ALBUMS OF THE YEAR SO FAR (THOUGH, TECHNICALLY, HALF HAVE YET TO BE RELEASED)
so, halfway through the year, we've seen some pretty good records come out. some notable, though not revelatory albums, include new efforts by boyracer, DAT politics, barmitzvah brothers, destroyer, the advantage, and the fiery furnaces. the runners up out of the way, let us proceed toward a halfway to the best of the year list. 10. camera obscura let's get out of this country (merge) like belle and sebastian at the turn of the millennium, camera obscura are diverging from their wonderful early sound here. their first full-length, biggest bluest hi-fi, mined the thirdhand old country-pop of serge gainsbourg through the secondhand pop songs of nancy and lee. their second album, underachievers please try harder, was more of the same, though they began to add another mediating influence between themselves and the old country. like belle and sebastian, camera obscura have begun to go full-on ronstadt on the somewhat fittingly-titled let's get out of this country. in the hands of a lesser band, fold your hands-era belle and sebastian included, this would be a disaster. while camera obscura are clearly on a downward trajectory here, they still haven't fallen nearly as far as belle and sebastian did on their last two albums. and now that camera obscura finally warrant the insistent belle and sebastian comparisons, i'll say that let's get out of this country at least equals the best of latter day rondstandt-pop belle and sebastian: e.g. "the model," "marx and engels," and "wrapped up in books." 9. yacht and lucky dragons we'll float around, hang out on clouds (not yet released; label to be determined) yacht (formerly Y.A.C.H.T., a.k.a. 9078686, former wolf colonel drummer, ex-of the badger king, and current programmer behind the blow) and his friend luke (lucky dragons) created a mini-album using only samples from nirvana songs. eschewing the cliché-as-it-began mash-up, jona and luke approach fennesz's amazing paint it black/don't talk (put your head on my shoulders) e.p. but approaching here doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't quite get there. jona and luke don't completely abstract their elements to the point of unrecognisability but, instead, play on the instant familiarity of even the smallest fragments of nirvana songs: half a bar of drums, two chords from a progression, three seconds of feedback, kurt groaning between lines. 8. the yeah yeah yeahs show your bones (interscope) most will disagree with me, but i didn't care for a damn thing this band ever did until now. which is not to say that this is properly a top ten record. by the end of the year, i'll have probably long forgotten about it. but i'm way more down with the kraut-pop-via-patti smith yeah yeah yeahs than the fake art-noise-punk yeah yeah yeahs. this is their god's money or, as you'll see when you read on, their body stories and their all at once. it's just that they're not nearly as good as gang gang dance, shoplifting, or young people. 7. shoplifting body stories (kill rock stars) i was expecting more from shoplifting and, actually, i still am. between now and their next album, they'll have to make a decision about what kind of band they want to be, kind of like the decision modest mouse made after the lonesome crowded west or, conversely, the one the fiery furnaces made after blueberry boat. will they settle for being a quirky band with impeccable influences that never gets beyond the indie/post-punk tradition like, say, sleater-kinney or unwound, or will they'll start to release their records on 5RC instead of kill rock stars? all that said, this is a very good album and a sign of things to come, whether they decide to be kill rock stars' noisy answer to modest mouse or whether they actually go for it. 6. thom yorke the eraser (XL recordings) this one completely took me by surprise. it sounds exactly how i expected it to: it continues to recycle that one insistent "paranoid android" riff, it's completely lap-top-based, it's listenable and pretty, and it sounds like radiohead without johnny greenwood. but it's good. the difference is that it doesn't sound like múm, the postal service, or any of that other garden state soundtrack bullshit. the beats inauspiciously keep things interesting, while the programming is well done, almost like ellen allien without the big techno splashes. 5. excepter sunbomber (5 rue christine) it's like everybody listened to last year's greatest album, gang gang dance's god's money and decided to make a remarkably listenable album of their own. as julianne shepherd pointed out, sunbomber has more in common with t-pain than it does with DFA-era black dice. excepter does to liquid liquid what sunn0))) does to maiden. they strip the keyboard electro of t-pain or the bassy electro of keak da sneak down to its simplest level and leave us with a dub-drone meditation (albeit a surprisingly busy one) that is perhaps the most ouward-looking and, possibly, relevant album the so-called "experimental noise scene" has so far offered in 2006. 