We should establish two things right off the bat.

First, R. Kelly has been arrested and accused enough times for us all to accept the basic idea that he has deep, ingrained pedophilic tendencies.

Second, there is no hard evidence, grainy internet film notwithstanding, that R. Kelly ever urinated on anyone.

But this isn’t an indictment or a defense of R. Kelly. I don’t pretend to know anything about him as a man, or as a singer either. My sister has a soft spot for R&B, but it always struck me as the honey dripper bullshit that Chuck D once proclaimed it to be. I took it that if you appreciated the crisp diction and streety rawness of hip hop you were honor bound, as it were, to thumb your nose at R&B and the endless sloppy crooning of it all.

That was before I saw Trapped in the Closet, which broke me down and rearranged me as a man. There is no way to describe Trapped in the Closet properly. It’s a long R&B song. It’s some kind of opera/soap opera/TV drama. It bears some vague genetic resemblance to the Hip Hoperas of the brilliant Prince Paul from a few years back. It’s sort of like a music video.

But as much as it is all these other things, it is simultaneously, incredibly unique.

The story starts with a character, played by R. Kelly, who wakes up in a woman’s bedroom after a one-night stand and immediately has to hide in the closet as the husband arrives home unexpectedly. From there, the R. Kelly persona morphs into two or maybe three semi-distinct characters: the character in the story, the singer of the song, and the meta-narrator who is sometimes also to be found hanging out in other closets all around town. The story then immediately splits into several more complicated sub-plots, all of which end up being interconnected in various streams of adultery, deceit, sex, and, violence. So, the material is good (I would mention something here about the guy who comes out of the kitchen cabinet but you really need to experience that moment for yourself).

The song is simple and loosely structured with no chorus, allowing R. Kelly to use his patented ‘rhyme-a-word-with-the-exact-same-word-repeatedly’ technique. Though there are various characters played by different actors, they all lip-sync to the voice of R. Kelly, who sings each part himself with gusto. The tension points in the story, of which there are quite a few, are punctuated by R. Kelly’s lyrical flourishes in what amounts to a remarkably effective drama heightener. The thing is extremely frickin’ watchable. Indeed, it is a rare occasion when I pop Trapped in the Closet into the DVD player, as I have done repeatedly in the last weeks, and witness anyone drifting out of the room before it’s over. It grabs you in some strange concoction of melodrama and lyrical flow. It has a hypnotic quality, without robbing the viewer of self-awareness. In fact, that is one of the oddest things about Trapped in the Closet. You can’t believe you’re watching it, and you can’t stop. You have no idea exactly what it is, even, that you’re watching or how such a thing could possibly have been created . . . and you want more.

Somewhere around the fourth viewing I decided, reluctantly, that R. Kelly is some kind of genius and that he’s spewed out something so utterly singular that a person simply has to give in to it. And it struck me, further, that I couldn’t admit this simple and irrefutable fact without also acknowledging that this accomplishment has something to do with R&B. As much as Prince Paul’s Hip Hoperas are infinitely smarter, more clever, and more sophisticated, they are also, maybe, too much all of those things. R. Kelly comes along with his complete, almost utterly naïve lack of just those qualities and creates something that is a genre unto itself. Whatever the failings of R&B as a musical style, there is something direct and immediate about the way it portrays human emotions that is difficult not to relate to. R&B is not afraid to lay it out on the line. However you’re feeling, that’s okay, man. Just sing about it. Nothing complicated here, you’re hurtin’ or wantin’ or missin’ or something like that. Just, you know, tell us about it. The thing I used to hate about R&B is also a kind of strength, if you look at it a little differently. And it struck me even further that the straightforward narrative simplicity of R&B lyrics are just another way to portray the complexities of human experience. It is the emotions that are complex. The language and syntax that expresses, however inadequately, those emotions, doesn’t have to be.

