Morrissey really seriously ill?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41qfdHUpexL.jpg

the paul gilroy book might be worth reading, here

what this thread has taught me is that we need a poll to determine which flag is the most racist

lots of flag posts itt

― Knob Dicks (wins), Wednesday, June 25, 2014 12:09 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

Very good

Actually thats not the book I meant - just a sec

I was talking to a queer friend about some of this stuff once. He pointed out that, in his view, songs like "Sweet and Tender Hooligan" and "National Front Disco" are basically really about rough trade, which I'd probably been naive to really miss. I'd been inclined towards a more charitable interpretation of "NF Disco" but this actually makes it seem more loathsome.

the footage of Finsbury Park was a surprise when i finally saw it. type in the phrase "morrissey draped in union jack finsbury park" into Google and see how many people have parroted that down the years. he doesn't appear to be draped in it at all from the look of the footage. he didn't wave it about during National Front Disco either which often gets said, he picks it up off the floor once during the show, twirls it around in the same manner one might do with a feather boa or whatever then chucks it away again.
(4.50 onwards on here for the full 'horror')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-0EQsbhTb0

i wonder how many people have ever actually seen this. it never came out commercially so i'm assuming.. not many.

GIS for "racist flag" is fairly conclusive

not nationalism, the NATIONAL FRONT, which is an explicitly racist group

yeah I get that, I know what the National Front is. But on a more general level nationalism - by itself, this idea that there is a PURE conception of the nation that deserves to be prized above others - is essentially racist, it always requires some idea of ethnic homogeneity, it's pride based on demonization of an externalized "other".

xp

clearly I need to read up on NF policy on the Irish occupation! interesting.

contextually, racism/nationalism and the national front were not misty-eyed 70s/80s nostalgia in 1992 - a year later, the BNP won a council seat in the isle of dogs. i was studying in mile end at the time and the sense of tension there was palpable. that moz would coyly play with this stuff seemed unforgivable to me at the time.

ward - i'm not saying a desire to preserve or be a booster of stuff is bad, i just think he tends to see the decline of it as part of a "declining England" narrative or loss of Englishness that's has been a theme of his and i think at times has caused him to be racist (like "life is hard enough when you belong here" or "we are the last truly english people you will ever know" etc)

― sinister porpoise (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 25, 2014 1:59 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol ums, i think i was just being defensive because i like a lot of the same old musty shit as morrissey - and of course a lot of this stuff (like british sitcoms from the 1970s) is really horribly racist, tho' i don't think that's the sole reason that morrissey digs 'em.

the last time i saw morrissey live - one of his Meltdown performances on the South Bank - I was struck by the surprisingly heavy audience presence in the bar beforehand of serious rocker and skinhead types wearing oh-so-cryptic 'european tour' 1938-45 t-shirts etc. maybe having the Cockney Rejects on the same bill contributed to that, but it was far from being a regulation indie crowd.

and of course a lot of this stuff (like british sitcoms from the 1970s) is really horribly racist,

yeah I assumed bringing up Nico was deliberate in this regard

didn't know the Union Jack was considered a racist symbol for example

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, June 25, 2014 3:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Depends on the context in which its used.

If someone throws the Union Jack on stage and you pick it up?

http://static-1.nexusmods.com/15/mods/110/images/18911-1-1339907682.jpg

Every racist has good luck.

Wait, UN Goodwill Ambassador Geri Halliwell is a racist!? What is the UK equivalent of a crying eagle gif?

this all seems to go back to the idea posited upthread somewhere that all nationalism is at heart racist, which I can't really argue with. Some expressions of nationalism are more racist than others, I suppose.

I struggle with this mostly wrt classical music: after the explosion of modernism in CM following from Prelude a l'Apres-Midi/Satie/Elektra and above all le Sacre du Printemps, there was this amazing, dizzyingly fruitful long wave of works informed by nationalism in a more or less positive non-racist way coming out of every territory with a western orchestra at hand-- all the Baltics, every future eastern bloc country especially Poland/Hungary/future Czech Republic, South America, Spain, every scandinavian country, Greece, Turkey, weird regions of France... this shit was so great but it was for sure nationalist and obv part of a thread that would curdle horribly as the century went on.

I mean I guess the early German nationalist artists were pretty non-pathological too (OG romantic poets & writers, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert) but once they started getting an actual nation things got vile pretty quick. Maybe nationalisms always have this kind of arc of being a positive thing in their infancy and then becoming poisonous...

The Olympics is a celebration of nationalism, yet surprisingly not racist.

Hmmm I see a connection there.

plenty of racist shit has happened at the Olympics

they used to throw gypsies down the luge

for luck

obviously the Olympics organization itself is an internationalist, not a nationalist, organization, so yeah they haven't done anything egregious that I know of. but participating nations have used the nationalist nature of their participation in racist ways

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0801.html

"I present to you this olive branch as a symbol of love and peace," he said. "We hope that the nations will ever meet solely in such peaceful competition."

