Hw for March 2, 2020

In Poland’s view on “how to approach objectionable lyric?” He simply tries to distinguish between “hate speech” and protest. IF the meaning of the lyric cause destruction to a certain community. Then, according to Poland, it’s not appropriate. For instance, if the lead singer of a band holds a biased view towards minority citizens and he comes to Saco to perform his controversial song here live, then it will cause chaos in the community. People may get hurt. However, he states that “Cop Killer” by Body Count is a different case. Despite the violence portion in the lyrics, the purpose of this song is to protest against police brutality on African Americans. The songwriter has no history of killing cops and this song didn’t make any police officer less safe, so it doesn’t count as “hate speech.” The reason why people have such a strongly critical view “Brown Sugar” is because of the rice of the songwriter. He points out a different band that produced a song that its lyric is strongly analogous with “cop killer.” It turns out, nobody really said anything. The main reason is that the band member is white.

The race to play a strong in this case. In my understanding, the race of an individual has influence people’s impression on others in a deep way. However, he falls to distinguish a clear line between “hate speech” and protest. His words don’t serve the purpose or clarify the idea he proposed. Furthermore, just simply states that society has a low tolerance for black people compared to white people when it comes to objectionable lyric is not enough. Lack of evidence and analysis undermine the credibility of this article. Matt in the other hand gives a deep analysis under the topic of “does the race of article impact our objection.” Not only he points out the issue but also indicates the reason behind it.

Matt believes that the essential way to approach objectionable lyric is to acknowledge the term “rhetorical distance”  He indicates that one useful way it introduced is “fiction narrator”. Those violent actions in the lyric don’t mean that the singer actually did anything like it. A vivid example of this would be “Blaze of Glory” by Bon Jovi. At one point, the lyric contains words like this “I’m a six-gun lover”  No one actually thinks that he is a six-gun lover. Or when Johnny Cash sings “ I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” I don’t think he actually killed a man in Reno. The reason they do it is to “play a character”. “To sing it in the first person a character who is fed up with police brutality.” Sadly black rap singer doesn’t get the privilege to be seen as playing the character. People often reflect the song as their true nature, but when a white artist does the same thing. Sadly, they do be seen as playing a character.

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