The Big Questions What is morally off-limits in pop culture?

First, a disclaimer: This is not another thinkpiece about the guy that you’ve read about lately who’s in trouble for saying nasty things. This is about all artists—with a focus on music, though it could apply to any artistic or cultural discipline—that have ever gotten in trouble for saying (or doing) nasty things, or ever will get in trouble. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper, Kiss, the Sex Pistols, Prince, Twisted Sister, WASP, Guns N’ Roses, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Body Count, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Eminem, and, yes, Tyler The Creator—they (and many more) are all interchangeable segues in an ongoing cultural conversation that goes back years before their time, and will continue well after they’re gone. Don’t think of this as a late-comer to the Great Odd Future Debate Of ’11; let’s imagine that it’s the opening salvo for an argument about whatever pop-cultural scourge/savior is next on the horizon. (Perhaps a sexually provocative heavy-metal rapper from outer space who’s homophobic and a lapsed Catholic.) 

The never-ending conversation centers on this question: What is morally off-limits in pop culture? The answers shift all the time, but the topics tend to stay more or less the same. Sometimes they involve language: So-called “naughty” words have become more acceptable over time (though the really good ones still can’t be uttered on public airwaves unless it’s late at night or somebody totally fuc—I mean, screws up), but terms used to describe individuals of certain races, creeds, or sexual persuasions are now socially outlawed, which has only increased their transgressive power for our interchangeable segues. 

Other times trouble is stirred up by broaching taboo topics; homosexuality once was so forbidden that you couldn’t even say the word “gay” in mainstream movies and TV shows, while childhood sexuality remains a very touchy subject. (I didn’t mean touchy that way. Stop looking at me like that!) It’s often not so much about the topic itself as how the topic is addressed; for instance, a song about rape is fine and even noble if it is considered an instrument for emotional understanding and empathy, but a song that makes light of rape (or caters to rape fantasies) is considered “dangerous,” a designation with both bad (for most of society) and good (for many rock critics) connotations.

The parties engaged in this conversation tend to fall into two groups. The first we’ll call “The Moralists.” These are the people who are offended by pop culture because it violates their sense of right and wrong. The second group we’ll call “The Non-Moralists.” These people are defenders of pop culture, arguing that art should be judged by artistic, not moral, standards, including (and especially) works that seemingly have little or no socially redeeming value. As the curators of popular culture, it falls on critics to defend artists against crowds of angry people, no matter the vileness of what the artist said or did. 

In fact, critics will often argue that art is supposed to piss people off—though that won’t stop them from condemning the public for reacting to “offensive” art exactly the way it’s supposed to. One of the best examples of this kind of defense was written by respected music critic Ann Powers, whose justly celebrated essay “In Defense Of Nasty Art” was published way back in 1997, a time when Oscar-winning composer Trent Reznor and old-timey gangsta rap were driving the nation’s moral guardians into a tizzy. 

Powers’ essay begins with a description of a “fractured fairy tales” comic book intended for adult readers that includes a story called “Fistophobia,” about two young girls engaging in graphic sexual activity. “I had to admit my own attraction to these images, the way the girls stared straight out of the page as if to say: Deal with it,” Powers writes. “I felt myself drawn into emotional territory I hadn’t realized was there. I’m not talking about recovered memory, hippie liberation, or good old catharsis. Just the compelling realization that, past the edge of whatever I don’t want to think about, there’s more.”

Powers later admits that she didn’t really “get” anything out of staring at drawings of youngsters violating each other, but she valued the shock to the system that comes from being pushed out of your comfort zone, just for the sake of the push. What Powers argues for is a way to critique this kind of art without applying moral standards, “to make distinctions between what’s truly transgressive and what’s merely gross” that don’t involve excessive finger-wagging. Powers sums up the Non-Moralists’ side beautifully: “Not all art that claims to be transgressive is worth caring about. But you can’t tell the bullshit from the real by setting moral standards. You have to set artistic ones.”

