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Acts Who Could Be Cancelled for Racially Dodgy Lyrics or Videos

Started by Satchmo Distel, June 18, 2020, 12:30:52 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Sin Agog

Quote from: Sin Agog on June 20, 2020, 11:49:57 AM
If you give me your address I'll happily stand outside your door and yell 'The Clash are cultural appropriators' up at you just so you can experience a new thing.

Naw, I'm good, thanks.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

Erm....does anyone else find those last few  posts a bit unnerving?

SteveDave

Fake Mexican Tourist Blues by Kevin Ayers complete with "Hey meester! Would you like my seester?" Mexican accent

Sin Agog


Sin Agog


famethrowa

The only thing I'm learning from all this is that some people can get away with it, and some can't.

Is there an example of someone who's sins are comparable to Bowie/Page/Iggy etc and has been cancelled and paid the penalty? A famous person, I mean.

Sin Agog

I always thought the worst example of this they love their simple poverty they do 'tude was Dylan's Mozambique.  Not even close to cancel bad, but there were quite a few scions of rich white families back then writing tunes about the simple, happy coloured folk.

Brundle-Fly

Quote from: Sin Agog on June 20, 2020, 11:47:05 AM
It's called context, mate.  Also the title of that Mike Read song might have had something to do with its iffy reception.  It was called 'The UKIP Calypso.'

I can't believe I'm defending my husband Mike Read and his rotten song, but his main musical intent was to pastiche Lance Percival's comical calypso numbers that were a regular item on the 1960s satirical comedy show, That Was The Week That Was rather than a direct piss-take of Trinidadian music per se.

Early white reggae 1965, Lance Percival - Shame & Scandal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNUHRZpWaVU&list=RDGNUHRZpWaVU&start_radio=1

daf

Quote from: famethrowa on June 20, 2020, 12:06:28 PM
Is there an example of someone who's sins are comparable to Bowie/Page/Iggy etc and has been cancelled and paid the penalty? A famous person, I mean.

Rolf Harris?

Brundle-Fly

Quote from: famethrowa on June 20, 2020, 12:06:28 PM
The only thing I'm learning from all this is that some people can get away with it, and some can't.

Is there an example of someone who's sins are comparable to Bowie/Page/Iggy etc and has been cancelled and paid the penalty? A famous person, I mean.

Jimmy's mate, Roy Harper pretty much got cancelled even though he was exonerated.

Cultural appropriation would be not acknowledging or respecting your source, I'd have thought, which is not true of The Clash (The Police maybe, but even they acknowledged that they got the beat from Jamaican music).

Macca is probably innocent in that he clearly thought he was honouring his mate's culture but the execution is naff, as you'd expect when Macca tries to take something from another (non-American) idiom into his thumbs aloft musical universe.

kngen

I think cultural appropriation in terms of music is a bit of a fruitless analysis given the endless cross-pollination that has taken place over the centuries. But if people insist on such reductivism, then I tend to counter that it only really carries weight if you view it through the prism of class. I think it was Chapo that put forward the example of a Marxist analysis of cultural appropriation being along the lines of: Elvis - good; Colonel Tom Parker - bad. I think most people could live with that, and I think most people's bullshit detectors are fine tuned enough to, at the very least, roll their eyes when they see/hear some trust fund wanker pretending to be Bunny Wailer. Bob Marley had a good old laugh at The Clash's expense when they played him their version of Police and Thieves, after all.

However, as much as I enjoy the music of the Police, I fucking wince when I hear Sting sing 'walkin' on de moon'. But, then, he's a prick, isn't he?

Jake Thingray

Quote from: daf on June 19, 2020, 06:05:15 PM
Peter Wyngarde - Rape *



Unbelievably, this was released as a single!



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* (don't worry, it's also tremendously racist!)

The silly person who claims she was Wyngarde's "soulmate", that they were "just like an old married couple" and that they would have married in hospital if he hadn't died aged ninety, is a former BNP member, so it all makes sense.

iamcoop

Quote from: famethrowa on June 20, 2020, 12:06:28 PM
The only thing I'm learning from all this is that some people can get away with it, and some can't.

Steven Tyler dated a 14 year old who subsequently ended up having an abortion and he was a a fucking judge on American Idol only a few years back.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Elvis first 'got together' with Priscilla when she was fourteen. He was 24. But that's apparently okay because Elvis is sexy and cool.