Indeed, it was while watching Trapped in the Closet for the eighth or ninth time that I recalled a conversation with a friend of mine, Alan Fishbone, who runs the Intensive Latin Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and has often had occasion to think about how language works. He once remarked to me that there is nothing but syntax, only syntax exists. He was in an extreme mood, and the comment has the ring of exaggeration to which Fishbone occasionally succumbs (I recall that it was also around this time that Fishbone started talking about stockpiling weapons and canned goods out in the woods somewhere. His beard had grown particularly scruffy and his eyes were sunken even deeper into an already cavernous skull. I started to worry that he might have joined some Humanist Militia, Juvenal-and-AK-47s-type outfit. But the phase passed). The comment, however, stuck with me. He meant, basically, that semantics gets you nowhere. Meaning comes out of the arrangement of words, not out of the individual meanings of individual words. There’s a perfectly respectable school for this type of ‘meaning holism’ among philosophers of language, but it somehow seemed more impressive coming from someone who’d gotten there solely in long, dark nights’ labors with impenetrable sentences in Tacitus that suddenly revealed themselves as if in a magical flash. Syntax is like that, he said, like some weird kind of magic with language.

Pushing this a little bit further (indulge me for a moment), if it’s true that it all comes down to syntax, then you could also say that human thought can be divided into two basic categories, paratactic and hypotactic. They are the two most elemental ways of putting thought together. In paratactic arrangement, you just keep adding something more. The greatest ally to parataxis is the conjunction. Such and such happened and then such and such happened after that, and next was a little episode of this and that, and then it all came to a head with this particular series of events, and then after that a whole new thing started. That’s pretty much how parataxis works. Epic poetry tends to unfold in parataxis and no one did it more paratactically than Homer. It just keeps coming, line after line, thought after thought, event after event. There’s barely a subordinate clause to be found in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Parataxis works, in a sense, in real time. It unfolds as experience unfolds, in a narrative line. It’s thick with the relentless forward push of lived temporality.

Hypotactic arrangement, by contrast, nestles thoughts within thoughts, steps to the side, qualifies, alters, and modifies. It has the structure of reflection and argument rather than that of lived experience. It is thus no accident that when one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Parmenides, wanted to appropriate the dactylic hexameter of epic verse for his complicated ontological argument about the necessary logical structure of all that is, he dropped the parataxis. Parmenides’ poem, despite its first-glance resemblance to epic poetry, is a mess of complicated hypotaxis.

The thing is, you can’t really choose one over the other; parataxis or hypotaxis. It doesn’t make any sense. That would be like saying that Homer is better than Parmenides or vice versa. They’re both great, they’re both doing amazing things. But when you start analyzing it you realize that they’re doing completely different things. Parmenides is messing around with the very structure of language, going inside of it in order to pull out inferences about the logical structure of Being. Crazy, maybe, but somebody had to see where that would go. Homer is riding on a sea of language, completely comfortable in it, surrounded by it, happily willfully drowning inside it. Homer doesn’t even say things like “I ask the Muse to help me sing such and such” like some of the later epic poets do. He just says “Muse, sing,” as if the difference between Homer, the Muse, and language itself is swallowed up in the great gush of the telling. By the end of the first few lines of the Iliad you are so much inside the narrative that there is no time to sort anything out. You just have to keep moving forward, adding more and more layers of experience. I always thought that Matthew Arnold got it right when he advised those attempting to translate Homer that, “he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas.”

Now, I’m not saying that R. Kelly is Homer. Trapped in the Closet will not be studied and revered by armies of scholars three thousand years from now (though you never know). But I am trying to say something about the power of parataxis. In that, at least, Homer and R. Kelly share something. There’s an amazing feature to the Trapped in the Closet DVD where R. Kelly gives his commentary to the episodes as he’s watching them. This should be the hypotactic moment where Kelly busts open the immediacy of the narrative and analyzes it, breaks it down, fills it with parenthesis and reflection, etc. But he can’t do it. He doesn’t think that way. So, basically, he simply ends up telling you the exact same story he is singing on the screen. He’s paratactic all the way, baby. It’s his only register. He has nothing to say about the story whatsoever except to reiterate it. That is goddamn amazing to me. It’s like he’s a traveling Rhetor from the sixth century BC to whom the very idea of ‘commentary’ as we generally think of it is completely foreign. When I watched that DVD commentary I was truly sold. People like R. Kelly don’t get produced all that often. I’m a changed man.

“If you’re addicted to alcohol, if a faith program is able to get you off alcohol, we ought to say, hallelujah and thanks…”

George W. Bush
Boston Globe
March 10, 2006

Well, hallelujah back at ya: the Boston Catholic Archdiocese, seeking to deny gay couples adoption privileges in violation of Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws, decided to get out of the adoption business altogether. They are foregoing their $1 million in state funding for adoption services, and have fired their 15 adoption service workers.

