"Kill Whitey", Cocorosie, and borrowing the Audi.

This sounds like the worst thing

Though since the title doesn't specifically mention the place you're not to be blamed.

Was trying to remember “the band close to Tune-Yards but not them” and had to search this title to find it.

Tune-Yards never went full racist

Yeah this is some real early vice magazine stuff

tune yards is 1000 times the musician coco rosie are / were

#actually I think this is the main kill whitey thread

CocoRosie member goes to "Kill Whitey" Ironic dance parties and gets called out by brainwashed.com as racist

Please stand corrected 2005 Ned

I realized that, given the amount of time that has passed, treeship’s “real early” judgment is probably correct

my brain still categorizes anything Vice did after releasing a couple books and gaining urban outfitters junk table ubiquity as late era but that was fifteen years ago!

the whole way "irony" was discussed and understood in the 2000s, especially as it relates to williamsburg subcultures, just belongs to history now. burnout trust fund kids with "ironically" edgy opinions, gleefully violating liberal taboos against racism, and all the while posing as the most sophisticated people of all -- because they care the least -- does not exist in the same way. these "hipsters" are like teddy boys or something now.

https://hyperallergic.com/324466/appropriated-images-of-black-people-spark-boycott-of-st-louis-museum/

this is actually the last documented instance of the "aesthetic" in its original form.

these "hipsters" are like teddy boys or something now.

should clarify -- in the sense of being a vanished subculture.

a lot of people who would have been in this scene are, these days, actual reactionaries.

I copyedited an academic book (by an author younger than me) a couple weeks ago that cited an article on hipsters as an entirely historical phenomenon

https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699313498263

yeah i think it's true. and like, the things that fell under "hipsterdom" included way more than this casual nihilism bordering on vague white nationalism stuff. that was just a single branch.

tbf a lot of it had its roots in the sarcastic late-period gen x post-racism bullshit

racism was over! white people can make insanely racist jokes because it’s retro and ironic and not at all because they’re actually racist!

ugh

I'm a bit surprised cocorosie hasn't been 'cancelled' yet but I guess this stuff all happened before that became a common internet thing

xp: now imagine being a Black person saying "you guys are just being racist, not ironic" and having a decade of "oh you just can't take a joke" thrown back at you

tbf a lot of it had its roots in the sarcastic late-period gen x post-racism bullshit

yeah but in williamsburg that stuff got mixed up with this ironic appropriation of blue collar americana. (pbr, trucker hats). it was weird. there are still dozens of bars in williamsburg that have buck hunter games and i think they're leftovers.

today there is a vogue for american workwear, like carhartt and these kinds of brands, but it's very different. it's connected, i think, with renewed interest in socialism--people relating to the working class as workers rather than fetishizing, or aestheticizing, their bigotry. so, you know, this is much preferable.

lol, sure, no fetishization going on there

i didn't say there was no fetishization. but it's not like these carhartt guys with marketing jobs are part of a nascent reactionary movement. there really is a line you can trace from the milieu in which that cocorosie party was thinkable to today's alt-right.

DJP, I’m so sorry

I tried to call this shit out when I heard it, but I’m sure I was complicit in ways that still bother me

vice magazine is the clearest link, obviously. but it's bigger than that. the people at the "kill whitie" parties weren't just naive about racism, or making a joke of it, they were racists.

anyway, enough history lessons

Carhartt has gone up-market via an American "legacy" brand move, no?

I mean I guess that doesn't refute your point, but it's not like people are picking it up at Kmart

yeah but it's like, an instance of workwear, these things associated with blue collar america, becoming popular in brooklyn. but the meaning behind it is, i think, really different than when trucker hats had a moment. that's what i think.

posted this a million times by now, but there is a Carhartt workwear brand that’s the long-running classic, and there’s a brand based in europe that was a licensee of the original brand. I think the latter sells expensive crap in the US now, too

but it's not like these carhartt guys with marketing jobs are part of a nascent reactionary movement.

neither were trucker hat guys!

some were!

I wore a lot of carhartt stuff when I was a teen and my family lived on an acreage. Really useful to throw on the overalls when you were heading out in frigid weather to clear snow or walk the dog

i like carhartt a lot

and a lot of legacy american brands. i love my red wings.

workwear being popular or fashionable isn’t new. that’s happened a handful of times now, last big resurgence was in the early 90s

apparently Carharrt is horseshoe theory fashion: https://www.racked.com/2017/4/17/15226134/carhartt-wip-right-left-america-workwear

also TIL carharrt has a podcast series about record labels

I mean, blue jeans were once workwear and became a fashion thing in the 50s.