4. the pipettes we are the pippettes (memphis industries) all of the pipettes singles to this point have been revelatory, the latest, pull shapes, perhaps being the best so far. the rerecordings of "judy," "dirty mind," "it hurts to see you dance so well," "your kisses are wasted on me," and the title track, like most album versions of a band rerecording an amazing batch of immediate and brilliant singles for the sake of debut album continuity, lose something significant the second time around. but this band is exactly what we need after the franz ferdinand era of post-punk-necromancy. (LINK TO COLUMN FORTHCOMINGHERE) 3. television personalities my dark places (domino) (LINK TO COLUMN) 2. ghostface killah fishscale (def jam) the entire wu-tang clan on one track, including one of dirty's last ever studio performances, for the last time notwithstanding, fishscale is the rare mainstream album with guest spots from all the hip producers that somehow manages to pull off a unity that has eluded all other ghostface albums except supreme clientele — RZA's ironman included. only, unlike surpreme clientele, fishscale is fun. as with every overlong wu-tang solo album, there are unnecessary skits, only half-intentionally funny ballads, and throwaways. but name me another 24 track hip-hop album in recent years that you can listen to all the way through. and, at this juncture in mainstream hip-hop, when the only interesting aspect of most of the young upstarts and movements (e.g. hyphy) is the production, ghost continues to prove himself as probably the most consistent emcee — though he never hit the heights of rae or nas on their earliest efforts — of the last ten years. 1. young people all at once (too pure) young people's self-titled debut on 5RC has become one of my favourite albums in recent memory because of former guitarist jeff rosenberg's restrained but adventurous guitar work. with rosenberg gone, young people have ditched the tossed-off we're hip and relevant art geniuses approach and fine-tuned katie eastburn's elegiac songwriting. all at once is a studied album that succeeds where its predecessor, their sophomore effort war prayers, failed because young people looked back to their debut and isolated the restraint that highlighted the songwriting. it's not enough to say that there is a lot going on in all at once while, at the same time, none of the individual elements is ever excessive or even pursued to the level that one would expect. really, it's the forethought and composition behind each utterance —instrumental or vocal, and there isn't much of either — that gives weight to every second of this album. there is a lot going on because every move is heavy with meaning.
the band i really went to see was carbonic, who i've written about before. there's a lot to dislike about carbonic. half of the time, he doesn't so much sing as whine and that whole nature boy with his eyes closed folk singer thing bores me to death. but when he does sing, it's amazing. i've been listening to some of the songs on his myspace page and his label's myspace page and he has yet to capture what his voice does in person on tape. so i didn't buy his new c.d.
we missed the first band, but the other opener, sleeping kings of iona, were immediately likable. and that makes me immediately nervous. like aloha, sleeping kings of iona aim for post-rock but draw heavily from the indie-emo axis. their myspace page indicates that their influences are mogwai, brian eno, björk, joy division, sigur rós, aphex twin, arthur russell, bark psychosis, dj shadow, portishead, and múm. listening to them, it's difficult to tease out the mogwai, joy division, and bark psychosis influences, but you can't help but hear stars, the postal service, american analog set, and frou frou/imogen heap. they only sound like björk in the way that emiliana torrini sounds like björk, which is to say that the singer kind of sounds like björk if björk ever decided to release songs with the sole purpose of getting starbucks radio airplay. and sigur rós? well, they sound like sigur rós inasmuch as they seem to be engaging in the same project as múm, who water down sigur rós for the stereogum set.
this is not to say that sleeping kings of iona suck. if nothing else, they pass the "bend to squares" test. but i'm trying to draw attention to the new "indie rock," which, in many cases, doesn't sound like two white guys with guitars, one white guy with a bass guitar, and a white guy drumming. to be sure, even the bands with that lineup, e.g. death cab for cutie, don't sound like that (i.e. modest mouse, any number of other pixies imitators, pavement, etc.) anymore. death cab for cutie, at least as far back as their third album, sound like coldplay. and the indie-laptronica bands (frou frou, múm, the postal service) sound like moby's coldplay remix. which is to say that all of these bands are inoffensive and immediately likable. they may not be immediately likable to you, my oh so discerning and au courant readers, but there's a reason why this new indie rock is the music of choice for corporate television ads aimed at the 18-30 demographic. watch the adidas commercial with karen o. and ask yourself why it sounds the way it does instead of sounding like "art star."
