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

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

^^^ just want to point out that when I whine about this stuff I do not mean 'rap music'

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

yeah, I meant to follow that up with a clarification and I got pelted w/ work emails. I personally find that for some reason I turn a blind eye to a lot offensive content in hip hop I probably not tolerate in other genres ..? not sure why that is. so it's not so much an indictment of rap as it is of my weird double standards. or something.

e.g. i was listening Back For the First Time and (especially) Project Pat's Mista Don't Play this weekend for the first time in a looong time while my gf (who is a hueg nerd and basically only listens to NPR and Paul Simon) and I were cooking and I have to tell you, it was weirdly embarrassing. i mean, she's a grown up and can handle it/ whatever, but it certainly sparked some conflicting feelings that a 22 year old me probably would not have experienced. but maybe this is for another thread.

"what you want your girlfriend and her sister listening to/can you escape bad/questionable language in modern pop?"

Wives or servants, surely?

yeah lots of otm responses...I don't necessarily think that CR are racist, or that they had anything less than the best intentions, but as HI DERE pointed out, the n-word sticks out like a sore thumb...it feels very exploitative; it sounds like the girls basically decided to borrow the horror and hatefulness of the word to make their song, and the underlying point behind it, sound more urgent and meaningful than it really was. Which is really shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218

^^^great song btw

I don't think that Lennon is being exploitative, or at least as exploitative as CocoRosie is being. The hatred he is evoking by using that word is being used towards a very real end; he's saying "If you think it's bad for a black person in America, that's how it is for women everywhere." I mean, I don't think you can say that Lennon is dropping the N-word to make his point seem more urgent and meaningful than it really is.

Whereas, with CocoRosie, they use the word right off the bat to paint Christianity as this malevolent force in American society, but when it comes to develop this theme, it's like "Christianity is bad bcz now we can't kiss our fathers very long...?" They use racism to prop up their song and pretend to be ironic with it, but really it's just treating something very serious as if it was something very frivolous.

you know actually:

seriously, black people don't need to hear me talking out of my ass about cocorosie!

― m@tt h (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

That attitude bugs me for an entirely different set of reasons.

Basically, by saying it isn't your place to object to this shit (even though the objection you raise is similar, if not identical, to mine), you are implicitly saying it is MY RESPONSIBILITY to object to this shit; furthermore, you are saying that these objections are only credible when coming from black people, who by raising these objections often find themselves placed in the "you're just being sensitive" pile by the people who did the objectionable thing, and by not getting corroborating objections from others regardless of race, the seriousness/breadth of the objection is undercut.

Or, to put it more simply/confrontationally, it's fucking bullshit that people who feel the same way I do have this easy way of ducking out of the fight and not causing controversy, leaving me out to dry.

i agree with a lot of what's being said here, but i'm still somewhat uncomfortable with the intensity of condemnation attached to cocorosie over this song. when compared to something like patti smith's rock n roll nigger (a song i love, btw), the use of the word in jesus loves me seems more careful and substantial - more well justified. pashmina talks about reading the lyrics of the song and finding them rather dumb/obvious, but the words alone don't get even half the message across. you have to hear the delivery and music to really get the whole picture. again, the song tries to link the blues to religiosity and religion to racism, washing it all down with a horrifying parody of "negro dialect". at the same time, it pretends this naive childishness about the horrors contained in the language it uses and the ideas it raises. in that sense, it's also about how children hear and learn things, how words like "nigger" can be inextricable from ideas like "blues music" or "salvation", both in adult society and through a child's eyes. on a more basic level, of course, it's an unsubtle attack on the racism that religion often disguises - that's the sense in which i'm bummed by the song's didacticism.

i disagree that it tries to pretend its language consists of "mere words", devoid of real power. perhaps CR have defended it in those terms somewhere, but if so, i missed it and am more concerned with the song itself, anyway. it seems to me that the song is fully cognizant of the horror evoked by its language, and is trying not merely to exploit certain words for their shock value, but to address something profoundly tragic and difficult. i've read pretty much the entire thread so far and strongly disagree with shakey mo's "this person is stupid" assessment of bianca's defense of the song. she doesn't sound brilliant to me, but nor does she sound terribly stupid. mostly she sounds as though she's speaking off the cuff to someone she's at least slightly uncomfortable with - there's an awkward hesitancy present throughout the interview, a quality of nearly paranoid reticence. moreover, the basic concept she's trying to get across (that the song is likewise trying to get across) strikes me as both valid and interesting.

