It's all well and good to follow one of your musical heroes on Twitter until you get into a tweet spat with him.Andy Partridge was the lead singer-songwriter of the great poppy rock band XTC, and I've enjoyed following him on Twitter because:
A. I feel part of a select group that understands that XTC's genius remains underappreciated in the cold, cruel world of mainstream rock.
B. He comes across as a witty, self-effacing underdog.
C. He's got only about 4,600 Twitter followers and regularly answers fans' questions, so you have an actual opportunity to interact with him online.
This last point is a key element of hanging out in the social media world with people more famous than yourself. Getting a response or retweet from a celebrity (or, even better, to have them follow you — except for Yoko Ono, who follows almost everyone) is the modern equivalent of an autograph, hence all those folks begging Alec Baldwin for a RT.
A few months back, I addressed a geeky-fan Twitter post to the 58-year-old British musician, who tweets under the name @xtcfans (and hasn't recorded with the band since 2000), and he quipped back. So I was feeling warmly toward Mr. Partridge while continuing to play his albums regularly. Then came the Jewish Beatles puns:
"OK, Jewish Beatles=HYME MINE,TWIST AND KVETCH,FOR THE BENEFIT OF MISTER KIKE,MY SON THE DOCTOR ROBERT,MAGICAL MYSTERY TORAH,HELTER SCHMELTER," he tweeted.
Puns are a Twitter staple. But "kike"? "hymie" (misspelled)?
Oh, no, he di'int!
Partridge tweeted more such jokes, ranging from innocuous ("BLUE JAY OYVAY") to noxiously stereotypical ("I NEVER GIVE YOU MY MONEY," "BABY I'M A RICH MAN"). I try not to be hypersensitive, and I'm not on board with our culture's pile-on mentality regarding gaffes, but I've also been imprinted with the notion not to be silent when confronted with derogatory language.
Plus, I didn't want Partridge's music tainted for me by the bad aftertaste of slurs I'd let pass. In theory I like to think that you can separate the art and the artist, but in practical terms that often isn't the case.
For instance, I can't watch Mel Gibson movies anymore. Forget it.
Other celebrities have dug themselves holes on Twitter. Rainn Wilson of "The Office" apologized in February for a since-deleted tweet joking about date rape. Ashton Kutcher took flak for tweeting in support of just-deposed Penn State football coach Joe Paterno as if he were completely unaware of the campus' sex-abuse scandal. Gilbert Gottfried got himself fired from his Aflac voice-over gig after joking on Twitter about the tsunami in Japan.
Part of what vexed me about Partridge is that, as fans are wont to think, I presumed I knew the guy — through his open-hearted songwriting as well as a lengthy, lively interview I conducted with him three years ago. His music and persona reflect someone who's well-meaning, if occasionally clumsy in his delivery.
I decided I ought to confront this issue head-on, so I tweeted: "Oh, crap. One of my favorite musicians, @xtcfans, is making Jew jokes. Sorry, can't see the humor in FOR THE BENEFIT OF MISTER KIKE."
Partridge soon responded: "@MarkCaro Please lighten up and read all my posts below."
Although one tweet referred to "an excuse to pun ourselves into a coma, Jewish Beatles coming soon," this didn't illuminate things much.
I volleyed back that such slurs "reflect poorly," and he replied: "Reflect poorly on what? One is not allowed to use yiddish words in puns?"
I responded that the words in question aren't Yiddish (though Leo Rosten in "The New Joys of Yiddish" writes that the K-word likely was derived from "kikel," Yiddish for "circle," though now is "meant to be contemptuous and to suggest a cheap, low-class, ill-mannered or ugly Jew.")
"I'm not a scoldy person," I wrote, "but it's like using the N-word to make wacky black-people puns."
Partridge returned that his dictionary says the K-word "was used by US born jews to describe immigrant jews, is that bad then? Comparable to N word? Really?"
Me: "Really. N-word grew worse too. Wiki: 'Throughout history, this term has been used as a derogatory word to disparage Jewish people.'"
Another fan also wrote to him: "no one on earth thinks you're a bigot, but yes it really is (comparable to the N-word)."
To someone else who took offense, Partridge responded: "Grow a humour bone, I'm not anti semitic ... " Later he wrote: "This list was compiled by myself and 3 Jewish friends, we all thought it was funny ... you don't." Eventually he sort-of apologized: "Then I'm sorry if you're offended. Moral of the story=never ask Jewish friends for funny Jewish Beatle song puns."
In part, the operative word here is "funny," which presents a high threshold for an awful lot of puns. Is the K-word's sonic similarity to "kite" so hilarious that it justifies tossing the term around casually?
Eventually, Partridge responded to the topic of who can use which words by tweeting, "Yeah, I'm confused." So I decided to try to clear things up.
I tracked him down on the phone in England, and to his credit he wasn't defensive or averse to taking the call.
"I seem to have caused a mini storm, and that wasn't my intention," he said. "My intention was for people to say, 'Hey, that's a funny pun.'"
He said three of his Jewish friends and he have been compiling Jewish Beatles puns for a while, and he's not the one who wrote the more objectionable ones. "I had to ask people what a lot these words were," he said, adding that he didn't realize the words I singled out were offensive. (I got him up to speed on Rev. Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" scandal of the '80s.)
Also, for what it's worth, Partridge's longtime significant other, Erica Wexler, is the half-Jewish daughter of the late screenwriter Norman Wexler ("Serpico,""Saturday Night Fever").
Still, he said he didn't relate to folks who take umbrage at such names. Having proclaimed his religious nonbelief in XTC's 1987 radio hit "Dear God," he said he wouldn't mind "if somebody called me any bad atheist words. If somebody called me a whitey doughboy, no problem."
Well, OK, I said, but "whitey doughboy" wasn't used at the service of folks who killed, injured, enslaved or otherwise discriminated against people on the basis of race or religion. He acknowledged the point.
"I love puns," said the musician who has a real groaner about "Gaddafy Duck" in the XTC song "Merely a Man." "I just do these silly lists to entertain myself if I can't sleep and it's 5 a.m. My mind goes into overdrive finding silly pun things. In that context I grab any word going. There was no intention to offend, and people didn't get the sense of humor where I just like words for the sound of the words."
He acknowledged that such explanations are not built for Twitter.
"(Using) 140 characters or less, it would take me forever to say what I said to you in the last 10 minutes," Partridge said.
It was a fine, open conversation, with both of us looking up word origins online. Ignorance and insensitivity aren't the greatest alibis for fully formed adults, but better those than calculated bigotry. Afterward I gave a spin to XTC's '60s-psychedelia spinoff project the Dukes of Stratosphear and still found the music funny and invigorating, certainly more so than his puns.
The songwriter returned to banter with admirers on Twitter, and a couple of days later someone was sending him such jokey Beatles titles as "Peas Peas Me" and "It's All Too Mulch."
Tweeted Partridge: "LET'S NOT START THE VEGETABLE BEATLES!!! I can't have vegetarians attacking me, it tickles."