‘Tis the season when you can recite every single word of It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year because you’ve heard it 25,671 times this morning already and, let me tell you, there is nothing remotely wonderful about the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you to be of good cheer. It’s extremely annoying.
To bolster those eye-catching claims of musical health hazards, Ms Mahdawi cites a report sharing the hitherto unguessed-at news that round-the-clock exposure to in-store Christmas songs can irritate a significant minority of retail staff. Yes, I know. I’ll pause while you steady yourselves. However, these anhedonic tidings extend beyond mere in-store playlist repetition:
The report [notes] that 43% of people who hate holiday music think it’s too repetitive and 26%, who I imagine all read the Guardian, said they the dislike the materialism of Christmas music.
Yes, people are buying their loved ones things that they might like. How ghastly.
It’s true that a lot of festive music is extremely materialistic.
It’s a “futile materialism,” apparently.
But, worse still, a lot of it is just deeply weird if not outright disturbing. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, for example, a classic of the genre… can be read as an early warning about the powers of the surveillance state and the pervasiveness of sexual predation.
Jim Goad on rappers, shootings and bullet-hole cred:
In late October 2005, a rapper named Cam’ron took three bullets in an attempted DC carjacking. When a reporter asked him for a quote as he was leaving Howard University Hospital, Cam’ron quipped, “I got shot three times and my album comes out November 22.” […] Being shot is such a shot in the arm for the aspirant hip-hop mogul, a rapper named Gravy got shot in the buttocks outside a Brooklyn radio station in April 2006 before heading right into the studio for an interview. As it turns out, Gravy had one of his friends shoot him because he knew it would be good publicity.
Angela Putman, who teaches public speaking at Penn State-Brandywine, designed a comprehensive three-day seminar on “white privilege” for her students, then interviewed 12 attendees on their belief in meritocracy and equal opportunity. To her dismay, Putman discovered that these “whiteness ideologies” were widely endorsed by students, many of whom agreed that “if I work hard, I can be successful.”
Believing in study, effort and diligence as positive things and broad prerequisites for success is, apparently, a harmful and racist ideology. Unlike cultivating resentment and then spending decades seething at how racist, sexist and hopelessly unfair everything is, which I’m sure is bound to pay off.
And Mark Steyn on the indignant librarian, The Cat In The Hat, and the great racist retcon:
The piece argues that the Cat in the Hat’s bow tie is meant to be an evocation of 19th-century racist minstrel shows. Now, just off the top of my head, cartoon characters who wear bow ties: Porky Pig, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Huckleberry Hound. Yogi Bear doesn’t wear a bow, he wears a tie like me, but his boy sidekick Boo Boo the Bear wears a bow tie. Ambrosia, I think the name is, in ‘My Little Pony’ wears a bow tie. I’m not one of the many men in the western world who are obsessed with ‘My Little Pony’ and have ‘My Little Pony’ parties, but I happen to know this one character in ‘My Little Pony’ wears a bow tie. Cartoon characters wear bow ties. That has nothing to do the minstrel shows. We are making ourselves a society too stupid to survive.
Black Lives Matter might more accurately be named White Killers Matter, because it only seems to care about black lives that are ended by white people. And that, of course, is because Black Lives Matter isn’t about justice, but about racial agitation.
If ever there were a narrative worthy of being subjected to “stubborn scepticism,” in [Yale president, Peter] Salovey’s words, the claim [by Salovey] that Yale was the home of “hatred and discrimination” is it… Yale has been obsessed with what the academy calls “diversity,” trying to admit and hire as many “underrepresented minorities” as it possibly can without totally eviscerating academic standards. There has never been a more tolerant social environment in human history than Yale (and every other American college) — at least if you don’t challenge the reigning political orthodoxies.
Harvard senior submits rap album as thesis, gets an A.
It would appear that Harvard’s English department is now intersecting with the even loftier department of hip-hop racial caricatures. The thrillingly original opus in question – which can be savoured here – is “a dark and moody take on what it means to be black in America… tackling topics ranging from police violence to slavery.” But of course.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Here’s yet another example of leftist student protest bearing a remarkable resemblance to opportunist spite:
The Whiffenpoofs, “one of the most prestigious a cappella groups in the United States,” last November chose to remain exclusively male.
I’m sure you can see where this one is headed. This male-only line-up has been both a musical aesthetic and the group’s identity for over a century. Whatever the prevailing politics on campus, male and female voices are, by and large, not entirely interchangeable, and I’d imagine that, say, close-harmony work, a signature of the group, is probably easier if the voices are in the same range. However,
As the Yale Daily News notes, this did not thwart females and “nonmales” from protesting that policy during their auditions.