The cause is religious freedom – yes, religious freedom. Because the Vatican in 2003 called gay adoptions “gravely immoral,” Massachusetts’ four Roman Catholic bishops decided on February 28, 2006, to seek regulatory relief from state anti-discrimination laws so that Catholic Charities can begin discriminating against potential gay adoptive parents. Though the agency had successfully placed 13 children with gay couples over the past 20 years with no reported ill effects, Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley announced that the Archdiocese would insist that Catholic Charities desist in order that the exercise of Church’s religious freedom be preserved.

The Archbishop did not give up without a fight. He ascended Beacon Hill in his ever-present Franciscan drag to convert the First Mormon, Governor Mitt Romney, to his cause, surely a delicious irony for anyone who has been accosted by black badge-bearing Utah boys in city streets and subways. An easy mark was the First Mormon, a presidential candidate and co-religious freedomist, but sadly for our proselytizers, the law is against them. Romney has promised to propose a bill guaranteeing the Archdiocese the right to discriminate against gay and lesbian couple adopters, and to do it with state funds.

The Archbishop’s band of four does not appear to be speaking for others connected with Catholic Charities. Its 42-member lay board voted unanimously to continue adoption to gay and lesbian couples. Eight of its members resigned in protest when the Archdiocese announced it would press on nonetheless for the right to discriminate. A Charities’ law firm declined to handle an exception-seeking lawsuit.

Nothing prevents Catholic Charities of Boston from discriminating and doing adoptions in the future. They just can’t have state money that subsidizes their efforts, or, it seems monies from other foundations and charities such as the United Way that practice non-discrimination against gays and lesbians. The deep reliance of Catholic Charities, like other charities, on government monies discloses just how faith-based our do-it-yourself welfare system already is. Consider that about 60% of Catholic Charities of Boston’s funding comes from government sources, roughly the same proportion true of the national Catholic Charities USA.

The Boston Catholic Archdiocese could do what do what other religious organizations have done, freeing their charity arms from church control, thus leaving the churches to believe and the agencies to serve, subsidized by state funds. Given that the curates created this crisis all by themselves by making their right to discriminate a test of their religious freedom, this path seems unlikely. Or, another family agency that obeys the law could hire the 15 fired Catholic Charities workers, and a cooperative and agile state bureaucrat could funnel the subsidy money to them. A little God-given common sense, one might say, could solve this problem in a jiffy.

Don’t count on it. The curates are on a mission. The American Catholic Church has long been committed to getting the states, federal and the 50, to fund the exercise of their religious freedom, as historic campaigns for state funding for Catholic schools, school bus and textbook subsidies for Catholic kids, and tuition tax deductions and vouchers, among other ventures, testifies. They now seek a radical extension. They seek to enforce Catholic norms and beliefs upon non-believers while acting as the direct agent of the state.

A strange, seemingly odd notion of religious freedom, you might say. Yet it is consistent with a kind of Orwellian double-speak that binds and blinds public discourse in so many aspects of American life today. The great French historian of capitalism Fernand Braudel wrote that capitalists, contrary to their professed love of competition in a free marketplace, actually despise competition and all of its attributes. What real capitalists prefer is monopoly status so they can set usurious prices, corrupt the state in their favor, and annihilate any potential competitors by whatever forces they possess (that’s where the state comes in). Remember: Halliburton is not a fish, unfortunately, even in Boston.

Boston’s Catholic clerics answer to a Church in Rome that is religious master of all it surveys on its home grounds. No grasping mullah, imam or rabbi could ask for more. Roman Catholicism in Italy is recognized as the paramount national religion, its priests paid for by the state, as is their ministry in public school classrooms. Its churches are recognized as part of the national patrimony and repaired at state expense when frequent earthquakes befall the peninsula. Religious instruction is mandatory in state schools: the odd Jew, Muslim, or Protestant may ask to be excused from priestly intellectual benedictions, but many I have known over the course of working in Italy for 25 years, just suck it up, as they say in the army, so as not to reinforce their pariah status. In sum, this is the Church that wants the European Community to pronounce itself a Christian nation.

