The Immaturity of "Mature" Content, and Why Music Artists Keep Dying · 10:41pm Feb 7th, 2021
Got some more hot takes for you that I’m sure most of you can actually relate to. So I guess it wouldn’t be a hot take after all. But whatever.
What comes to your mind when you think of adult content? Rap music, drugs, smoking, booze, cussing, porn, gory movies, money, etc, you get the idea. But what’s the mental image? Do you seriously see a mature, realistic adult consuming music that advertises and consumes soulless stuff? If you happen to be a realistically mature adult, would you consume this empty mature content? Probably not. You’d imagine a twelve-year-old listening to this kind of music, watching that kind of film, the kind of stuff you’d call crap. So what’s the disconnect here?
There’s a problem with the film and music industry. The more violent or risque they try to be, they inadvertently become less serious. Not all mature content is like this, of course; my very last blog post sang Attack on Titan's praises. But Attack on Titan is one in a million. Films with excessive R-rated content are seen as hollow because if you wash away all the blood, there’s nothing holding it together. If you want an example, Deadpool comes to mind. You had to be seventeen to see it, but sixteen to appreciate it. If it wasn't a Marvel property, how many of you would watch it in theaters? If you want an example closer to home, look at the Five Nights at Freddy’s and Warhammer 40k crossover fics that end up in the Overly Stupid Fanfiction group. Their tags are all the same: sex, violence, death, gore, fetish, non-con, profanity. Remember Fallout: The Frontier and how much of a mess it was? Something might be mature, but not respectable. The most obvious example of this would be porn. You guys already know why porn is bad for you. I’ve explained it many times. Most of the time, the porn here is cringy porn, too, so people can’t even get that much right.
In the popular music industry, the songs are all the same too. Every lyric of the wildly popular songs today is an iteration of a drug, sex, money, or hating someone else. I mean, these songs are exactly the kinds of cartoony shirts third-graders would wear. Just replace, “I like drugs, sex, money, and guns,” with, “I like pizza, video games, and cartoons, and I hate homework and annoy my sister,” and make the exact same song about those topics. Do you see what I’m getting at? No one takes these guys seriously because it’s garbage. The only people who consume it and actually like it are kids.
Now, among those kids are black kids and white kids. And since this music is sung by primarily black people, some music will contain the N word. And, oblivious to the societal ramifications of using such a word, these kids will inevitably sing songs with the N word in it or adopt the word along with the other lingo they hear in pop culture and see no problem. “If it’s used this often, there shouldn’t be that big a problem when I say it, right?” I’ve personally heard other minorities like Hispanics use the word, and not even in a joking manner, but it’s not nearly as big of an outrage as when a white person does it. I guess I’m not woke enough to understand why. There are plenty of examples of a person who gets canceled on Twitter for someone recording them saying the word, like, eight years ago. Is it cringeworthy? Absolutely. Is it worth destroying their entire future over? I don’t think so.
When it comes to this word, I don’t think anyone should say it. I think it’s an ugly word that dehumanizes black people, even if used in the black community. In high school, I was given the N word pass a few times, but I never actually cashed in, so to speak. I don’t feel comfortable saying the word, and I don’t feel comfortable when other people use the word. But who am I to take away this word which has had such a long history within the black community? They took something extraordinarily offensive and turned it into something normal between them. It was cultural appropriation, I guess. But expecting white people to consume and enjoy music differently than how a black person should consume it is kinda discriminatory. Remember how that one woman got on stage at a Kendrck Lamar concert to sing the 100%, 200% song, and everyone got shocked when she actually said the word? Like, what else would you expect her to do? And the shock isn’t directed at the uncomfortable song, but more towards when the wrong person sings the song. It really says a lot when the worst thing the wrong person can do is say a word.
(I bet I’m going to get scolded for speaking about this stuff. I’m not even saying the word! I’m just talking about it. If you’re going to say I can’t even talk about a word, that’s cowardly.)
In the rap industry, the artists are by and large directly involved in the use, manufacture, or distribution of the drugs they’re singing about to establish credibility, and if they aren’t affiliated with the drugs you sing about or the gangs they're in, like they claim, they’re called out for it by other rappers; they’re deemed fake. But you didn’t always have to be involved in this stuff to be credible within the culture. There’s always ongoing tension between them which leads to crime, which leads to either arrest or death.
But I legitimately don’t care about the drama. In the past few years, some rapper would die off, and I see the headline announcing it and go like, “Who?” And then I see dozens of white girls in tears over him. It's exactly the same reaction they have as when a black guy who murdered his entire family and another family is sentenced to death, and there's a trending hashtag like #freehim! Like, come on. The only thing they see is "black" and "sentenced to death" and let those two control their emotional response. If it was a white guy sentenced to death instead, he'd be used as an example of white fragility and despised all over Twitter. I'm more bipartisan than that. Any scum who kills his family or becomes a monster needs to be dealt with, and it doesn't matter if they're black or white.
Now, artists aren’t suddenly dying at a faster pace now. We’ve always had musicians who died young as a result of murder or drugs. But a key difference here is that the music is decidedly different. Instead of music that promoted drug use, they talked about how messed up it was, or how depressing it was, or stuff like that. We saw Guns & Roses do this, as well as Robert Plan with Led Zeppelin, Mick Jagger with The Rolling Stones, and John Lennon and others. Again, there’s a difference between mentioning evil and endorsing it.