i think, then, that "indie rock" as a genre is, and perhaps has long been, at an impasse. that it is a genre in the first place is, of course, telling, being that the indie rock movement was once unified not by a stylistic aesthetic but by a political one: the artists' relationship to the means of production. but, for me, the last time that indie rock was relevant was the early 90's. i am tempted to identify the beginning of its obsolecence as the week in january of 1992 when nirvana's nevermind replaced michael jackson at the top of the billboard charts. following from this, we can see the aftereffects of the late 80's to 1991 explosion of relevant new bands (dinosaur, sebadoh, superchunk, pavement, etc.) carrying on through the early 90's (archers of loaf, guided by voices), and continuing as late as built to spill's perfect from now on and modest mouse's the lonesome crowded west (both released in 1997), with indie rock's final stand being the microphones' it was hot, we stayed in the water (2000). that indie rock's last moment of relevance (before it became, once and for all, "indie rock") occured in 2000 is noteworthy because it coincides with death cab for cutie's second album, we have the facts and we're voting yes.
the "bend to squares" test is significant because it marks this passage from 90's straight white middle class indie boy guitar rock to the 2000's "indie rock" we know today. i first became aware of death cab for cutie during my last year of high school, '99, when they self-released a cassette called you can play these songs with chords. as i said earlier, i was down with the indie boy guitar rock at the time and my favourites were built to spill, modest mouse, quasi, and elliott smith. death cab for cutie perfectly synthesised these four insistent pacific northwest influences into an inoffensive and immediately likable sound that i admittedly fell for. death cab for cutie:built to spill::low:galaxie 500::múm:sigur rós::sleeping kings of iona:bark psychosis. death cab for cutie's first full-length, something about airplanes (1999) was galaxie 500 meets built to spill. their second album (2000) was low meets built to spill, and this is when i began to see them for what they really were, watering downers of bands i actually liked. their third album was low meets coldplay.
emo plays a part in this narrative because, like built to spill and modest mouse, the emo genre — now almost as far from what "emo" originally meant as "indie rock" is from its sebadoh/pavement heyday — came to national and international prominence at exactly the same time as the advent of widespread digital filesharing programs and, believe me, this was no coincidence. how many among us are willing to send away for a self-released cassette by some new band called death cab for cutie because we happened to be in seattle for a few days and read a small blurb about them in the rocket? but most college students with an internet connection in 2000 were willing to download a few of their songs free of charge from napster. five minutes and we have the facts and we're voting yes was on tens of thousands of hard drives.
death cab for cutie, for their watering down of their pacific northwest forebears, weren't n00bs; their fans were. dcfc knew built to spill and sunny day real estate and, in part because of dcfc's popularity, tens of thousands of kids between 1999 and 2002 downloaded sunny day real estate's legendary emo album diary. and a lot of these kids formed bands of their own. but digital filesharing, for all it's done to give us access to decades of music of which we otherwise would only have been able to hear a fraction, also decontextualises these bands. and so sunny day real estate is not the same thing as whatever emo bands the kids are listening to these days. but who would know it?
post-rock, math rock, and emo: one of these things doesn't belong. you can hear it in bands like death cab for cutie: the loud-soft-loud dynamic and the adolescent histrionics of late 90's emo (braid, mineral, cap'n jazz, early get up kids, e.g.) gave way to something else. we all know that death cab for cutie is emo — we can hear it — but most can't identify what it is. we could also hear it in early aloha and it's there in sleeping kings of iona. glasgow's life without buildings and toronto's controller.controller are particularly telling examples. if you listen to these two bands, the instrumentation, the layering of diminished guitar chords, arpeggios, and triad bass lines can be traced back to late 90's emo, mineral most pronouncedly, and, through mineral, back to the insistent influence of sunny day real estate on the genre. but the formal characteristics of this new emo-fied "indie rock" is not what is at stake. what we're dealing with here is emo de-fanged, its edges rounded and manufactured for mass consumption. you guys know me and know that i would never call for a return to the unlistenable emo of the promise ring, but the new, listenable emo-"indie rock" is perhaps worse. so bands like life without buildings and controller.controller display their influences on their sleeves and these are hip influences: altered images, josef k, television, and the raincoats. but beneath these influences is the unacknowledged influence of mineral-era emo that makes the music pretty enough to listen to, pretty enough to soundtrack the o.c.
