progress, commonly (though not exclusively) referred to as redneck, are places to be shunned.  Ironically, while Lovecraft was afraid of race-mixing, he was also afraid of inbreeding, which he called out in the Lovecraft Country story, The Dunwich Horror.  The association he observed between inbreeding and rural America is one that has lasted to this day, and unlike race mixing, the unhealthiness of inbreeding has been scientifically validated.  Lovecraft's observation of these sorts of places being less conventionally educated, overall, also holds true in the modern cultural perception.  Thus, for modern audiences with "politically correct" views on race, it is still entirely possible to write an effective story of evil afoot in antiquated, remote places that most Americans have the good sense to avoid.

It is partially for this reason that The Shadow Over Innsmouth remains such a compelling story; easily my favorite of the Lovecraft stories I have read.  The other big reason is it possesses narrative qualities akin to the aforementioned The Call of Cthulhu; there is a character arc, with the narrator-protagonist going on a harrowing journey, his attitudes and goals changing as he learns more.  Also like The Call of Cthulhu, there is action, although in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator is the one who experiences it.  The story is not just about his discovery of the shunned town, but also his adventures within it--and they do have a substantive ending.  Lovecraft's xenophobia is manifest in the particular nature of the evil afoot in Innsmouth; a fish-based religion imported from Asia, but the events it sets up, wherein the hostile locals hunt the protagonist through the dark, aging town, can be scary for anyone of any background.  Indeed, while they may be practicing a foreign religion, within their own town the Innsmouth folk themselves are effectively the xenophobes, determined to ensure that a visitor from the outside world never leaves alive to tell their secrets.  So the story may feel particularly relevant to anyone who has ever been a noticeable minority in a town that dislikes said minority, in a way many other Lovecraft stories obviously would not.  Granted, the Innsmouth folk are also scary for another important reason that I won't spoil here.  As with Cthulhu, then, Innsmouth, and the surrounding region reminiscent thereof, has an appeal so much more universal than many other Lovecraft creations that it almost feels like an accident.

Some would say this isn't being fair to Lovecraft, and it is only fair to acknowledge that he, like many people, was complex.  He considered himself a cultured intellectual, undoubtedly a self-designation shared by many modern readers who deplore his racial views, and as if in preview of that irony, his writing was full of notable contradictions.  Lovecraft was a curious researcher who saw a great risk to curious research.  The alien was frightening to him but this fright was compelling to him.  He was constantly unafraid to write about his dated values that have since died but also constantly writing about being afraid that his dated values would soon die.  He often depicted non-European people as scary in his stories, but paradoxically in his brand of horror that also meant depicting them as being more correct about the true nature of Earth and the cosmos.  Perhaps these contradictions, born as they are of a mind that considered moral values illusory, help Lovecraft's canon resonate with people whose moral values differ from his.

Nevertheless, I find myself cringing whenever I read modern Lovecraft aficionados denigrating other writers' takes on his creations, with such criticisms as they aren't hopeless enough. (As if there was any objective logic to the idea of entertaining people with thoughts of hopelessness!)  For me, the contradictions in Lovecraft's psyche and work are manifest in some stories being much better than others, and while I admit to not having read the vast majority, of the ones I have read I hold only the two I praised here in any major esteem.  I may change my opinion upon reading more of his work, and I intend to, but suffice it to say I do not find his work easy to read, so I can't say when.

PS: Some readers will argue that I write a lot like HP Lovecraft; particularly after reading that last sentence.  To these people, feel free to suggest a shorter way to convey all of the ideas in this post, which I trust you have read in its entirety!

"All media is political"--Truth, fallacy, or somewhere in between?

Some people reading this may know that I also have a political blog.  I tend to keep politics there, while using this one to comment on our culture.  However, when the subject of a post is addressing how much politics and culture do or don't intersect, I obviously have to choose one or the other.  Because I'm going to keep present-day political issues mostly out of this most, I am choosing to put it here.

Moving right along, it's becoming increasingly obvious that many popular works of fiction are pushing an agenda of some sorts these days.  Films like the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and TV shows like Steven Universe, all have received attention for promoting and demoting specific sorts of people and/or values; a summation that is hard to dispute when both their fans and detractors agree on this basic point.  When it comes to the points these people disagree on, a common accusation that detractors make is that media seeking a wide audience shouldn't go out of its way to include a political message; to which the defenders often retort that all fiction includes some kind of political message, so it's hypocritical to start complaining about just some of them.

How true is this defense?  Well, "all" is such a strong word that I'm not ready to concede that, but I will acknowledge that lots of fiction says something political if you look hard enough.  However, the issue with bringing this up, as a defense of an individual work's political themes, is that not all political statements are created equal.  The context that they are made in varies.  The audience varies.  The degree to which a statement is made a focus varies.  All of these things are key to understanding the difference between observing trends and starting trends.

