CocoRosie member goes to "Kill Whitey" Ironic dance parties and gets called out by brainwashed.com as racist

oh man here are a couple of awesome lines from a Pitchfork review of Two Gallants:

I want to believe that Two Gallants had good intentions in covering this song. But intention is fleeting; if it ever becomes known to the public, it's quickly dispatched to the mists of time. Only the artifact remains. And this artifact scans to me as deeply insensitive and offensive. Spin.com brushed it off as an account of racism; occasional Pitchfork contributor Jonathan Zwickel hailed it as "nothing short of revelatory" in New Times. But what value is there in an account of racism from people who've never stared down its barrel? What could it possibly reveal? If these myopic responses reveal anything, it's that the topic is much easier to gloss over than to actually discuss. Such an inflammatory project needs a complex intellectual purpose to make it more than a cheap provocation. This rigor doesn't come through in the cover, and when a Drowned in Sound interviewer pressed Stephens on the topic of "Long Summer Day", he equivocated. "I don't think it comes as something strategic," he said, and the interviewer demurred, because he was "in no mood" to really broach the topic.

full review (SPOILER: 4.8): http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8262-what-the-toll-tells/

last paragraph is also killer

lol @ staring down the barrel of racism

not so lol when you've actually done so; it does feel kind of like being in the scope of an invisible sniper rifle 24/7

i guess, i don't know, it always comes back for me to deciding who has the right to use certain words.

tbh I've never had any idea what to think of the country teasers, I do like their music a lot tho

great opening line: Nostalgic indie bands treat history like a playground, and one need not convey an understanding of the monkey bars' provenance in order to swing on them.

i guess, i don't know, it always comes back for me to deciding who has the right to use certain words.

For me, it's more a responsibility/consequences thing than anything else.

You can use whatever words you want however you want to use them; you should also be ready for whatever reaction will come back your way, intended or not, and make sure you can explain why you chose to communicate the way you did if someone takes your words in a manner you don't intend. In this case, CocoRosie recorded a song they wanted to be taken a particular way, but didn't use enough care in crafting their message to support their intent (IMO). Therefore, they are evoking an unintended reaction in me where I want them to die in a fire and their explanation, which is incoherent in its construction and very light on an understanding of the situation they wanted to criticize, does not assuage or mollify that reaction in me.

careful, plax, about confusing rights with reactions. people have the right to use all sorts of words. other people have the right to figure they used them badly or stupidly.

ha, xpost

did we switch bodies today or something

what if nabisco and Hi Dere switched bodies with the cocorosie sisters?

okay, but that doesnt happen with EVERY word, the same would go with like, I dunno faggot or something. A certain position in society gives you a right to use it in a way that will demand less justification for using it.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing btw, I think its good. I mean I think the partic. context I bring to the word faggot, is in a way a type of justification and I wouldnt feel comfortable with somebody who doesnt bring that automatic context using that word without establishing, implicitly or not, how and why they are using it, y'know?

besides being a plot for a potentially horrible indie version of a Wayans-esque comedy

i dunno, i think those rights and those reactions are kind of bound up somehow

I mean, this is kind of cheap, but I think it's telling:

In the States, we've had very few, but some occasions, where people have gotten confused by the message, and wonder if we were being offensive, and maybe if we were ourselves racist, which was really shocking. There was one gig we had where we weren't allowed to sing that song. ... It was shocking to us.

She is shocked -- SHOCKED, I tell you -- that if you use a racial slur a dozen or so times in a song, some people might wonder if you're being offensive and/or racist. That is the absolute LAST reaction they would ever have expected to come from repeated use of a racial slur. They were straight-up FLABBERGASTED that a venue might prefer them not to repeatedly deploy a racial slur in a performance. I mean, who would EVER think, while putting a racial slur in your song lyrics, that anyone would react that way? It is shocking.

^^ I say this not to be a snarky jerk, but like ... wow, if that outcome is honestly shocking to you, can we agree that you do not have nearly enough awareness of American race issues to address them in quite this way? Maybe that's just me.