In one sense, then, seeking some domain over state power and authority is part of the Catholic Church playbook. But in the United States, where Catholics are a religious minority, it means joining up with like-minded Protestants who, not to put too fine a point on it, compose the religious right. In fact, from many perspectives, including my own, the John-Paul II revised American Catholic Church now forms part of the religious right. Armed no less than their Protestant brothers with the truth of Jesus Christ, they seek to put real teeth into expression “one nation under God.” If national norms conflict with theirs, they must be changed. Their religious freedom, and its “free exercise thereof” is diminished if its access to state support is diminished. Like Braudel’s good capitalist, they seek guarantees and a good fix. Their institutions need feeding, and state funds in support of their mission – well, things couldn’t get any better, except perhaps than a state religion itself, which isn’t in the cards in America. The Catholic clerics, after several thousand years, are experienced card players.

This little case is our canary in the civic coal mine. It alerts us to the deeply dangerous zone into which America has entered. And it nicely coincides with a new propaganda campaign this week by the Bush regime to gin up support for expanding so-called “faith-based initiatives.” The administration whether by stealthy recounting or by actual distribution claims that $2 billion of a total of $20 billion in health and welfare expenditures currently goes to religious organizations in our do-it-yourself welfare state. The Big Brother in Christ makes it clear that he supports legislation that goes beyond the current authorization of faith-based program grants, and that will enable religious organizations to evade equal opportunity laws that currently prevent them from using religious preference as a hiring criterion. When government gives support to religious people providing social services, Bush says on the White House faith-based initiative website, “charities and faith-based programs should not be forced to change their character or compromise their mission.”

Somewhere deep in the antediluvian folds of my mind, the phrase “soldiers of Christ” resides, and some conjuring of Ignatius Loyola lurks. The White House would allow a Catholic Charities, say, to choose only Catholics for its social workers, and presumably Catholics of whom the clerics would approve for its state-supported work. This is a clever business: first, get the structure and the money right, and then the hearts and minds will follow. The grace of monopoly power could surely work wonders.

A final note. When one puts the machinations of the Christian right, composed now of the Catholic Church and many Protestant sects, in perspective, it forces consideration of the question of why American imperialism, so open to a kind of religious governance at home, is ostensibly so chary of religious governance abroad. The happenstance of building an imperialist majority at home, as in more Christians, more Catholics, more majority? Or perhaps it is the peculiar US hypocrisy of imperialism as foreign policy. Hypothesizing that constant oil flow and nationalist religious fervor don’t mix, the US becomes agnostic and universalistic abroad, while ignoring its Christian identity at home. Imperialism does seem to induce a somnolence at home about the degree to which we become what we pretend to abhor.

Or is it the case that we have met the mullahs, and they are us? If so, let’s stop killing the rest of the world in such great numbers and hold a great domestic inquisition instead. At least, we would be killing each other rather than annihilating substitutes.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

                                    UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE June 28, 2007

In the middle of a hot Australian summer, a new Cross City Tunnel forcing motorists to use its subterranean tendrils, road closures making drivers either succumb to its expensive ease or find new ways about, tempers at breaking point, one suddenly caught a glance of the Sydney Opera House, out of the corner of the eye. There, centring the whole city of Sydney, this amazing building still had the power to overwhelm with its leaping shells, its suggestion of ascent to an empyrean. Fruit rinds, sails, wings—each person chooses their own imagery. How far removed from the sweat and fury on the roads below. What Platonic perfection, in contrast to the swearing and rising blood pressure of infuriated drivers. How different a response, at least from me, to grotesque outrages on the spirit such as Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

But then, not wholly, for the history of the Sydney Opera House also reveals failure and tragedy. The physical splendour of those gleaming shells which has contained so much artistic splendour hides great bitterness and grief.  [Photograph by Darren Helsby.]

Most Australians think of Joern Utzon, the architect of the Opera House, as the great Dane, the architect who gave us this building which seems to draw all the horizontals and verticals of the city about its rinds. Yet this man was forced to leave mid-construction after cost blowouts and design problems ran up against philistine government policy. A great deal of dirty pool was played and Utzon’s reputation was besmirched. Another team of architects took over the completion of the interior of the building leaving its artistic integrity compromised and in need of an expensive makeover. Where the money is to come from is the problem. This icon requires plentiful supplies of it, and always will. Recently, the State government has re-established links with the architect and there are now long-term plans for renewal, some of which have already been implemented.

