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

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