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

i am sure every city in america has a party like this. the one i used to go to was called "booty bassment". the only difference aside from the name was that they didn't hand out a discount for bringing a fucking bucket of fried chicken (tasteless!) and the DJs didn't act and talk like total asses.

curmudgeon high on crack on the subject of whether brainwashed liking or not liking hiphop has fuck-all to do with anything

Banana Nutrament (straightup@gmail.com), November 6th, 2005.

That's not what I said, Banana.

Wait, is that true?! I've never been the clubbing type (I don't think I've been to a dance club in the last 11 of my 29 years), so forgive me if I seem like a complete naif for being shocked at this. But I am. Men pull their dicks out on the dancefloor? Routinely?

I've been missing out! (kidding). That's fucking awful.

Also yes, there is something so gigantically stupid and bizarre about saying the hipsters at Williamsburg parties are going to become "captains of industry." They're in their late twenties -- if they were ever going to do something beyond live in crappy lofts and play in bands, chances are they'd have gotten started on it by now. The bulk of them will get office jobs like everyone else, and the rest will wind up making cabinets or repairing amplifiers or running record stores or becoming publicisists.

shh nabisco you'll get in the way of the incipient class rage, how we gonna have a revolution without the class rage

E.g. I don't think it's coincidence that constant anti-hipster sneering (usually Williamsburg-related) coincided with the explosion of internet culture-talk: suddenly you can have bloggers with no significant experience of a particular hipster spot or place or scene who can look at the pictures and read about it in record reviews and develop some bizarro fantasy of a whole neighborhood of trust-fund racists with Flock of Seagulls haircuts doing coke all night and feeling superior to everyone. All shit that might, in some extreme instances, kinda vaguely trend toward certain realities, but it's still totally bizarre. Weirdest of all: the way "Williamsburg" become shorthand for NYC hipsters has created this class of people elsewhere who actually think it's a full-neighborhood hipster-trash party, despite the reality that Williamsburg looks and feels not that incredibly different from any "hip" younger neighborhood, anywhere, from San Francisco to Chicago to Philadelphia. That "captains of industry" line in particular is just kinda like ... well, this person's understanding of what he/she is talking about is massively divorced from reality.

How dare you say that about Costa Mesa.

I knew I'd be on the cutting edge of hip one day.

(And umm eBay, I'm not sure whether that's just a joke or whether you think you're making some kind of point; what I'm pointing out is that CocoRosie-as-band is actually about 50% black, and that they seem to think of their music as existing partly within a modern black-music idiom, and that their relationship with the notion of black culture is visibly way more complicated than any of these "I noticed her quoted in WaPo" articles bother examining.)

I mean, God, I can't fathom how young white people seem to think they're doing anyone any favors by saying they're so "awkard and square" but black people are cool -- all they're doing is switching the same old racist assumptions into some jacked-up compliment. (As if that hasn't been done before: "Black people have rhythm! And soul! Maybe they can come in through the back entrance and tap-dance for us!") All they're doing is reducing the whole notion of blackness to some rap-video caricature, one that still slots black people into a position of powerlessness (Ludacris can be "cool," but are you gonna elect him governor?) -- and, even worse, marginalizes and ignores millions and millions of everday "uncool" non-stereotype-fitting black people.

but also guys, it's "kill whitIE" --

Yes indeed.

as someone who likes cocorosie's music (am i the only one on this thread?) i enjoy the fact that they engage race at all. my reading of them is that they are not racist, and that most/all of the racial content in their music comes from fascinations with certain eras/ideas (of [re]appropriation). i feel that there is no harm in that, and that there's actually a fair amount of good in it, being that it has managed to provoke this kind of dialog. whether or not she goes to these kill whitey parties is kind of a moot point. every couple of years i might want to hear zztop at a bar or something, does that mean in order to be socially conscious that i should go to a biker bar and hear it in its native clime? or is it ok for me to go down to the hipster bar's cock rock night? i don't think there's anything wrong with feeling more comfortable among one's own peer group. i'm not advocating some kind of policy for social segregation/insularity, but i don't want to go to a biker bar. y'know?

(Ludacris can be "cool," but are you gonna elect him governor?)

well, he hates bill o'reilly -- that's a pretty good start!

AND HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

I am absolutely the last person that would ever argue that we live in a race-less, culture-less world; I've spent ages on other threads arguing exactly the opposite. But it's ridiculous and annoying for anyone to perceive black culture as being primarily about booty-bass, fried chicken, spilled 40s, and whatever else our culture gets from a steady diet of mostly engaging with blackness in the form of rap videos (and not, say, gospel videos). And for the record, apart from just-funny-on-their-own guys like Chapelle or Eugene Levy, I'm not a big fan of "white guy drives like this, black guy drives like this" humor, no matter who it's coming from; mostly it's just tacky and banal, but it also has some of these much-deeper problems up inside it.

And I don't get your last point: you seem to be implying that these people love hip-hop but are just embarrassed to admit it? Why the hell would that be anything other than kinda-stupid? (And for the record, while I'm sure the people at KW parties like hip-hop as much as anyone else, the point of these things isn't exactly earnest appreciation of the music -- it's about a racial-caricature dress-up, which I'm sure is innocently fun in a Halloweeny kinda way, but problematic nevertheless.)

i think it's interesting that a lot of the people who are attracted to the KW parties are gonna have arts degrees and read Fanon while listening to the Shins or whatever... and that they don't realise the problems the discourse of race that they are engaging with. no matter how "ironically" it's treated, these are real distortions - and you'd think they'd pick up on it.