i've traced a bit of a social history and genealogy of the current straight white middle class indie boy guitar rock and i've done so with the suspicion that "indie rock" is the new painting. which is to say that "indie rock" in 2006 is a lot like painting was in the late 70's and early 80's. (in lieu of explaining the predicament of painting at that historical moment, which would probably necessitate a book-length study, cf. this). my point is not that "indie rock" as a genre has been formally exhausted. rather, particularly since "indie rock" has become a style, the meaning of indie rock has become, if it hasn't been since 1/92, politically regressive. its newest stylistic directions are cosmetic and have changed little, and, as the market for "indie rock" has grown exponentially since 1999, the music has begun to speak to a different audience.
in the late 90's, well after sebadoh and pavement ceased being interesting, "indie rock" was a subculture. "indie rockers" were mostly straight white middle class boys hanging out in college radio stations. there was most definitely a class position behind the music, one of straight white middle class privilege, and, it no longer being the era of III, no pocky for kitty, and slanted & enchanted, whatever political element "indie rock" once possessed had long been forgotten. but there is a big difference between subculture and pop culture phenomenon.
the rise of emo took a parallel trajectory to late-"indie rock." jessica hopper writes of emo's move from sunny day real estate, jawbox, and jawbreaker in the early to mid-90's to the abstract straight, white, middle class male subject position of contemporary emo. the earnestness of contemporary emo, like that of death cab for cutie and stars, assumes that we can relate to the sentiments behind the songs. the subject position behind these songs being straight, white, middle class, and male, these bands assume a white, middle class male heteronormativity, either alienating those who don't fit this rubric or encouraging these Others to live with straight, white, middle class male ideology as if it were perfectly natural and nothing at all were the matter.
but what has changed since the late 90's? "indie rock" has achieved a position of cultural authority because some of those kids who listened to college radio at the high water mark of built to spill and modest mouse in 1998 are now critics at the new yorker and similar middle-brow institutional publications, as well as NPR program directors, music directors for tv shows like scrubs and late night with conan o'brien, and for movies like garden state. the new bands, reacting to this shift, have diversified their target audiences and, rather than speaking exclusively to 18-21 year old straight white male college students, now speak to an older set of young, straight, white, middle class, ikea-shopping and audi-driving male professionals. a recent pitchfork column on the last.fm phenomenon characterises this demographic well. quoting tim westergren of pandora.com:
People graduate from college, get into their twenties and start working, and they resign themselves to music playing this sort of peripheral role. It's not because their love of music goes away, it's because they feel they don't have time. And if you can reverse that, then look out.
"indie rock" = music for yuppies. more to the point, the target market, as tim westergren's statement clearly indicates, is middle class and probably white. in my trajectory, the late 80's and early 90's "indie rock" project sought to resume the project of punk rock and post-punk and transform, if not destroy, guitar-based rock music. "indie rock" as we know it now, straying from guitars in favour of electronic production though it does, reanimates itself with the legitimacy of guitar-based rock music. there are no guitars in the postal service, but most listeners familiar with north american or western-european popular culture, and many outside of the white first world, are acutely aware, at least on an unconscious level, of the straight, white, middle class male guitar rock subject position behind the postal service. painting took a similar move in the late 70's and early 80's. the move from abstract-expressionism to minimalism to conceptual art gave way, in the late 70's and early 80's, to the rebirth of painting (e.g. baselitz, kiefer, salle, basquiat, schnabel, et alia). many social historians of art trace this movement to the second explosion of the art market during the same time (the first one being the post-war boom that coincided with the rise of abstract-expressionism), which created a demand for consumable art objects, i.e. painting, with the caveat that they hold the cultural capital of high art.
like painting in the early 80's, independent music in the punk rock tradition is now subject to market pressures unseen since the boom of the early 90's. what it at stake here is not the old independence as authenticity argument, nor is it even a call for aesthetic innovation or a properly political engagement from bands in the punk rock tradition. the cultural capital of this kind of music — which seems to have escalated to the point that it blocks the listener from engaging with it beyond the level of passive (material) consumption: that is the biggest issue. what, then, is to be done with the new "indie rock"? my label, monoculture records, proposes one solution. undoubtedly, countless others exist. but this is the current situation as i see it. as we can see from the gerhard richter debates in the present, we are still feeling the after-effects of the rebirth of painting nearly thirty years later. if we are not careful, coldplay might someday go down as our generation's basquiat.
