White musicians and "artistic" use of the N-word: A Discussion and Social History

Please read this before posting

Since this has inspired such great debate in the CocoRosie thread, I think it's appropriate to have a discussion about this history of this phenomenon
--When did this begin?
--Was this ever "OK"?
--If CocoRosie is guilty of racial insensitivity does that mean so is Patti Smith and John Lennon and Elvis Costello?
--Was this more acceptable in the 70s than the 00s? If so, why?
--What does it say about a white artist willing to do this? Is that same trait in John Lennon as CocoRosie?

IMPORTANT RULES FOR THIS THREAD: PLEASE READ
If you guys can't play nice, I'm gonna have forks delete the whole thing

A) Please try to keep typing the actual word to a minimum.
I know we're all adults and there's context and the first amendment and whatever. But we're also all friends in a community, and I think we should just err on the side of courtesy to any people who might be offended or uneasy at seeing a thread with the n-word posted 80 billion times, just like I wouldn't post 800 pictures of a swastika.

B) Please no actual racist songs
This is about ARTISTIC use, so keep shit like Skrewdr1ver and Dav1d Allen C0e out of here. Showing off your working knowledge of actual racist music is just wink-wink bullshit and the thread doesn't need it.

C) Play nice

Here are some of the big ones of the top of my head. Feel free to add.
1. John Lennon and Plastic Ono Band - "Woman Is The N---- Of The World"
2. Elvis Costello - "Oliver's Army"
3. Patti Smith - "Rock And Roll N----"
4. Frank Zappa - "You Are What You Is"
5. Jane's Addiction - "Whores"
6. CocoRosie - "Jesus Loves Me"

'Holiday In Cambodia' was probably my introduction to this uh phenomenon

7. Guns 'n' Roses - "One in a Million"

"I was pissed off about some black people that were trying to rob me. I wanted to insult those particular black people. I didn't want to support racism." - Axl Rose in Rolling Stone

8. Marilyn Manson - "Irresponsible Hate Anthem"
9. Dead Kennedys - "Holiday In Cambodia"

Randy Newman!

10. The Dicks - Hate The Police
11/12. Gun Club - Black Train AND For The Love Of Ivy

More Axl in Rolling Stone:

The lyrics have incited a lot of protest, so let's go over them line by line. Let's start with one of the verses, "Police and niggers, that's right/Get outta my way/Don't need to buy none/ Of your gold chains today."

I used words like police and niggers because you're not allowed to use the word nigger. Why can black people go up to each other and say, "Nigger," but when a white guy does it all of a sudden it's a big put-down. I don't like boundaries of any kind. I don't like being told what I can and what I can't say. I used the word nigger because it's a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem. The word nigger doesn't necessarily mean black. Doesn't John Lennon have a song "Woman Is the Nigger of the World"? There's a rap group, N.W.A., Niggers with Attitude. I mean, they're proud of that word. More power to them. Guns N' Roses ain't bad. . . . N.W.A. is baad! Mr. Bob Goldthwait said the only reason we put these lyrics on the record was because it would cause controversy and we'd sell a million albums. Fuck him! Why'd he put us in his skit? We don't just do something to get the controversy, the press.

xhuxk wrote on here a while back about looking at 'One in A Million' as the equiv to 'Los Angeles' by X, only a few years on and a bit more poodle-y, which I thought was interesting but didn't really buy cos of, you know, Axl, and his words, and deeds

How the hell did I miss that Jane's Addiction song? Oh, it's on that first album that only listened to twice before just putting "Pigs In Zen," "Jane Says" and "Sympathy" on repeat, that's why.

Fucking Perry Farrell.

xp: "Holiday In Cambodia"?????? okay I am thinking I should have paid a LOT more attention to lyrics when I was in high school... although in context that one actually makes sense and is defensible in so far as it's being used to build a particular viewpoint that the rest of the song is knocking down

oh yeah and thank you for reminding me why I hated Axl so much

Axl is such a dummy

0MG G00GLE F0R N1GGA AND F1ND DAV1D ALLEN C0E

I used words like police and niggers because you're not allowed to use the word nigger. [...] Mr. Bob Goldthwait said the only reason we put these lyrics on the record was because it would cause controversy and we'd sell a million albums. Fuck him! Why'd he put us in his skit? We don't just do something to get the controversy, the press.

so did you forget what you JUST SAID, you massive douchebag

xhuxk wrote on here a while back about looking at 'One in A Million' as the equiv to 'Los Angeles' by X, only a few years on and a bit more poodle-y, which I thought was interesting but didn't really buy cos of, you know, Axl, and his words, and deeds

― heywood jabulani (DJ Mencap), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:38 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah. the bending-over-backwards critical theory deebs on the cocorosie thread reminded me of this

wasn't there a bit of a kerfuffle about j-lo singing "nigga" in a song p diddy wrote for her (can't remember which one atm) while they were dating? not that she's white, i guess.

1. in theory, I don't think there's anything forbidden when it comes to art
2. doing things for shock value alone is probably the easiest way in the world to make bad art

xpost to HI DERE

Yeah, I would GUESS the Biafra/Dicks/Randy Newman version of "I'm paraphrasing/quoting a racist character in my song who says this" is probably the most defensible... But then it's pretty much Tarantino in Pulp Fiction slippery slope shit

Smith/Costello/Lennon is more like "playing with semantics"

Perry Farrell/CocoRosie is more like I'M FASCINATED WITH RACE

doing things for shock value alone is probably the easiest way in the world to make bad art

This should be posted on billboards all over Los Angeles and New York.

Really? Anything? / xxpost

Slash weighing in on "One in a Million" in a Rolling Stone interview from 1991:

When Axl first came up with the song and really wanted to do it, I said I didn't think it was very cool... I don't regret doing 'One in a Million,' I just regret what we've been through because of it and the way people have perceived our personal feelings.

Perry pretty much set the standard for CocoRosie since he
1. Says it in "Whores"
2. Covered Sly's "Don't Call Me N---, Whitey" live
3. Has that Porno For Pyros song that begins "Ever since the riots, all I ever wanted was a black girlfriend"

Perry Farrell also had the whole "Black Girlfriend" thing with Porno for Pyros. He didn't use the N-word, but it's some cringey stuff.

Ever since the riots
All I really wanted
Was a black girlfriend
They don't play around
They're hard enough
To keep any man in lineb
Thinking of my pale white skin
Thinking of her dark and smooth
She against me
With my black girlfriend
Drivin' thru the 'hood
In my Chevy Nova '62
My arm around my
Little black girl
People on the corner
Looking in my car
Wanna do me
Cos I won't give back
My little black girl

The Randy Newman song would be "Rednecks." (Unless he had more.)

And while Whiney is probably right to dismiss David Allan Coe's racist triple-X bootleg material (little of which I've ever heard myself) his actual 1977 country hit "If That Ain't Country" ("trying like the devil to find the lord/working like a n____ for my room and board")is arguably more a grey area (not that it wasn't trying to pull certain strings itself, but then pretty much every song on this thread was.)

I've made my case about "One In A Million"; no need to do it again. But there is no "bending over backwards" in comparing it to that X song.

Patti Smith's reasoning seems pretty stupid ("they've got soul!"/"don't you have a sense of humor?"). Here's how she put it in Rolling Stone, 27 July 1978:

Reporter: The other day you said that if anyone was qualified to be a nigger, it was Mick Jagger. How is Mick Jagger qualified to be a nigger?

Smith: On our liner notes I redefined the word nigger as being an artist-mutant that was going beyond gender.

Reporter: I didn’t understand how Mick Jagger has suffered like anyone who grew up in Harlem.

Smith: Suffering don’t make you a nigger. I mean, I grew up poor too. Stylistically, I believe he qualifies. I think Mick Jagger has suffered plenty. He also has a great heart, and I believe, ya know, even in his most cynical
moments, a great love for his children. He’s got a lot of soul. I mean, like, I don’t understand the question. Ya think black people are better than white people or sumpthin’? I was raised with black people. It’s like, I can walk down the street and say to a kid, “Hey nigger.” I don’t have any kind of super-respect or fear of that kind of stuff. When I say statements like that, they’re not supposed to be analyzed, ’cause they’re more like off-the-cuff humorous statements. I do have a sense of humor, ya know, which is sumpthin’ that most people completely wash over when they deal with me. I never read anything where anybody talked about my sense of humor. It’s like, a lot of the stuff I say is true, but it’s supposed to be funny.

Reporter: I just think that people should be allowed to label themselves. If black people want to be called blacks, I call them blacks, just as I would not want to be called honkie.

Smith: What I would think is, a word can become archaic because we progress into the future, so words can be redefined. And I’m not, like, a slob with words, ya know. I don’t mean that, ya know, uh, I don’t, I don’t, wish to, like, um, twist and rend words to my whim. But I do feel words can outlive their usefulness, unless we redefine them. And I’ve said that a lot, ya know, if you’ve been reading my book or liner notes.

i can't really think of any examples of this where using the word seems to justify itself. regardless of whether its there for shock value or to, like, teach us all a lesson about race, or whatever--there is (as far as i can think) no situation where its actually warranted--where the strength of the vision or concept is matched by the words, uh, extratextual power.

i mean i guess what im saying is that it would be really hard to write a song that was so good or groundbreaking or whatever that it could contain what might be (is?) the most "powerful" word in (american) english, at least in terms of immediate, visceral reaction. was someone saying this on the other thread? probably. the word is so big, so weighty, that it tends to just take the whole song down with it.

ugh and the whole thing that both patti and axl try to do (in different directions) where they "redefine" the word--john lennon is kind of guilty of this too, maybe--is so facile and ignorant and just, ugh

interview needs some truffle fries

the elvis costello one is interesting because in the context of the song lyrics it's obviously intended as newman-esque character-based satire but then dude got in trouble later for using the word in reference to james brown and ray charles which maybe kind of retroactively made his use of it in the song less defensible

wow "black girlfriend" is appalling

i like patti smith, but never really knew the context of that song, and that "explanation" of it is about the most idiotic thing i expect to read this week.

the j-lo single was the "i'm real" remix, duh, and it was written by ja rule, not diddy, though the line refers to her relationship w/puff.

lol @ an artist-mutant that was going beyond gender.

Patti Smith said a lot of really stupid things in the 70s (according to the Please Kill Me book)

As far as rappers go, RA The Rugged Man accidentally let one thru in "What The Fuck"

"I say what I want to say, and other people play politics... I honestly don't remember saying that, but I don't even listen to my records.

Oh yeah, there's also the Steve Albini/Nate Katrud (of Urge Overkill's) one-off '80s act Run N____ Run, who did a track called "Pray I Don't Kill You Faggot." Not clear to me how that (or, say, the Gun Club stuff I've heard -- though I like them) would be any less race-baiting (or more "ironic") than the David Allan Coe lyric I quoted above. (That Albini later had a band called "Rapeman," hardy har har, doesn't help.)

i remember reading an interview with patti smith where she talked about the use of N-- in the song rock and roll n--, she was basically defending it as an reclamation of the word, saying that by using it to stand in for those that stand "outside of society" it becomes a more inclusive and positive appropriation of the word. But I mean, how old is this song now? This clearly has not worked, the word retains a unique power in certain racial discourses that is pretty resistant to that sort of dismantling, esp. from outside the context of direct race relations. The fact that the song remains shocking is kindof a testament to the failure of its own ideology (that is: "its just words") I kindof think that for eg. marilyn manson covering it for shock value is weirdly a more honest use of the word and kindof more respectful because its crude attempt at being controversial help to underline the implicit power it retains.

sorry that kindof just got covered

I apparently cut off the rest of the Black Girlfriend lyrics - the verses I missed:

Saw her on the corner
Whre she lived, I asked her
Can you braid my hair?
She and her girlfriends
Laughed at me, said that
It was easy but it'll cost you some
Looking out her window
It's so exciting and foreign
But i'm staying

Do you wanna come on in?
Do you wanna eat some?
Meet my family?
My black girlfriend
My black girlfriend

Listening to it on Spotify right now. It's oof-ier than I even remembered.

Perry pretty much set the standard for CocoRosie since he
2. Covered Sly's "Don't Call Me N---, Whitey" live

I think he recorded it as a duet w/ Ice-T as well?

btw I hope no one thinks this is overstepping bounds as a moderator, but del griffith is banned from this thread and anyone doing similar facile shit will also be banned from the thread; this is an interesting subject and I would rather not see it deleted

Yeah, I would GUESS the Biafra/Dicks/Randy Newman version of "I'm paraphrasing/quoting a racist character in my song who says this" is probably the most defensible... But then it's pretty much Tarantino in Pulp Fiction slippery slope shit

See, I don't really think it's "slippery slope" when it's done either in the context of setting the person saying it up for a massive fall or in the context of painting an undesirable image of the person saying it.

One of the issues I have with a lot of the way it gets employed by people regardless of race is that it's just put out there as empirically whatever the person using it thinks it should be; no one wants to put in the supporting framework around it that you need in order to justify its usage, or if they do it's usually an afterthought. I've never been offended by its use in "Pulp Fiction," largely because it's always occurred in the context of people with decidedly unpleasant sides to their personalities. The big problem with "Whores" is that Perry Farrell is basically equating all black people with weird white people with problems who have either dropped out or been rejected by society by using it like that; it's a wholly stupid way to talk about black people and doesn't even properly describe the people he thinks he's talking about. He thinks he's showing solidarity when in fact he is showing off exactly how condescending and privileged he is. Any "freak" can get a haircut, take out their piercings and wear long sleeves to cover up their tattoos; it's a choice. What choice do the niggers in that song have?

xp: oh my god

"I say what I want to say, and other people play politics... I honestly don't remember saying that, but I don't even listen to my records."

you and everyone else, r.a.

calling Ice-T whitey is just going too far

i find the "we're trying to get people to really think about the word" justification to be really lame - there isn't exactly a shortage of thoughts and information on racial epithets and their history out there, and i definitely don't think that body of work was crying out for cocorosie's contribution to it

Wiki:

In 1979, singer Elvis Costello used nigger in "Oliver's Army", a state-of-the-world-today song inspired by adolescent British Army soldiers on occupation duty in Northern Ireland. Later, the producers of the British talent show Stars in Their Eyes forced a contestant to censor the second-verse lyrics line, ". . . all it takes is one itchy trigger — One more widow, one less white nigger" to the euphemistic ". . . one less white figure".

she was basically defending it as an reclamation of the word, saying that by using it to stand in for those that stand "outside of society" it becomes a more inclusive and positive appropriation of the word

That's kind of like giving yourself a nickname and then insisting that other people start referring to you that way. It never works. The word's meaning is far too large and engrained for one person to write a song about with the hopes of changing the entire world's perception of the word.

I mean, wtf Perry

why not just call the song "Lemme Bone This Black Girl For A Minute" and call it a day

xp: haha uh, actually I very successfully gave myself a nickname, both in college and on the Internet, so I disagree with your analogy

lol

xp And if you're going to talk, say, the Gun Club, seems to me you could go way beyond the actual use of the N-word, and cite as their roots things like Warren Smith's often-covered (by Stray Cats, Alice Cooper, John Prine, etc.) and definitely racially questionable 1957 rockabilly classic "Ubangi Stomp." Every one of those bands knew what they were covering.

then dude got in trouble later for using the word in reference to james brown and ray charles which maybe kind of retroactively made his use of it in the song less defensible

ha yeah I was about to say.

for some reason Lennon's/Ono's and Newman's - and barring the episode referenced above - Costello's usage doesn't reek of stupidity like the others. which is sad, because "One in a Million' is a great fucking song.

Perry pretty much set the standard for CocoRosie since he
2. Covered Sly's "Don't Call Me N---, Whitey" live

I think he recorded it as a duet w/ Ice-T as well?

― heywood jabulani (DJ Mencap), Tuesday, 22 June 2010 15:54 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

During the first Lollapalooza tour, Jane's Addiction brings out Ice-T to perform a rendition of Sly & the Family Stone's "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey (Don't Call Me Whitey, Nigger)". Perry Farrell sings the white part, Ice-T sings the Black part. Black quartet Living Colour comes onstage afterward and bandleader Vernon Reid announces "I'll never be anyone's nigger for entertainment..."

― and what, Tuesday, 25 December 2007 20:53 (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The 'Black Girlfriend' lyrics read a little like a re-write of 'I Wanna Be Black' by Lou Reed (a song that is both funny, and ironic, and REALLY horrible all at the same time - well done Lou)

I can think of at least 2 more punk songs that use it in a sort of "in character" thing with the police - neither were exactly noted outside of obscure punk circles though - The Badge Means You Suck by AK-47 and Pigs In Blue by the Disrupters.

It's the same kind of usage as Hate The Police which I think is sort-of acceptable although still wish they could've used other words to make their point.