Specifically,
Student Sydney Garick used her try-out time to criticise the group’s male-only tradition.
And,
A gender nonbinary student… told the News that four Whiffs walked out in the middle of the audition as the student stood in silent protest rather than performing a solo.
Well, given the imposition on others’ time, and the limited number of audition slots available, stage hogging in silent protest is fairly dull to watch, to say nothing of being selfish and insulting.
Before auditioning for the Whiffs, students are required to sign a contract committing to the group’s demanding travel schedule. The student told the News they signed the contract with the pronouns “they/them/their” rather than a name.
But of course. Because pissing about with the paperwork and refusing even to give a name shows everyone just how serious you are, how genuine in your interest, and how terribly radical. For some people it’s just politics über alles. Imagine the fun on tour. Oh, and do note that the protest, the petitions, and the hectoring about inclusivity were aimed only at the university’s all-male singing group. The university’s all-female singing group, which doesn’t admit male singers, was strangely exempt from similar fuss and umbrage.
Speaking of wordplay, we’re once again being told that Baby, It’s Cold Outside is actually an ode to date rape. As so often, the umbrage-takers display a remarkable level of tin-earedness regarding the sentiment of the song, and a joke about feigned intoxication as an excuse for behaving as one might wish. And as noted in the comments over at Instapundit, “There was a time progressives would have said it was about a woman who obviously wants to have sex, but is being oppressed by slut-shamers through fear.”
Update, via the comments:
From the Huffington Postpiece linked at Instapundit:
The duo, singer-songwriters Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski, told CNN that they felt that the original song was “aggressive and inappropriate,” arguing that the listener never finds out what happens to the woman in the song. “You never figure out if she gets to go home.” “You never figure out if there was something in her drink. It just leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth,” said Liza.
You’d think that self-styled singer-songwriters would be able to deduce things from lyrics, arrangement and intonation. And it’s interesting how the rather sour, supposedly progressive interpretation, wheeled out every year in near-identical articles, assumes that the woman in the song is somehow passive and a victim, rather than an equal and willing participant. As Darleen puts it in the comments here, the song is in fact a kind of lyrical tango, “an intricate dance where each partner consents to play a part.”
And from a related CNN article, where the point of the song is, again, spectacularly missed:
The song’s seeming disregard for the woman’s desire to leave never sat well with Lemanski or Liza.
Somewhere, Mr and Mrs Loesser, the writers of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, are rolling their eyes in unison.
Readers are invited to ponder which party – the songwriters or Ms Penny – is actually “ignoring women’s sexual agency.” A demonstration, were one needed, of how rote feminism can bleach away any trace of subtlety.
To my ear, and plenty of others, the woman in the song is far from passive and is listing the customary reasons for leaving, almost all of which are external social pressures and proprieties – gossipy neighbours, maiden aunts with vicious minds – while very much wanting to stay. The crude feminist reading of the song, illustrated above, is of him trying to coerce her. It’s actually about both of them, together, very knowingly, pushing against the social conventions of the time. Which is probably why the song was once considered somewhat risqué.
Still, one has to marvel at how the default progressive line is not only tin-eared and wrong, but actually an inversion of the songwriters’ intent.
The song isn’t about ignoring or overriding the woman’s preferences, or indeed drugging her – but quite the opposite. Throughout the song, they’re both thinking of ways to delay her departure. Half a drink, another cigarette. And despite the woman running through the list of obstacles to her passion, and saying that she “ought to say no,” because social convention expects her to forego her own preferences, the song concludes with the woman deciding that she’s “gonna say” that she tried to go home but was thwarted by the blizzard.
The two of them then agree, in unison and in harmony, that the weather outside really is terrible.
I bring you art. Twelve minutes of it. In which Ms Eames Armstrong and Matthew Ryan Rossetti thrill onlookers at the 2015 MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival with a terribly radical rendition of music from Les Misérables. As readers will no doubt be aware, the MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival is where gathered artistic juggernauts “create queer experimental media through an ever-changing constellation of means.” The participants, we’re told, “make art for ourselves and our community, not for markets or museums.” Consequently, the festival is a “decisive launching pad for emerging talents.”
No skipping ahead to the good bits.
The festival, including the soul-engorging splendour of the piece featured above, was sponsored by both the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. An earlier performance by Ms Armstrong and Mr Rossetti, in which Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, um, enhanced and made transgressive, can be found here. You lucky, lucky people.
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