One of the most alarming aspects of the group’s overnight ascent to international fame last year was the propelling role of the liberal media. Journalists writing for hip and progressive newspapers, magazines, and blogs—even the kinds normally devoted to bands with guitars and whose readership might find Kanye West controversial—fawned over the collective. In a 2010 article for the indie music website Pitchfork, Sean Fennessey delivered a cringeworthy tribute to the group, describing them as “talented,” “stunning,” “sophisticated,” “impeccable,”  “hilarious,” and “the vanguard of modern hip-hop”.  Odd Future rode the wave of these rave reviews and catapulted into the mainstream.

These articles not only fuelled the group’s success but also normalized the messages in its music. While blog writers were busy squabbling over whether Syd tha Kid’s lesbian presence in Odd Future disqualified it from being misogynistic and homophobic (I’ll make it easy: it doesn’t), nobody paid any attention to whether or not their fans were, by implication of listening to and adoring their music, misogynistic and homophobic themselves. But this transformation is exactly what has happened.  Buying an album in which the word “faggot” is said 213 times is an act of homophobia. Listening to a song where women are reduced to the dehumanized category of “bitches” is misogynistic. And yet it is almost impossible not to participate in this kind of culture.

The influence of porn, the perpetuation of rape culture, the glamorization of abuse, and the persisting presence of homophobia and heterosexism are so integrated into our society that they can often seem unavoidable and so dominant within hip-hop that they are shrugged off as normal. No wonder listeners are excited by the shock of hearing rappers describe the kidnapping and rape of a woman; within the realm of hip-hop (and, thanks to its influence, society at large) robbing a woman of her agency is both presented and perceived as sexy. And hence, we have the success of Odd Future, whose music is undeniably sexy, cool, and exciting, but for a very awful reason.

COUNTERPOINT: Caleb Thompson

The suggestion that the purchase of an Odd Future album is a homophobic act in itself because the group’s use of the word “faggot” is both risible and vaguely insulting. Women are “reduced to the dehumanized category” of shrews in Shakespeare, to say nothing of his treatment of Jews and blacks. The former are not portrayed particularly flatteringly in the works of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, or T. S. Eliot. Does performing in “The Merchant of Venice” or buying a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov” make one an anti-Semite?

Ultimately, those who choose not to listen are well within their rights to abstain—and to not be criticized for their abstention—but do not have the prerogative to condemn those who do. The liberty of artists to express themselves is one of the absolute freedoms of a democratic society, as is the freedom of the listener to decide whether or not he is offended. Any attempt by a third party to contravene either of these—to suggest that the artist is objectively homophobic or misogynistic because he or she has produced a work that apparently expresses these attitudes, or that the listener is objectively homophobic or misogynistic because he or she choose to listen to such a work—is not just anti-democratic, but intuitively wrong.

—Staff writer Indiana Seresin can be reached at tseresin@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Caleb Thompson can be reached at calebthompson.college.harvard.edu.