Earlier this year, Mike Barthel critiqued and refined Powers’ argument in the similarly titled “In Defense Of Offensive Art,” pointing out that Powers was, in fact, setting moral standards in her essay, focusing her defense on art that offends the sensibilities of right-wingers, therefore making this art mean “something serious and important and challenging” to liberals like herself. In other words, she wasn’t really defending “nasty” art, but “nasty to other people but not me” art. But Barthel sides with Powers in his staunch opposition to mixing moral judgments with artistic ones. 

If we want to judge this stuff on an artistic basis rather than a moral basis, then we can’t try and prove that there is a socially redeeming value to offensive art. We should see “offensive art” as a genre, same as country, rap or anything else, one with its own conventions and reasons for being. With “offensive art,” the genre conventions are about being dark and talking about unpleasant things and being performatively confrontational. This doesn’t place such art outside the realm of critique—we can still have lots of problems with the ideological constructions underpinning one genre or another. Likewise, no piece of offensive art should get off the hook just because it’s using genre conventions. However, such a categorization would force us to consider each piece on its merits and, maybe most importantly, within an artistic tradition, instead of simply dismissing it because it contains offensive content.

Barthel’s take on offensive art is interesting and, I’m guessing, common: He thinks it’s essentially comic. “If humor is the mismatch between what you say and what you mean, then intentionally offensive art offers the widest possible mismatch,” he writes. This is the comedy of the anonymous Internet troll, the clandestine bully who cruises message boards dropping rank turds of sexist and racist bigotry without fear of being held accountable for his “jokes.” Steve Albini of Big Black and Shellac fame is an originator of this school of quippery in song lyrics and caustic ’zine columns—though he was courageous enough to put his name next to it—which basically boils down to: “If you’re stupid enough to take what I say seriously, then the joke is on you.” 

That might very well be true. I’m not immune to laughing at patently disgusting thoughts and words, and I’ll certainly join Powers, Barthel, and anybody else in defending the indiscriminate shit-talkers of our culture against those that wish to silence them, even if I don’t care for the art in question. I agree that critics should approach art as art and not scripture, and I even see a lot of validity in the idea that offensive art should be considered its own genre.

What I can’t relate to as I read the defenses written by Powers and Barthel is the implicit denial that anything might offend them. This is where the argument that morality always should (or can) be kept separate from artistic judgments falls apart for me, because while I instinctively side with the Non-Moralists, I know there are times when I must switch sides. It’s difficult for me to believe that we all don’t switch sides from time to time. This is not easy to admit, because acknowledging that something offends you seems like an admission of weakness or, worse, a sign that you might actually care about something enough to be angered when it is besmirched, even in the realm of pretend. But what’s the alternative? Being so aloof from genuine human experience that your soul is untouched by involuntary yet profound, immovable, and indignant emotional responses? Where’s the so-called “danger” in art if you’re never the one who’s outraged? Some dirty jokes are funny and some aren’t, and there’s more to it than differing “artistic” standards. 

I have no problem with bad words, graphic violence, sexual provocation, or frank depictions of fiercely debated taboos—bring it on, I say! But I did have a problem with Witless Protection, a truly terrible 2008 comedy starring Larry The Cable Guy. I reviewed Witless Protection for The A.V. Club, and gave the film a rare “F,” a grade that won’t surprise anyone familiar with Larry’s cinematic oeuvre. (By the way, many of my scattered film reviews for this site are of Larry The Cable Guy movies. This is part of the reason why I now write about music.) Witless Protection is an inept, lazy film, but what made it an abomination for me is a scene in which Larry, ostensibly our story’s hero, rudely accosts an Arab-American innkeeper, implying that he’s a terrorist and calling him “Pamperhead.” Not exactly Amos ’N’ Andy material, I know, but what disturbed me was all the pointing and elbowing at the audience’s ribs, as in, “Git ’er look at this foreigner! Ain’t he funny?!” The joke of Larry’s racism wasn’t on him; it was on the innkeeper. We were actually being invited to laff it up with this asshole.