I don't think we are disagreeing here plax, rather describing the same/similar phenomena in different ways.

I completely agree with you re: the context of slurs, which is the main reason why I think "Jesus Loves You" is a painful failure that actually upset me when I listened to it.

xp: lol nabisco, rest assured that it is not just you

yeah that line is definitely "thou doth protest o'ermuch" material

altho it makes me wonder who physically stopped them from singing that song (a black security guard?)

xp

"where people have gotten confused by the message, and wonder if we were being offensive" = poorly crafted message

man indie bands who say how much better Europe "gets" them really annoy me, too

I have a whole rant about this but as usual must be plied with drink to unleash it

well i saw these guys play in belgium and they really did have a massive following and the atmosphere was insanely volatile btw. My ex was way into them at the time.

CocoRosie - Big In Belgium (Aug 2011)

the atmosphere was insanely volatile

again, what??? so hard to understand, given what i've just listened to. kudos if it was a cool experience tho!

yeah i know, im not even pretending to understand it but they did put on a really elaborate and atmospheric show, and they were having a real or staged fight i wasn't sure, and the crowd were like really involved in the drama of it, and shouting things out. It was actually really, uh, intense. I agree that you would never think that from hearing their records.

(well, as J. Stewart's idiotic comment suggests, the line running from race stuff to reasons other artists might admire them is that it's all messy, volatile, difficult, weird, and intense. at least sometimes. it's natural that other musicians might admire that and a lot of listeners would be repelled by it.)

i don't own and haven't to my knowledge heard The Empire Strikes Back, but man i love the country teasers. that would suck if Waller is a racist. and tbh it sucks that even if he isn't, he's decided to play so fast and loose with his lyrics.

from what i've read i'd say he's not; he's just a huge and decidedly unprejudiced misanthrope.

generally the country teasers use of racist/sexist/prejudiced language seems to me to be half an attempt to provoke and half an attempt to examine how ridiculous those views are by examining them in a really up close and unforgiving way; and very often that means he speaks in character.

^^^ Not having heard the album, this is how all of the discourse surrounding it comes across, which is decidedly different than discourse around "Jesus Loves Me".

yes; you have to deal with what they're saying head on rather than claiming 'oh i was shocked when someone was offended'.
not always comfortable, as intended, but usually interesting.

country teasers cover of short people is p crazy

generally the country teasers use of racist/sexist/prejudiced language seems to me to be half an attempt to provoke and half an attempt to examine how ridiculous those views are by examining them in a really up close and unforgiving way; and very often that means he speaks in character.

yeah, a lot of the over-the-top sexism in the lyrics i've read this way. he was very confrontational when i saw them live, but in a sort of superficial, shtick-y way. i would assume the same for his writing.

generally the country teasers use of racist/sexist/prejudiced language seems to me to be half an attempt to provoke and half an attempt to examine how ridiculous those views are by examining them in a really up close and unforgiving way;

in my opinion the people who were born with all the privileges in the power/class dynamics (white people; men) need to stop fancying that they have a right to "expose noxious views to light" or w/e via caricature: such a stance presumes more than you can probably actually deal with in your work -- Randy Newman is sui generis, manages to get his point across so smartly imo that it would be difficult to miss, but pretty much nobody else should really imagine that they're anywhere near his level

like I can cope with an honest goregrind band a lot better than I can stand some guy flexing a lot of misogynist garbage and trying to claim some degrees-of-remove theoretical ground -- shut up, person of privilege, it's not for you to say whether your use of the language that was used to marginalize an entire population is "really" hurtful or not

well i saw these guys play in belgium and they really did have a massive following

I was at a small festival in Angoulême in 2007 or so, and the front page article of the local newspaper on the Friday was pretty much "ZOMG! International superstars Muse and CocoRosie to play our small town!". There were loads of gorgeous French girls in CocoRosie t-shirts milling around. Crowd at both bands was mental, while crowd for Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem was quite a bit thinner (you could walk right up to the front row no problem). Animal Collective played on the small stage in front of about 100 people drinking wine around the same time CocoRosie were on the big stage. The guy from Klaxons broke his leg. Good times!