2. Covered Sly's "Don't Call Me N---, Whitey" live

I think he recorded it as a duet w/ Ice-T as well?

Yeah I have a bootleg cd from a lollapalooza date. Perry Farrel says "dont call me nigger, whitey" and Ice-T says "Dont call me whitey, nigger."

damn xpost

it's depressing how ignorant ppl can be of history (musicians not ppl itt)

Max OTM

I thought the Elvis Costello mention referred to the incident when he (allegedly) (drunkenly) applied the "n" to Ray Charles/sorta disqualifies him, no?

looking forward to threads about artistic uses of homophobia & anti-semitism

that vernon reid quote is a classic

looking forward to threads about artistic uses of homophobia & anti-semitism

think there may be one or two already

Also, there was a music video of Jane's/Body Count performing it at the end of "The Gift".

I mean, from like 2:15 to 2:30, Perry seems downright ecstatic to say it. He says it more than than they ever did in the original.

I def get the point they were trying to make, but it's still rrrrreally cringey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07dCLYdsqJw

"Mr. Bob Goldthwait said the only reason we put these lyrics on the record was because it would cause controversy and we'd sell a million albums. Fuck him!"
I am pretty much always going to side with Bobcat over Axl.

"The word's meaning is far too large and engrained for one person to write a song about with the hopes of changing the entire world's perception of the word."
Axl using it has helped change my perception that people are entitled to use any words they like any way they like, and that feeling so entitled is the mark of an asshole.
As a society we should absolutely let assholes use it and call them out on what assholes they are.

for some reason Lennon's/Ono's and Newman's - and barring the episode referenced above - Costello's usage doesn't reek of stupidity like the others.

I can point you exactly at the reason; some thought went into what the word means and the respective songs were built around that. I mean, even dumb-ass Patti Smith's incoherency muddles halfway towards making a valid point in her song; Axl, Perry and CocoRosie are basically just flinging around words they know upset people without really thinking about or understanding why they upset people. (Obv Costello's subsequent behavior ruins his song.)

The The had a great failure along these lines on their Mind Bomb album in "The Violence of Truth", where the narrator of the song was SO straightforward and matter of fact that his n-bomb came across as an endorsement rather than an indictment, a la Conrad's Heart of Darkness (only without Conrad''s excuse of being a product of times where Africans were really considered sub-human).

Also, there was a music video of Jane's/Body Count performing it at the end of "The Gift".

― kkvgz, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:05 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The Jane's Addiction video vanity project that was so insignificant as not to even make their wiki page, I guess.

WHERE ARE THE OBLIGATORY NIGGERS? HEY THERE FUCKFACE! HEY THERE FUCKFACE!

i can think of at least 20 better ways you could made that point, SexyDancer

xxxposts @ HI DERE: yep. whether they are intellectualizing it (Lennon, and uh, Smith lol), or writing in character (Newman), these instances seem very of the time, i.e., I can't see this happening much now and it actually *working* on any level other than pure spectacle.

which I guess gets to --Was this more acceptable in the 70s than the 00s? If so, why?

yeah, and that song supposedly cost the fall their motown deal, which is true is pretty solid example of why its the people who have had to deal w. descrimination that are a lot more sensitive to the way its language is used.

not more acceptable in the 70s, but more tolerated in the 70s.

apologies to sexyDancer for the hairtrigger thread ban; it's been revoked

if you would like to explain your point for those of us who don't know the reference, you can

which I guess gets to --Was this more acceptable in the 70s than the 00s? If so, why?

― proof-texting my way into state legislature (will), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:15 PM (28 seconds ago)

this is kindof an interesting point and i would kinda guess that it has something to do with rap music and hip hop culture in gen. making v explicit minorities attempts at appropriating discriminatory epthets (cf. queerness etc.)

xp to dan, like i said above, "where are the obligatory n-" was the opening line of a fall album that was apparently slated for a motown release but cost them their deal.

hex enduction hour

I feel like singing from the POV of a character (esp. an unreliable character) (like Randy Newman often did) was always very confusing to U.S. rock audiences, who were used to earnestness and authenticity, and never really caught on.

see also all the people who think of Steely Dan as being smooth bastards

^^^ yes, or the legion of people from my high school who earnestly endorsed the fascist freakout towards the end of The Wall

Springsteen sings POV a lot of the time, but most of the characters he adopts are, like, 99.1% genetically similar to Bruce anyway so no one notices. xxxp

As a society we should absolutely let assholes use it and call them out on what assholes they are.
That's the beauty of free speech. Say what you gotta say, but realize someone's gonna hold you accountable.

Patti probably doesn't realise that if the song didn't have that one word, i'd probably put it into every dj set i ever play. The FOOL.

I really love the Stones song "Sweet Black Angel" but I find the lyrical content a little bit unsettling.

I've probably told this story before but I was raised in part by a far-left guy who instilled in me, early on, an absolute horror of racist language. (This had its pluses and minuses, since he was also a guy who was pretty into beating women & children for perceived wrongs, so if he thought you'd said something you actually hadn't said, there wouldn't be any chance to clarify the matter.) What's more, the school I went to was a super-sensitive 70s Cali school where we talked about the evils of racism (and the merits of environmentalism) at least as much as we talked about math. (Practically everybody from my school sucks at math.) So OK, 11-year-old me hears Patti Smith doin "Because the Night" and thinks it's awesome so he writes to the Patti Smith fan club to say "your record kicks ass" and they send out the newsletter. Guess which song is in all caps on the front of the newsletter? Guess how able to parse any nuance at all I am, in light of all that Bad Word? Guess which 11 year old freaks completely out because he thinks his approval of "Because the Night" means he's one of these horrible white people who'd say that?

in fairness to 11-year-old you, your approval of "Because the Night" was actually tacit approval of that other song due to the magical transitive property known as "ppl taking approval for one thing and applying it to something you actually find super repellent"; this is why I try as hard as I can to avoid supporting artists who do/say shit I find violently offensive, regardless of how much I like other things they've done

I feel like most uses of this wind up falling into one of two camps:

(a) People who are trying to make an artistic point, and for some reason believe their (often stupid) point is so important that it justifies toying with something huge and important in other people's lives. (The most acceptable example of this I can think of is the Lennon/Ono, because the comparison is non-stupid and the point has some weight.)

(b) People who want to be antisocial. And to be honest I think there's often a smooth bleed over from "edgy" punk use of the word, to the kind of misanthropic metal/punk attitudes that flirt with Nazi/white-power shit, to some actual Nazi punk and metal. Sometimes the malice consists of not giving a shit about this stuff as a form of hip misanthropy or cynicism. (But it's not misanthropy; racially specific misanthropy is just known as "racism.")

^^ Interviews with musicians about their use of the word often seem to blur these two things in comically stupid ways.

I'm not sure I'll ever understand why a lot of white people are weird about whether or not they get to use this word. It strikes me as an incredibly easy word to not-use. Like, harder to use than otherwise.

I also kind of accept that its status was just different in the past -- e.g., the 70s, when it was still enough in common circulation that people might feel like they could redirect it. (I mean, as of the late 70s you could hear it on television, in certain circumstances.) So I guess personally it's less annoying to me in that frame.

in fairness to smith though, she has handled marginality and appropriation in more sensitive ways for eg. her cover of don't smoke in bed, her clumsiness with race shouldn't be confused with actual racism

One big piece of stupidity and blindness in both camps is just ... people who have the luxury of thinking about race/blackness/actual-black-people as some kind of totally abstract concept they can be artistic and provocative about

xpost -- between "Rock'n'Roll etc." and "Radio Ethiopia" I always feel like Smith is designed to mess with me in particular

haha!

(I mean not me in particular, but you know what I mean)

I don't think I even knew "Radio Ethiopia" existed

I'm a big fall fan but the "where are the obligatory etc" line always stuck in my craw

mark e smith does have some great lyrics on race though, like in "english scheme":

condescends to black men
very nice to them

the singsong way he delivers the line is both funny and totally nails a certain genteel racism which isn't just for britishers

I don't think I even knew "Radio Ethiopia" existed

her best album!

I felt like her first record had a lot of awkward race stuff on it too. I haven't listened to it in years, but that was my impression at the time.

should we talk about this frogs album

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racially_Yours

that shit pissed me off so bad, got into fights with friends about it

I thought the Elvis Costello mention referred to the incident when he (allegedly) (drunkenly) applied the "n" to Ray Charles/sorta disqualifies him, no?

― lifetime supply of boat shoes (m coleman), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:02 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nah, the so-called 'Columbia incident' happened on the tour in support of the album "Oliver's Army" is on, a few months after the single's release. the 33 1/3 book on Armed Forces gives a lot of detail/context/analysis about the incident and the lyric.

I think for a lot of contemporary 'enlightened' white people there's a don't-touch-the-hot-stove pull in saying the N word. you become an adult, you get to say all the swear words you want, you're so open minded, there are no taboos, but wait, what's this? there's still a word you're not allowed to say? even if you're soooo not racist at all!!?!? even in the name of art!?!? it can't be!!!!

xpost
is that the same incident where Elvis caught an eye jammy from the female bassist for Stephen Stills Band at a hotel bar?

she was a singer not a bassist but yeah

I'm not sure I'll ever understand why a lot of white people are weird about whether or not they get to use this word. It strikes me as an incredibly easy word to not-use. Like, harder to use than otherwise.

totally, but at the same time there is the frustration about how prevalent the word is so as well as the obv shock factor there's the basic principle of being against the idea that some words must never be used however 'good' intentions may be (intensified because no other word is as taboo). there are some absurd/potentially amusing/potentially offensive effects too e.g. i did Gangsta's Paradise at karaoke once and i didn't say it but now i can't actually remember if it was displayed on the screen or not!

i think it must've been on the screen because otherwise i wouldn't have realised/remembered it was and having to think 'ha ha this was a stupid idea' (actually i thought that about 10 seconds in iirc)

I don't buy many of the justifications of the country teasers' shit but I like their music

the only reason I keep bringing them up btw is this kind of shit is like a quarter to a half of their shtick

totally, but at the same time there is the frustration about how prevalent the word i

what? only amongst the daily mail commentariat surely

p. sure they use the speaking thru characters justification but

i find nothing offensive or illogical about saying that some people are able to say certain words and others aren't

good luck with that

why don't we have a white history month

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/beastie_boys_apollo.jpg

stupid jews

totally, but at the same time there is the frustration about how prevalent the word i

what? only amongst the daily mail commentariat surely

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:15 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this post is so british that it made my mouth taste like prawn crisps

I don't think I even knew "Radio Ethiopia" existed

her best album!

― get your bucket of free wings (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:02 PM (19 minut

ok now i'm offended

AC/DC-Kicked in the Teeth Again. I think Bon drops an "N-bomb" in the first verse.

mark e smith does have some great lyrics on race though, like in "english scheme"

"where are the obligatory niggers" vs. "Jew on a motorbike!"

have read numerous well reasoned interpretations of the former, never seen any defenses/explanations of the latter. m.e. can be confusing.

"I'm not sure I'll ever understand why a lot of white people are weird about whether or not they get to use this word. It strikes me as an incredibly easy word to not-use. Like, harder to use than otherwise."

white people do get to use this word -- the angst comes from getting called out on it when it is "OK" for black people to use it. white people should just call out more black people on it, especially if they are the primary audience of the product with the offending words.

being legitimately crazy = a decent excuse, maybe

xp

NEVER FORGET:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6D5xpCgETk

re: patti: rock n roll nigger is like so embarrassing, ugh it makes me puke just as a song

white ppl just need to accept that it's not ok for you to say it but it is ok for black ppl to say it, but even if its not ok for black ppl to say it you really shouldn't get involved in a discussion with a black person about whether its okay for them to say it or not. that's the rules.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeEx18X6Y2A

Weren't we specifically not supposed to bring up DAC?

Answer:

White musicians and "artistic" use of the N-word: A Discussion and Social History

david allen coe is the third rail of american politics

well so much for giving you the benefit of the doubt

white ppl just need to accept that it's not ok for you to say it but it is ok for black ppl to say it, but even if its not ok for black ppl to say it you really shouldn't get involved in a discussion with a black person about whether its okay for them to say it or not. that's the rules.

― m@tt h (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:27 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

EXACTLY. i don't know why any white person would take issue with this, unless they're just a dick

newsflash: most ppl are dicks

I mean, it's a facile point but also undeniably true

^^^can't be said enough, really

i'm out of my depth on this discussion, its not intellectually elegant or anything, its just more a life pro tip for myself.

(tho sorry if i offended dan, see even posting in this thread violates the rule, and i'm sinking already)

in general I don't like when white ppl drop n-bombs, but you can't keep artists from using certain words.

I do find it odd that the least offensive example in this thread so far is "holiday in cambodia", mostly for the reasons dan points out. I guess "bragging that you know how the junkies feel cold" or any number of less offensive variations could work, but it comes off as savage satirical indictment rather than a lame attempt at being shocking. also it doesn't have the "hey I'm saying THAT WORD" space cleared around it, the delivery is off-hand, it's placed so well in the lyric.

there's nothing wrong with questioning why social rules exist and whether they should. "you can't say the n word, JUST ACCEPT IT" isn't a good way to go about it. the end result of a long and nuanced discussion - still gonna be white people not using the n word, but this "JUST ACCEPT IT. CASE CLOSED" philosophy certainly doesn't help. people should think about it and have discussion about it!

During the first Lollapalooza tour, Jane's Addiction brings out Ice-T to perform a rendition of Sly & the Family Stone's "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey (Don't Call Me Whitey, Nigger)". Perry Farrell sings the white part, Ice-T sings the Black part. Black quartet Living Colour comes onstage afterward and bandleader Vernon Reid announces "I'll never be anyone's nigger for entertainment..."

Backstage at a Rolling Stones show in 1989, Living Colour confronted Rose about "One In A Million" (both bands were opening the show). Rose said, "I didn't mean you guys were n*ggers!"

"you really shouldn't get involved in a discussion with a black person about whether its okay for them to say it or not. that's the rules."

I'm with you if it's someone going around uninvited like pushy church witnesses, but my understanding is that the majority of NWA, Body Count records were bought by white people, so there's a natural relationship where they as the consumers get to tell the producers what's bugging them about their otherwise fine product.

'discussions' xp

I thought the Elvis Costello mention referred to the incident when he (allegedly) (drunkenly) applied the "n" to Ray Charles/sorta disqualifies him, no?

― lifetime supply of boat shoes (m coleman), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:02 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nah, the so-called 'Columbia incident' happened on the tour in support of the album "Oliver's Army" is on, a few months after the single's release. the 33 1/3 book on Armed Forces gives a lot of detail/context/analysis about the incident and the lyric.

― neal page (some dude), Tuesday, 22 June 2010 16:03 (30 minutes ago)

I've read that Get Happy! and its Stax/Volt influence were seen as an attempt to redeem Costello for the Charles comment. Sort of like "hey, look, I love Black people so much I will now rip them off."

its status was just different in the past -- e.g., the 70s, when it was still enough in common circulation that people might feel like they could redirect it. (I mean, as of the late 70s you could hear it on television, in certain circumstances

Is this really true, though? Seems to me you're way more likely to hear it on the street now, from say young white males addressing each other. In New York, at least. Growing up in suburban Detroit in the '70s, I remember it mainly being a "shock" word that kids used once in a while -- calling Detroit "N___-town", say. But it was always grandstanding, not commonplace, which is how it often seems now. If anything, I'd say its ubiquity in hip-hop has made it less off-limits for young whites. (I'll take your word about '70s TV, though I can't think of examples -- maybe it was used occaisionally by Archie Bunker or somebody, to make a liberal point about racism?)

that's the rules

what interests me is at what point this rule was set (and perhaps you would measure this by the judgement and reaction of people, black and white, in the media?) and at what point will it be redundant, if ever. which is more likely - a distant future where the word and any words like it are barely in use by any artist (ie significant decrease in rap, reflective of socio-cultural changes), or a world where they continue to be used casually tho less often by any artist to ever-increasing indifference (without an actual increase in use, which surely could not happen)?

"where are the obligatory niggers" vs. "Jew on a motorbike!"

have read numerous well reasoned interpretations of the former, never seen any defenses/explanations of the latter. m.e. can be confusing.

― in my day we had to walk 10 miles in the snow for VU bootleg (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:24 PM

always took the latter to be a skewed variation of the wellworn epithet "christ on a bicycle", there's loads of religious imagery in the song and the clash of ancient/modern times is a theme throughout the album so

Backstage at a Rolling Stones show in 1989, Living Colour confronted Rose about "One In A Million" (both bands were opening the show). Rose said, "I didn't mean you guys were n*ggers!"

if I lol at this does it mean I'm a racist

I never felt bad for vernon reid before but lord give him strength

I always thought that "Holiday in Cambodia" seems to be addressing the semantics of the thread topic, am I alone in this viewpoint? (nb: i'm not a DK fan btw)

I'm not sure I'll ever understand why a lot of white people are weird about whether or not they get to use this word. It strikes me as an incredibly easy word to not-use. Like, harder to use than otherwise.