Let's go back to Ghostbusters.  The political messages of this series were actually being talked about long before the 2016 reboot, but "Racism is bad" isn't one of the messages of the original film.  Yes; an African American joins an otherwise white team as part of the movie, but because nothing in the film depicts him having trouble getting in because he's black, that isn't a message; it's just a given.  "Racism is bad" is a message in works like To Kill a Mockingbird or Blazing Saddles, as both depict a time when racism was more widespread and have characters learning not to hate a black character.  Ghostbusters isn't like that; because it's more modern, it assumes people already consider racism bad, so its characters have no need to spend any time telling them that it is.  No character in the film needs to act racist or crusade against racism because that issue is settled for everyone involved.  That doesn't mean these films are afraid to get controversial, but to be controversial you have to make statements that are still contested.

 Now let's move on to Star Wars, and whether accusations of a political agenda in The Last Jedi are frivolous, given this series has always had political themes.  Before we go further, a disclosure: I gave up on the prequels after Episode 1; I'm sure I'll have to bend over and watch them at some point, but let's just stick to the original trilogy.  The rather vague designation of "political themes" obviously does pertain to a film series about a rebel group going up against a tyrannical political regime, but Star Wars: A New Hope can't be described as having an agenda to convince people that regimes like the Empire are evil.  The story it intends to tell requires viewers to understand this easily and willingly upon demonstration.  The Death Star destroys the planet Alderan to demonstrate that the Empire is evil; not to demonstrate that mass-murder is evil--viewers are expected to understand that mass-murder is evil going into the film, because if they didn't the scene wouldn't serve a point, so the agenda of this film isn't to show that mass-murder is evil.  By extension, that the rebels are still rebelling after this implies that life under the Empire has to be truly horrible for the people to risk losing everything trying to throw it off.  Then, of course, there is the bit with some of the Imperial troops dressing and acting like the Nazis.  The film is not an allegory for the Holocaust, but it expects viewers to be familiar enough with it that mere allusions help make the point.

In summary, political statements and political agendas are not the same thing, as the latter are pursued under the assumption that things aren't the way they should be.  If things already are to your liking, you have no need for an agenda; you can just rest easy.  You will have an easier time entertaining more people if they're already convinced of something.  Future elaborations on this will probably go on my political blog instead, but for now, I hope I've explained enough nuance to better inform the subject of politics in entertainment from here on.

Malcolm and Me

Two rather coincidental things happened yesterday.  One, I finally finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, and two, I got suspended from a forum for posting a picture I drew that was arguably racist for cruelly mocking rapper dialogue.  I originally drew the picture (it's the fourth panel) in a Drawception game (note that despite the warning, there's no nudity or porn in that link, only language and racial humor), and if you don't know what Drawception is, the front page should give you a good idea. (Edit: It has now occurred to me that you need to log into the site to see NSFW games; fortunately simple Facebook or Google accounts work.)

I'm not going to say I did nothing wrong, when clearly this offended people.  Insofar as that game goes, I was just following the prompt, and in fact, my panel affected a change from a game that started as racist to one mocking wiggers, but it was, indeed, stupid of me to post that image on a forum thread devoid of context that explained it.  Nevertheless, I feel obligated to provide the context I conceived of it in, to explain why I don't believe this is truly racist at all.

The most immediately racist implication comes from the notion that I'm making fun of how black people talk.  Well, that would be a valid criticism, except absolutely no black person I've ever known actually talked like that.  In college, I had a good friend who was not only black, but from South Central Los Angeles, and he talked like an intellectual addressing other intellectuals; quite ahead of some white people I've heard.  The actual people I've heard spewing the sort of thing depicted in that drawing are of other races, trying to imitate a commodified version of black culture in order to be "cool".

This is how some High School students actually addressed me/the teacher, and none of us were black.

This is, in the words of someone who actually used such lingo (and wasn't black), all part of "the hip-hop subculture".  The image I drew isn't meant to be a stereotypical black man, but (as the prompt called for) a stereotypical rapper; the common perception of a rapper being both black, and using that sort of jargon.

Now, I want to pause and say I like rap music.  It varies in quality like every music variety, but it has am appeal to me musically that it doesn't for many people. (Though it is becoming increasingly more accepted, which, as I will note later, is a problem.)  Yet I've heard enough of it to deduce that something stinks, too.  I'm not getting fed up with people using bad grammar and a slang terms just in and of themselves.  I'm getting fed up with them for doing so because it's showing contempt for education in the most banal way popular, and because the slang terms are very often, something negative turned into a positive, and they aren't used facetiously, either.  I made certain to include in that drawing a lot of the terms for things I find particularly troublesome.  I do not like living in an era where "gangster", "pimp", and "dope" denote high quality and/or charisma, and furthermore, some relation to black people; had we only the latter connotation, everyone would see this association as blatantly racist, but somewhere along the line, hip-hop made vice look cool.  Which does not mean it isn't a huge problem for the race it's supposed to represent.