After all the fart jokes and gratuitous shots of Larry The Cable Guy’s ample bosom, this was the point where I decided to give Witless Protection an “F.” This was not a matter of Larry merely not being funny; even if the innkeeper scene were better, with wittier dialogue and snappier timing, the implications behind it still would’ve been just as offensive to me. For me, there’s no such thing as a “good” joke that encourages people’s prejudices; I couldn’t keep my morality out of my opinion even if I wanted to, no matter the argument that could be made that Larry, in Barthel’s words, was essentially “talking about unpleasant things and being performatively confrontational” as a pathway to laughs. As a culture consumer who prides himself on embracing difficult material with masochistic glee, I had found my line. 

The line became even clearer when I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary about intelligent design from 2008 starring monotonous game-show funnyman Ben Stein. Expelled is a product of the contemporary school of political documentaries where one-sided perspectives and smarmy cheap shots are the calling cards. The whole film was an endurance test, but the part I loathed most came at the end, when Stein visits the Nazi death camp Dachau and directly links evolution theory with the Third Reich’s “master race” rhetoric. That scene alone made Expelled worth condemning in my eyes, though it was clear that director Nathan Frankowski was working from a blueprint created by Michael Moore, a man who has made several films I liked. I copped to this double standard in an A.V. Club piece on infuriating art, admitting it was based on an emotional, not intellectual, response, and I didn’t feel the least bit bad about. Basically, if Moore is a propagandist, he’s doing it to forward worthwhile causes like universal health care and gun control; as a filmmaker, he’s severely flawed, but his work doesn’t really anger me. Frankowski’s film, meanwhile, seeks to legitimize a theory rooted in fundamentalist religion at the expense of science. That’s just inherently wrong as far as I’m concerned. I’m not saying you can’t make a good documentary about intelligent design, but it’s a steep climb that becomes increasingly precarious if you’re seeking to sell the audience on it actually being valid.

That opinion is certainly open to scrutiny (and A.V. Club commenters murdered me for it) but I’d rather be open about my moral compass than pretend it’s not there or say it’s irrelevant to how I regard everything, art or not. Perhaps it boils down to how we define morality. For some, Elvis’ gyrating hips and bluesy vocal affectations were harbingers of a sexual and racial apocalypse; for others, it was a battering ram against forces of oppression. Either way, some kind of moral judgment is being made; Elvis is the devil or a force for social good. 

Great art gets its power from its artistic properties, but important art has a quality the audience puts on it that goes beyond aesthetics. If you take art at all seriously—if you see it as something capable of not only entertaining but enriching your life—than you also must believe that art has the power on some level to do damage when it bypasses your best instincts and goes straight for your base desires, the part informed by fear and ignorance. And if you love art that makes you better in some way, whether it’s smarter, funnier, or more understanding and caring of the world around you, then you must also hate art that seeks to keep you mired in the muck of stupidity and ugliness. 

I’m reminded of a throwaway quote by Steve Martin from the book Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live, where he talks about how his sense of humor has changed:

When you’re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don’t really make fun of them. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people—that kind of iconoclasm. 

Younger people might sneer at Martin for going soft, but I see evidence of life being lived in this quote and, yes, wisdom. Every few years, there will be a fresh-faced artist who will be convinced that he (it’s usually a “he”) has invented a whole slew of words for denigrating people he doesn’t understand. And some people his age will admire him as a hero, and dismiss those who don’t get it as old and lame. And that’s fine. But that artist and his fans will one day feel an intense, terrifying love for something other than themselves, and it will transform how they look at the world. They might then know why people sometimes get upset about songs.

I’m all for defending nasty art, but there’s something to be said for being offended from time to time. In the ongoing tug-of-war over what’s acceptable in pop culture, there are times when I push, and times when I pull.