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Rapper Beats Noem in Culture Battle… But Trumpism Wins Culture War?

Politico recaps how rapper Montero Lamar Hill—a.k.a. Lil Nas X—duped the easily distracted Governor Kristi Noem and the right-wing culture war machine into helping him make money. I kinda sorta want to cheer the article’s assessment that the right wing has lost the culture war and is now a mere predictably manipulable minority:

…Though seemingly uninterested in religion himself, he recognized that millions of evangelical Christians could be recruited to the culture wars as a minority that feels increasingly embattled.

Just as a series of impotent “Go woke, go broke” boycott attempts have repeatedly failed to dissuade corporations from taking liberal political stances, there is no meaningful pressure threatening Nas’ various corporate partnerships. After four years of the Trump presidency, it’s easy to understand Nas’ provocation as a turning of the tables — making the confrontational demand for conservatives to “stay mad” amid the initial uproar over “Montero,” and sit with the fact that many, probably most, Americans are perfectly unbothered by a campy satanic lap dance.

At the same time, that very fact gives the whole episode a bit of a spiking-the-football quality. Nas, his fans and his critical allies have already won the culture wars, at least nationally [Derek Robertson, “How Lil Nas X Flipped Conservatives’ Culture-War Playbook,” Politico, 2021.04.10].

But Robertson’s essay concludes that Hill’s “victory” is just a marketing coup with a seamy, Trumpy flavor:

But the days of the culture-defining, tone-setting pop star are, at least for now, over. With “Montero,” Nas has proven himself masterful at taking advantage of our current cultural landscape and the incentives toward cheap and manufactured outrage that lurk within it—reacting to the reaction, and drawing energy from it.

He took the playbook conservatives have used during the Trump era to reliably “own the libs,” gratuitously flouting their cultural norms for fun and for profit, and turned it against them. Which is all in a day’s work for a political or ideological actor. But in the world of pop culture, that same savvy is also a weakness — revealing how hopelessly we’re trapped in the cycle of outrage the Trump and post-Trump era have engendered [Robertson, 2021.04.10].

I don’t think we can claim to have “won” any culture war unless we establish a healthy culture based on thoughtfulness and mutual respect, not money, manipulation, and outrage.

17 Comments

  1. Donald Pay 2021-04-10 10:19

    It’s a little strange that when we had Satan as our 45th President, there was little outrage from the “Christians.” As long as Satanism comes with a white huckster facade, rather a black gay one, Christian are willing to accept Satan. I think Satan has figured out how to fool those Christians, which is part of the reason why Satan ruled us from 2017 until this January.

    That Robertson article in Politico was interesting. Outrage is used as a marketing tool, but outrage is also a powerful human emotion that is different from marketing. I take issue with his placing “Piss Christ” in that category of outrage as marketing. What is more outrageous? The plastic Jesus on a cross sold at a church or the piss it is immersed in? That is the issue Serrano explored. He was outraged that Christians turn Jesus into a plastic idol for sale. The fact is in being hung on a cross is not a clean process. Body wastes are released. Jesus would have been covered in his own wastes, not covered by a flowing robe. In that sense, Serrano’s art is closer to reality than what the church was selling.. Isn’t that something to be outraged about?

  2. grudznick 2021-04-10 10:27

    grudznick agrees with Mr. Pay that Satan gets the notch over young Governor Noem, not the rapper fellow with cat eyes. And you can’t win arguments with pretend characters like Satan. Ironic, huh?

  3. Porter Lansing 2021-04-10 13:45

    Culture wars? Ha! We notice that the “cancel culture” is now a Republican weapon as they demand MAGA’s boycott Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Merck, Apple, Home Depot, the Atlanta Falcons and Hawks, Black Rock, JPMorgan, Chase, American Express, Citigroup, Google, Porsche, UPS, Microsoft, Aflac, Bank of America, Cisco and Viacom CBS for standing up against Georgia Voting Law.
    i.e. – The worst piece of the law is nearly eliminating early voter drop boxes.
    Cancel this, MAGA MAN.

