Djelloul Marbrook

Infotainment has come to suggest a radical cheapening of journalistic standards in the interest of corporate greed. I’d like to suggest another, more useful interpretation.

Rap, rock and country music, to name just a few genres, are popularly considered entertainment, but they’re much more than that. We need them to communicate issues around which the press is uncomfortable.

The press is uncomfortable about certain issues because its advertisers are uncomfortable about them—alcoholism, misogyny and nativism, to name a few. For example, where in the health care debate is alcoholism ever mentioned as a major inflationary factor?

I’d like to suggest that rap, rock and country are forms of infotainment because they often raise and explore issues the press is unwilling to touch.

I’ve lived long enough to remember when rock was as controversial as rap. It called attention to the elephant in the room, as does rap. Rap, rock and country are often forms of social and even political protest. Country, in particular, challenges our commercial values and calls upon us to give a damn about the tired and voiceless. Country music is far more eloquent and honest about values than any preacher.

Rap is just about the only popular art form that consistently addresses the issue of belonging and unbelonging, an issue the press would rather pretend doesn’t exist. Rap addresses nativism head-on. When rappers sing about The Man they mean anyone in some kind of authority who makes other members of our society feel less welcome, less needed, less respected. Not just cops, but the whole nativist lot of us—the very same people who have gerrymandered our voting districts, kept voters from the polls and otherwise acted like the United States of America belongs to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants only.

Oh yeah, sometimes the Irish or the Germans or the Scandinavians will “pass,” and if the nativists are feeling extra generous, some Catholics from central and southern Europe might “pass.”

The white establishment gets all squirmy around rap because it knows the rappers are getting it down, going to the heart of an immense disgrace.

But rap, rock and country have done little for the status of women. Our political establishment not only doesn’t look like our statistical profile, it doesn’t reflect the fact that roughly half of us are women. What’s that about, if not misogyny?

So we need rap, rock and country not merely as forms of entertainment but as means of communication, of public discourse. And for the same reasons we need poets, painters, sculptors and storytellers. We need them not to enrich public discourse but to enable it to survive, because the deteriorated and cheapened press is fundamentally incapable of exploring the problems that dog us.

The Department of Homeland Security, created by reactionaries, has identified nativist white terrorists as our biggest threat, and yet the popular press goes on yakking about Al Qaeda and Iraq and Afghanistan. If you ask the editors why the nativists are not getting comparable attention, they say, Oh, we reported that. Yeah, once.

The news is not on the front page, it’s not on television or talk radio—their mission is to stir an old, moldy pot—the news is in rap, rock, country, poetry, fiction, art. That’s where we’re happening, this country, our future.

We all want to belong somewhere. But belonging has a downside—whether it means belonging to an ethnic or religious or political group—because it means somebody doesn’t belong. Wars have been fought, genocide committed because somebody is perceived as not belonging. The tenor of many of our wedge issues is at heart the mean contention that some of us don’t belong simply because we’re on the “wrong” side of an issue.

In a multiethnic society such as ours and in a world of mass migrations in search of better lives the issue of belonging and not belonging becomes huge, perhaps the paramount issue of the century.

To confront this issue we have to name it, and keep on naming it. When we break out into a rash of flag-waving or gun-buying we have to ask ourselves how much of it is decent patriotism and assertion of Second Amendment rights and how much of it is nativism and the assertion that some of us don’t belong because we dissent or because we look different. When we say support the troops or America, love it or leave it, we have to ask ourselves how much of our intent is love of country and gratitude to our young defenders and how much is hate-driven nativism. The answer lies in each heart, but the question should not be swept under the rug.

Honest answers won’t come cheaply or easily. Flags and guns go with mom and apple pie in this country, but deep down we know that a significant number of us are unhappy about people who don’t strike us as belonging here. And we ought to know by virtue of the history of the 20th Century that this is a dangerous circumstance.

So while the press delivers mega-tonnage about Michael Jackson’s death and funeral we might consider how many of us never thought he belonged in the first place. And while the words pile up about health care we might give some thought to the neo-Nazis among us, the haters, the exclusionaries. And we might ask ourselves why they’re getting so little attention when even the most reactionary agency of government has labeled them our number one concern.—DM