finally, i get where hi dere is coming from with the "song by some people who hate religion and black people" criticism, but respectfully disagree. i can see as how CR's use of the word might strike some as insulting or hurtful, and might agree that the song is insensitive on that level. but imputing racist hate to the band on the basis of a single, perhaps thoughtless, lyrical experiment seems excessively and narrowly condemnatory. cocorosie are attempting to address something painful in this song, and they've chosen a painful way to go about it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were motivated by hate. by that measure, any artist who's ever built a song around the world "bitch" is a misogynist who deserves comparable condemnation. and many (many) songs built around the word "bitch" are far less compassionate and morally responsible in their examination of the issues involved. i mean, i can't claim to know what CR were thinking or feeling. perhaps they really are racists on some level or another. but i strongly reject the idea that we can assume that based on their use of the word "nigger" in this one song.

finally, nabisco otm about their whiteness and perceived middle-classness. i described them in those terms since that's they way they'd been framed in recent discussion (and cuz i drew certain conclusions based on other stuff i'd read about them). but it's unfair to pigeonhole them so neatly.

but imputing racist hate to the band on the basis of a single, perhaps thoughtless, lyrical experiment seems excessively and narrowly condemnatory. cocorosie are attempting to address something painful in this song, and they've chosen a painful way to go about it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were motivated by hate.

they make some of my favorite music around but this song is not the only instance of them copping some bullshit "provocative" racial stuff (feel free to check "japan" off of ghosthorse & stillborn for "no, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people" stuff)

I'd like to point out that cutting out the "but only realize that they hate religion" from my quote removes 90% of the argument I'm making.

eriously, black people don't need to hear me talking out of my ass about cocorosie!

― m@tt h (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

this was supposed to be a joke

yeah I got that, but it got reappropriated in a seemingly earnest manner to shut down a line of thinking I strongly agree with and I was responding to that

i have heard the song--it's awful

i don't think the song deepens the lyrics, at all

It most certainly doesn't; if anything, it makes the lyrics stick out even more.

Like, my main takeaway from it was "thanks for ruining a harmless church song"

mostly i just want art to be intelligent, interesting and aesthetically coherent... 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.

See, I'd say that the crude didacticism and the inconsistency in the lyrics w/r/t characterizations of minorities makes the song aesthetically incoherent. It seems like a number of us in this thread would have less of a problem with them and the song if it was more aesthetically coherent, with people citing country teasers as an example of something that is.

I was listening to that Patti Smith song recently, and I really did cringe when she used that word.

^^^ completely OTM re: "Jesus Loves Me" and aesthetic incoherency

but when it comes to develop this theme, it's like "Christianity is bad bcz now we can't kiss our fathers very long...?" They use racism to prop up their song and pretend to be ironic with it, but really it's just treating something very serious as if it was something very frivolous.

― dont forget B.Manning's shout-out to Dock Ellis (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:05 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

i find it a very sad song, much more sad than shocking. the sadness arises from the tension between the protected innocence it describes, the idealized state of a child we wish to shield from the world, and the tragic adult realities that it admits, with its talk of choosing between scars or bruises on the road to the wedding rings that will supposedly make everything better for us when we grow up. i can't ultimately endorse or even condone it because i don't think it ultimately justifies its decision to hammer the n-word home over and over again at every chorus, but its conflation of racism and religion isn't as simpleminded as it might initially seem.

it's a sloppily written poorly constructed lyric. There's nothing inherently racist in Christianity, Jesus didn't say anything preposterous on the level of "I hate niggers" and the song draws this line clumsily by just associating the one with the other in the crudest manner possible. It doesn't give any consideration to how black people and Christianity actually intersect, no nuance or actual understanding of history is evident. If I want to think about how racism and Christianity have been intertwined in America, there are any number of Ice Cube lines that are more informative and interesting than this garbage.

xp

"go to church but they tease us/with a picture of a blue eyed jesus"

The conflation of racism and religion is actually as simple-minded as it seems if you know one iota of American history.

