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

i think they are just demented. cocorosie. or something. those voices...

i could totally see devendra singing that song too.

your so-called man-made laws and rules just don't apply to them apparently. they are flying thru space.

does that guy playing with them in that clip always play with them or does he just do that song with them so that people don't start throwing shoes at the stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjexB6DHhII

new thread: black musicians playing with white musicians artistically using the n word: a discussion and social history

David Allan Coe attempted to defend his racist songs by pointing out that his drummer was black.

Nabisco on that CVB song is a rare instance of being borderline not OTM. "Negro" is mostly just outmoded, like "colored," or "Afro-American," or whatever. Its negative connotation is mostly retrospective, and Lowery def. understands this. Once we start talking about what a hypothetical first draft of a pretty clearly defined narrative song might have been, we're too far down the rabbit hole on this. At least too far for me.

No one's mentioned The The yet ...

no they got mentioned somewhere in the middle by HI DERE

yeah, Negro does not equal the "n-word"

I thought that's what I just said

that is what you said, i'm just agreeing with you. Sorry I didn't use the acronym "otm" ... i'm also a big CvB fan.

there's a quality of specificity, restraint and intelligence in "all her favorite fruit" that distinguishes it from most of the songs under discussion itt. it's not just "in character" in a general sort of way, it's very careful about the details and resonances of the situation & person it depicts, and it lacks the vitriolic, finger-pointing quality that makes a song like "jesus loves me" tiresome even if we don't find it particularly offensive. in the CVB song, the line about the "negroes" blinking their eyes isn't THE POINT or a big statement of any kind. instead, it's one small observation among many, and if anything, it's undersold. this gentleness makes it much easier to take, and to take seriously. still not sure it was necessary, as it tends to undercut and overshadow the rest of the song, burdening it with a bunch of complications and arguments that seem secondary to the timid character and his lazy fantasy. i dunno though, the song could be said to have a political dimension...

the word that really bugs me in "all her favorite fruit" is "corn". lowery's delivery there almost kills the song for me.

hahaha - i always laugh at the way he sings "corn" - it definitely stands out.

ha, sorry, I meant an earlier post!

I like the corn. but as far as whether the complications here are "secondary," I actually disagree -- I think if there's gonna be a colonial fantasy of luxury and importance, the people it's probably built on aren't remotely secondary at all! (this guy sees them as quaint scenery, but we don't have to)

Yeah, but it still veers pretty far from the specific subject at hand. It's just one of many literary-like period details.

Love the corn, btw.

Yeah, corn is definitely a punchline.

There's Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, who eventually changed their name to the Messengers. And the "coloured girls" of course comes from OMG Lou Reed. But again, that's just a matter of PC/time antiquating one of many terms. "Coloured girls" is, like "negro," primarily offensive because it is no longer favored, though of all the once favored euphemisms I've always thought colored among the most offensive. Like, what am I, not colored? I'm def. a different color from my wife, my kids ... what a stupid world we live in.

Yeah, but it still veers pretty far from the specific subject at hand. It's just one of many literary-like period details.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, June 26, 2010 7:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

now, fruit is ordinary to us, as consumers in the first world, but at the same time extraordinary in terms of what's required to bring it to our supermarket shelves. it comforts us, but rots quickly. note that her breath smells of decay in the first stanza just as the fruit she once spoke of rots in the last. the feed-me-mommy indolence of the narrator is compared to the indolent lifestyles of the (imagined) colonials and also to fruit itself, a luxury product that comforts us and that is even now provided to us by the labor of a desperately poor servant class.

i'm not sure what to make of the song's relationship to all this, because it seems a rather unwieldy burden with which to freight one timid office clerk's traffic jam fantasy. does the song finally indict, as similarly infantile and comfort-seeking, "our songs of life and its fecundity?" that's what i have trouble sorting out.

Yeah, but I meant mainly it's such a complex far-cry from the thread's main target of songs that use the n-word for shock or whatever. This one uses a different N-word, in passing, with its own different baggage, for something much more sensitive and complex. Fitting that the song says so much more than most of the aforementioned shockers. Which I guess places it somewhere between "Sail Away" and "Rednecks?"

