Watching Hodgy Beats ride through the suburbs, shooting lasers from the crotch of his Starship Troopers spacesuit, hitting patty-cake-playing white girls and turning them into cats, makes it very, very difficult to believe that the Odd Future crew is not thinking beyond whatever controversy and "troll-gaze" labels people put on them. I think they're having fun; largely innocent fun. And making good art ("violator art," maybe, though my head starts to swim with the word salad of critical terminology.) But I do think it's art that says, or is at least trying to say something about the world we're living in. And even if that [...]

In a fine example of what Ann Powers defined as "violator art" in a 1999 Village Voice article-one which is now being taught as a four-credit humanities course at Mt. Holyoke!-50 Cent's G-Unit henchman Tony Yayo has been making some great, awful rap music lately.

When I was fifteen, I prank-called a rape hotline. I called and asked if it was true that women who get raped are asking for it. This is maybe the worst thing I have ever done! But let me explain. While I was certainly the possessor of all sorts of sexist attitudes at the time (I was a 15-year-old boy, after all), I don’t think I actually believed that women who were raped were asking for it. The reason I even knew about rape hotlines in the first place was because I’d seen a number for one on a Tori Amos tape I listened to incessantly. I was a huge [...]

Ann Powers takes on the Camille Paglia/Lady Gaga flap in the Los Angeles Times (as well as the always-present, always-thorny topic of sex in pop music), and here's part of the setup: "[Paglia's] prose style is bloody and lurid and sometimes effectively comical, like a Rob Zombie-directed horror movie; it's hard to turn away."