American Grotesque
RMR’s “Rascal”, the 2020 track of the year, and the Southernizing of U.S. Culture
I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Confederate flags proudly flew from pickup trucks that blared an alternating mix of V100 rap and Rascal Flatts.
It was never adequately explained to me what any of this meant to anybody. The flag wasn’t representative of pro-slavery sympathies, I don’t think (though if you were to poll the few people of color in my town they’d probably disagree). Rather it was an adoption of some idea of a “rebel spirit”. The Confederate flag was a symbol of American individualism; a testament to our own self-determination. The tenterhooks of a capitalist hegemony in overdrive, wrought in the 50s, burrowed in and made the guiding philosophy by the 80s, and consecrated in the post-9/11 fog of endless war.
Back then, the culture war was as it is now: that of some sort of neoliberal dominance. The thought was that, well, if the Left isn’t going to win hearts and minds we can win the ears and eyes. This is what our country looks like, this is what we represent. We were The West Wing, not the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. But we were both, and we were more the latter than the former.
What the North didn’t realize was, this cultural hegemony was winning and losing in equal measure. Like the “rebel spirit” of self-determination, the atomized American South was building its own culture; and it was some mix of the sincere and the grotesque.
In reality, this new American Grotesque had existed for as long as America failed to address its own barbarism. It exists in the nausea of Faulkner and the gauze of Tennessee Williams — in blues — in the yelps of Carl Perkins’ “Her Love Rubbed Off”.
This culture had spent decades fermenting — or metastasizing — depending on how you look at it. You can now witness it throughout American pop culture. In the first season of True Detective, in NPR’s S-Town, in the work of Danny McBride, and the novels of Paul Beatty.
But I say metastasized, because it’s spread. You can hear it in the rumble of every dirt bike that runs through the streets of Brooklyn, or ATV in a toney Chicago neighborhood.
Which brings us to RMR’s “Rascal”, the most significant track of 2020, the ur-text for the Southernizing of American pop culture. A rap artist from Compton-by-way-of-Atlanta (or vice versa) interpolating a sappy pop country song by a band from Ohio, who in turn was covering a song by a Southern rock band formed in California (and written by guys from Washington DC and Detroit, respectively). It’s an ouroboros of strictly American products, flipped enough to make an important statement on a strictly American brutality.
Of course, outside of the pandemic and the presidential election, the prevailing “national conversation” of 2020 was about racial injustice. The largest mass political demonstration in American history hung heavy in every conversation, every action, every opportunity to learn and empathize. Through a cultural lens, music did attempt to capture some of the energy of it all. YG’s “FTP” and Denzel Curry’s “Pig Feet” were strong contenders, but there was something unique in the way RMR brought the topic to the fore.
The video, of course, is the meme. It’s parody for parity; black comedy for black comity. It’s a stark contrast that will evoke both laughter and (perhaps) confusion. But it’s 100% compelling.
Of course, this is all an exercise in reading too much into these cultural products; but when we talk about the significance of culture as a vehicle for expressing a collective consciousness, nothing connected the lineage of modern American culture quite like “Rascal”. Against the backdrop of brutality laid bare and the corresponding anger and soul searching therefrom, a song that encapsulates so much of how we got here was particularly resonant in 2020.
We are the South. We all bear these wounds. These wounds are our DNA, and in spite of our drive towards a more communal truth, we accept these wounds alone. “Rascal” is the accumulation of rugged individualism, a rejection of authority, and the product of a curdled American culture, born in the South, filtered through some vague idea of American liberalism, and spit out the other side.