I prefer the Vaselines version of "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" to this song

sorry HI DERE I didn't mean to duck out...I was just getting second thoughts about whether I was actually contributing to the discussion rather than 1) parroting other people's opinions, or 2) spouting off about stuff that I don't have a lot of firsthand knowledge about.*

*This is probably just a euphemistic way of restating what it was that pissed you off.

I'd like to point out that cutting out the "but only realize that they hate religion" from my quote removes 90% of the argument I'm making.

― HI DERE, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:53 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

i don't think the song deepens the lyrics, at all

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:58 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

I suppose it's a question of which is unfairer, thinking someone is unintentionally racist (my take) or intentionally stupid (your take).

Because every word you write in defense of them highlights more of their terrible artistic choices (the dialect, the fake blues styling, the minstrel show vibe) and the idea that anyone with even half a brain in modern America could look at this song as it was shaping up and think "Wow! This captures my point perfectly!" and then be shocked and amazed when people think you are a narcissistic racist, particularly when you also attend racist, ironic Kill Whitey parties, it is amazing that your brain functions well enough to keep your subconscious processes going.

There's nothing inherently racist in Christianity, Jesus didn't say anything preposterous on the level of "I hate niggers" and the song draws this line clumsily by just associating the one with the other in the crudest manner possible. It doesn't give any consideration to how black people and Christianity actually intersect, no nuance or actual understanding of history is evident. If I want to think about how racism and Christianity have been intertwined in America, there are any number of Ice Cube lines that are more informative and interesting than this garbage.

xp

― in my day we had to walk 10 miles in the snow for VU bootleg (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:17 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

that said, i think you could easily make the case that christianity has a complicated relationship with racism in america, and that the song's argument makes a certain amount of sense in light of that.

"complicated relationship" in implied scare-quotes there...

i'm generally in favor of artists taking risks, and ambiguity and messiness, and works that "problematize" issues - but there are certain subjects, and certain language that are extremely volatile and potent that require greater sensitivity and care taken with their use.

The conflation of racism and religion is actually as simple-minded as it seems if you know one iota of American history.

I really don't think this can be stressed enough - sure you can point out that white racists used Christianity to justify their way of life, and that they forced the religion onto the black slave population, but that's only a part of the picture, and is a ridiculously narrow view that ignores the role of Christianity in the abolitionist movement, or the way black slaves managed to take Christianity and subvert it to their own ends, using it to preserve other cultural and musical traditions, with it eventually becoming one of the pillars/driving forces behind the civil rights movement. there are a LOT of nuances. I don't think MLK would be too down with this "Jesus hates black people" nonsense. And taking the tack that because you put the words "Jesus" and "nigger" in the same song makes you some kind of incisive social provacateur just makes you look stupid.

xp

he song describes an outsider's view of that intersection, and moreover a deliberately childish version of an outsider's view.

who is this hypothetical "oustider"? someone who is neither white nor black nor Christian or American presumably...? that makes no sense.

is this the classic Native American/Syrian take on American racial relations and Xtianity, is that what you're getting at...? they're deliberately hiding behind a character? one that doesn't understand how provocative/inciteful the language being used is? wtf

yeah, that gets at the main problem with reception for an American audience - and might explain why they're better received in Belgium - here in America (with a few exceptions) no one is really an outsider with regards to this.

i'm generally in favor of artists taking risks, and ambiguity and messiness, and works that "problematize" issues - but there are certain subjects, and certain language that are extremely volatile and potent that require greater sensitivity and care taken with their use.

― i don't know whether it's really popular in Canada as well (sarahel), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:37 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark

contenderizer - have you seen the movie "Farewell Uncle Tom"? (title might be Goodbye Uncle Tom) made by the Italians that did Mondo Cane?

David Allan Coe IS playing a character you ninnies