Elvis wasn't racist, though, even Chuck D admits he was wrong to accuse him of that*. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

* Although Chuck D quite rightly maintains that, while Elvis himself wasn't racist, a good-looking white man selling black music to white people is a blatant example of cultural appropriation. That wasn't Elvis' intention, he genuinely loved blues, soul and gospel, but there's no getting around the fact that Elvis received far more exposure than the black artists he was influenced by.

Then again, as kngen mentioned earlier, Elvis being a poor white kid who was raised alongside his local black community in the Deep South renders him more palatable than a white person who just decides one day to have a bash at the old blues and gospel lark. Is that inverse snobbery? Hypocritical? Probably.
 

kngen

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on June 20, 2020, 10:21:45 PM


Then again, as kngen mentioned earlier, Elvis being a poor white kid who was raised alongside his local black community in the Deep South renders him more palatable than a white person who just decides one day to have a bash at the old blues and gospel lark.


Or Pat Boone, as he's best known.

I think those that accuse Elvis of cultural appropriation are correct to a certain extent (it's very hard to disagree with the description that you ascribe to Chuck D, BofBB), but when you compare him to Boone, the only artist at the time he sold more records than, he's pretty much a Trojan horse for black culture to enter the mainstream (again). Boone was exactly the opposite. No one went to the 'rough end of town' to a juke joint to dance to music they couldn't hear anywhere else because of Pat cunting Boone. Cultural exchange should always be celebrated, and I'm always deeply suspicious of those who seek to represent it as appropriation. Yes, there is a power imbalance in that exchange, but I'd like to think opening those avenues of communication can redress that more effectively than closing them off.

non capisco

The Elvis problem is structural racism rather than individual racism, I guess. Him and his white record label execs and backers making all the money "introducing" rock 'n' roll to a white audience, getting rich off covering and repurposing songs like 'Hound Dog' and successfully making them part of a white cultural narrative. It's the same thing as with Pat Boone, who just happens to be less charismatic and more diluted than Elvis and thus easier to criticize. Elvis Presley himself may not have been a racist but he was certainly an incredibly successful vessel for a bunch of rich white guys to make a fuckload of money ripping off black culture in the segregated USA.

evilcommiedictator

I like this naivety that only some rock stars have had sex with underage girls. Surely all of them have in a dance as old as time?

non capisco

Nah, that "they were all at it, it was a different time!" argument just helps let off the ones that definitely were.

kngen

Quote from: non capisco on June 20, 2020, 11:31:59 PM
The Elvis problem is structural racism rather than individual racism, I guess. Him and his white record label execs and backers making all the money "introducing" rock 'n' roll to a white audience, getting rich off covering and repurposing songs like 'Hound Dog' and successfully making them part of a white cultural narrative. It's the same thing as with Pat Boone, who just happens to be more less charismatic and more diluted than Elvis and thus easier to criticize. Elvis Presley himself may not have been a racist but he was certainly an incredibly successful vessel for a bunch of rich white guys to make a fuckload of money ripping off black culture in the segregated USA.

Again, I agree to a certain extent. But there was a reason that Elvis was seen as a threat to the social fabric, and Boone wasn't.


This article isn't perfect, by any means (whitey wrote it for a start), but it does at least get beyond the usual binary arguments regarding Elvis and black musicians that have calcified over the years: https://theconversation.com/champion-or-copycat-elvis-presleys-ambiguous-relationship-with-black-america-82293

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: evilcommiedictator on June 20, 2020, 11:39:53 PM
I like this naivety that only some rock stars have had sex with underage girls. Surely all of them have in a dance as old as time?

A lot of them were for sure, and because at least some of those girls were complicit and wanted to shag a rock star knowing full well what they were doing (at least according to numerous docs and interviews with ex groupies), a lot of them will "get away" with it.

But I agree with non capisco - there's NO way every single one of them was at it.  Besides, some of those rock stars are bound to have had kinks the other way - MILFs and GILFs etc...

Wasn't it one of the Monkees that used the young girl fanbase to get to the mums?

daf

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on June 21, 2020, 02:21:37 PM
Wasn't it one of the Monkees that used the young girl fanbase to get to the mums?

Or the other way round, possibly?


Shit Good Nose

I may be conflating that very story with another singer/musician at the time who went for his fans' mums.  Can't remember where I've seen/heard/read it, but I'm 99.99recurring% sure about it.

