Just as I was lamenting the irrelevance of my blog to my mostly-American audience…
Immigration minister Kevin Andrews denied Snoop Dogg a travel visa to enter the country to perform at the MTV Awards ceremony. While I’m no fan of the guy and I’ve sheltered myself so successfuly from the vicissitudes of pop culture that I couldn’t even name a song of his, I still think this has to do with race.
In a situation where we have the American military coming into Australia for training exercises in less than a month’s time, and Bush himself coming to town later this year (while the whole goddamn city is being shut down for him, BTW), I think some “drug and gun offences” look pretty fucking trivial.
It’s this whole drive to individualise moral culpability and evade the issue of power that’s really outrageous about this. While a high-profile black American rapper whose audience is mostly white, whose wealth is built upon a skewed portrayal of black men, which again benefits wealthy white Americans (and was indeed constructed to do so) is made out to be personally degenerate for embodying elements of a culture that has both been socially engineered and lambasted, the whole fucking country is getting ready to hold an orgy in celebration of war and capitalism.
I know who I’d rather bar from the country and it’s not the rapper.
EDIT: Now the PM is comparing his behaviour to Holocaust denial and making comments about his “background”.
