Difficult Others and Cultural Pluralism

The outpourings of white rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers III) have not met with universal acclaim. Women's groups, gay activists, and US politicians have been loudest within the refrain of unnumbered individuals deploring the degeneracy displayed by his malign lines. My epigraphs, quotations from The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), offer clear enough signs of what the trouble is: the usual intractable tropes of hardcore hip-hop: violence, misogyny, homophobia, and foul language. Such vernacular extremes might breach the decorum of an academic symposium, but, however sensationally, the incongruous juxtaposition performs precisely one of the principal points I plan to explore: the question of how we liberals are to deal with words and music (or for that matter any cultural form) that we identify as Other – especially when, as is likely in this case, that Otherness is radically problematical.

Of course these days the Other has almost become a platitude of the new historical, the new musicological attitude; and pluralism has found recognition as a facet of that condition called postmodernism. We're waking up to a world where any set of truth claims, or aesthetic claims, has to be understood as relative to any other. But relative in what sense – and on whose terms? How are we to construe the relationship between the plural coordinates of the postmodern map? One starting point might be an idea advanced by Gary Tomlinson in his article ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz’, which he calls a ‘parallactic conception’: