Beatty wants to address more subjects than that the form of a legal procedural allows. The resolution of the trial does not figure much in the end. And though he avoids the traps of plotless modernism, Beatty’s constant barrage of asides and routines eventually does take precedence over the supreme court plot, for example. Chalk it up to humourist’s license.)īeatty’s wicked wit is the book’s chief source of momentum. (It hurts so good, you shouldn’t even bother about the fact that 2 Live Crew’s obscenity case never made it to the high court. Me then delivers the punchline via a memory of 2 Live Crew’s landmark obscenity case: “Though if I’d been on the other side of the bench, I would’ve snatched the fountain pen from Chief Justice Rehnquist’s hand and written the lone dissenting opinion, stating categorically that ‘any wack rapper whose signature tune is Me So Horny has no rights the white man, or any other B-boy worth his suede Pumas, was bound to respect.” Using the painful language of the majority opinion in Dred Scott as inspiration for a multicultural denunciation of empty-provocation rap: that right there is the Beatty touch. Also, his gambit winds up helping public-school test scores.) The defendant expects that future constitutional scholars will focus on his case as some “unforeseen hip-hop generation precedent”.

(Me hopes to give the town back its essential identity, rescuing it from gentrification. Me’s own alleged crimes echo the facts underlying the critical American segregation cases of Dred Scott, and Plessy v Ferguson: the holding of a slave (in Obama’s America!), as well as the formal “re-segregation” of Me’s majority-black-and-Latino suburb of southern Los Angeles.

The sellout book