The drug use now is something new. If you look at the 38 most popular rap songs from 1979 to 1984, only 4 of them mention drug use in any capacity, and the context behind them was also much different, since they were talking about the hardships the drugs brought, like the crack epidemic. But now we’re seeing drug use portrayed as a status of wealth, and sex appeal, which is all rap music nowadays talks about. The messages are an ego-booster to whoever listens to them. “I have more money than you do. I could inflict great bodily harm upon or kill you with little to no consequence. Your girl is far more attracted to me than you, and in fact, she and I have already engaged in relations! Ooh! Rrrt! This should make you upset. Also, I like to use drugs.” Like, every rap lyric we see nowadays can fit into one of those categories.
The lives these artists live is an inherently dangerous one. Mac Miller died of a drug overdose at 26. Lil Peep died of a drug overdose at 21. XXXTentacion was 20 when he was shot and killed in a car because he had 50k on his person. He was also accused of multiple charges like robbery, assault, a stabbing, home invasion, and domestic violence. Juice WRLD (Again, never heard of him before he died) swallowed a ton of drugs on a plane because there were federal agents waiting on the ground suspecting he was transporting arms and illegal drugs, which was correct. 6ix9ine pleaded guilty to using a child sexually and domestic violence, was arrested based on racketeering, weapons, and drugs, pled guilty to nine charges including conspiracy to commit murder and armed robbery in February 2019, and snitched on his fellow gangsters in the Nine Trey Gang. I’m not sure how much longer he’ll last. These are just the bigger names within the past year or so, but there are a lot more.
I’m not saying I’m glad they’re dead. But I understand why they died, and it’s fairly easy to predict if and how they die. Fifteen of the most notable rappers who died last year did so as a result of either being shot or overdosing, and only two of those cases were as a result of the China virus. (Which also led to many people doing more and more drugs and alcohol as they’re shut inside their home for months on end.) And the media would make a big mourning cavalcade out of it.
It’s so rich. Our culture on the one hand buys their music, idolizes its creators, and celebrates the direction of our culture towards hard and excessive drug use and violence; but on the other hand, when these very lifestyles catch up to these artists and costs them their lives as a common byproduct of their involvement with crime, we see the same people talk about how sad it is that they died, ooh, it happened too soon, it’s such a shame. Which it is, of course. But you have to understand, at the very least, those people are complicit in the artist’s death. Those people supported the music, supported the culture, supported their lifestyle and even financed it for them, and then they want to act shocked and sad when it ends up costing the artist their life? You only cared about the artist because they were putting out music that enabled your own degenerate lifestyles--because you want your pursuit of that to be normalized within the culture so you don’t feel as bad for it--and you paid them to do that for you! And when it killed them, you sobbed.
If you really cared about them, you would have been outspoken against them engaging in that behavior. But that’s not what we’re seeing. They ended up getting lung cancer, but you gave them the money to buy the cigarettes. This kind of music promotes a culture that ruins lives, and it’ll catch up to you eventually. The bill always comes due. And this is a depressing topic; I have a lot of sympathy for these people. They lived depressing and empty lives. But it’s also extremely hypocritical to celebrate what this music represents and then sob when it catches up to them and kills them. And I don’t think that it’s the music causing the culture, because we’re already stringing ourselves out on drugs so much that our life expectancy is decreasing, but it’s still very important to understand what may be the most easily-spreadable form of culture. If we’re going to continue promoting this behavior, you should get used to your artists dying.
The problem there is that those stories are written by people who don't understand 40K. Yes, 40K is violent and gory, but there's a lot more to it than that. Deep lore, a large backstory, a game system beloved across the world-all of this often gets discarded by second-rate authors here who only focus on the blood and guts.
My point being; these elements can be used, but they can't get shoved in willy-nilly. This is why Fall of Equestria doesn't work, to name another example.
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And again, the implication here is not that Warhammer 40k is bad. I'm sure it's very fun and enjoyable. I never played it. But if there are legitimately mature 40k fics, and not the edgy gorefests I always notice, I've never seen them.
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Here's a good one.
- MLP: FiM
- Warhammer
- Sci-Fi
Equus is a broken remnant of what it once was. Twilight Sparkle means to change that.As someone who reads a lot of comic books, your point with Deadpool bugged me because my brain had trouble disconnecting Film Deadpool with comics Deadpool, who's had decades of development to show what a silly character can do with a good writer. Look at the 'Don't Jump' comic, for instance. But you definitely bring up a ton of agreeable points, and I think it may have some relation to just how hands-off everyone is nowadays with raising children. I don't think children and their activities should be strictly policed, but I don't think enough is being done to make 'Mature' mean Mature, and not "Guns, Gore, and Cursing". Media, music especially, just seems to really lack soul any more when it tries to be 'mature'. When I think of a good mature show, I'll think of something that deals with actual mature topics, like the PTSD graphic violence can induce, or the emotional detachment that a life of "Guns, Gore, and Cursing" would lead to. Black Lagoon was a pretty good anime at handling a lot of that, but I never idolized the characters because they were unashamedly shitty people, and the show made that clear. If something says it's going to have mature content, it should be mature about that content, shouldn't it?
The whole thing about music is spot on. You and I may not agree on many things but here, we do. Rap music is a cancer in my opinion. It is all about rape, murder, drug use, greed and everything else horrible in this world.....and to think, some people think the 80s metal I listen to is bad.