Criticism
As with many similar scenes around the world, grime has encountered some criticism, especially from government officials such as Home Secretary David Blunkett who in 2003 called rap lyrics "appalling". Former minister Kim Howells made a statement in 2006 that Grime artists were helping to create a culture "where killing is almost a fashion accessory." Howells went even deeper into the issue, making comments that some grime supporters claimed to find "deeply racist," referring to popular artists and crews as "boasting macho idiot rappers." While the government offers one point of view, the artists and listeners offer another. In an article by Jeff Chang in The Village Voice, Dizzee Rascal’s often violent and sexual lyrics are heralded as “capturing, encapsulating, and preserving” the life that he and his peers live on the streets every day.
Read more about this topic: Grime (music)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)