so, as i said six months earlier in this blog, i've had the next tradition and the individual talents album in my younger and more arrogant years all written and worked out for some time now. now that i've finally finished my first year of Ph.D. candidate candidacy (which is to say that, if i pass my qualifying exam in two or three years, i can start writing my dissertation), i've been thinking about finally getting shit together and recording this album. that will begin in about a month, when i return to vancouver. it was all really up in the air because i had no idea who was going to sing on it. i was planning on just recording the album all by myself except for the vocals, and keeping the tracks with me until i found someone to replace the inimitable samantha jane marriage, who moonlights as a med student in the southeastern hemisphere. but it turns out we'll both be in vancouver at the same time for about two months this summer so, my loyal fans, watch out when shit drops in august.
here's something that, if not thought provoking, should at least make for an interesting read. my brain being completely overloaded with information and wacky ideas right now, i've only glanced at it. maybe you can summarize it for me in an email? from what i gather, they're calling stephin merritt a racist for not liking hip-hop. predictably, people are pissed. but then nobody really liked jessica hopper or sasha frere-jones (or their partner in print j-shep) in the first place. something about smart young critics talking shit about shit in a way that isn't easily readable but which points fingers at things middle class white people don't want to talk about really rubs those middle class white people the wrong way. especially the straight males among them.
when i was in high school i had this wu-tang tape that i carried around in my backpack with the best tracks from the 36 chambers and all the side projects on it. everytime i'd get in someone's car, i'd put it in. the usual response: "turn it off. i hate rap." to which i would, of course, reply: you're a racist. actually, being that some of these people were among my dearest friends, i'd be slightly more charitable and call them "negrophobes," but you get the point. why did i call my friends racists? some of my best friends are a lot of bad shit, but they're not racists. but when a white kid professes to hate rap but has all of the beastie boys' c.d.'s, we've got something to talk about. or, at the very least, i'm going to want to talk. the older, less actively polemical me would, today, say that, while these kids weren't racists, there was something conspicuousy unsaid about this kneejerk reaction against hip-hop, especially when some of these kids were the same ones going around telling the normal kids (this was at the height of 2pac and biggie, so you can imagine how the normal kids acted and what they dressed like), "dude, you're white." so what? white kids gotta listen to beck and wear vans? yawn. to quote kathleen, super fucking yawn.
when i read j-shep, i think of kathleen in the early days: really smart people who are doing something approximating that tired "organic intellectual" cliché that we all supposedly aspire to. funnily enough, early kathleen also comes to mind when i read karen beckman. kathleen wouldn't go to the academy, so the academy, it seems, is coming to kathleen. being in cultural studies, i'm all over that shit. but i digress. actually, one further digression: jess hopper's blogkritik of stephin merritt liking that racist song comes from some stuff said at an EMP pop conference panel a week and a half ago, a conference that declined my paper proposal. the same paper was, however, accepted by an academic conference on "high and low culture." reading the names of the other papers on my panel, i'm almost completely sure that my work does not take part in the conversation. i am, however, speaking to hopper, frere-jones, and j-shep. so maybe this boring academia v. "organic intellectual" thing deserves more of my consideration. a propos of both main thread and digression: this.
but no, my friends who professed to "hate rap" in the mid-to-late 90's weren't racists. but they were reproducing racism. teenaged boys don't think. we all already knew that. two kids say something, then ten kids say something, then... you have an entire subculture of late-alternative rocking middle class straight white boys hating rap. no question, a lot of it was due to their anxiety towards the normal kids, the popular kids, the kids who played on the basketball team. but why attack them on the basis of being race-traitors? don't lie to yourself kid, that's what "dude, you're white" really is: that's your daddy's or your daddy's daddy's negrophobia.
why rail against those kids' inauthenticity? why not rail against those kids for being bullies? or for being sexists and homophobes? but, like i said, teenaged boys don't think. and, you know, i'm not going to act like i never called some clown with one pant leg rolled up a "wigger" when i was thirteen. but flash forward to 2006. look at these now grown men's current record collections: mf doom, aesop rock... kanye west? atmosphere? ignore for the moment that these guys, who were still jizzing all over alternative rock in the late 90's (which is not to say that it was ever defensible to like the foo fighters), haven't stopped being late-wavers. my point is that they're still only listening to hip-hop that white people are allowed to like.