Yeah I think if I was writing a song and really really needed to use that word I'd make damn sure I knew why I was doing it and could explain myself beyond the old holding up a mirror shit.

I quite like Country Teasers and can understand the irony/paradoy/in-character thing they're doing but I still (maybe wrongly) feel a bit uncomfortable hearing them live, like there's a room full of white people nodding and tapping their toes and getting a wee cheap thrill from the white man dropping the n-bombs it's ok to sing along to.

I dedicate this smh to corey glover

It actually took me forever to realize that some white people might hear this word a lot, used casually, and then wind up thinking of it as a casual word they can "reframe" in a song. That honestly took me a while to realize. Because, you know ... if you are black, you're not really going to hear white people use this word in person in a way that's not extremely non-casual and/or aggressively pointed at you. I'm not sure white people who choose to use it have, like, a reciprocal realization along those lines.

^^ (For the record, part of this is that I don't really think there's a single word that some people can say and some can't. I think there are two different words, one of which is hateful and one of which isn't. Your latitude to use the second one depends less on your race and more on whether you actually speak the language it's part of. I don't use it; plenty of non-black people in my city do. I kinda think that anyone who even needs to ask whether they can say it or not shouldn't say it -- if you're asking, that means it's not really authentic to your language/experience in whatever context you're in.)

well, i guess, for me, what am i bringing to the discussion? do i really understand (like REALLY understand) the cultural forces that resulted in the situation? am i invested in or knowledgeable about it in a real way? do i have something to contribute to the discussion? or is there just a great chance i come off condescending or a dick or whatever?

for me, the answer is no, i don't think i really know enough to contribute

Wait, where did M@tt do something that could have potentially offended me???? As far as I can tell, nothing like that has happened...?

man i don't even know!

i was just basing it on this:

david allen coe is the third rail of american politics

― m@tt h (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:29 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well so much for giving you the benefit of the doubt

― HI DERE, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:29 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I thought that was in regard to sexyDancer posting the DAC video.

( who Dan had already been a bit taken aback by for posting those The Fall lyrics)

oh shit, that was to sexyDancer re: a previous thread ban and almost immediate revocation

sorry! should have actually made that clear

Matt's all like "guess I'm just out of my depth here...(sigh)"

but i am! seriously, black people don't need to hear me talking out of my ass about cocorosie!

I interviewed Biafra about that Holiday in Cambodia line recently and he said that it was a late substitution:

"[Producer Geza X] thought it would probe deeper into the mindset of the bourgeois, comfortable, spoilt white kid that the song focusses on. When D.H. Peligro joined the band I vaguely remember asking him about the line and I believe I changed it back to 'blacks', which I’ve used ever since.”

Ian MacKaye on "Guilty Of Being White":

"I say 'bitch', and that means a girl asshole. I might say 'jock', which means an athletic asshole. But you say 'n*gger', which means black asshole, everyone flies off the handle. That's where the racism thing is kind of fucked."

full interview/context (such as it is) here: http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/maximumrocknrollviciandave.html

Granted, he was, what, 19 or 20, but still.

ugh

Granted, he was, what, 19 or 20, but still.

He was 19 or 20 in, like, 1981. It's a pretty ignorant thing to say, but it seems like it would be a more excusable opinion to hold thirty years ago...not because racism was excusable thirty years ago, but because he was only half a generation removed from the civil rights era at that point and 20 year-old punk dudes didn't have three decades of writing from which to pull their opinions on things.

athletic asshole
athletic asshole
athletic asshole
athletic asshole

Yes, "jock" and "n*gger" are completely equivalent words, thank you Ian "Useless Dipshit Who Should Have Been Ignored From The Very Beginning" McKaye.

Reading a lot of this commentary reminds me of why I went industrial and goth instead of indie in the first place; it wasn't that similar hangups didn't also exist there, but it wasn't at the foreground of every other conversation around the music.

Fwiw, Minor Threat also covered the Standells' "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White," a song whose line "the white collar worker or the digger in the ditch" was sometimes changed (maybe not by MacKaye, but by some other bands -- the Count Bishops, for one) so the word "digger" seemed to start with an N. No idea whether that's a coincidence or not.

Like, a lot of punk and indie kind of aggressively went out of its way to alienate black people; I give Jello and The Dead Kennedys a lot of credit for not going that route and for doing songs like "Nazi Punks (Fuck Off)".

er, and Bad Brains too. (lol)

"bitch" is also not ok imo but that's a lost cause I fear

I don't disagree, but at least he is drawing a genuine correct equivalency between "bitch" and "nigger" in his stupid argument; wtf is "jock" doing there?

Oh right, it's there because Ian McKaye is a useless moron.

I kind of wish there was a de-humanizing word for jocks on the level of bitch even.

money over jocks

I don't think being strong and athletic is a bad thing.

Signed, someone who used to be strong and athletic. ;_;

"jock" at some schools means "the rich white kids who beat you up and call you fag"

"jock" is basically another failed attempt at coming up with an abusive term for the people who have all the privilege; such attempts are doomed to failure, because racist terms are there to remind their targets of their less-than status, whereas aimed-at-the-privileged terms can easily be rebutted "yup, I'm a jock asshole, guess what, I get all the good jobs & am allowed past the velvet rope"

this use certainly wasn't "artistic" but there was that old eminem track from when he was like 18 that said iirc that he wouldn't date n-words anymore

OK, I don't know why I'm even getting into this facepalm of a quote, but...

"I say 'bitch', and that means a girl asshole. I might say 'jock', which means an athletic asshole. But you say 'n*gger', which means black asshole, everyone flies off the handle. That's where the racism thing is kind of fucked."

McKaye you're a fucking idiot. The reason it's OK to say "jock" meaning "athletic asshole" but it's not OK to say "Bitch" or "N*****" is because people can *choose* to be the kind of person who values athletic prowess or to be indifferent to it. You cannot *choose* to be female or to be black.

Someone may be an "asshole" for the choices that they make. They are *not* an asshole for the things that they were born as.

"Jock" in this case is specific that the assholedom is reliant on a lifestyle choice. The assholeness of a person has nothing to do with their gender or race, and to flag them up as being somehow reliant upon or qualified by that is a dick move.

that mackaye quote is pretty O_O... like it's okay to call a woman an asshole if you want, you don't need a new word

i don't think i've ever heard the word "jock" used in a derogatory way

guys i don't disagree at all but he was 19 and had a public forum and said some dumb bullshit (which is utterly non-shocking except i guess the content of the bullshit)--not sure why a pile-on is needed.

Although some kind-hearted scholar athletes will definitely be collateral damage under my new, scorching jock-epithet, there is probably no worse mentality than the macho bullshit it targets, so please consider yourselves martyrs for the cause.

McKaye you're a fucking idiot. The reason it's OK to say "jock" meaning "athletic asshole" but it's not OK to say "Bitch" or "N*****" is because people can *choose* to be the kind of person who values athletic prowess or to be indifferent to it. You cannot *choose* to be female or to be black.

I actually kind of hate this reasoning. It smacks of a certain condescension, the same reason gays have this weird vested interest in proving we were "born this way." We deserve rights and respect not because we were born this way, and who would choose that. It thus destroys the logic of for eg. gay pride, black history month, etc.

i don't think i've ever heard the word "jock" used in a derogatory way

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:27 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

it's pretty outdated tbh

the last time i remember hearing "jock" as an insult was like... columbine, but i think the idea that they wanted to kill only jocks was a rumor that the press ran with, which tells you at which point in american history the term "jock" was a legit insult

"jock" is basically another failed attempt at coming up with an abusive term for the people who have all the privilege; such attempts are doomed to failure, because racist terms are there to remind their targets of their less-than status, whereas aimed-at-the-privileged terms can easily be rebutted "yup, I'm a jock asshole, guess what, I get all the good jobs & am allowed past the velvet rope"

Chris Rock* did a great bit in Kill The Messenger about that privilege gap: "Okay, let's trade; you get to say 'nigger', I get to set interest rates."

* btw sorry for being the guy who brings Chris Rock into the race relations

this is all secondhand, and maybe i'm getting this wrong a little, but my understanding of DC punk in the 80s was there was a culture of extreme hostility to "jocks" which didn't really mean the guys on the team or whatever, it was georgetown kids, suburbanites, children of the actual! ruling class, etc.

add in the straightedge thing bleeding into the skinhead bootboy thing... a gang of punks descending on a bunch of drunk fratboys and kicking the shit out of them was not unheard of.

so, as far as that quote is concerned, "jock" had a kind of DC-specific meaning (i think) and not a larger every-highschool-in-america kind of meaning.

not that it makes it any better

In Ian's defense, his horseshit is a natural product of the same naive utopianism that built the DIY network of people making business and culture in a non-assholish way.
It's a different species of obtuseness than Axl's, which is the natural product of assholism.

Shit, Tim Allen beat Chris Rock to that logic by a decade; summed it all up with "Yeah, men are pigs. [Grunting noise] Just too bad we own everything, huh?"

Yeah I think if I was writing a song and really really needed to use that word I'd make damn sure I knew why I was doing it and could explain myself beyond the old holding up a mirror shit.

guess I'll throw in my own personal story in here. around the mid-90s I wrote a poem/performance piece from the point the view of colin ferguson (the jamaican who killed a bunch of ppl on the LIRR in '93). I was usually nervous doing it in front of black audiences since at one point colin invokes the devil by saying "rise up papa legba, you old coon/you will defend me". even though I felt like the line worked in context and the black poets I was hanging with at the time were supportive, I felt hyper-aware of the sensitivity some audience members could have.

around this time I was invited to a one-on-one slam at a maximum security prison in tennessee. the opposing poet was black, the audience was (sadly, predictably) 95% black. I bravely/stupidly went ahead and performed the piece, and the reaction was super positive. after the slam we were socializing with the inmates, when a straight-backed fierce-faced nation of islam guy approached me. I braced myself for a confrontation. he handed me a pen and paper, asked for my autograph, giving me his koran to steady the paper. it was an emotional moment for me, still is tbh, and from then on I gave up on second-guessing myself about the piece.

I never had a problem performing it in the south, but when I moved up north there was at least one time when I suspected a poet was being cold to me afterwards because she was bothered by the piece. or maybe it wasn't that at all, maybe she thought I was trying to pick her up?

I'm still not sure what to make of it all. if we don't talk about this stuff it never gets worked out, and I do, rightfully or wrongfully, believe art is a valid forum for working through the intractables of life.

ugh so many many bad grammars in that post

i've always heard "jock" as referring to a certain type of athlete - the kind who seems seems completely at ease in the no-nonsense world of sport, who isn't a diva or a rebel, who just gets on with the job - kind of like the sporting equivalent of "model professional". someone like lindsay davenport.

ALSO HE WAS 19

so glad no one was interested in publishing my opinions when I was 19, it would have been a very compelling article about how turntablism is the future of music and believing in a christian god is for mindless cretins

so glad i never published my opinions when i was 19

i'm saddened that jocks have been the most successful group at reclaiming their word.

guys i don't disagree at all but he was 19 and had a public forum and said some dumb bullshit (which is utterly non-shocking except i guess the content of the bullshit)--not sure why a pile-on is needed.

The pile-on is happening because this guy is a successful, well-known pillar of the punk scene and he never should have been (imo) because of bullshit like this.

I think the dumbest opinion I held when I was 19 was "I would like to abolish equal opportunity because I would like to take an argument away from white racists who don't actually understand that yes, I am that much smarter than them, I always have been, and I always will be"; personalized bravado arrogance > being a racist dick.

I'm just not clear where a person of any age, at any point, would get the idea that a racial slur only refers to people of that race who are jerks. The fact that it was in the early 80s just makes it sound worse to me, because you can't pretend it was some kind of post-racial world where he got confused by that one Chris Rock routine. (OMG THIS IS AN XPOST) Surely anyone with any glimmer of any kind of awareness about what racial slurs are would be aware that they do not work that way. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE WHINING ABOUT BEING PIGEONHOLED AS "WHITE."

(I said stupid shit when I was young, too, some of it preserved on this very message board, but if someone brought it up I would offer much stronger apologies than McKaye ever does about this stuff; I've seen him do a lot of explaining about why he might have thought stupid things, but not much acknowledging that his stupidity might have been important for reasons beyond just himself.)

I've seen him do a lot of explaining about why he might have thought stupid things, but not much acknowledging that his stupidity might have been important for reasons beyond just himself.

see this makes mackaye much more of a dick than having the opinion in the first place.

I agree.

finding eiiis post super awesome atm

also speaks to the insularity of many scenes and that scene in particular--i can't fuckin stand people with no appreciation for history and wider context and maybe this is why i don't really like "punk" as a concept and blah blah blah

I'm just not clear where a person of any age, at any point, would get the idea that a racial slur only refers to people of that race who are jerks.

In my experience with white racists (the kind who get angry when you call them out for being racists, not the kind who are proud of it), claiming that they call everybody who meets a certain set of vaguely defined characteristics n----r, regardless of their race, is a pretty common justification for calling black people n----r. The fact that these people never seem to find a reason to call anybody white a n----r just means that to them, white people rarely embody these vague characteristics, which in and of itself is pretty racist.

I mean, one of the central points of racial/ethnic (and gender) slurs is how they are used to tell people that no matter what they do, how they behave, or what they accomplish, they will always be Less Than someone else, less than an equal participant in humanity.

(Even the idea that it's just part of a spectrum of identity insults is a huge part of how you have a society where a certain ideal of straight/white/male/etc. is always dominant. You have broad racial and gender slurs, you have things about class or religion, you have things about people's appearance or weight or ability or age, on and on and on. So when someone cuts you off in traffic you say "fuck you, you $IDENTITY INSULT." And some people seem to imagine this is somehow equal opportunity, but there is always some ideal for whom there is no major identity insult with any cultural force behind it. The fact that very few people 100% fit this ideal is totally meaningless; the point is it exists and has force.)

the loveliest thing about the Ian MacKaye quote is that his bands attracted that jockiest fanbase in the punk/hc scene.

pretty sure ian would smh at himself right now

shh

("I HATE JOCKS" patches were very popular with punk rock kids when I was in high school. Big athletic dudes were also pretty happy to refer to themselves as "jocks", mind you.)

It's probably a reflection of how outdated the term is now that I can't even find one of those patches with a GIS.

And where does this fit in?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I&feature=player_embedded

Seems to fit a certain "hip" '70s attempted defanging of the word. But I guess comedy is different. Or maybe not. The only way the word's use seems close to being excused is in satirical context, a la Newman.

and that movie was co-written by Richard Pryor iirc

the loveliest thing about the Ian MacKaye quote is that his bands attracted that jockiest fanbase in the punk/hc scene.

― _▂▅▇█▓▒░◕‿‿◕░▒▓█▇▅▂_ (Steve Shasta), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 5:56 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nah what about those crazies that followed TSOL?

or like boston in general

I went through a mini "I HATE JOCKS" phase that lasted maybe a week; stepping back and looking at my family (which includes a great-uncle who played in the Negro Leagues, several uncles who played college football, my dad who still holds a college track record, my older brother who was a hair's-breadth away from being on the US Ski Team and got his picture on the cover of Powder magazine, and my oldest brother who was a bodybuilder, high school and college football player for the Air Force and still holds a high school track record) cured me of that pretty quickly; also it kind of didn't make sense for me to be all "I HATE JOCKS" when I was on the basketball, soccer and track teams, and consistently lettering in track.

not all sports are were jock sports though, like tennis and cross country

IF YOU CAN'T HACK IT
GRAB A RACKET

i was only on the practice squad in 7th grade tennis, none of my matches counted ;_;

one time i played a "7th grader" that had a moustache and looked about 17, he was wearing boat shoes and cut off jeans shorts

also no lie i swear to god i played a guy with one arm once, i almost blew it too, i was so scared of being the guy that lost to a guy with one arm i melted down early on, but rallied for a less than triumphant victory

wait, there was a MN school where cross-country wasn't a jock sport???? what happened, I am confused

cross-country sure wasn't a jock sport in my high school

i will be kind of sad on an abstract level if punks v. jocks has died out in our nation's high schools. teenage america needs its pointless divides.

at my school x-ctry was the sport for people who wanted a sport on their college apps

I was raised in very white-normative places until I left the country so it took me a while to figure out why n----r was taboo but saying shit about French people or Arabs even on TV was fine and I'm still not sure I approve. I like my insults to be as specific as possible even if it's only just in reference to odd but universally despised body parts or organs, though I do kind of agree w/Kate above wrt "jocks" since that's an elective community and the jocks at my high school were brutish, clannish, and conformist (though not all white) w/militantly policed heteronormative standards for everyone. Still to go to far in jock-hate would be to become too much like them whereas calling them out on their behavior specifically seems totally legit.

wait, there was a MN school where cross-country wasn't a jock sport???? what happened, I am confused

― HI DERE, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 6:10 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah it was kinda nerdy, not totally nerdy like every once in a while a real athlete would go out for it to keep in shape for b-ball

but it's a fall sport, running concurrently with football

is there a team aspect to cross-country? it feels like to be a proper jock you have to run in a raucous, disgusting bro-pack. though i have to admit the shaving head in solidarity for the teammate who gets cancer is pretty cool. i begrudgingly salute you for that, jocks.

