|
The Intellectual Expert
Academic music critics talk about the “exhilarating symbolic violence” in gangsta rap and in heavy metal alike. I’m inclined to agree. Why, just last night I thrilled to the rigorously deconstructive beatdown I received at the hands of five revolutionaries I encountered on a bus. “Just a moment, gentlemen,” I cried as they began punching and kicking various unspeakable parts in the Hegemony of Myself; “Please don’t spare the cranium.” What a thrill it was as they uncompromisingly rammed from my head (that Cartesian despot!) various autotelic discourses with a lead pipe while one of them (with the same splendid invasiveness with which Axl Rose talks about women) ripped my wallet from my pocket. All the while they were chanting choruses from N.W.A. and Slayer in which random destruction (that exhilarating leveler of Capitalist mystification) found its most eloquent apologists. After they left, I lay gasping in a pool of my own blood, each drop of which contained an implicit victory for Theory and a devastating critique of my white male privilege (for I am, after all, all three), realizing that I hadn’t known such exhilaration since Kurt Cobain obliterated the subject/object distinction by shooting himself. After all, as Derrida said so many years ago, there is no “hors-texte.”
|
|
