The danger with covering topics of current interest in your art is that you flirt with irrelevance more overtly than, say, someone who writes nothing but songs of love, lust and loss. That’s why people remember there’s a movie series called Scary Movie but not all the late-90s movies it lampoons; that’s why it’s never the first single off any given Eminem album that people remember, the one with all the name-dropping and the pop culture references. More generally, some artists are very much a product of a particular time and place—so much so that outside of that context, the music becomes an embarassment.
Paul Barman isn’t exactly there yet, but that may just be because his take on things is a bit odd. Depending on who you are, Barman is a) the latest (as of 2002, anyway) in a long line of politically-minded rappers who never takes himself too seriously, or b) someone who spent way too much time in frathouses convincing himself he was clever. “N.O.W.” is a good case in point for both sides; it neatly skewers the liberal protest culture (which, as it turns out, is largely a college phenomenon—hmm…) by exposing the alterior motives of some of its participants. Or, if you want to be uncharitable, Barman rambles on a bunch about hot protester chicks and “a lot of cum.” Oh, and then there’s the woman in the middle of the song creaming, “STICK IT IN! STICK IT IN!”
I think it’s hilarious—not the least of which because how the hell can you possibly take any of it seriously? Come on, “whichever men has the balls to come to the pro-choice protest is gonna get some sex”?—but it also sounds oddly like a relic from another age, one completely foreign to us now. When Paullelujah came out, American politics weren’t quite as polarized as they are now, and so you could still poke fun at the whole process in exactly the sort of way Barman does. With a bitter election and the Iraq incursion behind us, and the threat of a nuclear North Korea and an increasingly powerful China ahead, things have taken a far more serious and dour turn. It’s definitely a sophomoric slant to things (Maxim gave him a glowing review), but the glee with which Barman recites sexual positions and globalization symbols in “N.O.W.” is worth something, even if only as a trip down nostalgia lane, when everything seemed so innocent and pure.