I guess "jock sport" is overselling it but cross-country god mad respect in my high school because we were really fucking good at it, especially in my class; we had two dudes who were monsters all through high school, one of whom was also the state 2-mile champ in the track season and the other who won the state cross-country skiing race 4 years in a row.

My entire time in high school, our cross country team was WAAAAAY better than our football team.

was it? i thought it was a spring sport opposite tennis and track. these things being set in stone for all times and places, obv

wait, skiing race??

non-jock sports: track, swimming, tennis, golf (lol).

then again i went to a high school where FOOTBALL WAS ALL, so we could have a mixed martial arts team and they probably would have been seen as pussies.

yeah it's a team but it's like i dunno, more like golf or tennis where individual results are compiled to get the team score

a lot of my good friends in hs were "jocks" i guess
the whole thing is retarded to me, and i guess is dying out according to today's young people like j0rdan s.

our cross country was in the fall! cuz track was spring, so lots of the distance dudes wouldn't have been able to do cross country and track at the same time!

CROSS COUNTRY IN SPRING IS LUNACY

(also possible RACIST)

for our distance guys it was:

fall: cc running
winter: cc skiing
spring: track & field (distance)

we ran all of that shit

lol half, if not all, of our golf team was also the hockey team

the real crazy divide in my HS was the winter sports: all the shitkickers and country ass kids were wrestlers, all the more straight-up jocks and 'rich kids' played basketball -- weird racial subtext there too, even though everyone was white lol.

xp m@tt u may be right about that, huh

yeah we were so close to iowa that wrestling was actually probably more popular than basketball

wrestlers have the weirdest fucking subculture ever.

lol half, if not all, of our golf team was also the hockey team

Amazing. Also, yeah, cc was an acceptable athletic pursuit for the less overtly macho guys in my high school. Actually, even our water polo players weren't that bad but our baseball and football teams (when I was there) were dicks even though they sucked.

... you had water polo...?

lol we should probably stop this diversion, huh

"the whole thing is retarded to me, and i guess is dying out according to today's young people"
the idea of an athletic clique that goes around getting special privileges for being buffoons is dying, or the righteous ridicule of such a clique?

because the former dying out means WE'VE WON.

...you had hockey...?

I believe that 80's teen comedies started slowly killing off jock 'culture'.

jesus loves me/but not my coach/not my cross-country friends/or their cross-country lives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkJ-ybvAgQs

never forget.

did you guys have fellowship of christian athletes? that shit is so bogus

"will be kind of sad on an abstract level if punks v. jocks has died out in our nation's high schools. teenage america needs its pointless divides"

I never experienced this divide. At all.

"it feels like to be a proper jock you have to run in a raucous, disgusting bro-pack"

Shut the fuck up.

I'm yet to hear anyone comment on '(You're A) Nigger Homosexual' by The Frogs

wrestlers have the weirdest fucking subculture ever.

yeah, this.

our wrestling coach was an a-1 right wing limbaugh worshiping prick. there was a story at the time in the news about a girl getting on the wrestling team in some other iowa town. the guy made it known all the time he'd quit if that ever happened here cos it's unnatural.

but the star state-level wrestler at the time was this guy who was the most sexually crazed maniac and creepy bully you'd can imagine -- really weird shit like assaulting lower-weight and younger wrestlers in the locker room, giving them hickeys and other over-the-line sexualized hazing that'd be just as embarrassing to the guy doing it if he wasn't this hulking weirdo. like, one man hazing!! and mr. right wing coach man just laughed it off as a wrestler doing his thing

we're a little off topic however

"the whole thing is retarded to me, and i guess is dying out according to today's young people"
the idea of an athletic clique that goes around getting special privileges for being buffoons is dying, or the righteous ridicule of such a clique?

because the former dying out means WE'VE WON.

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:25 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Man, you are just bringing the idiocy here.

I was that rare thing, a stoner/jock crossover (swimming) - hey man, it was the 70s...

no, no if we put on our zizek masks, you can see that jockocracy is at the very heart of n-word problematics.

back to white musicians and artistic use of the N-word for a sec - let's blame it all on this knucklehead

http://blackberryjam.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/lester.jpg

I was that rare thing, a stoner/jock crossover (swimming) - hey man, it was the 70s...

― lifetime supply of boat shoes (m coleman), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:32 PM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Everybody I ran with was that hybrid. Not so rare.

"Man, you are just bringing the idiocy here."
It's not being facetious to say that jock mentality is one of the major sources of white privilege, and wiping it out is a step forward.

jock mentality is one of the major sources of white privilege

I think you would have to lay a lot of groundwork for you could reasonably make this assertion

xxxp: who's that?

To be fair to Bangs, he did write a tremendously articulate and self-lacerating repudiation of that whole schtick in White Noise Supremacists.

nah the jock stoner is classic, randall "pink" floyd

I was that rare thing, a stoner/jock crossover (swimming) - hey man, it was the 70s...

― lifetime supply of boat shoes (m coleman), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:32 PM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so rare they made a movie about it:

http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2010/02/25/dazed.jpeg

xpost!

To be fair to Bangs, he did write a tremendously articulate and self-lacerating repudiation of that whole schtick in White Noise Supremacists.

that article is hypocritical and self-serving IMO but to be fair to Lester his takedown of Dylan's "Hurricane" is definitive repudiation of condescending white liberal racism though its use of the "n" word is sorta self-defeating

I am going to sound like Ian M here, but in my area "jock" was used as a John Hughes social type more than an issue of sports -- most athletes weren't considered jocks, plenty of guys were jocks but didn't do sports, etc. I guess you could also be a burnout without doing any drugs, or be a preppy even though we went to public school. Unlike Ian M, I will concede that this was a very sloppy use of words, and if anyone had ever brought to my attention hundreds of years of justice issues on behalf of athletes or prep-school students, I would be less cavalier about that sloppiness.

xpost -- I like later Lester Bangs way more than earlier, and I respect people who can own their own shit, and I appreciate that "White Noise Supremacists" article where Bangs takes himself to task, both for something he'd written and for something he'd done privately and wasn't going to get called on. Admitting your own failures and caring about what they meant can be a good look, and he uses it to make that a much stronger article than it otherwise would be.

xxpost -- part of what I like is that it's not just straight self-lacerating and repudiation -- I mean, you get the sense that he's looking at himself honestly and caring about it, not just trying to get away from mistakes

xxxpost -- (can you expand on why you think it's hypocritical / self-serving?)

I'm yet to hear anyone comment on '(You're A) Nigger Homosexual' by The Frogs

― PaulTMA, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:29 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

because the thread is about artistic use not boring, ironic racism/IRL trolling from bands like Anal Cunt that don't exactly need an explanation to anyone who's not 11

I've posted this before - it's a long story - but Dazed & Confused parallels specific events in my life to an eerie degree. summer of 76!

"jock mentality is one of the major sources of white privilege
I think you would have to lay a lot of groundwork for you could reasonably make this assertion"

How much groundwork would you need? A group is granted status and privilege above others for dubious reasons at a crucial stage of development of their worldview, and once they get out they continue to hold these expectations.

"I am going to sound like Ian M here, but in my area 'jock' was used as a John Hughes social type more than an issue of sports"

^^^ exactly.

i am going to guess he thinks the bangs piece is hypocritical and self-serving because he's calling out other people for pulling the same shit he's pulled while also claiming he's now above that, thank you very much. but that sort overlooks the real anguish running through the piece over the damage/pain he's caused by unthinkingly showing his ass in public for so many years.

xp let's start by defining jocks, and let's not do it in this thread

So have we determined there's 6 reasons why a white person says the N-word on a record

1. Because they are playing a character (Newman/Biafra/Dicks)
2. Because they are making people "think" about "words," oooh (CocoRosie, Perry Farrell)
3. As an irresponsible metaphor (John Lennon, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello)
4. IRL trolling (Frogs/Anal Cunt)
5. Being racist/just ignorant (Axl Rose, David Allen Coe)
6. Letting one slip on accident (RA The Rugged Man)

I think any "shock value" use is either 2 or 4.

A group is granted status and privilege above others for dubious reasons at a crucial stage of development of their worldview, and once they get out they continue to hold these expectations.

I don't know that this supports the statement "jock mentality is one of the major sources of white privilege" - that group of people (the white middle class) would have privilege pertaining whether they were jocks or not. and do.

the frogs were the biggest assholes i ever opened for

So who has N Word Privileges?

Current rules appear to be as follows in the country of its most predominant usage, the United States of America:

* Those a part of the ethnic group to whom the term originally applies usually get a free pass.
* Those a part of an ethnic group who have also historically experienced racial discrimination sometimes get an honorary pass, but pains must be taken to not appear as part of the out-group when using it.
* Those a part of an ethnic group who have not historically experienced racial discrimination or have been folded into the group who have not historically experienced racial discrimination can exercise N Word Privileges only if their honorary in-group status is unquestionable to every single person within earshot. (And sometimes not even then.)

Another aspect of this trope is that if a person outside the group says an ethnic slur, that person is aware that it is wrong, or will soon accept that it is wrong, then later apologize for it. (This applies to clinical discussions of offensive terms.) Otherwise, it's just plain old prejudice. Thus when Draco Malfoy and Voldemort say "Mudblood" it doesn't count as this, because they never accept that it's wrong. (This applies bigots in Real Life, as well.)

Because whites as an ethnic group have not experienced racial discrimination (at least in history recent enough to be considered relevant) as almost every other ethnicity in the U.S., it is worth noting that most white people don't have N Word Privileges at all, even so far as calling other whites "whitey" or "gringo," etc. However, N Word Privileges do not just encompass ethnic slurs but religious ones as well, and these religious slurs are perhaps the only time whites are counted as part of an "in-group" with N Word Privileges.

Many people (of all ethnicities) find this trope problematic. Those belonging to the in-group wonder if they can really "reclaim" a word with such a loaded history, or the point in doing it at all. Those belonging in the out-group feel bereft at not having every single possible word in the English language at their disposal (not that they'd ever use it, mind, but Its The Principle Of The Thing), or perhaps just feel that a Double Standard is inherently wrong no matter what it's in reference to (that if a word is supposed to be improper to say for one group of people, it should be improper to say for everybody).

The title of this trope comes from Chris Rock's explanation of why white people can't say the N word. "Well, the thing is, you used to use it all the time. Got a little uppity with it, you might say. So your N-word privileges have been revoked."

The same phenomenon can be applied to non-ethnic terms as well, usually terms for various disabilities (crip, gimp, spaz, etc.) or for sexual orientation/identity minorities (fag, queer, tranny, etc.). The general idea is to resist the euphemism treadmill—thus implying that no euphemisms are needed because the concepts that would usually be referred to by "polite" words are not inherently shameful and do not need to be hidden.

Source: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NWordPrivileges

jock jamz mentality

Just checked out the lyrics for "Kicked in the Teeth". Bon is off the hook, i hear the lyric wrong.

"Two faced woman with the two faced lies
I hope your two faced living made you satisfied"

The way he says "living" is what tripped me up.

the frogs were the biggest assholes i ever opened for

― m@tt h (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:52 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Theyve done a very poor job at this year's World Cup, you have to admit.

I would break these out separately as I think the Lennon/Ono usage is on a different plane:

- As an irresponsible metaphor (Patti Smith, Elvis Costello)
- As an "responsible" metaphor, to whatever degree the word can be responsible used (John Lennon/Yoko Ono)

I hated jocks in high school and always will

I hated jocks until the Raiders beat the Redskins in the Super Bowl, then we were all bros cryin on each other's shoulders

Nabisco I'm definitely being unfair to Lester - who did repudiate his own bad behavior - I've always felt he should've stopped at the self-lacerating part of that essay and refrained from calling out the racism on the punk scene. not that those people weren't idiots & bigots too - moreso than Bangs. But acknowledging his own moral failures didn't give Bangs the authority to judge others. We're all prejudiced in ways we don't realize; the best we can hope for is to NOT pass it on to our children or the next generation. I don't know, that article always felt sanctimonious and self-righteous to me - a lecture on racism from a guy wearing a "last of the white ..." t-shirt. It's a baby-boomer conflict; the 60s hippies always talked down to their younger brothers and sisters, people my age in the 70s. Punk was about casting off their influence until it got co-opted.

"Two faced woman with the two faced lies
I hope your two faced living made you satisfied"

The way he says "living" is what tripped me up.

o_O at your mishearing, holy hell

also granted I wasn't there but being talked down to by the previous generation is part of what is generally known as "being alive"; you even see it now in interactions on this board

shut up, dan.

oh wait, you were here first.

quiet old man

It's bad, I know. I thought he said "two faced little n****** satisfied". Bon was a guy who liked to wear the Confederate flag on occasion, maybe as a kid that's why I though he said that.

I hated jocks in high school and always will

― in my day we had to walk 10 miles in the snow for VU bootleg (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:56 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Intelligent comment.

zuh

Yeah, I mean, there are elements of the Bangs piece that strike me as both good writing and the guy owning up to some things being more important than him. Probably the best being the conversation with Ivan Julian that goes "You probably don't remember, but--" / "Oh yeah, I remember."

More importantly, I think it's really OTM and prescient that he connects the racism with this effort to be misanthropic and powerless and little cretins about it, which I think still animates the same thing in all kinds of punk and metal. I don't think he's particularly sanctimonious about it; it seems like he's putting work into understanding or finding sympathies for it, actually.

(this is a separate story but I am like 75% certain I had several drinks at a bar with Ivan Julian on Christmas once)

Lennon/Ono are really winning here as the most valid/responsible/meaningful usage, aren't they. It's the only one I can think of where the intent to shock or discomfort people is actually being used to make you uncomfortable about something of equal weight. Though it's still tricky and it really does not have time on its side.

- As an irresponsible metaphor (Patti Smith, Elvis Costello)
- As an "responsible" metaphor, to whatever degree the word can be responsible used (John Lennon/Yoko Ono)

― ilxor has truly been got at and become an ILXor (ilxor), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:56 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's all a matter of opinion. there's def some ppl that would argue that ANY use of the n-word by a white person is irresponsible no matter how strong the message. I

Lennon/Ono are clear winners here for me, as is EIII (didn't comment before but your story was rad)

its not a contest, guys

lol at the Frogs response, oh dear

I assumed it was obvious that the word "winner" was being used as shorthand for people who were able to successfully navigate the landmines around using hateful verbiage in their art to put forward a coherent point but apparently I was wrong.

'that group of people (the white middle class) would have privilege pertaining whether they were jocks or not. and do."
That's what's so insidious about it -- the jockocracy reinforces that type of privilege as a norm. It makes everyone the poorer for it.

I guess you could argue that having to confront that ugliness might bring you to question your own assumptions, as Axl's nonstop boorishness did for me, but by and large I think it's a net positive to just do away with it as much as possible, especially in a venue that is supposed to be instilling in you values on how to behave in the real world.

xpost

the W-word

This issue has been bounced back and forth since at least Huck Finn.

i don't think enough is being made of non-black instances in hip-hop except for that classsssic dr. dre story about the beastie boys upthread.

much more interesting that axl rose imo.

I guess you could argue that having to confront that ugliness might bring you to question your own assumptions, as Axl's nonstop boorishness did for me, but by and large I think it's a net positive to just do away with it as much as possible, especially in a venue that is supposed to be instilling in you values on how to behave in the real world.

Absolutely not. "Doing away with it as much as possible" leads to this:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/18/doll.study.parents/index.html

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:0J1UXKebnom80M:http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zQF_BaMJ5qw/SodbjOVfkVI/AAAAAAAABxs/o7hhhD554gA/s320/R-152218-1079243773.jpg

never forget

full study results here: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/05/13/expanded_results_methods_cnn.pdf

must say that j-love & mc serch using this annoys me intensely, and strikes me as posturing/over-compensating/presumption tho i'm sure nabisco has a point abt being part of a culture etc.

what about fat joe?????

when did serch do this?

yeah i did not ever hear that abt serch

j-love's tag is "j-love, nigga" rather than "nigger" which is implicitly connecting to the culture and can be an inclusive thing but still

serch used it in everyday speech

man afaic -a or -er is still a distinction that white people don't get to make

there was Ill Bill's "white N----"

which is def a Patti/Lester throwback

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUt5cJheY3Y

ARE there really that many instances of non-black rappers doing this, though? that's half a real question and half an assumption that most non-black rappers would be rather sensitive about this particular issue.

xposts: haha guess so.