I have been attending performances there since its opening. Even as a student I went on the occasional tour when it seemed as if one had strayed onto some gigantic Mayan temple. There are some evocative photos of the Opera House in this early pupating phase by David Moore. The first performance took place when Paul Robeson sang ‘Joe Hill’ in 1960 at the invitation of the Building Workers Industrial Union, prophetic intimation of the necessity for blood sacrifice on the temple steps.

Utzon left Australia, eventually taking up residency in Majorca, after being given the thumbs down not only by the New South Wales state government, but also by his colleagues back home. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were about, waiting to dispatch Hamlet at the first opportunity. The Queen eventually did get round to opening the building in spectacular style in 1973, but the excited crowds, the flotilla of vessels on the harbour, the planes overhead, hid the shadow side of this architectural leap to the sublime. However, one could go back further in history to come up with an even greater tragedy than Utzon’s.

In the foyer of the Concert Hall there is a bust of Sir Eugène Goossens, the man who first proposed an opera house for Sydney, a home for the performing arts. He fought for it, charmed politicians who eventually came up with the competition that brought forth Utzon. Goossens’ energy, persistence and foresight brought the Sydney Opera House from idea to reality. He had come to Australia to lead the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and head the NSW Conservatorium of Music after brilliant work with Stravinsky and other moderns in Europe and America. All was going swimmingly until Goossens was intercepted on arrival at Mascot airport, back from one of his overseas trips, and found to be carrying with him rather mild forms of pornography that would hardly raise an eyebrow today. Revelations about a relationship with a local celebrity, Rosaleen Norton, the ‘white witch’ of Kings Cross followed on from an orgy of splenetic baying by the press, and Goossens lost his job as Chief Conductor. Exiled in England, he died six years later. As I said, human, all-too-human, the Nietzschean imperative part and parcel of the building down by Circular Quay.

What one has seen and heard there in the decades since its opening: muck-against-glory Strindberg in the Drama Theatre, Bette Davis with her trademark ‘what a dump’ mannerisms, a superb concert-version Ring cycle under the direction of Edo de Waart. And there were plenty of surprises too: the USSR State Symphony Orchestra with Yevgeni Svetlanov tearing through Rachmaninov’s First Symphony, Leonie Rysanek transforming herself into a teenager as Sieglinde, the young French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin setting the Concert Hall ablaze with Bruckner when we expected an also-ran after Maazel cancelled. And the great missed opportunities. Ella Fitzgerald! She’ll be back—she never was. What a susurration of the soul has threaded its way beneath and around those shells with theatre, ballet and opera; political demonstrations, recitals and readings; conferences, music, music, music; eating and drinking, dancing, tourists; the solace of the great performance to renovate a spirit at the end of its tether; the weeks of the Olympics, a special feeling, the air like champagne, a general feeling of goodwill.

And yet. There are things still worse than exile, more joyful than sporting celebrations. Go beyond the towering, powder blue sky with its Brancusi curves, back beyond the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, past the old Tram Shed on Bennelong Point where the Sydney Opera House now stands, beyond colonial hard times when floggings, leg irons and rum ruled the roost, to a dusty evening, just as afternoon’s rose fades before the ghosts of spirit ancestors. Aboriginal people—the Cadigal, the Cammeraygal—are fishing around the harbour’s edge. Thousands of years of cultural adaptation are about to undergo severest trauma. Over the horizon sails are approaching—Dutch, French, and British. Dispossession is on the way.

And then again to the present. A performance has finished. The wind drops and evening’s purple dissolves into the swirling waters of the harbour. Crowds have dispersed and you are left to your own devices. John Olsen’s mural tribute to Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘Five Bells’ stretches out into the darkness beyond. Suddenly, the whole panoply of human endeavour raises its mighty yearning edifice before you with its intolerable cruelties, its inexplicable greatness, imagination’s parallel universe moulding itself through the sculpture whose stairs you descend towards home. Mahler and Shakespeare are echoing in the shells, lithe limbs reaching apotheosis in the Rose Adagio, with cheering, waves of applause, first visits and last glimpses. Before you, above you, around you, is the winged victory of human aspiration made visible in concrete, steel and tile. The Sydney Opera House stands, not phantasmagoric, something inspiration, technology and sheer hard work brought forth at the cusp of city and ocean, yacht sails and ferry lights disappeared in evening.