Petey Pate

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on June 20, 2020, 10:21:45 PMElvis wasn't racist, though, even Chuck D admits he was wrong to accuse him of that*. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

Speaking of Chuck D, the lines 'crucifixion ain't no fiction' and 'so called chosen frozen' in Welcome To The Terrordome make me wince a bit. It's the closest any of PE's lyrics got to Professor Griff's vile antisemitism.

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: Sin Agog on June 18, 2020, 04:16:42 PM
Lou Reed's voice is so achingly irony-drenched it's hard to actually listen to this song and not get the point, but put the lyrics in a separate room, deprive them of food and water for twelve hours as you and your partner give them a thorough going over, and they'll fold like cards:

I wanna be black, have natural rhythm
Shoot twenty foot of jism too
And fuck up the jews

I wanna be black, I wanna be a Panther
Have a girlfriend named Samantha
And have a stable of foxy whores
Oh oh, I wanna be black

I don't wanna be a fucked up
Middle class college student anymore
I just wanna have a stable of
Foxy little whores

Yeah yeah, I wanna be black
Oh, I wanna be black
Yeah yeah, I wanna be black

I wanna be black, wanna be like Martin Luther King
And get myself shot in the spring
And lead a whole generation, too
And fuck up the jews (fuck up the jews)

I wanna be black, I wanna be like Malcolm X
And cast a hex
Over President Kennedy's tomb
And have a big prick too (have a big prick too)

Wow, that's real?  Even if you put the dodgy content aside, that's utter drivel!

Brundle-Fly

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on June 21, 2020, 02:21:37 PM
Besides, some of those rock stars are bound to have had kinks the other way..

Talking of 'Kinks' (Happy 76th today Ray Davies), Ray Davies was married during the band's heyday and said he completely missed out on the Swingin' Sixties. A bit like Charlie Watts, apparently. Wasn't he a saint until the eighties when he discovered heavy drinking and skag?

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Brundle-Fly on June 21, 2020, 05:03:31 PM
Talking of 'Kinks' (Happy 76th today Ray Davies), Ray Davies was married during the band's heyday and said he completely missed out on the Swingin' Sixties. A bit like Charlie Watts, apparently. Wasn't he a saint until the eighties when he discovered heavy drinking and skag?

Similarly Jethro Tull's first (and John Bonham's favourite) drummer Clive Bunker, who left the band and quit the music industry, just as they hit massive, to start a family.  It was 5 or 6 years before he returned, and even then only as a session drummer.

There's also some uncertainty about how much Frank Zappa played around - his onstage antics and persona in the 60s and 70s suggested he was shagging groupies left right and centre, and he was certainly surrounded by them and "talked the talk", BUT more than several mothers (including, notably, Chester Thompson, who was one of the more straight-laced members of the band) have always said that whilst they'd all go off and party after gigs, he'd go straight back to his hotel room (or his house in LA if they were playing locally) and practice guitar and compose.

Pauline Walnuts

He'd be a lot more #cancelled for his songs, Thing-Fish, Nig Biz, the homophobia of Bobby Brown. There's quite a list. Never mind all the "So Called" sexist stuff.

It's only because he's been forgotten since he died that he gets away with it.

I'm not quite sure why I put the " around so called.


kngen

He was always pretty socially conservative and, even by his own admission, would have been more vocally supportive of the Republicans if they weren't in thrall to the evangelical lobby. I think his sexism, homophobia, casual racism and generally snide attitudes to progressive politics (and his lifelong criticism of drug use) are pretty unsurprising when you look at who he targeted on We're Only In It For The Money. There is still quite a surprising amount of people that think he's some kind of freak-scene flower power ambassador (albeit a wryly witty one), when he laid it all out there in 1968. He fucking hated hippies, probably even more than he hated 'the man'.

So it wouldn't surprise me if he was tucked up in bed while the rest of the Mothers were doing unspeakable things with jars of groupie shite.



Shit Good Nose

I don't think he can be criticised for being racist at all, and stuff like Thing Fish and Nig Biz is all satirical and is obviously an attack on the people who hold those views (ditto Bobby Brown, although I'll acknowledge it's a fucking dreadful song).  I mean a huge chunk of Thing Fish was co-written by Ike Willis for fuck's sake (in fact ORSICR, terrible though it is, I suggest you have another listen to Thing Fish and pay close attention to the lyrics), and also holding the mirror up to the entertainment industry.  Also note that Zappa had black and minority and female musicians in his bands since 1967.  That being the case, I think his "sexism" was coming from the same angle as well.  Certainly Ruth Underwood (who was a Mother on and off from 1967 to 1977) thought so.