"Absolutely not. "Doing away with it as much as possible" leads to this:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/18/doll.study.parents/index.html";

I don't understand -- are you saying these kids spontaneously developed racist attitudes that somehow a jock culture vaccine would have inoculated them against?

A 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that 75 percent of white families with kindergartners never, or almost never, talk about race. For black parents the number is reversed with 75 percent addressing race with their children.

Po Bronson, author of NurtureShock and an award-winning writer on parenting issues says white parents "want to give their kids this sort of post-racial future when they're very young and they're under the wrong conclusion that their kids are colorblind. ... It's in the absence of messages of tolerance that they will naturally ... develop these skin preferences."

this is disturbing cause white kids must get the color-biased outlook from somewhere? like their teachers or peers. unless white racism is genetically determined. kindergartners would seem too young to be influenced by popular culture beyond the subliminal level. of course the survey questions could be subtly biased or leading toward this outcome.

Well look, all I was saying is that if you're really and seriously from an environment where it's always been cool for you to use the non-slur version of the word, I'm not going to get as bothered about saying you shouldn't. But I think most non-black/Caribbean* people in hip-hop know that no matter how much they share with the overall culture, this is maybe one thing they should acknowledge as a difference between themselves and some other people -- how many white people are cavalier about doing this?

(* this is an NYC perspective but, you know, there's lots of common experience here between black Americans, Caribbeans Americans consider black, and Caribbeans Americans consider Latino, and the non-black people I hear using the word most often and most comfortably tend to be in that last category.)

XPOST --

kindergartners would seem too young to be influenced by popular culture beyond the subliminal level

Dude, I'm sorry, but I just don't get this -- it's not "subliminal," it's coded into all the basics of our culture! I mean, it's like gender roles -- children do not invent those or hear about them later in life, they are being absorbed and imprinted from the get-go.

Some parents are doing something right: "4 Black children and 8 White children did not make a selection; they claimed that all of the children could be smart and, thus, they could not select just one child"

I'm going to requote you and highlight where I think you went wrong in your assumptions:

this is disturbing cause white kids must get the color-biased outlook from somewhere? like their teachers or peers. unless white racism is genetically determined. kindergartners would seem too young to be influenced by popular culture beyond the subliminal level. of course the survey questions could be subtly biased or leading toward this outcome.

Even allowing for an effect only on the subliminal level, doesn't that mean by definition that they are being bombarded by images that are subconsciously shaping their worldview towards the conclusion found in this study?

xp lol nabisco I think maybe we should make a formal tag-team system for these threads

Well look, all I was saying is that if you're really and seriously from an environment where it's always been cool for you to use the non-slur version of the word, I'm not going to get as bothered about saying you shouldn't. But I think most non-black/Caribbean* people in hip-hop know that no matter how much they share with the overall culture, this is maybe one thing they should acknowledge as a difference between themselves and some other people -- how many white people are cavalier about doing this?

(* this is an NYC perspective but, you know, there's lots of common experience here between black Americans, Caribbeans Americans consider black, and Caribbeans Americans consider Latino, and the non-black people I hear using the word most often and most comfortably tend to be in that last category.)

yep i accept that and more or less agree, and it must be said that j-love's dj tag, being a dj tag, is particularly intrusive, in-your-face and contextually weak, which adds to the disconcerting & annoying effect.

wrt to the dead kennedys, this made me dial up give me convenience on the ipod, and jello basically does that "ironically voicing the viewpoint of the enemy" thing on like half their songs

What's a DJ Tag?

xP: I thought he actually wanted to Kill the Poor!

haha yeah i know its obvious but i just hadn't listened to them in ages, it's like every song!

OK I'M WRONG

xxxp it's something you shout over the music to tell ppl who u are etc. mixtape djs have signature tags associated with them: "holiday season u shrimps!" "get familiar" "drama king!" etc.

TONY TOCA!

though a lot of the pop culture directly aimed/marketed at five year olds is self-consciously tolerant or as the right-wingers like to point out "multi-cultural" I'm not denying that kindergartners are bombarded w/all kinds of not-so-subtle affirmations of white superiority, just suggesting that they don't process this information the same way adults do.

(digging hole deeper...)

The thing is, I don't think this study supports that suggestion. Or rather, I should say that it is precisely BECAUSE they don't process things the way adults do because they haven't learned to second-guess information that makes the results unsurprising was you get past the initial shock.

agreed. but there are all kinds of mitigating factors like it would be interesting to see if the kids surveyed attended integrated schools

as a parent I've gotta say this is so far one of the weirdest/hardest things to deal with. my daughter is only 2 1/2 and is still building her vocabulary/learning to express herself and while my wife and I are conscious of surrounding her with multi-culti stuff and pointing out skin color and things like that, its hard to tell how she's processing it. when it comes to interacting with other kids and especially their parents the potential for mortification/embarassment/misunderstanding seems pretty high

it would be interesting to see if the kids surveyed attended integrated schools

they did

this study (and related ones) have been making the rounds on liberal-minded parenting blogs/sites for like a year now

I'm trying to think who would be a living positive beacon of black excellence to impressionable kids besides obama to break these biases, and i'm coming up with jocelyn elders, and geordi from star trek.

"I hated jocks in high school and always will"

liberal minded

dude let go

Bill do you have something you need to get off your chest with me, cuz I don't get it

I mean I reserve the right to hate for the rest of my life the rightwing musclebound retards that beat me up/destroyed my homework, clothes, social standing/yelled racist slurs at me/humiliated me routinely in public for 6+ years and fuiud

t would be interesting to see if the kids surveyed attended integrated schools

I now have a splitting headache from reading the survey results and AFAICT the samples were balanced between schools w/varying populations

I mean I reserve the right to hate for the rest of my life the rightwing musclebound retards that beat me up/destroyed my homework, clothes, social standing/yelled racist slurs at me/humiliated me routinely in public for 6+ years and fuiud

Well, the actual response to that is "hate the guys who did that to you, not every single person who looks like the guys who did that to you" but I presume you're smart enough to have figured that out on your own.

sure

at the same time if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck etc I'm gonna be inclined to cross the street when I see 'em coming

was not aware jocks were an oppressed minority btw

"As honorary chairman of the welcoming committee, it is my privilege to present a laurel and hearty handshake to our new...jock."

"Bill do you have something you need to get off your chest with me, cuz I don't get it"

No. I have no problem with you at all. Just seems like a broad brush. And I agree that you have the right to hate the guys that made your life miserable, cuz noone deserves that. Not to get too english teachery, but how's this sentence: "I hated the jocks in my high school and always will".

I'm trying to think who would be a living positive beacon of black excellence to impressionable kids besides obama to break these biases, and i'm coming up with jocelyn elders, and geordi from star trek.

Are you serious? What the hell.

So who has N Word Privileges?

I keep thinking of this Daily Show exchange:

Jon Stewart: Larry, is it ever ok for a white person to wear blackface?
Larry Wilmore: No. (gets up to leave)
Stewart: Wait, that's it? I was hoping you'd have a longer answer.
Wilmore: You want a longer answer? OK. Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoooooooooooo.

multiple xxxposts

jocks arent an oppressed minority, but if you saw me coming you would probably cross the street. which is sad because even though i played sports my whole life and still lift weights and work out, i'm about as harmless as they come.

was not aware jocks were an oppressed minority btw

No one's talking about oppressed minorities here, rather giving people the chance to prove that they suck as individuals rather than blanket-assuming they suck as a group. It's baseline anti-prejudice stuff that has at best a tangential relationship to racism/sexism/classism/homophobia/hatred of short people/insert your favorite discriminatory practice here.

re: Obama, Geordi, etc. it's way more general than that - it's not about needing positive black role models (there are PLENTY) its more about how skin color gets coded really on, primarily with darker skin = bad and lighter skin = good. what goes in to enforcing this encoding is really complicated and hard to discern, especially because we're talking about little kids here, who are nigh impossible to analyze given their limited communication skills

xp

coded really EARLY on

but if you saw me coming you would probably cross the street.

I will give you a pass because I'm assuming you're wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt

anyway hugs it's all good guys don't worry

"needing positive black role models (there are PLENTY)"
There are a ton of sports, entertainers -- not so much on the professional side.
Is there a corresponding study for how tint is correlated in kids' minds for athleticism, being hilarious?

hahahaha, yeah. only on the days I am not wearing a polo with a popped collar!

(kidding)

xpost

jesus stfu xp

There are a ton of sports, entertainers -- not so much on the professional side.
Is there a corresponding study for how tint is correlated in kids' minds for athleticism, being hilarious?

the President is black, the highest paid media figure in the world is a black woman, etc. again I don't think role models are the issue. what's at issue is a subtler, more deeply rooted psychological construct - about what is attractive, about who is smart, etc. For example, how about this dynamic: everyone thinks their kid is adorable, tells their child their beautiful. The kid absorbs this - but what they also absorb is that makes them beautiful is their particular characteristics. so a blond blue-eyed kid thinks being blond and blue-eyed is beautiful, and when they see other kids that look like that they make that connection. by exclusion, kids who are not like them must not be beautiful, so kids create this scale in their mind that is basically "people who are like me are good/people not like me are not" and then you have to think okay how do you break down this seemingly perfectly natural and logical conclusion my child is drawing...

that WHAT makes them beautiful

shit dropped a bunch of words there sorry

Yeah, but that doesn't explain why the study found that black children were also biased towards lighter skin.

how pumped is bill magill??

Yeah, but that doesn't explain why the study found that black children were also biased towards lighter skin.

yeah I know I can't really offer an explanation of the whole study, was just giving an example of the kind of psychological developmental sorta issues at play here

re. subliminal acquisition of racism: I read a book by a cognitive psychologist a few years ago (from an academic press, fwiw) in which she cited evidence that kids from day 1 key in on the parents' pupils, and have "built-in" ways of judging from their parents' pupil dilation whether their parents are alarmed at a situation or not. And they "learn" these reactions for themselves right away too---like, day 1. So you may not even be aware of your own "instinctive" racism & maybe you've worked hard to overcome it in your outward behavior / conscious thoughts but your intrinsic physiology may pass it on to your children anyway.

uh I would think there's a pretty big leap from parental pupil dilation to racism to me

re: sleeve, i was being serious, but i sense i have offended.

re: shakey, you're right there must be some component of child self-image that plays into it, but the fact that this negative skin-color bias persists to adulthood (even on participants who are themselves black) suggests that something else may be operating. In fact, wasn't it Obama's face that was used as the test image in the adult bias test?

this is disturbing cause white kids must get the color-biased outlook from somewhere? like their teachers or peers. unless white racism is genetically determined. kindergartners would seem too young to be influenced by popular culture beyond the subliminal level. of course the survey questions could be subtly biased or leading toward this outcome.

― lifetime supply of boat shoes (m coleman), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:32 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, Shakey; the idea is that babies grok their parents' instinctive reactions to others (they can see the person/situation that's causing fear in their parents' eyes, in reflection, though obv. not in great detail; skin color comes through), and they pick up on skin color patterns with those fears pretty quickly.

re: bill m. & phillip n.

i was initially kinda on bills' side, but phillip makes a very good point about the ways in which jock culture in high school & college formalize a lot of the inequities built into the social structure. kids of a certain class or race may receive special benefits and privileges, but in modern america, these tend to be subtle, tacit. jocks, on the other hand, are often granted explicit license and privilege.

make that "formalizes the inequalities"

haven't taken the time to dig up the studies, but the current thinking = kids are "naturally" racist. regardless of color and absent strong social pressure one way or another, most kids will notice racial differences and will assume that they belong to the "best" group in this regard. it's a way of maintaining a strong, healthy ego in a world of difference. therefore

yeah but again this does not explain why black children are choosing the lighter-skinned children to be smarter as well (this might also puncture the pupil dilation theory)

I was going to mention Tarantino in Pulp Fiction, which I see has come up a couple of times. For me, that falls somewhere between creepy and embarrassing. It amounts to, "I'm Quentin Tarantino, and I've got carte blanche to throw around this word as casually and as glibly as I want--wink-wink, nudge-nudge." In Reservoir Dogs, I didn't have a problem with it; it seemed as part of the fabric of the characters' lives as in The Godfather or Goodfellas. More on topic, I'm drawing a blank beyond X and a couple other obvious examples. "Los Angeles" is a great song. I've never been sure how much distance there is between the band and the word, but it's a great song in any event.

so a blond blue-eyed kid thinks being blond and blue-eyed is beautiful, and when they see other kids that look like that they make that connection. by exclusion, kids who are not like them must not be beautiful, so kids create this scale in their mind that is basically "people who are like me are good/people not like me are not" and then you have to think okay how do you break down this seemingly perfectly natural and logical conclusion my child is drawing...

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:35 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah, but that doesn't explain why the study found that black children were also biased towards lighter skin.

― emil.y, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:38 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah but again this does not explain why black children are choosing the lighter-skinned children to be smarter as well (this might also puncture the pupil dilation theory)

― dont forget B.Manning's shout-out to Dock Ellis (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:59 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

the study i'm talking about (and lazily refusing to dig up) found that all children express a degree of preference for their own "type"

but yeah, that's potentially in conflict with social messages that attach more value to one type than another

i mean, it's not like there's ever only one factor in play

xp I disagree...I don't think there are two different causes for both racial groups choosing the same answer...I think it's more systematic than that.

Kids are tribal and exclusionary and race (and class and intelligence and social ability) are certainly early and convenient ways of separating people.

"how pumped is bill magill??"

You don't wanna know man, tick me off and i may come over and bench press your house!!!

so a blond blue-eyed kid thinks being blond and blue-eyed is beautiful, and when they see other kids that look like that they make that connection. by exclusion, kids who are not like them must not be beautiful, so kids create this scale in their mind that is basically "people who are like me are good/people not like me are not" and then you have to think okay how do you break down this seemingly perfectly natural and logical conclusion my child is drawing...

AFAIK, lighter skin and more 'European'-looking features are still privileged as 'beautiful' in India, (incl by darker-skinned people). (Certainly were for my parents' generation.)

my sister who slathers herself in fake tan was really freaked out when she lived in india by the skin bleaching creams that were so popular

"I'm Quentin Tarantino, and I've got carte blanche to throw around this word as casually and as glibly as I want--wink-wink, nudge-nudge."
Do you mean the dialogue he writes? or the ones he delivered himself, because his cameo was a little cringey anyway, n-bombs notwithstanding.

xxxp missing the point. to say that white children think that lighter skin denotes intelligence bcz children are exclusionary & tribal, and then to say that black children think that lighter skin denotes intelligence bcz they are programmed to feel inferior...they're something wrong with that statement.

"children are 'naturally' exclusionary & tribal" is what I meant, btw.

yeah i was 100% w/ dialog in Reservoir Dogs

his DNS bit in Pulp fiction brings the film to a screeching halt and pretty much made me want to punch him

maybe there's another category for sly race-baiting that doesn't quite go for anything as strong as the n-word:

i dig the black girls
oh so much more than the white girls
i was so pleased to learn they were faster
c'est c'est c'est vous i'm after

black girls by violent femmes

or even worse

Black girls want to fuck all night long

by that lovely Mick Jagger chap

Some observations as I had as I read over this thread:

1) 10/10 of you fuckers have said something moronic at age 19. In fact, 10/10 of you have said something moronic within the last 2 hours. You're just lucky no one with a mic was standing near you and it didn't get repeated a hundred times to the general public.
2) Jocks don't exist anymore. Everyone who would have been a jock in the past is now a jock/stoner/surfer-dude hybrid.
3) Is every single person in this thread white?

the mighty tag-team of HI DERE & Nabisco I believe are not white...

lol

10/10 of you have said something moronic within the last 2 hours. . .Is every single person in this thread white?

i'm white btw

A real heart-breaking one for me is The Oblivians' "Nigger Rich" - which I'm sure they did as shock value "punk rock" transgressive bullshit on some level - but they're so much fucking smarter than that. Also - and not to harp on Southerners - but something about that coming from a Memphis band is extra depressing

I said something massively stupid just minutes ago, ffs.

itd kindof be awful if white ppl were entirely barred/absolved from holding other white people to account for the racially insensitive things they say. Especially because it would mean even more work for people of colour.

imo.

"2) Jocks don't exist anymore. Everyone who would have been a jock in the past is now a jock/stoner/surfer-dude hybrid."

