What is Black Flag's "White Minority" About?

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What is this song about? I'm pretty sure Black Flag's not a racist group, so what is this about "white pride" in the lyrics?

lyrics:
We’re gonna be a white minority
We won’t listen to the majority
We’re gonna feel inferiority
We’re gonna be white minority

White pride
You’re an american
I’m gonna hide
Anywhere I can

Gonna be a white minority
We don’t believe there’s a possibility
Well you just wait and see
We’re gonna be white minority

Gonna be a white minority
There’s gonna be large cavity
Within my new territory
We’re all gonna die

― Mervin Heinz, Friday, 3 June 2005 02:15 (twenty years ago)

Look, you gotta understand that back in the day these guy were beer swilling bigots. Theit fans harrassed immigrants and new wavers alike. Remember "Black Flag Kills [Adam] Ants on Contact'? Who do you think the DK wrote "Nazi punks fuck off" about? Their ilk.

― Orbit (Orbit), Friday, 3 June 2005 02:19 (twenty years ago)

first guy who sang it was a jew, though.

― el sabor de gene (yournullfame), Friday, 3 June 2005 02:21 (twenty years ago)

I'm guessing that they were attempting to take the first step toward making the subculture of punk into a legal minority with the rights that come with such status. You know, affirmative action for mohawks and stuff.

― Mr Deeds (Mr Deeds), Friday, 3 June 2005 02:24 (twenty years ago)

t/s "white minority" vs. "guilty of being white"

― el sabor de gene (yournullfame), Friday, 3 June 2005 02:29 (twenty years ago)

TS: Beer swilling asshole vs. Wally George (no, wait)

― Orbit (Orbit), Friday, 3 June 2005 02:30 (twenty years ago)

back in the day these guy were beer swilling bigots

Really? Somehow Black Flag always seemed to me like one of the few early punk bands promoting some sort of "social consciousness"-- albeit of a variety that's hard to take seriously.

― Mervin Heinz, Friday, 3 June 2005 02:39 (twenty years ago)

I assumed they were being facetious. Lots of talk at the time in California, L.A. in particular, about white minority, lots of racist reaction. "We're all gonna die"--sounds like irony to me...

― These Robust Cookies (Robust Cookies), Friday, 3 June 2005 03:08 (twenty years ago)

I was there, a teenager at the time in LA, and if the band wasn't like that, their fans certainly WERE

― Orbit (Orbit), Friday, 3 June 2005 03:10 (twenty years ago)

Somehow Black Flag always seemed to me like one of the few early punk bands promoting some sort of "social consciousness"

Black Flag and social consciousness v.s. The Damned was the last important band.

go go go

― Cunga (Cunga), Friday, 3 June 2005 03:10 (twenty years ago)

I was there, a teenager at the time in LA, and if the band wasn't like that, their fans certainly WERE

I have some relatives that supposedly engaged in behavior like that as well. What was the story?

― Cunga (Cunga), Friday, 3 June 2005 03:11 (twenty years ago)

They were related to YOU

― Orbit (Orbit), Friday, 3 June 2005 03:13 (twenty years ago)

Did they really have "no values"? Who'd want to listen to music by a bunch of guys with no values?

― Matt Matt Matt, Friday, 3 June 2005 03:54 (twenty years ago)

i would!!!

― el sabor de gene (yournullfame), Friday, 3 June 2005 04:03 (twenty years ago)

black flag also used to hold these parties where everyone would just watch television. i think they wrote a song about it too

also i think chavo was being serious when he sang that he would be "white minority", despite being puerto rican.

????

― Amon (eman), Friday, 3 June 2005 04:36 (twenty years ago)

So, not the first or last time ironic art was misinterpreted by a thick audience. But if you're interested in what it's "about" I guess you'd want to look at late 70s-early 80s discourse about changing demographics in L.A.

― These Robust Cookies (Robust Cookies), Friday, 3 June 2005 04:51 (twenty years ago)

Not to mention Kira's giant weiner!

― Matt Matt Matt, Friday, 3 June 2005 04:52 (twenty years ago)

uh...it's pretty obvious the song's ironic.

― latebloomer: Pain Don't Hurt (latebloomer), Friday, 3 June 2005 04:59 (twenty years ago)

Theit fans harrassed immigrants and new wavers alike.

a lot of their fans may have, but in interviews various members have clearly said that they didnt endorse the violence that sometimes erupted at their shows. they just weren't going to tell people what to do or how to think.

― latebloomer: Pain Don't Hurt (latebloomer), Friday, 3 June 2005 05:06 (twenty years ago)

"uh...it's pretty obvious the song's ironic."

IT'S LIKE RA-EE-AIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY...

Yes, sir - you are CORRECT!

― Matt Matt Matt, Friday, 3 June 2005 06:21 (twenty years ago)

Maybe worth mentioning that X's song "Los Angeles" from right around the same time also invoked the fear/anxiety that BF are parodying in "White Minority". The character in the song is repelled by LA's heterogeneity (Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, "and the homosexuals and the idle rich"...)

