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I was semi-speechless when my dad asked me when I became a Demo­c­rat. For one thing, I don’t self-identify as such. I do “lean left,” but I also do my best to incor­po­rate into my life the ideas in Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Chris­t­ian Nation. For another, I know that he prob­a­bly under­stood that first thing, and was really ask­ing why I’d departed from the way in which I was trained up as a child, namely in the polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive way. For a third thing, I don’t think there was a sin­gle moment when I was sud­denly changed. My polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion was more like a game of Jenga. Bricks were pulled away one by one, the tower wob­bled, I made attempts to raise it higher, and then it all came crash­ing down into a pile of indis­tin­guish­able pieces. Only the most geeked out of Jenga nerds would be able to iden­tify in detail how the tower came to fall, but any casual play­ers might be able to recall (at least imme­di­ately after the game) moments when their hearts raced and they could feel their hands shak­ing with anx­i­ety. Read­ing Boyd’s book may have been the last move, but the tower was already thin and shaky by then. One of the ear­li­est and most sur­pris­ing moves (in terms of sig­nif­i­cance) was a pair of lines, total­ing about ten sec­onds, from Paul­lelu­jah!, the 2002 debut LP by MC Paul Bar­man.

Bar­man is a polar­iz­ing artist. His music is fre­quently dis­missed as “com­edy” or “nov­elty” rap. His style is idio­syn­cratic. His “flow” often vac­il­lates between care­less and forced. He often comes across as either too silly or too pre­ten­tious. He is obvi­ously very lib­eral, but the tar­gets of his ridicule are more often lib­eral than con­ser­v­a­tive. In my opin­ion, he was at the cut­ting edge of post irony, which is some­thing that audi­ences, and espe­cially those of us with some Gen X sen­si­bil­i­ties, find to be frus­trat­ing and con­fus­ing. It’s this prob­lem that I chalk up to Matt LeMay’s scathing Pitch­fork review (2.0). As LeMay asks, “what exactly is Paul try­ing to say?” LeMay’s chief com­plaints seem to be a the­matic inco­her­ence, a lack of focus, Barman’s attempts to avoid being pinned down or pro­vid­ing a clear meaning/message with­out so much con­tra­dic­tion. LeMay even imi­tates Barman’s rhyming style, as if to say, “Look, any­body can do this.” I’m guess­ing he didn’t have any 8 year old chil­dren, or else he couldn’t have resisted the oppor­tu­nity to say, “My 8 year old could’ve done that,” like some jerk look­ing at a Jack­son Pol­lock painting.

I’ll admit that there’s some­thing to be said of the dis­com­fort that char­ac­ter­izes LeMay’s review. For exam­ple, there’s one offen­sively titled song which is basi­cally four min­utes of ridicu­lous sex jokes, with rhyming cou­plets based on the names of female celebri­ties. It’s weird, and that post ironic dilemma is heavy. It seems almost cer­tain that maybe Bar­man “doesn’t really mean it,” and maybe that he “kinda does,” and that he’s “try­ing to con­vey a mes­sage,” and that he’s “just goof­ing around,” or some­thing. For that mat­ter, is there a rea­son he included a song called “Burp­ing & Fart­ing,” and what’s the deal with that song, anyway?

There’s another song called “N.O.W.,” which is a sendup of a repro­duc­tive rights rally, wherein the per­sona has a casual-sex encounter with a female pro­tes­tor, and, at the end, con­fesses, “I fol­low pol­i­tics to ball all the chicks/ cross-pollinate and then call it quits.” Here, the irony is a lit­tle more straight and a lot less “post,” but there’s still some­thing about it that is uneasy. Bar­man is undoubt­edly a pro­po­nent of repro­duc­tive rights, and yet he takes aim at its pro­po­nents, instead of its oppo­nents. And I think this is where Barman’s zany style of self-contradiction appealed to me.

I was 24 years old and still pretty con­ser­v­a­tive in 2002, when I first heard Paul­lelu­jah!, and I’m sure that Barman’s appar­ent “lack of message/focus” and incon­sis­ten­cies, whether exem­pli­fy­ing post irony or not, appealed to me as some­thing hon­est. It may have been my first con­scious encounter of incon­sis­tency as a mat­ter of integrity instead of intel­li­gence. We are liv­ing in a world filled with cir­cled wag­ons. Doc­trines and dog­mas are summed up in 140 char­ac­ters or less. We’ve crowded out inte­rior con­flict and nuance and abil­ity to live at peace with our own con­tra­dic­tions. Paul­lelu­jah!‘s lyri­cal clev­er­ness, fresh pro­duc­tion, and idio­syn­cratic rhymes opened my ears; its con­flict and nuance opened my mind.

And here’s where we get to that metaphor­i­cal Jenga move. It hap­pens in a pair of not so clever, force­fully deliv­ered lines in “Anar­chist Book­store, Pt. 1.” The song is one of the more sophis­ti­cat­edly struc­tured on the album, and the lines have an inter­est­ing con­text as part of the song’s nar­ra­tive. They also have an inter­est­ing con­text as clear, con­cise lines that pro­mote and exem­plify integrity of speech in an album filled with extreme irony and/or post irony. These con­texts are intrigu­ing, but the lines stand on their own, too. They twisted around in my ears like some 21st cen­tury hip-hop ver­sion of a Zen koan, and have proven pow­er­ful and endur­ing in the style of a Proverb…

If some­one uses a non-offensive vocab­u­lary, then that per­son is con­sid­er­ate, not PC.
If some­one has a heavy-handed agenda, that per­son is narrow-minded, not PC.

Maybe it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but the tower started wob­bling. And, for what it’s worth (which, to me, is a lot), I haven’t accused any­one of being “PC” since.