it gets really sticky when you start talking about gut feelings, because they are difficult to defend and more often than not end up revealing the favored prejudices of the gut owner. anyway, my gut really feels that har mar’s spectacle comes from a place that is a touch racist.

the interaction between har mar and his audience has just made me feel queasy and uncomfortable every time i have seen him. har mar claims to be sincere, but is obviously engaged in parody, which the audience laps up all too eagerly. and there is a lot that’s funny about it on the first level.

“he’s adopting the persona of something he doesn’t look like.” holy fucking zombie jesus, what an ironist. no, james, it is not automatically racist for a white person to mock something more popular with black people. it would be racist for a white person to suspend objective judgement on something because its more popular with black people.

so maybe i should just leave har mar alone, but i can’t get around the fact that something personally pisses me off about him, and i would be dishonest not to express that, even if i’m coming from a place that is completely left field or this has more to do with my own issues than anything else.

i like r&b. i used to work at dj’s and would listen to it for most of every day. i don’t understand and am a little bit offendend when i sense that r&b is completely dismissed as a legitimate genre, which it is (i remember one of my first brushes with this blog was writing a nasty response to jerome’s editorial that was all about deriding r&b).

it is carried so far that it goes beyond the glut of commercialized, pre packaged pretty plastic doll singers that are always going to be around, to visionary, high quality artists getting dismissed because of their genre.

then har mar, with sub boy band music and a thick, unsubtle schtick, is somewhat embraced by an audience that largely doesn’t have the time of day for what he is referring to in his act.

i’m going in circles so i’m going to stop for now, but suffice it to say, the times i’ve seen har mar, something has felt very wrong about being in that audience.

Though maybe i’m not making any sense.

har mar primarily is marketed to and listened to by an indieish crowd that happens to be predominately caucasian. his image apes r&b lovermen who tend to be black, and it carries a sense of self satisfied parody, despite his insistences that he is completely sincere. it is hard to feel he isn’t winking at an audience that doesn’t listen to r&b and finds it ludicrous, and he is making a spectacle of confirming that generalization and mocking it.

something is just viscerally racist and insulting about har mar superstar to me. maybe i’m just tripping.

how is har mar racist? i am being serious, i have no idea.