Despite Obama's vengeance for hoops, I firmly put him in the nerd column, and GWB in with the jocks despite being a cheerleader, and very likely some kind of stoner surfer dude in his youth.

10/10 of you have said something moronic within the last 2 hours. . .Is every single person in this thread white?

^i plead guilty on both counts.

Despite Obama's vengeance for hoops, I firmly put him in the nerd column, and GWB in with the jocks despite being a cheerleader, and very likely some kind of stoner surfer dude in his youth.

^does this type of categorization advance the ball at all?

I meant the dialogue specifically uttered by Tarantino himself. In Reservoir Dogs, he disappeared into his character in that first scene. (I'm being unfair here to the extent that, if you saw Reservoir Dogs on initial release, you hadn't a clue who Quentin Tarantino was; disappearing into his character was a lot easier.) But when he shows up towards the end of Pulp Fiction, he's just doing the kind of wreckless shtick that Bangs wrote about (excoriating himself) in his White Noise Supremacists piece.

jocks def. exist

"wreckless" = "reckless"; I've just got Wreckless Eric on my mind 24-7...I'm just hopeless with typos on this board.

I don't know the timeframe of the study, but maybe Obama's presidency not equalizing child's perceptions of smartness w/r/t skin color has something to do with GWB having the same office previously. So yeah, black nerds need to represent. When you think of physicists, Neil deGrasse Tyson needs to bump out Stephen Hawking for the exemplar spot.

obama was not a nerd, he was a choom gangsta

10/10 of you have said something moronic within the last 2 hours. . .Is every single person in this thread white?

Unfortunately, your clever quoting missed the point I was making... which is that we all say stupid things all the time, and they tend to sound even stupider when you hear them out of context, and when you don't know the person.

Regardless, I think it's worth asking about the racial composition of this thread's participants. I don't like the idea of a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan surrounding the word NIGGER. It would be a masturbatory pursuit that would only serve to emphasize the depth of the racial divide, where people pretend like they understand shit about race relations, but who can only speculate based on their own fears, inherited perception of social tensions, guilt, and overall acculturation processes about how people "should" or "shouldn't" talk. Fuck that. This should be a multicultural discussion.

A real heart-breaking one for me is The Oblivians' "Nigger Rich" - which I'm sure they did as shock value "punk rock" transgressive bullshit on some level - but they're so much fucking smarter than that. Also - and not to harp on Southerners - but something about that coming from a Memphis band is extra depressing

― brio, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:26 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

phil u seem to have this "every one i like isn't a jock everyone i hate is a jock" thang goin on

my bmi is 23.8

i went to the gym this morning

Obama was clearly no nerd

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/06/09/PH2010060903176.jpg

res ilx is relatively but inevitably 'narrow' culturally (as opposed to racially which is a slightly different ish).

a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan

new board description

I don't like the idea of a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan surrounding the word NIGGER. It would be a masturbatory pursuit that would only serve to emphasize the depth of the racial divide, where people pretend like they understand shit about race relations, but who can only speculate based on their own fears, inherited perception of social tensions, guilt, and overall acculturation processes about how people "should" or "shouldn't" talk. Fuck that. This should be a multicultural discussion.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:40 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

hey, some us are really skinny.

(not me though.)

I didn't say that's what ILX was. I said I'd want to know if that was the case. xpost

too many belle and sebastian fans tbh

it's spelled phat btw

' "every one i like isn't a jock everyone i hate is a jock" thang goin on'
ha! pretty much! I'm sure there's some nerds I hate, too though.

I'm neither fat nor do I know much about pop culture and I can't remember where my 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' CD is.

i'm a lard-carrying member of the phatty club

but yeah, the tendency to excoriate ian mackay kinda sticks in my craw, too. maybe he hasn't sufficiently apologized for his remarks, but he's at least tried, and i'm sure i said equally reprehensible shit in my teens. i get the impression that he was speaking from an ignorance he later outgrew, which doesn't automatically render his youthful remarks harmless, but it does incline me to cut the dude some slack 30 years down the line.

I don't like the idea of a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan surrounding the word NIGGER. It would be a masturbatory pursuit that would only serve to emphasize the depth of the racial divide, where people pretend like they understand shit about race relations, but who can only speculate based on their own fears, inherited perception of social tensions, guilt, and overall acculturation processes about how people "should" or "shouldn't" talk. Fuck that. This should be a multicultural discussion.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:40 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

One of the all time worst posts. And trust me, I've put a few up there.

many xxxposts @ clemenza, I was specifically talking about the N word, but now that I think about, maybe it wasn't used in Res Dogs..? but you are correct; his character in RD, however obnoxious, is believable. in Pulp he's really excessive and irritating. tbh he could have subbed "Dead Asshole Storage" and it still would have been grating. but at least it wouldn't be pig-ignorant shock tactics.

i'd like to think that people of any sort can have meaningful discussions even about difficult subject

Yeah, I'd like to think that too. But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

I didn't say that's what ILX was. I said I'd want to know if that was the case. xpost

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:49 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Kinda depends on the white dudes, tbf, and this isn't a white man's convention, res.

But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:53 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this isn't a "white man's convention about race relations" (argh xpost)

hmmm gee maybe if there was some way we could tag posters' racial characteristics... you could put a little Star of David next to all my posts if that would make you comfortable (whether or not Jews are white people is highly contentious)

ps I am not fat

xp

res has brought a whole new level of energy to thread, kudos

Before res ruins this thread, I just wanted to say this --

As far as the discussion about American children goes: this is a largely white country with ideas about things like beauty and intelligence and normality that privilege white people. Those ideas are encoded into everything around us. The bulk of them are practically invisible to us. They don't have to be malicious or explicit for children to soak them up. They can work by omission or via ideals. They're the culture we live in, the water we swim in. Of course that's what children pick up, whether it's making them think less of someone else or think less of themselves. That's not going to be escapable until our culture has changed way more dramatically than we can sit here and imagine.

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

(I mean, it's way more straightforward to explain to a small child how people from different parts of the planet look different, no big deal, than it is to start explaining the whole history of why people who look a particular way all live on the other side of town, or have less money than you, or whatever else.)

nabisco OTM

Plus, babies' conversational abilities are somewhat limited.

I could speak perfect swahili when I was born but forgot it all by my second day out of the womb

(Shit now I'm dissing babies on this thread)

children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff

I think a certain little motion picture called Baby Geniuses begs to differ

But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:53 PM (10 minutes ago)

white men relate about race like this

And for the record, when I say it's encoded into everything, I'm not saying we live in some dystopian racist nightmare (I guess that depends on your standards), just that it's threaded through all the smallest things around us. We've gotten better and better about being aware of the big obvious things, but isn't not like the entire culture can just magically forget the whole deal.

right, and that was more what I was saying, that as disguised and disavowed as it certainly was nowadays, the racial delirium was still prevalent in American culture, and young children were still picking up on it at an alarming rate. Except that I was way more pissed off about it (being a white person, that is...having an unearned head start tends to bruise the pride.)

I don't think I've actually addressed the OP on this so I'll just say that I have never heard a song by a white person that contains the n-word that I found defensible. The Lennon has always made me cringe a little (a tad condesecending to women and a tad insensitive to blacks) but I wonder if Costello's usage in 'Oliver's Army' (the Cromwell reference sounds a little over the top to me, too) doesn't reference the language of a certain kind of British soldier.

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:00 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

xp I do tend to give MES a pass on The Classical; something about throwing the word "obligatory" in there always implies in my mind that he's saying that certain groups of people need to be marginalized in order for society to structure itself, which along with the rampant misanthropic (twelve ppl in the world, rest r paste) & and anti-national (classic British attention to the wrong detail) vitriol, makes it seem very much like scouring social satire.

One great way to deal with little kids wrt racism is to have lots of friends who are different than you - then your children stand a better chance of hanging out one on one or in small groups w/people of different races even before the positive or negative institutional atmosphere of pre-school or kindergarten.

being straight-up with your kids about the fact that race and racism do exist in the world, even from an early age

look for me the problem is what does "being straight up that race and racism exist in the world" amount to when we're talking about 2-4 year olds, because what these studies show is that by the time they get to kindergarten racist stuff is already getting ingrained in their heads. So how do you talk to someone who can barely talk themselves about things that are really difficult and complicated to talk about...? Like how do you verbally counter stuff that is developing non-verbally?

xp

One great way to deal with little kids wrt racism is to have lots of friends who are different than you - then your children stand a better chance of hanging out one on one or in small groups w/people of different races

the problem is that the studies directly contradict this commonly held liberal belief - kids in integrated classes actually were MORE likely to hold racist predispositions.

I will try to find some links, my wife has been pretty up on this...

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

nabisco otm (once again)

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/09/11/colorblind_myth/print.html

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

wife has a link to actual study somewhere, but I may not get it for a little awhile...

ike how do you verbally counter stuff that is developing non-verbally?

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:24 PM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

Wow you guys are waaaaaaaaaaayyyy off the original thread topic (sorry, just checked back in).

kids in integrated classes actually were MORE likely to hold racist predispositions.

I mean before school/pre-school. My little nephew's best friend is the son of my sister's best friend and they're Korean Americans.

I'm not saying that will preclude him from developing racist attitudes or thoughts but it may be less likely that he develops them about Koreans.

Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

wife has a link to actual study somewhere, but I may not get it for a little awhile...

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:29 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

kids in culturally uniform environments self-segregate anyway. they ostracize one another and form cliques, etc. we just don't worry as much about such behavior as we do about racism.

"...along which to organize their self-segregation."

lol my daughter's half-Korean playmates have (apparently) never been told about their Korean heritage.

yeah I dunno it's just worrisome, I try to make sure she has a range of playmates but it's a social landscape littered with landmines out there, no one wants to feel their kid is being tokenized and whatnot. In a weird way, parents complain about racial disparity on either end - I've heard white parents complain that their kids' playgroups are too white, and latino/black parents complain that their kid is the lone minority, so there is a weird self-segregation that goes on, where the white folks wanna be all integrated and the other minority groups want to keep to themselves (to retain cultural pride/continuity, shelter their kids from racism, who knows what else)

xp

As a non-parent, I am amazed at the amount of landmines you have to negotiate but if you do it in the right spirit, I think it tends to lessen the chance that your kids will turn out to be sociopaths.

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

I went to a v racially diverse elementary school and I don't feel like I saw that much self-segregation going on. Maybe I just didn't notice it. But I mingled with anyone of any race and didn't really develop conceptions of race beyond what people looked like until later on. (Then again I was an aspie rube who until first grade thought the only difference between genders was hair length. Then I saw a girl with short hair and realized there must be something else going on.)

It actually took me forever to realize that some white people might hear this word a lot, used casually, and then wind up thinking of it as a casual word they can "reframe" in a song. That honestly took me a while to realize. Because, you know ... if you are black, you're not really going to hear white people use this word in person in a way that's not extremely non-casual and/or aggressively pointed at you. I'm not sure white people who choose to use it have, like, a reciprocal realization along those lines.

was about exactly this just the other day, actually, when i heard one coworker had called another a "black mf" (twice, ugh). the incident was sort of a weird life-before-my-eyes flash of all the casual racist shit i've heard, all the "i'm-not-racist-buts", really, really angering, saddening. (curious about the homo perspective on this wrt casual gay bashing--cuz i know i hear a lot of it--and i mean gay isn't the color of your skin so god i bet ppl sit through so much of that horseshit. right there in front of them. and as infuriating it is to me as a hetero, i just can't imagine...)

the tendency to excoriate ian mackay kinda sticks in my craw, too.

i know this is a minor thread in this discussion, but i have to say. in my experience, ian mackaye's weirdness about race has tended to register on the radar of people of color i know much more than among white people. which is not particularly surprising, whatever. i know he means a lot to people, but the part of this that gets weird is how defensive white fans of his sometimes get when people point out his weirdness about race.

it's not really about excoriating him, but i will admit that i've never been able to get into minor threat/fugazi/whatever in the way a lot of my social cohort was into those bands because i found statements he had made about race...alienating. again, i know people love him but he's not jesus.

lol "minor thread" geddit. (that was unintentional)

if those dead sea scroll guys ever dig up that flipside interview with jesus, we're in for a shocker.

From a 2007 MySpace interview I just found:

Ian MacKaye: Another example, Minor Threat has a song called "Guilty of Being White." I grew up in Washington D.C., and at the time I was growing up it was 70 or 75 percent black, I went to a junior high school that was 95 percent black and I was beaten up for being a white kid. I wrote a song about how I thought it was wrong to beat me up for the color of my skin. Writing a song that was an anti-racist song. And yet fifteen years after I wrote that song I was in Poland and I had a white power skinhead guy thank me for writing such a great song about the white race. So you can see that the context has a lot to do with everything. In some ways to answer your question I feel like to hear this lyric I'm like "Wow, I wouldn't write those lyrics the same way again." But I wouldn't have the opportunity anyway. I love those songs. I stand behind them all.

"So you can see that the context has a lot to do with everything" just seems like a way to avoid talking about any specific lyrics in the song that are kind of clueless about the way racism operates in American history and in the culture more generally. I find it heartening that he wouldn't write those lyrics again, but it still seems like an insufficient response.

I was also surprised by how willing people were to give Ian MacKaye a pass. Reading the MRR interview, what sticks out most for me is actually what comes in between the two quotes that were singled out on this thread:

throughout my entire life, I've been brought up in this whole thing where the white man was shit because of slavery. So I go to class and we do history, and for 3/4 of the year slavery is all we hear about. It's all we hear about. We will race through the Revolutionary War or the founding of America; we'd race through all that junk. It's just straight education. We race through everything, and when we'd get to slavery, they'd drag it all the way out. Then everything has to do with slavery or black people. You get to the 1950's, they don't talk about nothing except the black people. Even WWII, they talk about the black regiments. In English, we don't read all the novelists, we read all the black novelists. Every week is African King's Week. And after a while, I would come out of a history class, and this has happened to me many times, like in junior high school, and you know that kids are belligerent in junior high, and these kids would jack my ass up and say, "What the fuck, man, why are you putting me in slavery?" To me, racism is never going to end until people get off this whole thing. It's going flim-flam, back and forth. When people will just get off the whole guilt trip... First, all the white people were like "Fuck the niggers", and all of a sudden, it's "The black man is great. We love him. We're going to do everything for him," all the time. It's never going to get anywhere, because one generation it'll be the KKK, the next generation it'll be the Black Panthers. Now we see the KKK come back in again, more popular. I think the best way we're going to have to deal with it is that if I am able to say "nigger" without everyone gasping, and if I'm able to say that word, because I don't have any problems with that word.

(Also, I'm not white and am way the fuck skinny.)

holy shit, ian

Also, these:

And I'm just saying I'm guilty of being white - it's my one big crime. That's why I get so much fucking shit at school, that's why I cannot get on welfare in Washington, most likely. That's why when we took the PSAT's, when Jeff checked off the black box, he got awards, he got scholarships, he got all kinds of interest, but when he admitted he was white, all that was gone...

I: No, I'm saying if someone made you constantly feel guilty, what do you think that may result in?

D: A resentment..

I: Thank you. And what would that resentment lead to? You just go right back. They're going to beat me over the head about African kings and stuff to the point where I'm going to say "Well, fuck the African kings. And fuck the black people too. Fuck all this shit. I've had it, blah, blah, blah..." Guilty of being white.

I'd tend to give him a pass on that because it's a common enough resentment borne of youthful myopia, and it's asking a lot of a kid to have some larger perspective when he's getting beat up.
It's the "purity of violence" stuff that gives me the creeps.

19 isn't that young!

ian mackkkye

i dunno 19 is just outta the cocoon imo. how long prior was he still being beaten up? god of all the idiot things i probably said when i was 19.

but that debate aside, that interview there was from 2007, SO LIKE UM

There's a pretty terrible Joe Jackson song called "Battleground" from his Beat Crazy LP which is totally relevant to this thread. By "terrible" I mostly mean terrible-sounding -- it's a sort of talking-reggae type of song very much in the vein of Linton Kwesi Johnson -- though I'm sure the words are just as embarrassing as I remember them being (though which I probably didn't completely know what to make of them at the age of 15 TBH).

there was so much fucked up "thinking" going on in the hardcore/straight edge world going on at that time - not giving him a pass whatsoever but shit was ugly in a ton of ways - a lot of it was just garden variety adolescent zombiedom, but in my experience full-on eighties hardcore esp sxe was a hair away from lord of the flies shit at the best of times - kind of a brutal environment that pulled out some awesomeness for sure but real ugliness like ian's racial shit too

woah that interview was 2007? fuck

So like I said before: fuck Ian MacKAye

the myspace quasi-apology interview is from 2007. the horseshit raving about African Kings one is from a long time ago.

er, the myspace one was 2007, i'm not sure on the one Sundar was quoting--which was a holy mother of a quote

xpost--A HA

i've always had trouble squaring the part of me that thinks minor threat rock with the part that wants to dick punch ian mackaye

The easy resolution to that is to dick punch Ian MacKaye and then feel slightly guilty about it years later, in the privacy of your own home.

