Tonight’s Grammy Awards may result in an award to Buju Banton in the Best Reggae Album category, and the dismay over his homicidally anti-gay lyrics (noted two posts below) has been dismissed by the Recording Academy, which gives out the awards, as irrelevant to the act of ‘honoring musical achievement regardless of politics’.Oh yes, that familiar message: Tut, tut, now people, please don’t be dull and mix politics with capital-A Art.
But what if we were to do a thought experiment and change the let’s-shoot-and-then-set-fire-to-homosexuals lyrics by substituting another class of people to be on the receiving end?
Like Jews, for example. Or blacks. How far would a singer get who pumped up his dancehall listeners with calls to shoot Jews or burn dark-skinned people? I suspect the reaction might be characterized in a lot of ways but never as mere ‘politics’.
Nor would many people rush to such a performer’s defense in name of artistic freedom, which merely demonstrates that hateful incitement to violence against gay men remains acceptable in polite society while anti-Semitism and racism are not.
[P.S.] One of Buju’s esteemed ‘longtime collaborators’ listed on the Irish and Chin website (which also carries furious attacks on Banton’s critics under ‘Dear Sodomite or Sodomite sympathizer’) is Wyclef Jean, the Haitian musician who is raking in mountains of money to his modestly-named Wyclef Jean Foundation. Problem is, according to The Smoking Gun, the WJF ‘has a lackluster history of accounting for its finances and . . . has paid the performer and his business partner at least $410,000 for rent [and] production services’.
Great bunch of guys. Let’s dance (non-politically)!
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