Erykah Badu: C /D, S&D

lol, deric, horseshoe totally understood what you were saying

maybe u don't understand what you were saying, tho?

o that must be it thank you for explaining my brain

lex's post was a little reckless, but i read your post as saying people should wait a week until they dare to bring up "the whole 'race and gender' aspect of this," this being a video of a naked black woman, possibly (definitely?) released to the internet without her consent. what part did i get wrong? we can't all be the sensitive readers that you clearly are.

Arright, y'all can just go on down that road without me. I was trying to keep shit from turning real ugly itt, but that was probably a fool's errand.

right it's lex that's being ugly

how is it "being ugly" to talk about what happened with an eye to race and gender?

This thread is now helping me to see just how unhelpful taking the position of devils advocate can be sometimes.

o that must be it thank you for explaining my brain

actually, yeah. when u say that discussing race + gender is a 'can of worms,' i understand what you're saying - that you think that it has the potential to be a huge clusterfuck and you want ppl to be delicate when they discuss it. however, what you seem to be missing is that by making such a request you are inevitably telling ppl that concerns about race + gender in this situation are too much of a livewire to discuss - when for ppl effected by them, they are too much of a livewire not to discuss. that's what you don't understand about your own words.

Yeah i dont think race has really come into these arguments yet. But yeah if you want to put it into that context and make it about race, go on ahead. I think trust is like a 1000% more relevant topic here. Perhaps you should ask ex-Lips guitarist Ronald Jones, who is of African-American and Filipino descent.

It's still kind of stunning that the Lips responses are being perceived as cynical and calculated while Badu's are kind of accepted as fact. Nothing calculated at all about publicly declaring your artistic integrity and decrying colleagues as hacks?

Perhaps you should ask ex-Lips guitarist Ronald Jones, who is of African-American and Filipino descent.

lol okay in a way i now wish no one had brought up race, too.

she looks a spoiled brat
he looks like an exploiting asshole

i kinda knew the first already. lips have been mostly annoying to me since soft bulletin. i came around to the realization that his wide-eyed wonder was really forced and cloying.

horseshoe, your posts are a perfect illustration of why I made the suggestion that people maybe just stop and think a little before discussing this particular aspect of the issue. It doesn't take much for people to get heated and start attacking people and making unfounded accusations over stuff like this. Apparently, the very suggestion that people take a breath and maybe let their tempers cool a bit before diving into the discussion is, in and of itself, enough to light the powder keg. Believe me: it was never meant as any kind of edict or suggestion that those aspects shouldn't be discussed. I just didn't want to see the inevitable ramp-up to shit-flinging itt. Also believe that I'll be staying allll the way out of that particular conversation.

That's a false binary; something can be 100% factual and still be calculated and/or cynical.

My takeaway from this is that fandom is a terrible thing that should be destroyed.

horseshoe, your posts are a perfect illustration of why I made the suggestion that people maybe just stop and think a little before discussing this particular aspect of the issue. It doesn't take much for people to get heated and start attacking people and making unfounded accusations over stuff like this. Apparently, the very suggestion that people take a breath and maybe let their tempers cool a bit before diving into the discussion is, in and of itself, enough to light the powder keg. Believe me: it was never meant as any kind of edict or suggestion that those aspects shouldn't be discussed. I just didn't want to see the inevitable ramp-up to shit-flinging itt. Also believe that I'll be staying allll the way out of that particular conversation.

For someone who says he doesn't want to fan the fire, you wield an effective flamethrower.

nobody did any shitflinging except me as far as i can tell, and i only did it after your post. you might reconsider your posts-from-on-high-above-the-fray tone. or not. whatever.

xp

Sigh. I genuinely fail to understand why suggesting that people don't hastily post about a topic that we all know is going to get tempers flaring is such a controversial and flame-fanning position. But whatevs.

you got that luxury to ignore a thing you dont like

http://www.partypacks.co.uk/images/products/product_64917_1_orig.jpg

"Sigh."