CoCoRosie's having more appeal to European audiences than Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem or Arcade Fire makes total sense. folk and avant-garde and fetishizing twee girls all run pretty deep in European culture and combined all those elements make for an easier sell.

also Europeans not gonna have the same kinda racial politics-related reactions obvy

well, and, not to open up a whole can of worms, but when you are an English-speaking band playing in Europe, you sometimes find that while some people do in fact listen to you for the lyrics, some of those same people think you're saying "fire in the storm" when you're actually saying "furniture store"

i'm a native english speaker and i regularly think bands are saying "furniture store" when they're saying "fire in the storm"

But intention is fleeting; if it ever becomes known to the public, it's quickly dispatched to the mists of time. Only the artifact remains.

As a general point, I really like this line from the P4K review.

hi dere otm, eff these broads

weird to hear people defend the country teasers in the same breath that they begrudge cocorosie. the cocorosie song is much more compassionate and straightforward in its criticism of racism than wallers tends to be. and then there's this (from the 2 gallants review linked upthread, but relevant here):

In the same interview, Two Gallants repeatedly complain about critics not "getting them." But a persistent failure of interpretation usually signals an initial failure of expression. The critic's job isn't to explore what an artist was trying to do, but what they've actually done.

i strongly disagree that we should necessarily blame artists for poor communication when audiences or critics fail to understand them. artists aren't journalists - not exactly. their job is communication, but they can just as legitimately trade in confusion, ambiguity, and contradiction as clarity. and certain subjects are so difficult & loaded that explosive reactions and profound misinterpretations are all but guaranteed. i mean, i completely understand why people object to the "jesus loves me" song, but at the same time, i respect cocorosie's artistic intentions and execution. it's unpleasant & uncomfortable to listen to, and i don't think it quite works (i find it embarrassingly overstated and obvious), but i don't see anything fundamentally wrong with it. i'm not inclined to condemn them for a failed though basically noble experiment.

honestly, i think the objection is less that the song is unclear in its intentions than that people have a strongly visceral negative reaction to hearing privileged young white people say "nigger" repeatedly in the chorus of an otherwise pleasant-seeming pop tune. which is fine. i feel the same: it's jarring and even repulsive. it smacks of naive entitlement, makes me wonder why they decided to go that way, why they thought those sorts of shock tactics were necessary or justified, just what they hell they were thinking in general. but it also makes me think about the power of language and indoctrination, the relationship between the hopeful and the oppressive aspects of faith, and the way our confused and blurry childhood (mis)understandings of these things continue to echo around inside us despite the wisdom we accumulate with years. all of which i respect on an artistic level.

yeah except i think your ending at the exact point where intention comes into the eqation i think. If somebody yells "faggot" at me in the street, its a more effective deployment of that word in me examining my relationship between language and power, because its gonna make me feel shitty and see how language is a tool of marginalisation etc. When some chick uses it in a song in order to make me cofront this same relationship its less effective because it works outside of this power dynamic, that is neither used as a fag-basher to put me down, or reclaimed by myself as somebody who can use it and therefore claim marginality as the source of authority in some way.

Also, existing outside of this power dynamic, there is no context and the power of the word itself is meaningless which either makes it pointless as a rhetoric device to me (I mean, who is learning anything from this) or I will naturally read the speaker into the dynamic and as priveliged white chicks, its a lot easier to see them as the oppressor. Obv, this is not the only way this can go down, but to avoid these traps I think there needs to be a more nuanced stating of positions and you can't just get pissed off that everybody knows you're being ironic for one thing, because "historically", you are the "bad guy" here.

