Evil Bert Laden Takes On Gangsta Rap

Brown's essay on Evil Bert Laden is centered on the notion that interpretation as we know it needs to go through a major overhaul. Our current interpretive impulses are simply insufficient: in trying to extrapolate meaning out of the unlikely pairing of Sesame Street's Bert and Osama bin Laden, we miss out on the concept of true significance. What Brown sees as important is not the basis upon which Bert and bin Laden happened to meet on the Bangladeshi posters. It is the fact that the two can share and have shared a space – that two wildly different and ultimately opposing symbols or ideas can conceivably meet. The possibilities of previously concretely divided cultural artifacts and concepts colliding, for Brown, are most intriguing. What Brown suggests may result is an ultimate bridging of gaps and a movement towards peace; by eliminating the contrasting "us" vs. "them" element of differing culture and presenting this distinction instead as a coinciding – albeit not unified – "we," a mutual understanding and shared experience can develop, which can be nurtured into peaceful and productive coexistence.

Let's take a step back, though. Brown's ideas are definitely novel and just barely plausible in the right climate. But they are by no means practical. In my reading of Brown's essay, I was struck by two important points. First is the practicality of Brown's lofty implications of this cultural mashup. In our Youtube era, with an increasing amount of media consumers becoming proficient enough to produce content attractive to other viewers, the novelty of the bin Laden and Bert unification is lost. In a culture where we autotune the news, bizarre juxtapositions of seemingly disparate elements of national or international culture happen far more regularly than Brown leads us to believe. A prime example of this juxtaposition recycles Brown's fascination with Sesame Street, presenting us instead with Bert and Ernie meeting purveyors of gangsta rap, Mash Out Posse (M.O.P.)'s Ante Up.



Brown effectively reduced Bert and bin Laden into metonym's for Western and Eastern culture; in my example, our puppet friends represent children's entertainment, and the M.O.P. song Ante Up represents gangsta rap. The creator of this video spent an afternoon splicing episodes of Sesame Street and syncing them perfectly with one of rap's most mindnumbingly vulgar, violent, and frankly awesome hits – it's fair to say, as it was in the West-meets-East clash of Bert and bin Laden, that these two pieces of culture couldn't possibly mix in a reasonable setting. However, with the creation of this video, upwards of 6 million and counting viewers has taken in the deliriously weird and funny sights and sounds of Bert and Ernie playing the parts of Lil Fame and Billy Danze in Ante Up. This viewership doesn't even include the viewers – and creators – of the endless numbers of slightly unfortunate copycat videos featuring other puppets or childhood cartoon characters taking on hip hop staples. Yet still, even with the astounding popularity of these cultural appropriations, Brown's suggested results – both his lofty hypotheticals regarding unification, and his nervous suggestion about our desire to undress content for meaning – failed to surface. There was and still is no bridge between hardcore rap culture and educational children's entertainment; there was and still is no critique of the American culture that houses both the extremely abrasive and the predictably tame; there was and still is no discussion of a middleground that comfortably acknowledges the presence of both pieces of our national culture. Instead there are just laughs at the novelty of it all. Perhaps it is rather fascinating that the person that created video has an extensive library of Sesame Street videos, extensive video editing skills, and an ear for gangsta rap – but this will not ever be the center of the conversation around this video.

The reason that Brown's suggested hypothetical and assumed results failed to surface lies in the second point that struck me while understanding Brown's essay. He says our interpretive impulse should be shifted to seek out the implications of cultural appropriations, rather than the subtextual meaning of it all. However, as seen with the Ante Up vs. Bert and Ernie example, neither of these interpretive perspectives prove to be fruitful. What seems to be a much more reasonable interpretive impulse is to seek out an understanding of the source of the juxtaposition. In understanding the source of the juxtaposition, we can understand the intended meaning. This would discourage the truly beneficial aspects of Brown's hypothetical peace-building operation that is birthed by cultural appropriation; by accepting the intentions of the creator and not deconstructing the media in front of us, we are limited to the singular purpose the author offers. However, a dissection of authorship and its context delivers a learning experience free from the unnecessary meandering of publications like the NY Times, or irrational paranoia as shown by the owners of the Sesame Street brand. By first understanding the fact that the posters were the results of hasty, opportunistic printers, the entire narrative surrounding the Bert Laden controversy would have been radically different from the start. Perhaps the reason behind the very limited dialogue that was produced by Bert and Ernie indulging in their fake gangsta rap alter-egos, the video creator explicitly states the sheerly recreational nature of the video. Reality dispels manufactured experience. If our interpretive impulse was to understand the foundation of the information we receive, we may become more rational and reasonable as a society. Bert and Ernie may be the puppets, but we are the ones who need to take control of our own experiences and actions. Ante up.