What do Ice Cube, NWA, and Julius Evola have in common? Well, not much actually. But let’s play a game.
girl: “Ice Cube, do you think you could give me some money to get my hair done?”
ice cube: “How short’s your hair right now?”
girl: “Well you know I get it done every week, and I need my nails done too!”
ice cube: “Look, I’ma tell you like this..
I ain’t the one..”
Relish, in the lulz. In the classic NWA song “I ain’t the one” Rapper Ice Cube delivers up purposefully sardonic and humorous dating and relationship advice from a street-wise perspective. The thing is..
The song has a serious core.
Get past the cynical and sarcastic wording, the confrontationism (and – some may say – misogynistic framing), and you really have a message valid for Men White and Black, Older and Younger, Hip and Square, Suburban and Urban.
Oh, and Woman and man as well.
The basic message is “don’t let yourself get played” – in other words, don’t let your relationship partner game you in an attempt to exploit you, spoon off from you. It’s valid advice for women and men alike, given the rather large number of young men spooning off their women nowadays, but the primary recipient is the guy likely to wind up being the retirement plan of a lapsed demimondaine prone to buying dinners for her tattoo artists with her boyfriend’s or husband’s charge card, before entertaining them on his living room coffee table, while he’s tediously at work slaving for the man to bring home a wad of cash that she will blow on hair, nails, getting her tattoos colored in, oh and weed (randomize the order as you will).
In an age and society in which people are reduced to their lowest common denominator character components, screw you before you screw me becomes a tragic and rather ugly aspects of modern marriages and relationships. The fact that people increasingly lack character in this matter may necessitate some sane self protection on a person’s part.
When I remember the song, that venial and silly bird from “Poetic Justice”, Janet Jackson’s character’s friend, comes to mind. Of course she was enabled by her ‘boyfriend’s’ cupidity and greed. It should be noticed that one thing worse than being delivered the classic “LJBF” line by someone you’re crazy about and infatuated with is being made into a source of economic tribute and resource expropriation.
That’s usually a sign of being conquered, literally. Like Ashurbanipal harrowing your front yard. Do you want a legion of half crazed Assyrians harrowing your front yard? No, well the emotions of getting played can feel worse. I’ve met men who would literally prefer death to these emotions. In fact some do.
Ever look at the male suicide rate?
“..So I step to em, with aggression
Listen to the kid, and learn a lesson today
See they think we narrow minded
Cause they got a cute face, and big-behinded..”
Seriously, there’s loads of callow relationship advice in that song, if you take it too seriously you’ll end up breaking hearts, being a general menace to society and causal factor in the general fall of western civilization (&tc, &tc, ) and add to the general roster of broken women running around while igniting tidal waves of Maurice Povich show style drama.
But if you pay attention to the sensible core of cogent advice along the lines of “Know what you want, and don’t let your desires make you weak in the knees and susceptible to getting turned out into an ATM machine on wheels for a perpetual narcissist with serious personality and mood issues, well then don’t be all aspergy literalist and refuse to read between the lines son.
Don’t be the one.
I don’t really encourage the reading of Julius Evola by the vast majority of people. He’s a subtle author, a crafty one, and one with real agendas some of which requires an astute and erudite reader to even half comprehend. Some of his deeper agendas may be seen as threatening or pernicious to even people who consider themselves ‘fans’ of his works. But there are useful things, for the careful and thoughtful reader, in his Mysteries of Love, Metaphysics of Sex, relating to the non biological and transcendent nature of sexual and gender differentiation.
I with great humility put on the plate that the framing of Ice Cube’s funny little rap here actually has an explicitly metaphysical basis dealing with the polarities of the Sexes and Genders that have a subtle fluidic basis. Evola’s bookon the Metaphysics of Sex and the Mysteries of Love has the distinction of being one of the only semi-easily obtainable ones in any Western language I’m aware of that looks at these things from a vantage point detached from and a bit higher than that of a mere moralist (either a libertine or puritanical prig, both really are moralists when it comes down to it)
So like, son.. Don’t be the one.
In any case the whole framing of all of this is just another brick in the wall, the downward spiral – as always – continues.
(* I say fludic, a usage closer to the norms Evola or Guenon, or even that dajjal Crowley would have used. Fluid and fluidic are a metaphors describing the phenomenon’s truth better than ones like energetic or energy – increasingly common among people influenced by modern Western neo-Yoga, or New Age reading, and in particular people who read neo-Tantra stuff.
**Strict materialists may want to debate this, frankly I’m not interested in debate at least not with one who hasn’t put in serious work in reading and throughly comprehending the opposite terms of the dialectic in which he or she finds a warm sitting bench – and most people, beyond google searches “debunking XYZ” seem incapable of truly subtle and informed dialectical engagement or repartee)
_EOF
“but the primary recipient is the guy likely to wind up being the retirement plan of a lapsed demimondaine prone to buying dinners for her tattoo artists with her boyfriend’s or husband’s charge card, before entertaining them on his living room coffee table, while he’s tediously at work slaving for the man to bring home a wad of cash that she will blow on hair, nails, getting her tattoos colored in, oh and weed (randomize the order as you will).”
This is why rights need to be rolled back and corporal punishment must become necessary. For the tattoo artist as well.
There is a cogent argument, that can be made to that effect, no doubt.