Man, y'all are some strange fruit hanging out in here...

enjoy your vacation

okay, as this thread is now basically dead and i've had a few days to mull things over, I wanted to respond more directly to nabisco's big post on race, identity, social power and the ability to mentally reduce the “other” to an abstraction. I've cherry-picked a few statements, not because i think they summarize nabisco's entire line of thought/argumentation, but because they form a clear thread within it, a thread that's directly connected to my initial objections.

...if you strip all those identity things away, one by one, you're eventually left with some kind of societal ideal, where there's no real societal force to saying "you are categorically Less Than." [...]

The point is that the closer you are to this core, the easier it is to think of people's differences from it as abstractions, or shit you don't feel like thinking about. Plus you have the latitude to flex that luxury in a really meaningful way. [...]

Everyone absolutely has the capacity to dehumanize other people. My point, upthread, was that certain types of people who are safer from the power of that stuff -- especially if they're young and haven't thought it through -- have more luxury to see these differences as abstract, or see other people as not being people but being special kinds of people. [...]

So this is why I said that, yeah, OFTEN straight white men (for starters -- add stuff like "Christian" or "able-bodied" or whatever if you feel like it!) have a shitload more leeway and power to start thinking that way and point it out in other directions.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Thursday, June 24, 2010 10:52 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

it might seem self-evident that the ability to think abstractly about those who seem “different from us” is in some way dependent on social empowerment, i.e., dependent on the social position of the “us” with which one identifies relative to the “them” one is thinking about. but i can't see any good reason to assume that this actually is the case. everyone identifies with at least one (and probably with many) socially defined identity groups, and even if the groups with whom we identify are marginalized, they are nonetheless able to manufacture and share abstractions regarding other groups, even much more socially powerful groups. we see this in the abstract and often negative assumptions that many people make about cops, politicians, the wealthy, christians, frat boys, the middle class, white people, and on and on forever. again, i accept that many of these abstractions may be more-or-less “toothless”, due to disparities in social dominance, but they are no less abstract for that. no less easy to conceive and to share.

the example i mentioned earlier in this thread – the relationship between jews and palestinian arabs in israel and israeli-occupied territories – suggests that even vastly disempowered groups retain a profound ability to think of “the other” in simplified, abstracted, dehumanized terms. i have seen no evidence that members of either group are individually less capable of reducing and dehumanizing the other, or that either group is collectively less able to manufacture and promulgate dehumanizing abstract narratives about the other among its own members. this despite a vast disparity of social power between the two.

on the other hand, I do grant that the ability to think in abstact terms may be the product of some specific sort of social autonomy. i say this because it seems reasonable to think that a given group could be so entirely stripped of social power or so small in numbers relative to a dominant monoculture that it would become in some sense “super abstract” to members of more powerful groups, and perhaps even lose its ability to manufacture and promulgate its own counter-narratives. but I don't think that's really the issue in contemporary american society, at least as it relates to the present discussion. as far as I can tell, americans of all races and ethnicities abstract and depersonalize one another almost effortlessly. furthermore, this depersonalization sometimes results in or channels hatred, even violence among all racial and ethnic groups.

does any of this really matter? i dunno...probably not, but I nevertheless wanted to set the record straight, to put my case in (hopefully) unobjectionable language. and speaking of that:

"the tendency to view other people as abstractions, is in no way the special province of straight white guys."

contenderizer, can you see that no one is saying that? nabs and horseshoe have been contending (justly imo) that straight white men (in the united states at least) are just better placed for this. the ability to dehumanize others, to abstract them isn't exclusive to straight white guys at all! it's just open to them more.

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Friday, June 25, 2010 2:50 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark

wonder how my SB total is doing right about now...

Man, y'all are some strange fruit hanging out in here...