A glimpse of the Sydney Opera House from a mess of traffic. The spirit is refreshed and your blood pressure eases, architectural lines tracing from paper the nervelines of our best intentions, metamorphosing into reality, not dissolving into thin air. Silence is best then. The heart, vexed but not yet cynical muscle, is too full to say anything more.

                                                                        *
                                  Sydney

A kookaburra’s blubbering laugh
Skids above the gumtrees’ lean,
Shards of light rekindling
Harbour’s blue acetylene.

And blossoms large as bruises fall
In supplication where a swirl
Of wings divide this limping air,
Cresting over beachs’ foil,

Roundabouts of coastal wrap,
Sandstone blocks and bitumen,
Miles of terracotta roofs
Sloped to sheer oblivion.

Flesh abrades in shower and bed
Geographies for loving,
Hillside muscles slumped
On salted sheets’ revisions.

Cockatoo headline of Opera House sails
Flashes its crest near the Quay
As night’s shenanigans up at the Cross
Dwindle to weak cups of tea.

Pulseline of buildings mortgages trains
Where Heralds flap into position,
Row upon row of white collars creased,
Timetables laughed at by larrikins.

Westwards to afternoon, reaching at bush,
Grids sweat time from the crowd,
Circling emerald’s eucalypt swash
Strking sunset down.

Then, past backyards, over the mountains,
Images float to the brain,
Tethered by dreaming in suburbs
Beside the Pacific’s black sheen.

Heralds: The Sydney Morning Herald  Written 1993
Lines 17 and 18 from this poem were used in a booklet (poetry and photographs) given to official guests at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, along with work by Henry Lawson, Douglas Stewart, David Campbell, Judith Wright, Judith Beveridge and others.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Since our incarnation as a destitute and sometimes diligent academic, we haven’t possessed a TV, much less cable. We lead a wonderfully Spartan life here in Cambridge, reading, writing, braving the Massachusetts winter. Like hermits, ascetics, Eskimos, or those lost natives of the Amazon with dangling members, it seems we have also lost the talent for chit-chat, small talk. Consequently, the opening episode of “The Sopranos” Season Six presented us with a project. We had to call up old friends, mend tenuous if not severed relationships, invest in wine, crackers, a pricy lump of cheese. It was an awkward encounter, a bona fide production.

Had Tony been in a similar predicament, he would have done things differently: the balding, bearish, flinty-eyed Soprano antihero would have showed up unannounced, yelled at his host (arguably Arty), consumed the six-pack he brought for himself, sprawled on the couch, hand jammed in trousers, cradling his testicles. Strangely, we understand the impulse. In fact, we have a visceral appreciation of Tony’s likes and dislikes, his aspirations and motivations, his rages, his lusts. Even Tony’s theme song, the moody, bluesy A3 number, resonates in quiet cantons of our head most mornings during Soprano season:

“When you woke up this morning everything you had was gone/
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong/
Ringing like a bell from your head down to my toes/
Like a voice telling you there was something you should know/
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low/
Ain’t it times like these that make you wonder/
If you’ll ever know the meaning of things as they appear to the others…”

Typically, we’d consider having our head checked. After all, identifying with a sociopath is always a troubling development. And Tony is not a mere sociopath; he’s serial adulterer, a misogynist, a man who considered murdering his own mother. He has no real friends and has people he calls friends murdered. He is a very, very bad man.

We have, of course, empathized with such men before, from Richard III to Patrick Bateman, American Psycho. In American popular culture, the antihero has a rich heritage. The protagonists that populate the canon of film noir, for instance, are real pieces of work. Mike Hammer, the antihero of “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), is, as his name suggests, not a charming rogue but a brute. A commentator characterizes him as a “cheap and sleazy, contemptible, fascist private investigator/vigilante.” Hammer’s doppelgangers populate other genres of cinema, from the cool, squinty, monosyllabic and violent Blondie in the late Western, “The Good, Bad and Ugly” (1967) to the raging, foul-mouthed Cuban gangster, Tony Montana in DePalma’s gangster film, “Scarface” (1983).