plax OTM

i dunno that i'm prepared to grant great artistic legitimacy to the taunts of assholes in the street, but i get your point. still, i think that "jesus loves me" is being mischaracterized to some extent. it isn't primarily about the power dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed (with and "i" and a "you" clearly placed on either side of that equation), but rather about how we all internalize the bigotries of our society -- as filtered through the relationship of folk blues to christianity and christianity to racism, done up in a ghastly sort of musical blackface. and that's a tough, strange thing to try to address in song, perhaps especially for a couple of middle-class white girls. i mean, i could see some objecting to the way the song constructs its "we all", either presuming a universality of white privileged us-ness, or pretending an entitled sort of color blindness. but i actually think it handles those issues reasonably well.

i'd agree that there isn't much to learn from it, but the same might be said of most art, confrontational or not. i don't think that a work of art really has to justify itself in that sense though. mostly i just want art to be intelligent, interesting and aesthetically coherent. i find cocorosie satisfying on those levels (well, for the duration of that first album anyway). if anything, i wish that "jesus loves me" were a bit more subtle, conflicted, genuinely confused about its statement, because i find its crude didacticism at least as off-putting as its insensitivity.

i guess it just seems to me that the only people who are like "hey these are words, the needn't exert such power" are ppl who have no primary stake in the struggle of marginalisation, ie those that have never (and cannot) feel the ACTUAL effects, and conversely do not intend to wield them as weapons. The reason I brought up the asshole on the street is bc its an example of somebody actually owning and exerting the power that language maintains, I don't know that from an outside position you can just decide that you are going to negate that power whose effects you dont feel, and who are you to tell the people who have had to deal with it that it is meaningless, it seems really arrogant.

I mean, there is such a massive plurality of contexts that racial/mysoginistic language exists in in the first place.

As a kind of generalisation, I would have a strongly visceral negative reaction to hearing privileged young white people say "nigger" in pretty much any context, or in fact, any white person use the n-word in any context, beyond maybe reporting someone else using it* I read the lyrics of that cocorosie song and they seemed to me to be pretty idiotically using the shock value of the n-word to make a fairly dumb/obvious point. Also, in the interview their defence of it seemd a little disingenuous to say the least. I was glad i didn't like the msuic in the youtube clips I watched, it was really ordinary and lame. it would have been very dissapointing had they been awesome.

*as an aside, when i saw patti smith, she encored with a medley of "rock and roll nigger", and I kind of got the impression that some of the audience dug shouting it out, it made me feel a bit uncomfortable to hear i must admit.

some excellent points from Dan and plax, I thought.

i guess it just seems to me that the only people who are like "hey these are words, the needn't exert such power" are ppl who have no primary stake in the struggle of marginalisation, ie those that have never (and cannot) feel the ACTUAL effects, and conversely do not intend to wield them as weapons.

massively otm - when michael richards had his meltdown, remember that he tried to paddle back from the abyss by saying "so we have these WORDS" or something like that - but it's not for the dominant class to be suddenly distancing itself from how those words are used

I don't want to start a big fight about anything but I wish when people used the words "faggot" and "bitch" in their songs they would also get hated on for being assholes because it is hurtful and offensive for people to use those words, too, even if the privilege isn't as thrown-into-relief as it is in this case

I don't want to start a big fight about anything but I wish when people used the words "faggot" and "bitch" in their songs they would also get hated on for being assholes because it is hurtful and offensive for people to use those words, too, even if the privilege isn't as thrown-into-relief as it is in this case

they don't? i mean, i agree with you, i didn't know most people didn't.

rap music

Just for the record, I think the Casady sisters are white, Native American, and Syrian. (I imagine they scan to people, day to day, as just "white," but would not think of themselves that way.) I'm not sure we have any information about whether or not they are "middle-class."

I understand that art can be used to play out ideas in messy, volatile, and risky ways. But you can't just cordon that off as an anything-goes sandbox -- that is exactly what makes it "risky." If you choose to messily play out ideas that are not just "ideas" to other people, and get them wrong, you will have a problem. A lot of the people contributing to that Stereogum piece want to praise Cocorosie for taking risks and yet excuse them from the consequences of those risks (e.g., some people will find your voices annoying!).

rap music

because no rock 'n roll person has ever used the word "bitch" in a song or conversation