― beat boy damager, power 2 the people (Its all about face), Monday, June 28, 2010 2:53 AM (Yesterday)

yeah so some other mod is free to reverse this but im thinking that a lynching joke in this thread equals permaban. see you later dick.

catching up on this massive thread now - MacKaye debate (re: 'Guilty of Being White') reminds me of a similar problem I always have with nietzsche's work and it's re-appropriation by the Nazi's. Fair number of parallels: both (Nietzsche and MacKaye) are held in high esteem by most intellectuals, both made works expressing what in their experience was truth, both were hijacked by unsavory people to fit their needs. If anything, MacKaye looks a little better because he never really expected anyone to care (true, Nietzsche didn't have much readership, but it's hard to deny that he was hoping to influence a lot of people). Interested to see what people on both sides of that MacKaye song/apology think about Nietzsche.

not that like Nietzsche could have apologised or anything, j/w abt life/death or author argument and how that fits in here etc. etc.

what intellectuals are holding ian mackaye in high esteem??!

"guilty of being white" wasnt "hijacked" anyway

thought the same thing, figured mcoll was trying to say that both were held in high esteem, and the "by intellectuals" part just kinda fell in there by mistake

Key difference - 18 year old peeps who take away a surface reading of the Nietzsche moral philosophy are dumb as fuck, 18 year old Ian McKaye was in and of himself dumb as fuck.

It's subtle but when you draw back the curtain

Heh to clarify, I am talking about current day 18 year olds wrt Nietzsche, not historic nazis, who were able to be stupid at any age

tbh if you are an 18-year-old who takes away a surface reading of the Nietzsche moral philosophy you'll probably just go away hating women

or hating nietzche

^ add 1 ess

add 1 (one) clue

18-year-old + surface reading = absence of clues, or are you making a more general point?

pretty much what you said, that 18-year old + surface reading has a clue deficiency.

seconded

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2552/3780867344_7ddea7a694.jpg

Dont call me stupid!

"he never really expected anyone to care"

he just accidentally recorded it, distributed that recording to the world, and played it live at thousands of shows!

i doubt nietzche approached that level of self-promotion

though jack nitzsche on the other hand

thousands of shows

Minor Threat played less than 100 shows in their three-year career, actually. Though they were playing "GoBW" all the way up to the end.

0.1 thousands

Grrrrr...fuckin' Ian MacKaye.

let's just agree on millions of shows and call it a day

Discussing Nietzsche in a college German class led to some amazing lols for me, particularly when the conversation veered towards a discussion of selfishness and altruism and I took the position that no one chooses of their own volition to be altruistic because the emotional reward from volunteerism/helping others makes them selfish acts.

People also didn't like it when I kept telling them that, when talking about the Uebermensch, Nietzsche was talking about us.

first line is a classic philosophy 101 challop.

It was a tense class but oh so worth it when the girl who was doing volunteer programs got super mad because she wouldn't let go of "selfish = bad" in an academic conversation divorced from reality.

found this on a mixtape me and lhgoo made in 1986 where everything seemed permissible
plus th record was a dollar at Caldor
and goo had just won lotto
i think we thought wanna be black and black girls by violent femmes and all that fake tranxgression stuff was funny
we were 22
no excuse
and now that my gf is black i dont get away with anything anymore

John Cale - Wilson Joliet
She was so afraid of everything she said
Since her mother told her why once upon a time
There was no rhyme
Before the clock slammed another door
Of the weary hours we were facing a second hand shylock
Shylocked in, in on us

I saw what it had taken
Playing back that old brigade of mine
Everything was dirty, everything was without rhyme
Everything was dirty, everything was without rhyme
Cause me and nigger marched
Yes, me and nigger blasted our way out
Of here just like yesterday

Yesterday's streets were burnt down into shells
Mothers weep while children sleep
Like ancestors in the ground
The misery of nuns lie together like sons
Who do not have the taste for the battle

We are shuffled like a pack of cards in the dead of night
Like lovers below Bataan, below the senses
Cause the senses smell of tears
While we and nigger marched
Blasted our way out of here
Close the door and let's have some private life

"no one chooses of their own volition to be altruistic because the emotional reward from volunteerism/helping others makes them selfish acts."

I volunteered for some pretty unrewarding stuff -- wouldn't necessarily call it altruistic, but in order to be selfish, they would have had to be rewarding on some level and they weren't.
Do you think the girl was mad for trivializing her drudgery, or making it seem like volunteers were help-junkies addicted to helpahol?

what intellectuals are holding ian mackaye in high esteem??!

all the Continental philosophers are nuts about Repeater

they recognize a fuckin jam when they parse one