I have that problem with tons of shit from around then. rollins & jello are dick-punchable too.

yeah, he would have been, what, 45 when he gave the interview I quoted from? is that old enough to be held responsible for your statements?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3108/2656404984_31397e7cc6.jpg
from that bands in surprising t-shirts thread

(FWIW, the MRR interview is from 1983, when Ian M was 21. I say all kinds of ridiculous shit when I'm drunk and bullshitting but this was something he said in an interview that he knew would be published. He was explaining lyrics to a song (that he brought up in the interview) that he had written and thought about. You guys know you can vote at 18, right?

All that said, I'd be the first person to want to forgive someone for stupid stuff they said 30 years ago if they have shown that they have changed. [This is really problematized by the Myspace interview, however.] I'm just pointing out that these were seemingly earnest comments from an adult who had an audience. If anything, I think I find it kind of fascinating and bizarre more than anything.)

ian's used the more recent "context is everything" argument re: minor threat lyrics a lot in recent years, not just for "guilty" - how straight edge was just him talking to his 15 closest friends, that he was only recording his own teenage life, never meant to inspire a movement or be seen as a role model etc. which may have roots in the truth - but disingenuous at best as the whole Dischord thing had a pretty explicit political angle, if only on a kids unite! level... so kinda hard to buy that he was oblivious to the idea that he was writing anthems and that racially charged anthems are fucking noxious

eh that quote about history class, even if it's old, is fucking vile

YOU CAN'T "GET OFF THIS WHOLE THING," FUCKFACE

excuse me, i'd like to "get off" 500 years of history

http://991.com/newGallery/Prince-Gett-Off-Remix-EP-373500.jpg

23 racist positions in a one-night stand

i didn't know any of that about ian mackaye, btw. but i always thought he was a dick, so somehow not surprised.

yeah, since prior posts i've been mentally unearthing dumb shit i've said and thought during those just-into-the-real-world awkward years and through the pangs of embarrassment i've sat here feeling i could not come up with anything near as ridiculous and dead-dumb-poisonous as that MRR interview, thank god.

(like holy lol me after i first read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance but that is a very different douche plateau to inhabit)

To respond to something from Will earlier: I checked an online transcript, and you're right, Tarantino's character doesn't use the word in Reservoir Dogs. (Other characters do, five times altogether.) Apologies to Mr. Brown.

yeah, he would have been, what, 45 when he gave the interview I quoted from? is that old enough to be held responsible for your statements?

― horseshoe, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 7:13 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark

i mean, that's all i'm saying.

Yeah, I think we're all in agreement, ultimately.

in the thread that occasioned this one, i worked hard to defend the cocorosie song. i did this because i genuinely liked the album at the time of its release (less so since), and because i want to believe that the band's heart was in the right place, even as they stuffed their mouths with feet. i can't resolve the questions about white artists and "that word." i like the oblivians. i like the country teasers. i think rock 'n' roll nigger is an incredible song and love a lot of elvis costello stuff from his early years, including oliver's army. but i've never been in the least comfortable with the word, especially not when it comes from the mouths of white musicians. there's a part of me that always has and always will feel sick in response to rock 'n' roll nigger and jesus loves me, stuck with knives.

in the 70s, maybe, it was easier to find some value in that experience of lacerated revulsion. it was the sign of something awful being exorcised, a pain that might lead to healing or transformation. the shock of a taboo transgressed, valuable in itself. our sad track record since indicates that this wasn't ever true. the wounds still fester, still ache. the "liberating" rush we get from bravely shattering those taboos only seems to etch them deeper. but i won't condemn the artists that try, in good faith, to solve the unresolvable. maybe this is the most craven sort of apologia, but there's potential value even in showing people where they can't go. what remains untouchable and why. and if it weren't for well-intentioned (and questionably intentioned) fools, we might not know this. that sounds forced, and i suppose it is. no one who's spent any conscious time in the last fifty years can really claim to have been in the dark about that word's power to do real and lasting harm.

maybe in some imaginary future, when we've resolved or at least papered over our racial damage, people will look back at songs like jesus loves me and see them as forward-thinking harbingers of a better way. but i doubt it. and in the here and now, much as i want to grant cocorosie the benefit of the doubt, it's hard not to see their experiments as rather selfish, thoughtless and naive. however well-intentioned and aesthetically compelling i might find them.

A friend (Jewish '70s punk from Queens) went on a rant about Patti Smith and Lennon on this very topic last week, his main point being the two songs in question resulted directly from their being pompous asses who saw themselves as "heroes."

A friend (Jewish '70s punk from Queens) OTM

did you guys mention white n***** by The Avengers? penelope houston was probably 10 when she wrote it. the fact that she looked like hitler's dream date at the time doesn't help. the lyrics always confused me. can't believe that they still do it live for reunion shows. though it is one of their famous punk anthems, guess they have to. the original recording (late 70's) seems of its time a la patti's song, but today...yeah, just seems doubly wrong. (or maybe recent youtube footage of 50-something ex-punks never makes anyone look good)

http://www.penelope.net/white.nigger.html

Not sure why Ian wanted to get on welfare when his parents were pretty well off from what i've heard/read. Wikipedia tells me he was raised in a super tolerant open minded environment....so maybe this stuff is what it took for him to rebel; he had to talk some major shit to feel like a proper rebellious teenager? A dose of fascism to piss off his liberal parents/teachers? That probably also ties into the macho violent side of M.T. (which always seems ironic when you look at the lyrics to Bottled Violence etc)... I know listening back to some Minor Threat boot that chunklet posted recently I was REALLY embarrassed by the amount of really sexist language and violent posing coming from Ian; and it just stunk of angry teenage inadequacy/lashing out at people for attention.

Always struck me as slightly silly that Ian got so pissed about Slayer covering Guilty Of Being White (they notoriously sing "Guilty Of Being RIGHT!" at the end) when they were probably just being more honest about trying to shock/piss off people than he was when he wrote it; most of his annoyance is probably just embarrassment at that song being focused on again. Also funny when you consider one of Slayer isn't 'white'...

Given all that; I'm inclined to let by gones be by gones (despite him being at the totally responsible age of 19 when he said/did all this) shit, just because he's made up for it since then by supporting a lot of good causes, doing speeches against racism at shows etc, and because despite 19 being a responsible age, it's still possible for people to be idiots then and still change for the better and realise what dicks they were in hindsight....

here's that minor threat bootleg by the way: http://chunklet.com/index.cfm?section=blogs&ID=559

i deleted it a while ago but i recall there's some ranting from ian about some drunk girl in the audience which is so far away from fugazi show banter its crazy! and as i haven't listened to it for a while i won't quote it here because its pretty awful and i don't want to misquote.

Also funny when you consider one of Slayer isn't 'white'

yeah that lyric change was Tom Araya's brainwave as I always understood it - he seems like a 'complicated' guy shall we say

I do tend to give MES a pass on The Classical; something about throwing the word "obligatory" in there always implies in my mind that he's saying that certain groups of people need to be marginalized in order for society to structure itself

Pretty sure it's about annoying white middle class liberals (esp. those who worked at the NME)

one of Slayer isn't 'white'

Two, actually. Araya is Chilean and Dave Lombardo is Cuban.

Am I alone in having trouble with this American definition of Latin Americans as non-white?

It's complicated, obv. I don't know what the Slayer guys look like though.

Indeed, some pretty white Cubans and Chileans out there!

tom araya pretty clearly has some amerindian blood in him but tbh in chile it's the norm to downplay non-european ancestry and would be surprised if he doesn't view himself as white.

but tbh in chile it's the norm to downplay non-european ancestry

Not unusual in South & Central America in general?

don't know really, in chile it's easier to dissimulate non-european ancestry because generally it's not that obvious (average chilean has 20% amerindian background or something like that iirc) in other parts of latin america it's more common for people to have a lot more amerindian background to the extent that it's too obvious to downplay.

Yeah, depends on the country I suppose, it would seem odd to me to think of Argentinians as non-white, for instance

Argentina: Ethnic groups 86.4% European (mostly Italian and Spanish), 8% Mestizo, 4% Arab and East Asian, 1.6% Amerindian [2][3]

Chile: Ethnic groups White (52%), Mestizo (44%), indigenous (4%).[2]

Different countries. I think Argentina is kind of exceptional in S. America though.

Uruguay is even more white I think

Or European, or whatever

Ha, I just looked up a few S. American countries to try to prove my point and Uruguay was the first one. Anyway, it does differ from place to place.

those stats for chile are definitely off. i think maybe 52% would like to think of themselves as white but mestizos must be the majority.

I'm just going on what their football teams look like!

i.e. i just did a google and found a study from the university of chile that found that 65% were predominantly white mestizos. which i would agree with.

Am I alone in having trouble with this American definition of Latin Americans as non-white?

― I am utterly and abjectly pissed off with this little lot (Tom D.), Wednesday, June 23, 2010 4:07 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

fwiw, a lot of americans of latino and/or hispanic heritage are emphatic about the fact that they aren't white, aren't anglo.

The "anglo" thing is the difference between USA and Europe

Sigh. Googling to try and figure out how Tom Araya ethnically i.d.'s just brings up Str0mfrnt. : (

The Fall line "Where are the obligatory N.....s" I always took to be a sarcastic reference to the practice, circa 1982, of white rock bands boosting their lineups with black backing singers or horn sections. It's also obviously meant to be gratuitously offensive, witnessed by the fact that it's followed by "Hey There Fuckface!" As their audience was mostly white libs, I guess we were the people it was meant to offend, rather than black people. I don't know if the story about it losing them a Motown contract was apocraphyl or maybe even invented by MES to further stir things up. All the same, it remains difficult to defend if you love the fall, as I do.

i remember one guy i used to know who worked on a hip hop magazine and didnt like me saying maybe he shouldnt be using the n word. he got kind of a kick out of it. prob the same reason everyone from patti smith to lou reed to lennon or whoever like it.

has iggy ever used it in a song? was a bit dissapointed when i first read about various times hes used it (or other racial epithets) on stage but not surprised anymore.

"prob the same reason everyone from patti smith to lou reed to lennon or whoever like it."

and actually a lot of white people in general (not necessarily even in a racist context). they just love it!

I've always wondered about Bangs and that "Last of the White N_____s" t-shirt that he wears in the iconic photo-- like, is that something that he wore all the time? And if so, why? If he could go around in that t-shirt in NYC it makes me wonder how different the context was in the 1970s. It almost seems like the fact that Richard Pryor was so famous during that time shifted what was acceptable in some way, maybe.

well i doubt he was wondering around harlem with it on.

wasn't he probably wandering around detroit with it on?

wr2 minor threat/mackaye: have always hated that song. so much of minor threat's lyrical output is questionable in really interesting ways: for all its stridency, it mostly seems powered by a real terror of adulthood and adult society - the subtext of 'filler', for example, seems to be MacKaye's fury at a former friend abandoning the coccoon of their adolescent rules and values and friendship in favour of drugs/girls/religion, and for all his later claims to the contrary, songs like 'straight edge' and 'out of step' seem to paint a line between the states of abstinence and hedonism, and view crossing from one side to another as some act of profound betrayal. so figure ian and his troupe as equal parts lord of the flies and peter pan's lost boys... its all juvenalia, really, and kind of interesting to explore, esp. the distance between the lyrics' stridency and machismo, and the panic and vulnerability and confusion hiding behind them.

but yeah, 'guilty of being white''s another thing altogether, a really ugly song with a really ugly message, a song ian's evidently ashamed of, possibly along with his views at the time, and his explanations/apologies since are really unsatisfactory.

i always considered the incredibly positive, thoughtful, principled way that ian led his life as an adult as a satisfactory apology for the dumb shit he said as a kid

And also, I know this is a cover, but isn't this essentially an ANTI-RACIST song?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yujJPYPfxI

prob wondering around the creem offices with it on

I met ian once and he was super nice and not racist to me

always figured it was a punk kid's hamfisted response to growing up in a predominantly black city, but i never knew if the members of minor threat lived in the city or were from the outskirts/suburbs/etc. not that that excuses it.

um, guilty of being white that is.

i always considered the incredibly positive, thoughtful, principled way that ian led his life as an adult as a satisfactory apology for the dumb shit he said as a kid

The thing is, in our society 19-year-olds are adults. I guess you can excuse him for being ignorant but you can't excuse him for being a kid, because HE WASN'T.

Everybody makes mistakes; not everybody's mistakes are wholly repellent race-baiting bullshit that allows legions of assholes to justify their hatred of minorities. Mistakes on that level require a hell of a lot more than "well, consider the context" handwaving. Mistakes on that level require more than saying and doing all the right things so that people forget you ever were that noxious, undeserving brat. Mistakes on that level require acknowledgment and unqualified apology; you THEN back that up with living your life in a righteous and positive manner.

If Ian MacKaye has made that unqualified apology, I haven't seen it. I assume it would have been linked here had he done so. Since he hasn't, fuck him. He's a worthless piece of shit until he does.

(itt HI DERE has STRONG OPINIONS about Ian MacKaye)

yeah i dunno im not sure that living ones life in an ethical way really "makes up" for putting out what can seem at times like really harmful racist bullshit and never making a coherent, public critique of it. shit is still out there & still harmful and mackaye for some reason wont step up to the plate and say "hi all you 15-year-old skaters getting into me, that was a bullshit thing for me to say"

xp dan otm

and delete "what can seem at times like"--i had something else written originally

In some ways to answer your question I feel like to hear this lyric I'm like "Wow, I wouldn't write those lyrics the same way again." But I wouldn't have the opportunity anyway. I love those songs. I stand behind them all.

I would not have said "I stand behind them all." From the preceding sentences, it's obvious that MacKaye doesn't feel the same way as he did when he was a kid, but that last phrase is just some "no regrets" macho bullshit.

Like, just be ridiculously apologetic already and don't stand behind shit just because it was true for you at the time.

again, 19-year-olds can be preeeeetty fucking stupid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bVa6jn4rpE

But, yes, I do agree that an apology is LONG overdue from ian

so can people of any age. being 19 doesnt abrogate his responsibility, just makes his actions more forgiveable--were he to ever ask for forgiveness

19-year-olds are daft puppies.

Unfortunately "no regrets" is the default stance for musicians. I've asked so many interviewees what they regret, when often there are some pretty big fuck-ups in their past, and almost without fail they give that answer. I love it on the rare occasions when they go, "yeah, that was a shitty record" or "yeah, that was an idiotic thing to say - I was drunk/young/stupid". I guess it's a defence mechanism - once you admit to one regret you'll be asked about it again and again - but I still find it cowardly and dull.

I went to a talk given by mackaye and he did seem like a genuinely nice and sincere guy. otoh I did listen to a lot of minor threat growing up, and while I never really identified with the music beyond an "I am an an angry teenager" level, I did introduce minor threat to my (white) friend who did identify with "guilty of being white." (I guess we were both 14, 15 at the time.) I won't offer any defense except to say that when he (and I) were still at the stage in life when you think "I have come into this world a priori" and don't really understand the gravity of anything really, much less history. I'm sure if you asked him now he's probably come around 180 degrees on the song, and it's sad that mackaye still hasn't.

I am pretty thankful to this thread for spelling out precisely what bothered me about Minor Threat (and, by admittedly unfair proxy, Fugazi) when I was a kid; at the time, all I knew about them is that the only people I knew who were super into them were also incredibly suspect when it came to racial issues and I transferred that to the band and its imagery. I had no concrete idea that my instincts were that OTM because I refused to go near the dude or any of his work; now I have a much more coherent argument for why I refuse to fuck with him beyond "when I was growing up, most of his fans that I met were racists".

Minor Threat's song "Guilty of Being White" led to some accusations of racism, but MacKaye has strongly denied such intentions and said that some listeners misinterpreted his words. The song was inspired by his experiences at Wilson High School, whose student population was 70 percent black. There, MacKaye and his friends were routinely picked on by black students. Slayer later covered the song, with the last iteration of the lyric "Guilty of being white" changed to "Guilty of being right." In an interview, MacKaye has stated that he was offended that some perceived racist overtones in the lyrics, saying, "To me, at the time and now, it seemed clear it's an anti-racist song. Of course, it didn't occur to me at the time I wrote it that anybody outside of my twenty or thirty friends who I was singing to would ever have to actually ponder the lyrics or even consider them."

x-post

I have been staying out of this, as I live in the DC area and have known Ian since Minor Threat days (and saw him perform before that in Teen Idles). I have had my share of disagreements with him on things and told him(although we never discussed any of the comments here), but I am also pretty sure he has modified his views and apologized for stuff he said way back when Hi Dere.