  4. Mark Anderson 2021-04-10 16:41

    You know I didn’t really care when Republicans were in charge because the Democrats won the culture war, or so I thought.. I wasn’t aware of the depth of racial hatred. Luckily cameras on everyone’s body has lead to all of that coming out and it won’t go away like in the past. Change is coming even with the trumpies feeble lies and attempts to make voting secure. They are only fooling themselves.

  5. leslie 2021-04-10 16:55

    “A The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last summer’s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo about “antisocial elements” and “hooligans.” They blame their failures at the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.

    Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.””

    TOM NICHOLS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy

    “A dying party can still be a dangerous party. The Communist leaders in those last years of political sclerosis arrayed a new generation of nuclear missiles against NATO, invaded Afghanistan, tightened the screws on Jews and other dissidents, lied about why they shot down a civilian 747 airliner, and, near the end, came close to starting World War III out of sheer paranoia.”

  6. Donald Pay 2021-04-10 17:28

    Leslie, I agree completely. I used to think there would be a way back for the Republican Party, post-Trump’s defeat. Now I think they realize they have no way back, They are going down, and, they have to turn toward authoritarianism to regain any power. If they ever get their hands on power, they will take this country down as well, AND THERE WILL BE NO WAY BACK. Democrats need to realize what you have laid out. Democrats need to be a governing party, one that gets things done for the people. This is what democratic governments between the two world wars failed to do. They failed to unite the left. They failed to keep the center. They failed to solve problems. They festered, and then Mussolini, Hitler and others offered a way out.

    It’s a tricky political problem, but they need to solve it. I think Biden is going about it correctly. He does need to reach out to the state-level governing Republicans, some of whom will join him on infrastructure. He needs to show he will fight for progressive values, but not be afraid to compromise with the center, such as it is. He needs to try to use regular order in Congress for some parts of his program. But most of all, he needs to get things done.

  7. mike from iowa 2021-04-10 18:54

    Religion should be banned for all in America.

  8. mike from iowa 2021-04-10 18:56

    Banning religion makes no difference to magats as they have turned kristianity into a cult with drumpf as the chosen one.

  9. o 2021-04-10 22:31

    MFI . . .or turned religion into the man behind their curtain of dogma. Tonight on FOX, Judge Jeanine Pirro raged against Democrats being foolish enough to stand agaisnt our GOD-given right to own guns.

    The MAGA crowd has followed suit of so many before, created a god in their own image.

  10. Neal 2021-04-10 22:50

    “Religion should be banned for all in America.”

    Legit lunatic fringe stuff there mike. Clown show level. Well done.

  11. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2021-04-11 08:23

    Donald’s point at the top reminds me of all those portraits of Jesus as a white man. Satan isn’t painted to look like us.

  12. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2021-04-11 08:26

    Come on, Neal, you know Mike from Iowa doesn’t mean it; he’s just trying to sell more downloads of his upcoming rap single, “Satan Sittin’ on My Silo.”

    Seriously, I seek no ban on religion. I just want you to take your religion seriously and not elect the anti-Christ again.

  13. mike from iowa 2021-04-11 09:02

    Magats would ban Muslims in an instant and likely catholics, as well. Magatized kristianity is a mockery of everything taught in the bible. and is pure gutter slop. Magat’s idea of godswill is preaching hate and greed!

  14. mike from iowa 2021-04-11 09:05

    Tom Nchols is/was a longtime contributor to Madison Cap Times paper in Wisconsin. Good writer.

  15. Joe 2021-04-11 15:42

    Lil Nas X is a gay man who was raised in a Black evangelical family and church. The imagery and narrative in his latest video is all about conquering and banishing the shame and self-hate that upbringing placed upon him.

    I think he has a lot of opinions about religion. “Uninterested” is not one of them.

  16. DaveFN 2021-04-11 19:11

    Nice article by Derek Robertson although it’s highly interpretive of Montero’s actual motivations (and Serrano’s, too, as Donald Pay points out above).

