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

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.