"Addressing the issue", as PC-ists used to say (last year), I want to
enter the tent under the flap.  A very very small percent of music --
or any craft -- is art.  Most content in 'art' is preaching to the
converted.

Preaching what?  Preaching values, mores, morals, politics -- how to
dance, how far apart, marriage is good, mine went bad, marriage is
good, what to eat, what to wear, what to cry about, etc.

Songs, innocent as they seem, whether on purpose or inadvertently,
are freighted with these social constructions.  They are as much
prescriptions as they are descriptions.

An _artist_, on the other hand, leaves all this garbage behind.  There
is often little consideration for the intended market.  Though a song
might be 'about' a love affair, or any subject, if it is art, it
transcends that certain petty taint of an era's values.  It endures
for other reasons, perhaps universality -- which, however, mightn't be,
in the wrong hands, necessarily artistic, and is more often tacky
propaganda, servicing the 'state' ...

I have seen various offensive cartoons, usually to blacks, and they
made me sick.  They're the puerile projections of someone's icky
'creativity'.  In his post, Gabe Della Fave says,

> Do we need to _censor_ (that is what it is) these works and artists
> because they sometimes depicted African-Americans (or any other race
> for the matter) in a derogatory manner and miss their great art and
> entertainment?! NOT!!!

I myself loath censorship too, Gabe, but if a race or anyone is
depicted in a derogatory manner, then the depiction is not, sic, 'great
art' -- although it might, perhaps to you, be 'great entertainment'...

I am not preaching some sort of elitism.  Most craft is manufactured
in the shadow of true artists.  Certain music/art genres have appeared
only because someone -- who truly loved the art-form -- re-contextual-
ized it in a form the teeming populace could enjoy.

An example is the cartoons of the Fleichman bros.  One watches their
productions and understands how, at least Max Fleichman, loved jazz.
He loved it so much, he animated it, for example, the masterpiece,
St. James Infirmary.  In order to 'sell' this to the public however, a
certain acknowledgment of the primary originators of jazz, namely, black
Americans, had to be incorporated into the product.  This was be done
in a good-natured way, or in a mean-spirited way.  Sometimes one person
did it both ways.

Political correctness is vastly misunderstood.  Another way of saying
it, for me, is, simply, be true to yourself, and let everyone else do
the same.

Johnny Lite