Vice’s music site Noisey is reassuring readers, “You Don’t Have to Worship 2pac.” And I, for one, am relieved. I wasn’t wild about getting that “Thug Life” tattoo.
It seems that “Recent criticism of the rap icon from Lil Xan and 03 Greedo forces us to ask whether or not our heroes are beyond reproach.” Heroes assuredly are not beyond reproach. Neither is Noisey’s definition of “hero.”
It’s certainly not for me to judge Tupac Shakur’s music, but people who can tell the difference (and I’ll assume Lil Xan and 03 Greedo are among them) haven’t been uniformly impressed. According to Noisey contributor Lawrence Burney, “While covering Shakur’s 1995 trial for allegedly raping a woman in a hotel in 1993 for the Village Voice, hip-hop journalist Touré proposed that while Pac was one of the most famous rappers on the planet, he was ‘merely an average vocalist and lyricist …’” (That’s the same Touré who’s for years been a talking head on MSNBC. Surely he can afford a last name by now?)
Did you catch the context there? A rape trial. A few sentences later we learn that “Users accused Pac of pimping out the gangsta persona once signing to Death Row, while others cited his shooting of two off-duty cops in Georgia as reason for why he was the realest of all rappers.”
Hmmm. How else did Noisey’s “hero” keep it real? Some highlights:
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In August 1992, Shakur got into a post-concert scuffle and someone (maybe him, maybe his half-brother?) fired Tupac’s .38. The bullet hit and killed a 6-year-old boy 100 yards away. No criminal charges were ever filed (uncooperative witnesses) but Shakur settled a wrongful death suit with the boy’s family.
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In April 1993, Shakur was arrested for assaulting another rapper at a concert with a baseball bat. The next year, he served 15 days in jail for assaulting the director of Menace II Society.
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That rape trial Touré was covering? Shakur was convicted of first degree sexual assault (but hey, he beat the associated sodomy and weapons charges.)
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In 1994, he was shot five times in an attack outside a New York recording studio, an attack probably ordered by a hip-hop rival. (Remember that time McCartney ordered a hit on Jagger and Richards in ’65? Me neither.)
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The night of his fatal shooting in 1996, Shakur started a casino brawl not long before a gunman pulled up next to his car at a Las Vegas stoplight and opened fire.
So, he was more or less a violent career criminal who also made records. If you look at his life, the manner of his death is unsurprising.
But that doesn’t stop Burney from waxing eloquent about him.
During his short time in the public eye, Pac gave everything he had. He didn’t care if that offering of self would result in his punishment or death because he knew that he was walking with a clearer purpose than most. He made songs that supported violence and the hyper-sexualization of women, but he also showed—better than all of his peers—that he was compassionate and cared about the condition of Black America in equal measure.
He showed he cared. A lefty elegy if ever there was one.
Get that, er, man(?) an NEA grant! “In MAN-MADE, Chella Man, a 19-year-old queer, deaf, genderqueer artist, documents his journey transitioning on testosterone.” -- LGBT website them.
When the bean-counters spot too many (white) franks. Is there any aspect of life that wouldn’t be better with fewer white men? As SJWs never tire of reminding us, dudes of European descent are the cause of every evil in society -- from paper cuts to hurricanes to Sting’s post-Police career. Why, even our beloved gay TV characters are woefully white and disproportionately penised, according to a “Teen Vogue Take” video featuring Tiffany Bender.
She’s discussing a study from GLAAD, the LGBT speech police, that claims only 6 percent of the regular characters on broadcast TV shows are LGBT. So they’re overrepresented by way more than 50 percent compared to their actual percentage of the population. If you think that’s good enough, you’re a homophobic bigot, and you probably always will be. GLAAD’s goal posts aren’t going to stop moving anytime soon.
But Bender’s particular peeve is that the GLAAD study found that “the majority of LGBT characters are white and male.” Then she says, without a trace of irony, that “what we’re seeing on screen does not actually depict the reality if the real world.” Ya think?
The point is that, since the population contains more women than men and since the LGBT alphabet soup is 52 percent Bs … well, I don’t know what the point is, really. Get more black female swingers on TV? Anyway, the video has a nice chart -- very colorful.
This all matters because “The more representation we have onscreen, the more we’re able to amplify the diversity that already exists within the LGBT community … Maybe, if we get more diversity on-screen, societal expectations will change. Plus, we’ll have more dope shows to watch.” Would those be shows about dopes, or shows for dopes? Or both?
Um, it’s a show about homosexuals who turn heterosexuals into metrosexuals. The reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy “address[es] a wider range of issues including racism and religious differences. 
Recent reviewers say the show does a good job of teaching heterosexual men how to display emotions and develop self-acceptance. By so doing, Queer Eye becomes “an antidote” to contemporary forms of toxic masculinity that narrow men’s self-expression to aggression and anger. -- AlterNet ‘Queer Eye’ and the Myth of the Self-Made Man
Not “self-preservation.” Apologies for the somber turn, but there is a point at which the left ceases to be a joke and becomes actually dangerous.
Is a person more than the sum of his victim identities? Increasingly to the far left, the answer seems to be no. From the Vice site Broadly: “Transfeminine Filipinx multidisciplinary artist Mark Aguhar, who died [by suicide] six years ago this week, left a legacy that continues to teach us about the power of everyday expression as a tool for self-preservation.”
“Self-preservation.”
Mark Aguhar, a transfeminine, Filipinx multidisciplinary artist whose work blurred the lines between high art and everyday expression. As an MFA student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Aguhar cultivated a subversive online presence dedicated to a high-femme, queer, brown girl aesthetic. Through her visual art, videos, and Tumblr posts, Aguhar critiqued normative beauty standards, called out racism, misogyny, and fatphobia, and expanded conventional understandings of femininity. Although Aguhar died by suicide on March 12, 2012, her legacy continues to teach us about the possibilities we can find in queerness, and the power of everyday expression as a tool for survival.
“Survival.”
Aguhar’s work reflects not only the convergence of her multiple identities—queer, trans, fat, femme, and brown—but also how these intersections can be fostered to create an everyday art practice that’s rooted in self-care.
“Self-care.”
Mark Aguhar was a very ill person who did not survive. “Self-care” (self-destruction seems somewhat closer to the truth) wasn’t enough. To say otherwise is a lie and it dehumanizes Aguhar in a way that the violent bullies Broadly talks about could not.
A human being killed himself. A person died, not a pronoun or a gender identity or a cultivated “aesthetic.” An individual human who had emotional and mental problems didn’t get the help he desperately needed. That makes his death a senseless tragedy, not performance art or a social statement. All the gender theory gargon ever concocted can’t change that.
Y’all need Jesus. “A feeling of celebration, gratitude or reverence lightens the load. This is not self-indulgence, in which bourgeois white people accessorize their egos with spiritual idealism. This is a spirituality that expresses itself through tangible service, humility, generosity, personal discipline, practical responsibility, and skillful communication.”-- Salon What it really means to be “woke”: Radical activism is spiritual as well as political