― These Robust Cookies (Robust Cookies), Friday, 3 June 2005 06:41 (twenty years ago)

Greil Marcus's attack on this song was stupid: It's basically a "Who's 'we,' paleface?" joke given a great riff, which I'm sure the Puerto Rican singer and black producer understood very well. Did Ginn literally think white people were all going to die? Maybe he thought some of the white punks wrecking local minority community centers (where shows were sometimes held) deserved a good beatdown, but...

Oh, and don't blame a band for its audience. Clash fans threw cups at Grandmaster Flash, too...

― Pete Scholtes, Friday, 3 June 2005 16:17 (twenty years ago)

uh...it's pretty obvious the song's ironic.

Not to some of the bonehead fans it wasn't, sadly. "Six Pack" was ironic as well, but that point was vastly lost on several friends of mine in school. "Dude, you've got it all wrong, Black Flag are a Party band, man! Cheer up, son!"

People are stupid.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Friday, 3 June 2005 16:22 (twenty years ago)

Black Flag != Skrewdriver.

― Ian John50n (orion), Friday, 3 June 2005 16:24 (twenty years ago)

"Wasted" was probably approved by Ginn as ironic-seeming, but its singer didn't mean it that way.

― Pete Scholtes, Friday, 3 June 2005 16:49 (twenty years ago)

i always thought it was about wanting to be seperate from the stupid white majority. "I'm gonna hide" meaning they wanted to get as as far away as possible from the white pride american idjits. so, you know, they would have there own white minority of people who hated the majority. "they" being punks.

― scott seward (scott seward), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

I remember reading Angelo Moore from Fishbone somewhere telling some story about when they did shows with Black Flag and Black Flag's fans flipped out and got all boo-y and violent and shit. haha.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:16 (twenty years ago)

with good reason!!!!!!!!

― gygax! (gygax!), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:28 (twenty years ago)

the white negro thing was already plenty played out by the time black flag got to it though. still, catchy tune! i was gonna play jealous again right before i saw this thread!

― scott seward (scott seward), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:33 (twenty years ago)

Black Flag interpretation is kind problematized by the fact that at least one of them was demonstrably not dumb. That messes everything up. Still, I take this song as coming from the same place -- neither really ironic nor really earnest -- as a lot of band's songs, dumb or smart: they identify something that appears to be an issue (teenage suicide, say, or white-people minority fears) and then write a song that's just a bunch of words about it ("teenage suicide! slit wrists in high school!," say, or "we're gonna be a white minority," etc.). A lot of what people routinely call songs with points or songs with messages or songs that "tackle issues" are really just this sort, these types of Thing-songs, where no particularly great amount of energy has gone into shaping the message that'll be received or the levels of irony and/or earnestness that come though. I mean, if some band had a song called "Wal-Mart" that just repeated the title over and over for two minutes, how much time would you spend trying to figure out what the specific intent was?

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:42 (twenty years ago)

Anyway in this case I think the context leaves it trending toward irony; it sort of can't help it, given how thoroughly hilarious white-minority fears tend to sound when verbalized. California's epidemic Reagan-era panic over this issue is a particularly easy target.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:46 (twenty years ago)

I've heard a number of different people's ideas of what your song "White Minority" is about. What's your explanation of it?
GREG: The idea behind it is to take somebody that thinks in terms of "White Minority" as being afraid of that, and make them look as outrageously stupid as possible. The fact that we had a Puerto Rican (Ron) singing it was what made the sarcasm of it obvious to me. Some people seem to want to take it another way, and somehow think that we'd be so dumb to where a Puerto Rican guy would sing it and it would be--I don't know how they could consider that racist, but people took it that way.
CHUCK: It's one of those things. It's like the flyer for this gig (a naked superman flying through the air with a hard-on). It draws out peoples' existing attitudes. If someone is afraid that they're racist or something, then they're gonna call it racist.
GREG: Or they would like to say, "Oh, Black Flag--racists." It's people that don't like us, basically.
CHUCK: If someone IS racist, they'll use it for an anthem, for a while, but it's so polarized, that if you do it for a little while, it starts to get a little bit ludicrous.
GREG: It throws that attitude out and makes people think. To me, that's what it does. It doesn't preach, but it makes people think.
CHUCK: The fact that there is a controversy means it accomplished its goal.
GREG: It's not a kind of song that has a long term emotional impact or value to us. We don't even play it all the time.
What is your song "No Values" about?
GREG: It's not ABOUT anything. It comes from just feeling like what's in the song, rather than some kind of political thing. It's an emotional concept of a feeling at a certain time.
Would you say that describes most of your songs?
HENRY: Yeah. Our songs are personal. They're not about issues. They're about what's in our heads.
GREG: Yeah. "White Minority" is different than that.

http://www.dementlieu.com/~obik/arc/blackflag/int_ripper6.html

― gygax! (gygax!), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:47 (twenty years ago)

It's basically a "Who's 'we,' paleface?" joke given a great riff, which I'm sure the Puerto Rican singer and black producer understood very well.

not to mention Mexican-American guitarist.

― gygax! (gygax!), Friday, 3 June 2005 17:53 (twenty years ago)

nabisco otm.

― latebloomer: Pain Don't Hurt (latebloomer), Saturday, 4 June 2005 00:25 (twenty years ago)

greg and chuck OTM

― gygax! (gygax!), Saturday, 4 June 2005 14:41 (twenty years ago)

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