    While outrage may be the effect of a given stimulus, it would be a mistake to say without qualification that deliberate provocation was therefore at work as the cause. Recall that Jesse Helms was outraged at the Corcoran’s 1989 exhibit “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” leading to chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Robert Frohnmayer’s 1992 resignation (and Frohnmayer’s subsequent 1993 book ;Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior’).

    I was fortunate to have attended Mapplethorpe’s exhibition prior to its pulling. Part of it included a video critique some words of which yet ring in my ears, viz., “Is it offensive? Yes, but SO WHAT!?” (Which, of course, begs the question of whether such exhibits should be funded by public dollars, something that was to become the more salient question, but that’s another matter; in any case, ‘Montero’ wasn’t publicly funded as far as I’m aware, so that’s one less thing for detractors to gripe about).

    The point is that any ostensible work–and I stop somewhat short of saying ‘work of art’–is overdetermined, that is, subject to a myriad of interpretations–at least by thinking people. Whereas Noem’s gut reply IMHO to ‘Montero’ was her single tweet “What good does it do for a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul,” one might on the other hand counter that the video is instead about a man so tormented by society who is, in fact, trying to reclaim his own soul–whether or not his means justify the end, an end reached by sliding down a pole into the depths of hell (with all the metaphors that might unfold from such literal and slippery imagery).

    If offense is a function of both societal norms and a projection by the individual, doesn’t that say as much about both society and the individual as it does what has ‘provoked’ the offense taken? If the unexamined life was once considered not worth living, the constraints of our technologies which allow us to opt out from unpacking and interpreting the world around us by anything but sound bites will likely ensure unexamined lives and the adoption of canned phrases and formulas, the lenses through which the world will unfortunately take form. At least Montero is willing to venture an interpretation by his chosen venue. As far as Noem, Twitter is about as good as it seems to get.

    Nice article by Derek Robertson although it’s highly interpretive of Montero’s actual motivations (and Serrano’s, too, as Donald Pay points out above).

    While outrage may be the effect of a given stimulus, it would be a mistake to say without qualification that deliberate provocation was therefore at work as the cause. Recall that Jesse Helms was outraged at the Corcoran’s 1989 exhibit “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” leading to chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Robert Frohnmayer’s 1992 resignation (and Frohnmayer’s subsequent 1993 book ;Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior’).

    I was fortunate to have attended Mapplethorpe’s exhibition prior to its pulling. Part of it included a video critique some words of which yet ring in my ears, viz., “Is it offensive? Yes, but SO WHAT!?” (Which, of course, begs the question of whether such exhibits should be funded by public dollars, something that was to become the more salient question, but that’s another matter; in any case, ‘Montero’ wasn’t publicly funded as far as I’m aware, so that’s one less thing for detractors to gripe about).

    The point is that any ostensible work–and I stop somewhat short of saying ‘work of art’–is overdetermined, that is, subject to myriad interpretations–at least by thinking people. Whereas Noem’s gut reply IMHO to ‘Montero’ was her single tweet “What good does it do for a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul,” one might on the other hand counter that the video is instead about a man so tormented by society who is, in fact, trying to reclaim his own soul–whether or not his means justify the end, an end reached by sliding down a pole into the depths of hell (with all the metaphors that might unfold from such literal and slippery imagery).

    If offense is a function of both societal norms and a projection by the individual, doesn’t that say as much about both society and the individual as it does what has ‘provoked’ the offense taken? If the unexamined life was once considered not worth living, the constraints of our technologies which allow us to opt out from unpacking and interpreting the world around us by anything but sound bites will likely ensure unexamined lives and the adoption of canned phrases and formulas as a semblance of reality, the lenses through which our world will unfortunately take form. At least Montero is willing to venture an interpretative work by his chosen venue. As far as Noem, Twitter is about as good as it seems to get.

  17. jake 2021-04-12 13:25

    Dave FN-good comment. Thanks

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