I think there is some semiotics at play that connect to when these things become popular though

I'm a bit surprised cocorosie hasn't been 'cancelled' yet but I guess this stuff all happened before that became a common internet thing

Hard to get cancelled when you've been completely forgotten.

I only encountered Cocorosie "irl" once - my witchy treeplanting foreperson was a big fan and would play them in the truck on our long logging-road commutes. Interestingly enough this person was WAY ahead of the curb re: pronoun use and generally avoiding potentially problematic language (this was the summer of 2013 or 2014 so it was a bit early for that!) but was totally unaware of their, uh, baggage. (My guess is they were only familiar with a handful of cuts or a particular album.) I informed them of the "Kill Whitey" stuff, which I remembered quite vividly from the dedicated thread on the subject. Anyway, it was probably enough for them to lose a fan, so that's nice, but I really should have just showed them these lyrics, which are way worse than I recalled.

Hard to get cancelled when you've been completely forgotten.

Their appearance on the Chance album, which was seemingly uncontroversial, really cemented this for me.

today there is a vogue for american workwear, like carhartt and these kinds of brands, but it's very different. it's connected, i think, with renewed interest in socialism--people relating to the working class as workers rather than fetishizing, or aestheticizing, their bigotry. so, you know, this is much preferable.

uh, what? ... honestly I think it's about fashionable educated ppl wanting to look like fashionable educated ppl that don't work a desk job -- in other words, artists and craftspeople. And if you are doing work like carpentry, welding, painting, etc. ... carhartt's are super functional for that kind of work. ... the side loop where you can hold a hammer or drill while standing on a ladder or scaffold -- incredibly convenient.

honestly I think a lot of the type of aesthetic choices we are talking about here are a result of middle and upper middle class white people wanting to reject their family and class backgrounds. Aren't we talking about brooklyn/urban elite types? Mostly people who aren't from the cities where they are living and buying blue collar workwear?

I think I'm glad I didn't live in NYC at the time all of this stuff was going on because it just sounds so incredibly dumb and awful

i think there was relatively dumb and awful stuff going on in the SF Bay at the time ... just maybe less so because .... idk?

i didn't say there was no fetishization. but it's not like these carhartt guys with marketing jobs are part of a nascent reactionary movement. there really is a line you can trace from the milieu in which that cocorosie party was thinkable to today's alt-right.

― treeship., Monday, August 24, 2020 1:54 PM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I used to always complain about the weird crypto-ironist whiteboy fetishization of Lil B, and now...

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/09/24/kyle-based-stickman-takes-felony-plea-deal-in-berkeley-weapons-case

see also

https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=79104

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/19/magazine/boogaloo.html

this person was WAY ahead of the curb

This is an excellent typo!

i strongly doubt that fascist dude is really representative of whiteboy Lil B fans

i hate to say it, but, it is probably the equivalent of using Charles Manson as an example to argue that white male Beatles fans in the late 60s all kinda wanted to start a race war by murdering rich white people.

always comes back to the beatles

the stick guy didn't call himself that btw

it always comes back to the beatles

I cosign Whiney's point but also am going to be over in the corner LMAO at "Thoia Thoing, Maryland"

sorry for unrelated but i have literally "borrowed the Audi" before, from my ex-boyfriend, who is a racist, and i can say from experience it is definitely a bad way to go. if you're borrowing the Audi you should be rethinking your life choices.

tangent tbc

i don't know what that means, though ime Audi drivers tend to drive like douchebags???

like "douchebag in an audi" to the tune of "girlfriend in a coma" ... tangent tbc

I know, I know

it's spaci-ous

There were times when I could have double-parked

literally lol'd when i saw that one of the CocoRosies signed this (i'm pro-letter ftr)

https://musiciansforpalestine.com

For being emblematic of blue collar work, Carhatt is fucking expensive. I don't remember that being the case in the 90s.

They are super durable iirc ... idk, I haven't bought any Carhartts in like 15 years and I don't remember them being that expensive ... but still, think in comparison to a suit?

Feels like even the workwear trend peaked in the distant past, 2012ish.

Workwear as a fashion trend is IMO infinitely preferable to psuedo-early 20c foppery (also a trend that peaked probably a decade ago, but still)

what would you prefer people wore?

I don't know if I'm ready to accept cookies from the musicians for palestine website