What's funny to me, "whatever," is that the paranoia and neurosis being dealt with here comes largely from the white side of the issue: it's not as if black people, by and large, are gonna have some massive problem with a white person who sincerely tries to get involved in this music! It seems more like white people are just scared over the idea of having to enter a black context, and to have their whiteness suddenly be an issue -- to have it suddenly make them stand out, to be "out of place" in the game of racial expectations, and for there to be the chance that they'll be negatively singled out for it. But hey, congratulations, white people: welcome to being black in America!

Yeah, welcome to being "the black guy" at your office, or a black student at an Ivy League college. And this, right here, is the nasty undercurrent kinda tainting the flipside of what you're saying up above. If these problems of "appropriation" attach to everything, and not just hip-hop, isn't the implication that it's wrong and strange for a black woman to learn classical cello? Isn't the implication that Condoleezza Rice is play-acting a "whiteness" she doesn't belong in? Isn't the implication that white people "belong" in the dominant culture, and black people "belong" strictly in some booty-packed video, and not in the dominant culture around them? You're working on the assumption that the dominant culture of board room and governorships is common and open to everyone -- that there is no culture of whiteness -- and that the only issue is crossing into a culture of "blackness." But as soon as you construct this culture of "blackness," you're acknowledging something outside of it, and in the process doing something unfortunate -- unless you imagine a president who says "what up, g."

especially in france am I right

Have to check the French stats vs. the Irish

This terminology, “TERFS” is being used to silence women

if only it worked

this doesn't really surprise me coming from them but it is pretty bizarre in the context of an interview for a performance as part of a festival program curated by anohni, alongside a statement from her about the legislative attacks on trans people. #4 in the 'tenets' here does read as a dogwhistle though: https://www.hollandfestival.nl/en/fututre-feminism

Always thought there was something vaguely fascist about new age Earth mother people who talk about "the body" a lot.

it's whole lot more than something!

i'm not going to bother listening to their new song ("witch hunt", lol) but i recommend looking up the lyrics because it is mostly 'we transphobic and are being silenced!!!' the song

I did listen to it (incognito mode on YouTube so this shitstain doesn't influence my algorithm) and I can confirm it's every bit as bad as you'd expect it to be!

lol it's more than just #4 that's a dogwhistle, the whole fucking Future Feminism thing is gender essentialist garbage to put it lightly

women be shoppin and nurturin

so can we assume that Anhoni, despite trans status, has some not very friendly beliefs about all of this

juliana huxtable also present … by one way to reconcile the contradiction might be that they hold that mtf transition is cool but not ftm

xpost I really am wondering about this now!

I might be and probably am wildly misinterpreting it but the lyrics to “My Lady Story” might hold the answer

she goes on to say in the same interview that she's bound her chest and fantasized about top surgery. I'm an apologist for their music, Ghosthorse & Stillborn was great afaic but that essentialist terfy stuff ain't it

While we should all agree that TERFy shit is bad, I think it’s a real bad look to immediately go “What does their trans/nb friend have to say about this” like all trans people have to constantly live their lives as public spokespeople and accountants for their dumbest friends

Like ANONHI is living ANONHI’s life. They aren’t CocoRosie’s publicist or keeper

While we should all agree that TERFy shit is bad, I think it’s a real bad look to immediately go “What does their trans/nb friend have to say about this” like all trans people have to constantly live their lives as public spokespeople and accountants for their dumbest friends

― kirsten gilla band (Whiney G. Weingarten)

mmmm not sure i personally agree with you but i'm also not interested in debating this

---

re: those TERFy paras:

i mean kudos to them for trying to put the "radical feminism" back in TERF ig. it's just... the stuff they're saying is so far removed from my lived experience as a trans person, with the lived experiences of the queer people i know. that's kind of the funny thing, they're suggesting transness as something that erases queer identities and i don't really think of myself primarily as "trans" right now. it's useful only to the extent that people won't fucking shut up about it. i'm trans, sure, but it's more important to me that i'm a dyke, that i'm a faggot, that's a bigger part of who i am, these days.

all of this bullshit about "radical self-acceptance". accept what? that their definition of "woman" is more important than my bodily autonomy? it's goddamn silly. you wind up sounding like the fucking catholics, all of this shit about "acceptance" is the same shit the "natural family planning" people say. i mean under what circumstances does this manifesto consider a hysterectomy _acceptable_?

the only reason I brought it up is that they are all working together on a festival that included this: https://www.hollandfestival.nl/en/fututre-feminism which people pointed out seemed to point to TERF-friendly philosophy. So I thought it was odd that Anhoni would be spearheading it.

I had to google "kill whitey" parties. Another cultural phenomenon I'm happy to have missed.

It’s always someone fascinating when people who were awful from the jump go out of their way to show how much more awfulness they have inside them to share with you

omg how did I end up on this PR list

on wednesday 2.21, CocoRosie will announce their upcoming Elevator Angels EP (to be released 3.8) as a start of their 20th Anniversary celebrations. "Beautiful Boyz" HERE is their first track released wednesday 2.21.
this Fall, the sister duo will also release a brand new studio album.
CocoRosie - Elevator Angels EP: https://on.soundcloud.com/XZqFd
embargoed press release, with photos, quote, artwork etc HERE
would you be into connecting?

"dear CocoRosie, eat a brick of shit"

they fucked up by not becoming mainstream country, they could have been ilx country thread darlings with their complex opinions and contradictions

Hardy har