I remember you firing off a letter to Flipside when a girl took you to task on "Filler," a Minor Threat song. Do you take responsibility for things you have said?
To the degree that I can. I don't think I can ever reconcile or clear up the straight-edge stuff or the "Guilty Of Being White" stuff. [Minor Threat inspired a subculture within punk known as straight-edge, which advocates abstaining from drugs and alcohol. Kids loyal to the trend would draw Xs on both hands with a black marker as a kind of counter-symbol to the marks underage kids receive at clubs that sell alcohol.] A lot of those songs were written at a time when it never occurred to me that anybody outside my [circle of] 40 people would ever even hear the songs. You have to understand the context. Anybody who didn't grow up in Washington D.C. might have a little bit of a hard time understanding what "Guilty Of Being White" is all about. It's a little discouraging to be sort of heralded by Nazi Polish skinheads because they think "Guilty Of Being White" is such a great song, a great anthem for the white man. Knowing those lyrics are being posted on some Aryan Nation web site is discouraging, but life has that aspect to it. It's absurd. I never would have thought it. The same way, I think it's discouraging that there are kids cutting up other people for smoking cigarettes. That's totally ridiculous. If somebody is actually interested in my lyrics, I'm happy to explain what I intended. But I cannot control those lyrics. They're not mine. They're out there….

I've always wondered about Bangs and that "Last of the White N_____s" t-shirt that he wears in the iconic photo-- like, is that something that he wore all the time? And if so, why? If he could go around in that t-shirt in NYC it makes me wonder how different the context was in the 1970s. It almost seems like the fact that Richard Pryor was so famous during that time shifted what was acceptable in some way, maybe.

believe that picture dates from before Lester moved to NYC and I'd guess he wore it occasionally "for effect" (read for a photo session) and I'd further speculate that wearing that shirt in an urban environment would get your ass handed to you, then or now. as per the "white supremacist" article, Bangs' racist hijinks took place in Michigan. Creem's office was in Birmingham, a lily-white defacto segregated suburb. FWIW when I lived in Ann Arbor during the mid/late 70s I was always struck by the brazenly racist attitudes of many suburban Detroiters, akin to Birmingham Ala. and I grew up in Cincinnati Ohiuh, not exactly tolerance central by any means. there's a suburban Detroit tradition of making virulent racist joeks and countering any objections w/what you don't have a sense of humor? always thought Eminem's homophobia played into that, but hey that's another thread.

sorry for digression - carry on

my (white leftist) boss at the record store in 1979 wanted to ban Richard Pryor for his use of the 'n' word.

"He's a racist!"

"Uh but he's black - it's different."

can't remember who bought Pryor albums.

lol yeah i accept responsibility to the extent that i can, i.e., not at all

It's a little discouraging to be sort of heralded by Nazi Polish skinheads because they think "Guilty Of Being White" is such a great song, a great anthem for the white man.

"a little discouraging" wtf

Neither of those quotes is an apology, let alone an unqualified apology.

When your shit inspires racism and violence and that was not your intention, you need to baldly state "I am sorry that I wrote some things that inspired racism and violence" and not equivocate about how if you were just from his neighborhood you'd UNDERSTAND, or that you never realized that anyone outside of 40 people would ever hear them when you put them on an album that was sold to the general public.

It's perfectly safe for white posters on this thread to say "oh but look at how he's lived his life, he's changed". It's not safe for me. It's NEVER safe for me. That's part of what goes into being a member of a group targeted by racism and something that I don't feel some of you really understand.

Slayer: two Latinos and a Jew (Kerry King). Granted, the other guy is about as Aryan as you can get and is obsessed with Nazi imagery, but what are you gonna do.

not be obsessed with nazi imagery

ha

fwiw, a lot of americans of latino and/or hispanic heritage are emphatic about the fact that they aren't white, aren't anglo.

Very true, and Cubans of a certain generation are obsessed with whiteness: they're white, while Latin and most South Americans (i.e. those not from Uruguay, Chile, or Argentina) are "Indian." Lots of racism implied here, of course.

fwiw Slayer dude's dad was in WWII and had that shit all around the house so ¯\(°_O)/¯

Punk/metal bands obsessed with Nazi imagery shocker!

I think what Bangs represents - and to an extent Smith (Patti) as well - is that shift from '60s Civil Rights idealism to '70s cynicism, if not outright nihilism. I imagine a lot of these folks actually believed racism would end in the '60s, and then when it didn't and in fact only got further entrenched, it made strong supporters of the Civil Rights movement even more cynical and nihilistic (I'm shocked Dylan toured in white face, not black face* ... or maybe not). By the '80s we'd reached what I'd consider a sort of detente, with plenty of idealism and cynicism in equal measure, which may be why there currently seems to be little rhyme or reason behind when or why the n-word is evoked (explicit racism aside). It's like n-word entropy.

*See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLShxXgIK5w

There's an interesting parallel thread of discourse to this thread about the use of racially-charged imagery, why it happens and how that affects your audience. I avoided Siouxsie & the Banshees like the plague because of the pictures floating around of her in her early days wearing swastikas. Several years later (circa 1987), I got into them via Peepshow and Tinderbox but still refused to go back into their back catalog (aside from Hyaena, lol Cure fanboy), mostly because of the swastika thing and what I thought I'd find there. I didn't know anything about their musical career or how frankly awesome it was until after ILX was in full swing, maybe circa 2001...? And it was primarily because she was running around wearing a swastika.

Said something nasty about Jews in one of her early songs too, I think?

But ... but ... Siouxsie was a Sioux!

I mean, Siouxsie swastika was UNDENIABLY race-baiting as punk nihilism in its purest form.

doesn't rip it up and start again touch on that? it was basically brit punks saying fuck off to the wwii generation.

the please kill me book has a couple people trying to explain that too. not very well, iirc.

http://babellist.xnet2.com/9606/msg00578.html

ha, googling for "day glo swastika" brought up something useful!

Please Kill Yourself

A new oral history captures the Punk power of negation

by Al Giordano
Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement, June 27, 1996

Please Kill Me: The uncensored oral history of Punk
by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Grove Press, 456 pages, $2

The mission, of course, was to do just that. Oversocialized
leftists have long argued against negation as a tool to change the
world: "Sure, you're disrupting things," they say, "but what's your
program?" The punk program *was* disruption. Punk codified the art
of "not-niceness." Artist Arturo Vega painted day-glo swastikas that
decorated the Ramones' apartment. He considered the paintings, "a
closet Nazi detector," exposing those who most loudly objected as
repressing their own authoritarian tendencies ("I always thought that
to conquer evil," he says, "you have to make love to it").

The Siouxsie swastika thing was strongly contextual though - there was a generation of ppl in the UK who'd either fought against the nazis or been bombed by the luftwaffe, and in '76-77 this generation was still culturally/politically powerful, wearing a swastika like that was undoubtedly a way of REALLY getting the attention & getting up the right up noses of uncool older britishes folk.

There's kind of a blatant blind spot in your head if you don't notice that your fuck off to the WWII generation is also a fuck off to every non-white, Jewish and gay person around you, plus it shows a very strong social privilege that the people doing it probably weren't even aware of.

Well, yes, I'm not arguing with that, but I don't think any of the brit class of '77 were sophisticated enough to even think of issues like that.

I mean, basically it's on the level of a schoolkid drawing a swastika on his/her classrom desk to piss off teacher.

There's kind of a blatant blind spot in your head if you don't notice that your fuck off to the WWII generation is also a fuck off to every non-white, Jewish and gay person around you

the point being that punks in the 70s didn't really give a fuck who they were offending. this is long before "punk" meant goody-goody Fugazi $7 all-ages shows.

also, Pash 100% otm, that's exactly what it was

"no, they're the GOOD swastikas"

This is some hot button shit, for sure, but calling Ian MacKaye a worthless piece of shit is fucking wrong and crazy.

As a native DC-er myself, I attended packed Fugazi benefit shows for the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Community for Creative Nonviolence, DC Battered Women's Shelter, Washington Free Clinic, and several other worthy causes. They only ever played benefit shows in Washington, D.C.

As for "when I was growing up, most of his fans that I met were racists", we had very different experiences. His bands and his fans turned me on to volunteering & activism.

"Guilty of Being White" is definitely deeply misguided and offensive. The guy's lyrics have gone all over the place over the years, from the comically pose-y "I don't like parties / they avoid the truth" GRRRRisms of the Embrace album, to the mind-blowing-as-a-kid-and-still-pretty-incredible-actually feminsim of Fugazi's "Suggestion." I suppose he could probably apologize for his teenaged myopia, but he seems to just not be that type of artist - in all those later-years quotes, he seems sort of dumbfounded by it all.

Either way, "worthless piece of shit" is nuts.

There's kind of a blatant blind spot in your head if you don't notice that your fuck off to the WWII generation is also a fuck off to every non-white, Jewish and gay person around you

the added wrinkle is that punks were (or "came out of") the part of the culture that was, if not exactly non-white, the most jewish, the gayest. "bohemia" e.g. sort of.

There are plenty of people who support good causes who are worthless pieces of shit. Ian MacKaye is one of them. Good on him for doing some good in this world, now take some responsibility for being a hate-inspiring prick.

now "he needs to" take, if that wasn't clear

yeah, the politics of purity kinda run in some bad directions pretty quickly

I thought punks loved old grandad and it was hippie shit they didn't like.

No arguing with Hi Dere, he has made up his mind.

He has taken responsibility is what I mean.

He being Ian M.

Just curious in a stupid way, the Nazis co-opted the swastika, is it now unreco-optable?

In the UK, they didn't like old grandad OR hippie shit. or disco, IIRC.

^ guilty of being Michael White
xpost

yeah the punks distaste for disco sorta cancels out that 'gayest' subculture thing tho some gays did find a safe haven in punk

you mean this old grandad?

http://www.sunband-designs.com/AVB/Drinks/Bourbon/Old%20Grand-dad%20100.jpg

http://www.sunband-designs.com/AVB/Drinks/Bourbon/Old%20Grand-dad%20100.jpg

i think the 77 swastika thing is more complicated than just pissing people off - it's self-identifying as loathsome, disgusting, and a dead end
also worth noting that it's identifying with the world's biggest LOSERS of the world's biggest war

which is all part of the childish fuck you, dad stuff too i guess

Just curious in a stupid way, the Nazis co-opted the swastika, is it now unreco-optable?

― I suck as an individual not because I'm a (Michael White), Wednesday, June 23, 2010 10:25 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

imo for western cultures, yes. for non-western cultures, hard to say. there was this fracas that happened in 2004:

Hong Kong - German and Israeli diplomats have lashed out at a Hong Kong fashion company for using swastikas and other Nazi party symbols in a clothing line and to decorate its chain of stores.

a lot of buddhist schools and associations in Asia still use the left-facing swastika prominently, and there's also the Red Swastika Society, which I believe is still in existence today.

Man, you've got a pretty crazy definition of "worthless piece of shit."

Just curious in a stupid way, the Nazis co-opted the swastika, is it now unreco-optable?

― I suck as an individual not because I'm a (Michael White), Wednesday, June 23, 2010 10:25 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Pretty much. You'd have to have a HUGE campaign to disassociate the two things in the minds of the general public, plus regardless of intentions it would certainly meet with gnashing of teeth from ADL and the like.

holy shit that ian mackaye rant at the drunk girl is o_O

that it's identifying with the world's biggest LOSERS of the world's biggest war

i don't really think this is what they were going for

you see now why i didnt want to misquote it because if i did it would probably be some pretty nasty libel...

fat white pop culture dorks social response plan:
1. ask ian mackaye for a formal apology

that it's identifying with the world's biggest LOSERS of the world's biggest war

i don't really think this is what they were going for

really?

Really. They seemed to be going for an evocation of pre-war Nazi perversity (a la Cabaret) rather than bombed-out & starved Germany circa 1945.

Good job assuming that the people on this thread being most critical/unforgiving of Ian MacKaye are white, LOLK; what other scintillating pieces of 100% bullshit do you have in store for us?

Becky: I don't know anything about you and can't make any assumptions about you or your background. Understand that as a black kid growing up in a relatively rural part of the Twin Cities area, Minor Threat exposure carried with it a certain set of ugly baggage that I refuse to ignore. I acknowledge that context can change meaning; my argument is that MacKaye has clearly seen how taking his stuff out of (IMO a barely if at all defensible) context has resulted in some ugly shit that I believe deserves a stronger repudiation than anything he has done, especially given his standing. The fact that he is the type of artist who refuses to do such a thing is what makes me say he is a worthless piece of shit. Not to be all Spiderman or anything but with any measure of power (which he undeniably has wielded throughout his career; every successful person gains power and influence and their words and actions have larger consequences the more successful and powerful they become) comes an equal measure of responsibility. He's done good things in the intervening years but his entire oeuvre ties into his power and influence and I don't think "people just didn't understand" is an adequate-enough acknowledgment of responsibility given how powerful he is.

You could say punk was largely about the abdication of responsibility; fortunately, life is not.

Holy shit, I just listened to Ian MacKaye's comments to and about the drunk woman.

how far into that bootleg is it?

I cannot wait to listen to Ian MacKaye's comments about the drunk woman.

hi dere: sorry to offend, i was just making a tongue-in-cheek reference to res's comment and the mackaye discussion in the thread

oh hey, kkvgz, i don't know if you know this but I have been known to review like 1,000 records a year and can't be jerking around all day listening to hissy Minor Threat bootlegs so I can see what the fuck everyone is talking about.

xxxpost 10 minutes in

xpost It begins at about 10:20 in "Minor Threat Live1".

oh hey, kkvgz, i don't know if you know this but I have been known to review like 1,000 records a year and can't be jerking around all day listening to hissy Minor Threat bootlegs so I can see what the fuck everyone is talking about.

― ripecock (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, June 23, 2010 11:42 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

What in the name of god are you fuming about, Whiney?

sorry LOLK, I should have seen what you were going and reined in my MacKaye-fueled unreasonableness

what is this yelling at a drunk woman bootleg y'all are talking about?

my ctrl-f is weak

x-post Basically he spots a drunk girl and his first thought is "Why don't we all gang rape her?"

i'm not asking for a narration of it, President Keyes

wow this thread is not going well for ian mackaye

Search for "chunklet".

Man, fuck Ian McKaye.

http://chunklet.com/index.cfm?section=blogs&ID=559 jamieatp posted it earlier

i'm not asking for a narration of it, President Keyes

That was an x-post to Whiney, not you.

xposting is causing anger today

thankig u

that is an xpost to myself

Don't worry though, if the girl actually had been gang raped during or after the show, Ian would have expressed half-assed regret over his word-choice 30 years later, but stood by what he said given its context.

I haven't listened to it yet so I don't know if the "obviously the comment comes across completely differently if you grew up in DC" joke I want to make would make sense.

Well, you know, in the DC public schools they spent way too much time talking about women and rape and all those Queens.

the point being that punks in the 70s didn't really give a fuck who they were offending.

I kinda talked about this way upthread: there is nobody on earth who has ever not given a fuck who they were offending, or offended everyone equally. There is always someone you are leaving out and privileging because their identity is not really offendable. So when you reach for racial slurs or swastikas or sexism as ways of being cretinous, misanthropic, and antisocial, or just conveying that you don't give a shit, you absolutely give a fuck who you are offending, because you are reaching directly for the most potent offenses against people who aren't like you and whom you're cutting out of your area. You're creating a boundary line of who's "inside" and who's "outside" the offense, and you're specifically announcing who you're fine with being outside.

Growing up in DC, "gang rape" was slang for helping out in soup kitchens.

...Okay, fine, you're on your own from here on out, MacKaye.

I mean, even if you take punk's WWII stuff as saying "fuck you, dad" -- that is drawing a line between you and "dad," right? But that kind of shit draws an even huger line for lots of people in ways that are way more fucked up than intergenerational/manner-based line-drawing. You're always drawing a line, there's no such thing as "we're cruel to everyone."

Christ, I don't know - this is some complicated shit. "Suggestion" is a song that meant a lot to me; nobody in punk wrote lyrics like that at that time and played them to those types of crowds. But hearing him on that Minor Threat tape is really awful. It's all very difficult to reconcile.

Oh, and Hi Dere - I definitely appreciate where you're coming from, and I think ultimately my problem is literally just with the term "worthless piece of shit," which my bleeding heart finds unpalatable re: any human being.

piece of shit is worth $7

I can respect that; "worthless piece of shit" is intentional hyperbole (although, paradoxically, I do wholeheartedly mean it; life is difficult to reconcile!) I recognize that MacKaye's actions at the beginning of his career are the sum totality of his career. However, I do think they taint the rest of his career and, for me anyway, they will continue to do so unless he makes a stronger statement about them than he has to date.

lol Shakey