Interestingly, David Liao makes the case that Scarface has even influenced gangsta rap:

“Perhaps no movie has had as conspicuous an impact on hip-hop, and more specifically the genre’s gangsta variation, as ‘Scarface’…Since its release, [it] has lent its dialogue, music, fashion and  imagery to countless rap artists and their songs, such as Notorious B.I.G’s ‘10 Crack Commandments’ and Mobb  Deep’s ‘It’s Mine.’ One rapper has even gone so far as to adopt ‘Scarface’ as a stage name, and build an entire career around references to the movie.  Indeed, two decades later, it seems as if the very essence of De Palma’s film has been assimilated by the hip-hop community, or at least a highly prolific segment of it. Evidence of this can be seen in the 2003 album ‘Def Jam Recordings Present Music Inspired by Scarface,’ a compilation of songs by artists including Jay-Z, N.W.A, Ice Cube and even Grandmaster Flash.”

There may be some resonance of the classic American antihero in the rage of old-school gangsta rap but its ethos is informed by a different variety of disestablishmentarianism. Institutional racism dates back not more than a couple of generations and continues to exert itself. NWA’s beef with the police has little to do with Hammer and Blondie, Tony Soprano or Tony Montana. Their anthemns concern certain ground realities; in particular, the reality of being a young black man on the streets of Compton, LA:

“*uck tha police comin’ straight from the underground/
Young *igga got it bad cuz I’m brown/
And not the other color so police think/
They have the authority to kill a minority…

*uckin with me cuz I’m a teenager/
With a little bit of gold and a pager/
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/
Thinkin’ every *igga is sellin’ narcotics…”

Of course, this raw sentiment has since been appropriated and cheapened by hip-hop, repackaged and marketed for an audience of young white men who wear baggy jeans and tilted caps and furiously mouth manifestos while listening to their I-Pods. Faraway, in the banlieus of urban France, young North African men find meaning in hip-hop, in what Staley Crouch calls the “thug-and-slut minstrelsy,” and roving child soldiers in Sierra Leone also listen to it while hacking off limbs.

But perhaps we shouldn’t treat this generation with too much sarcasm. After all, back in the day, we listened to NWA as well (and can spout lyrics on demand). Why, boys and girls, are we all drawn to the antihero, black, or white?

Montana sagaciously mulled this question before us and arrived at the following conclusion:

“Whattaya lookin’ at? You’re all a bunch of *ucking *ssholes. You know why? ‘Cause you don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your *ucking fingers, and say ‘that’s the bad guy.” So, what dat make you? Good? You’re not good; you just know how to hide. Howda lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth–even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy. Come on; the last time you gonna see a bad guy like this, let me tell ya. Come on, make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through; you better get outta his way!”

In this rather brilliant discursive philosophic pose, Montana seems to be suggesting the symbiotic duality of good and evil, an echo of the Zoroastrian creation myth, the Sufi malamti tradition, the business of Yin and Yang. Also inherent in his response is an allusion to Freudian tension, the Ego grating against the Id. (We here must note that we agree when Nabokov when he says, “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”) Parsing Montana’s pithy treatise is a project for a bigger, better man. We return, then, to our initial impulse, Tony Soprano, and pose a different, perhaps more interesting question altogether: why does “The Sopranos” command such popularity in America today?

That Tony is a sociopathic leader may have some resonance among a segment of the voting populace but this variety of exegesis seems somewhat facile to us (and as a young Muslim male in America today, not at all advisable.) No, we suspect that apart from being an intelligent, dramatic show (when every other critically feted production these days seems to be peculiarly undramatic, whether we’re talking “Capote,” “Good Night and Good Luck” or “A History of Violence”), “The Sopranos” evokes nostalgia for a simpler time, for simpler violence.

After 9/11, America, indeed the world, changed. The scourge of international terrorism suddenly threatened civilization. A “War On Terror” was waged. Now, there are different ground realties. Iraqis are daggers drawn, their country teetering on civil war. The Afghans have a smart new leader but continue shooting themselves in the foot as they have throughout their bloody history. And somewhere in the southern Afghanistan, in and around Helmand, lurks Osama bin Laden, and his one-eyed pal, Mullah Omar (who corroborates the proverbial theory that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”). They are figures we cannot identity with. Tony Soprano may be a very bad guy but he’s goodfella. He whacks some people; he scratches his balls; he’s the sort of antihero we get. It’s kind of like the sage once said, “All I have in this world is my balls, and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one. Jou understand?” We do.