Then we get to #1. The song choice itself is pretty great--"B.O.B." by Outkast. I don't think I would say it's the best song of the decade by any means, but it's an interesting and surprising choice (good from the point of view of a long article leading up to a denouement, like this one), and, most importantly, it's an extremely good, important song.
So, we're good. But then those dipshit, elaborately ignorant writers have to act clever, and things go downhill extremely fast.
Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it.Are you hearing this? Not only are you entirely unaware of anything in any way related to what you're talking about, fuckhead, you're completely missing the central point of the song you're supposed to be praising above all others from the past ten years. Namely that when it was written, recorded, and released, we were bombing Iraq constantly.
Outkast wasn't formulating some kind of hypothesis that we might bomb Iraq at some point in the future. They weren't being "futurists". They were being reporters. You would know that if you weren't focused on your pretty delusion that the Bush administration was some kind of deviation in the course of American history rather than just another part of the continuing bloody story of our imperialist adventures all over the world. You would know that if you did one second of research. You would know that if you actually had any interest in being part of an alternative independent press. You have a responsibility to know that because your tax dollars, and mine, have directly caused the deaths of multiple millions of Iraqis over the past twenty years. Oh--sorry. Am I not supposed to mention the 90s in an article about the 00s? Is that what's going on here? Anything that happened the previous ten years doesn't count, whether in terms of music or the mass murder that music is responding to?
Here's a question for you. Who killed more Iraqis, Clinton or Bush? The answer: your guess is as good as mine, unless of course your guess is that it isn't close. It is a fact that Clinton's policies killed many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children alone, which Madeleine Albright referred to as a "price" that she considered "worth it".
In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear...a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals.Considering that the Clinton administration was just as warmongering as the Bush administration (but better at framing it for liberal consumption), I have to assume that what really upsets you here is the "evangelical" part. And if you really think that Bush is somehow quantitatively worse than Clinton because he thought God was telling him to kill rather than Wall Street (which is itself a pretty debatable proposition), well, I don't even know how to hold a conversation with you. Dead people are dead, no matter why you killed them. (This is of course also ignoring the issue of how creepily religious the rhetoric Clinton and many members of his administration often was.)
We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black).Oh please. Painted black by a man who regularly gives speeches chastising Blacks for poor behavior (also known as "trying to survive in a world that tries to murder them every day"), who threw his own pastor under the bus for being insufficiently Uncle Tomish? Painted black by a man who pretends to withdraw from Iraq while leaving enough troops there to ensure that we can continue to inflict terror on the people at will? Painted black by a man who waited only two days after his inauguration to start killing Pakistani children? Painted black by a man currently trying his hardest to create a new health care system even more harmful to the poor and middle class than our existing system? Painted black by a man who only cares about racial profiling when it (debatably) happens to a rich man who was not appreciably harmed by it, as opposed to the people imprisoned and murdered by police every day?
Yeah. "B.O.B." is about how much Republicans suck and how much the Black man loves his Democrat massa. Fuck you, Pitchfork.
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