Hitler, receiving it with obvious emotion, thanked him heartily and shook hands with him. The "Hallelujah Chorus" in a final great burst of melody and the recession of nations from the stadium brought this notable opening to a close.

In British terms, the Olympics are mostly inclusive these days. It doesn't really matter where you, or your parents, were born - if you are competing for GB you are considered British by all but the most cantankerous, exclusionary racists. Morrissey's commentary on contemporary Britain in much closer to the cantankerous, exclusionary racist vision than the Olympic one.

The reason black athletes wrapped in the union flag is a big deal is because of the way it was so closely associated with the far right for so many years. The Spice Girls were probably, in some way, trying to reclaim and detoxify it. Morrissey not so much.

lol yeah nothin racist about the Spice Girls nope

The dresses understandably made a lot of people uncomfortable at the time, as did Annie Lennox's union flag suit a few years before. There was definitely a strain of British triumphalism to the whole era but, at the same time, a kind of inept but well-meaning attempt to take the symbolism of British nationalism away from the far right and towards a more inclusive place. Not necessarily successfully.

you can be included, but we get to call you scary

*bookmarks thread in "cultural studies" folder*

you can be included but we get to call you posh

you can be included but we get to call you ginger

you can be included but we get to call you baby

you can be included but we get to call you minger

foodie idea: the posh nosh

When you read 20th century history books, if you get bored at the non-eventful stage of "eccentric" entertainers making racist comments without any opposition, just skip a few chapters to the more eventful death-camp/pogrom stage of approved mass murder where all this PC nonsense has been dispensed with.

pretty sure the spice girls participated in coming up with their own nicknames

foodie idea: the posh nosh

David's favourite dish

pretty sure the spice girls participated in coming up with their own nicknames

I thought the story was that they were nicknamed in a magazine article and everyone liked them, so the names stuck

"without any opposition"

I heard it was Andi Peters xpost

wiki sez: "Each member of the group received a nickname from the media. Brown was named "Scary Spice""

lol xelab so Morrissey is Wagner now ok

rubber ring cycle

I look forward to the mass murdering dictator that cites Morrissey as a formative philosophical influence btw, hopefully they will cite Freddie Mercury and Nico too

more to the-poster-formerly-known-as-Shakey's point:

As the girls become more popular, their images became as important as their music. In their early days of the band, the girls had a laid back and casual look, and maintained an image of everyday British young females. As their career progressed into a worldwide phenomenon, the girls and their manager Simon Fuller became more aware of the impact their images had. The Spice Girls soon became noticeable just by their clothes and hairstyles, and soon became icons of late 1990s fashion. In a summer 1996 issue of Top of the Pops magazine, editor Peter Loraine gave them nicknames for their images and personalities, and this soon had an impact on their fashion. In contrast to their early career, the girls soon began to differ their images from each other, and each girl had a unique look.

er his Spice Girls point, not the one where Morrissey is as relevant and omnipresent as Wagner

(the one he is rebutting that is, I am terrible at posting today)

More on the Spice Girls. They were in cahoots with "the media" (TOTP magazine LOL) re the nicknames.

July 1996

A feature in Top of the Pops magazine gives the Spice Girls their nicknames, Posh, Baby, Scary, Sporty and Ginger. Editor Peter Loraine suggests the names during lunch with the girls in Notting Hill.

"I simply said it would be a good idea if they had some nicknames. The girls liked the idea, so I had an editorial meeting back at the office and about four of us started thinking of names. Posh was the first one to be thought up because Victoria looks pretty sophisticated. The rest were pretty easy really because the girls' characters were already really strong. The names jumped out at us. We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot.

"We ran the names for a couple of issues and the first time the girls saw them they thought it was funny. Then the newspapers started picking up on the names and they cropped up everywhere until they were fully accepted by everyone."

The reason black athletes wrapped in the union flag is a big deal is because of the way it was so closely associated with the far right for so many years

1)I didn't know it was a big deal
2)what is is your definition of black? Are you talking about the photo above?

It's a big deal. Lots of people from minority backgrounds wouldn't have felt comfortable being associated with the flag in the seventies, eighties and early nineties, many would still be uncomfortable with it today. Athletes from Thompson to Christie to Farah being positively associated with it, and increasingly seen as British first and black second (which wasn't always the case with Thompson's generation, or even Christie's - see Seb Coe's "jive talk" quotes) changes the way in which national iconography is perceived by some.

I'm not really sure a Morrissey thread is the best place to get into a discussion about whether the British-Jamaican Jessica Ennis is "black" or not.

shari vari otm - 2012 was definitely a turning point in what the union jack means, a big step in redeeming it. 1992 was a massively different story.