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

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)