that's right, i said it: this kind of engagement with hip-hop is racist. if you say you "only like good hip-hop" and then drop mf doom and aesop rock's names, that's racist. john cook asked incredulously, "If black artists are underrepresented in my CD collection relative to the frequency with which black people are found in the general population, does that make me a racist?" well fuck being older and more mature and less actively polemical; i'm going to one up him: liking aesop rock and mf doom is racist. there's my pullquote. and, john cook, if you ever happen to read this, i'm the last person to advocate the sort of happy, enlightened pluralist quota-tokenistic agenda that you're disingenuously criticizing jess hopper and frere-jones for promoting — after all, that's what it is to like aesop and mf doom. probably, the people who buy aesop and doom c.d.'s are unconscious of it; they're just unthinkingly reproducing stupid straight white male ideology, like when some jarhead talks about some "chick band" that "totally rocks."
so my point, if i have one, is that people need to think. when aesop goes, "Life's not a bitch, life is a beautiful woman/You only call her a bitch because she won't let you get that pussy," that's sexist. he's trying to be a good, enlightened postmodern man and critique sexism in hip-hop, but dude needs to think before he opens his mouth. i prefer nas: "life's a bitch and then you die/that's why we get high/'cos you never know when you're gonna go." to invoke that slavoj žižek movie, "it's more honest." and, if you think about it, it's also less sexist.
i wonder who i'm writing to here. those i'm talking about will probably never see this. (does that mean i'm talking shit behind someone's back? and will they, like stephin merritt, come back at me indignantly complaining, "i don't like being called a racist on the internet"?) and, really, does anybody actually read my blog? but i know one old friend, who is always on me for my "ivory tower" (his words) tastes and my resistance to happy, enlightened postmodern pluralism, who would reply to this saying something like, "don't even act like you listen to hip-hop." to him, i would respond: just because i don't own any hip-hop albums released after 1995, doesn't mean i don't listen to hip-hop. it just means that i've grown old and curmudgeonly far too soon. and, in my defence, i don't listen to any straight white middle class indie boy guitar rock either, at least none that postdates the second microphones album (spring of 2000). i'm listening to keak da sneak right now and, i'll come out and say it: it'll do but i don't really feel it. but it sure beats driving to ikea in an audi listening to magnetic fields.
p.s. if you read this literally, read it again.
5/08/06
SUCK MY LEFT ONE
one paper handed in, two more to go. of those two, one is fully written and needs only heavy revisions and the other is half done. not that any of you slags care. here's something somewhat more pertinent:
a note from my wealthy benefactor: "i should warn you that if you don't stop this cat-blogging nonsense and get down to business, i'll block access to the myriad image files i've been hosting. where will your messiah be then?"
as most of you know, i don't take kindly to threats. beyond that, i react badly when people tell me what to do. anyone who remembers the first punk rock show i ever played with monopöle! can attest to this (turn down yr guitar). or anyone who ever attended a centipede show. or anyone who was at the party i dj'ed last week. i'm not trying to bite the hand that feeds here. it's just that, in these kinds of situations, i get an uncontrollable urge to tell people to bite me. on that note, more cat blogging: here's another photo by geoffy.
5/07/06
SCORPIO RISING
the pipettes, the subject of the next (imaginary) pop réistance column if i ever finish these papers, have a new song streaming on their myspace page. everytime the girl-group backup vocals go "pull shapes," it sounds like "bullshit": "clap yr hands if you want some more bullshit/clap yr hands if you want some more bullshit."
5/06/06
WHERE SEA-GRASS TANGLES WITH SHORE-GRASS
Small is
This white stream,
Flowing below ground
From the poplar-shaded hill,
But the water is sweet.
julianne shepherd's blog draws our attention to a counterpoint. and, while i'm with said counterpoint in spirit, i think a few of its critical beatdowns are a bit too easy. but i think, at this point, we (i mean my readers here) are all aware of the flaws of the "you" to which this entry's opening "fuck you" is aimed. what i think is at stake here, setting aside the culture of blaming non-straight white male victims, space politics, and the often unexamined issue of race in gender discourse (though much attention needs to be pointed in these three directions), is the last sentence that "you" (naomi schaefer riley) wrote: "People who need to be told to use their common sense probably didn't have much to begin with." the blame element can't be taken out of this statement but a subtextual meaning we can tease out of it is riley's mistaken belief that only "certain kinds" of girls get raped. it seems to me that this assumption is the most easily lifted sentiment of her piece and, accordingly, it is perhaps the most dangerous issue at hand. surely, it could never happen to "you," right? right?