Usually, when people consume period literature, they remark on how different popular culture was back then.  Upon reading Malcolm X's autobiography, one of the most shocking things I discovered was that black popular culture actually wasn't very different.  Already in the World War II era, the ghettos were filled with black people using bad grammar and slang to be cool, and dealing in gambling, drugs, and prostitution to make themselves wealthy; many of them falling victim to the same temptations, or to rival gangsters, or the cops.  Malcolm X fell to all three, and during a long stint in prison, when he had a chance to meditate on all of it, came to the exact same conclusion I would decades later: The "gangsta" culture is degenerating the black race, and now it hasn't stopped at them, either.

In Malcolm's opinion, and especially that of the Nation of Islam, who were his mentors at the time, these things were largely set in motion by devious white members of society with the specific goal of keeping blacks down, and this could be true, as America was still quite a racist nation at the time. (Which is not to be taken as a wholesale endorsement of the NOI's beliefs, but sometimes it doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the wind's blowing.)  It could also be Nietzschean resentiment; that is, people who find their lives in the low levels of society inescapable, identify aspects of their life in the low levels of society, and reinterpret them as positive parts of their identity that, in fact, make them above others; sinking into nihilism and becoming their own worst enemy.  It could be both.  What caused it, though, is not important.  The fact is that was the state of black popular culture then, and that it still is now proves that something in the Civil Rights movement didn't go quite right.

I've certainly had people suspect me of being a racist for my myriad attacks on what hip-hop values, and I actually wondered about my own negative views when I first started listening to such music, but now that I've found respected black sources that share my criticism, I feel no more reservations in stating it.  Listen to what these men (and now, women, too) are spouting and ask yourself what it says to listeners about their race.  What does it say when black people revel in subverting grammar standards taught in school?  What does that say about intelligence?  What does it say when black people brag about killing other black people (whom they frequently call by the N word) for being competing criminals?  Whom does that really help?  What does it say when they brag about their diamonds, which were quite possibly mined in Africa by other black people enslaved by terrorists?  What does it say when they brag about their price-gouged designer clothes, made by companies run by white people?  What does it say when they boast about subjugating women to be their "bitches" and "hoes", and their hatred of homosexuals, when the trod-upon members of society should be helping each other out?  Who's the racist here; us people who criticize this shit, or the people who endorse it and actually buy it as a quintessential part of being black?

If a white person drew this picture, how would your reaction change?  Should it matter?

Now, some will say things are improving.  That we don't have many lyrics about killing other black people anymore (though it took two hugely influential and respected rappers dying in a feud to stop it), or about violent crime in general.  Now, it's just people bragging about their obscene wealth; partially squandered on status symbols that are only worth so much because people are stupid enough to pay that much for them, and their virtual sex slaves, and their drugs.  So whereas before, hip-hop sold an image of black people as tough and immoral, now it just makes them look immoral.  Is that an improvement?  It certainly isn't a fix to the damage that this culture has done.

Things aren't looking to stop, either.  Nietzsche said something else about resentiment; he said that, while it's born among those at the low end of society who have the most impetus to make it the most hypnotic, it can spread upward, as the forced valuation of the trappings of being at the low end of society sweeps people higher up in its spell.  That's what's happening now, when non-black people imitate what they mistakenly believe is black culture and think is cool.  It's happening in the casual, positive use of "gangsta" and "pimp" and "dope", it's happening in the Far East Movement's ridiculously pretentious claims of being awesome for getting high off cough syrup, it's happening in myriad young people, of every race, who view success as doing immoral things for money, all so they can buy Gucci and Louis and ice and dope and SUVs with decorated hubcaps.  If this cancer ever spreads to the point that society breaks down from being too immoral and stupid to function, whom do you think they're going to turn around and blame?  The black people, whom hip-hop convinced them started this all.

This is why I feel absolutely justified in mocking the stupidity and one-dimensionality of many rappers, because they don't represent their race or what's good for their race; they represent a lifestyle that gives hollow, short-term gain to a few people while being worse in the long run for them, and worse immediately for many others.  Now if you enjoy this music, as I do, go on back and enjoy it some more; the same as you might enjoy hearing Scarr sing about how he plans to kill Mufasa and crush the remaining opposition.  But think about how things could be better; how rap could be turned into something that retains its appeal and edge without being stupid and immoral, and consider drawing the line more thickly sometime in the very near future.