Where's that zombie's bacon?

it's a topic that is more than just a nuisance to some of us. dude, do you not hear what you sound like? i wish people would just shut up about race and gender all the time because it's boring/controversial/inconvenient for me!

xxp

Because, to be blunt, your posts read like "now now, you people are being too sensitive, you'd better calm down before you hurt an innocent white man's feelings".

and one of those already got attacked on the internet!

let's not ever discuss race and gender in any context guys, you know how it offends those sensitive white dudes' sensibilities

i mean, i agree; it's boring as fuck to have to talk about exploitative dynamics in how black women's bodies are treated in 2012; as soon as the shit stops happening, people can stop talking about it.

first they came for one of the flaming lips and then they came for a man who cared about hair

And away we go.

since the topic was pretty dead before his contributions, i'm going to posit that deric was stealth trying to turn this into a race gender thread bc a) he feels strongly about the issue or b) he feels strongly about enjoying ilx clusterfucks

lol

i know, right; i get the distinct sense i'm being played

or that i'm trapped in the bottle opener thread

also how was this shit not ugly BEFORE?

lex otm; i was trying to say that. i love when people make this rhetorical move. shitty, possibly racially charged thing that happened isn't the problem, the person naming the dynamic is the problem.

since the topic was pretty dead before his contributions, i'm going to posit that deric was stealth trying to turn this into a race gender thread bc a) he feels strongly about the issue or b) he feels strongly about enjoying ilx clusterfucks

I really, really, really do not enjoy ILX clusterfucks. It seriously makes me sad to see people taking potshots at other people, particularly when it degrades to the point of people making unfounded accusations of racism or sexism. My entire intention was to try to forestall that likelihood. Which, unsurprisingly, totally blew up in my face. Congratulations, though, because y'all totally made me feel like shit about about even trying to keep the peace!

http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20111115&t=2&i=532818485&w=460&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&r=BTRE7AE14NJ00

just tryin to keep the peace

for what it's worth, deric, i'm not really interested in calling wayne coyne out as racist or sexist, but i think the history of exposing black women's bodies in the west without their consent might be relevant to this discussion. or not, but freaking out at the mention of it is uncalled for.

also, seriously, how can you not talk about gender; it's a video of fully clothed men and a naked woman being jizzed on.

well when you put it like that it just sounds tawdry and gross

i feel like these questions are separate from the discussion of coyne's and badu's bad behavior as twitter personalities. like, badu could be acting badly on twitter, and the release of the video could still be exploitative of her and her sister.

^^^ OTM

It's still kind of stunning that the Lips responses are being perceived as cynical and calculated while Badu's are kind of accepted as fact. Nothing calculated at all about publicly declaring your artistic integrity and decrying colleagues as hacks?

weird way to spin this conversation. the issue here is not really the tone of each party's tweeted responses to this situation, but rather the content and release of the video itself. often, when people take risks in front of a camera, they do so only because they trust that the person behind the camera (and the person in the editing room) will respect them and their wishes when it comes time to make the results public. unless i've missed something, coyne & co. haven't denied badu's accusation that the video was released without her approval, and they haven't denied that she was guaranteed the right to refuse. that inclines me to at least tentatively accept her accusations as valid. if what she says is true, and if she feels violated as a result of the way she was treated, then i take her side without question.

translation: horshoe's last post

also, seriously, how can you not talk about gender; it's a video of fully clothed men and a naked woman being jizzed on.

― horseshoe, Friday, June 8, 2012 10:02 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. even before i knew the full extent of the controversy over the video, i was bothered by its basic structure. not so much the erotic images of erykah and her sister, but the contrast between that material and the stupid, boring, risk-free shots of the band goofing around.

she sang "green eyes" off mama's gun while performing some crazy rhythmic gymnastics routine.

― horseshoe, Saturday, May 31, 2008 11:38 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was a high point in my life, can i just say

yeah all of horseshoe's last few posts otm

i kind of feel that whether coyne is "racist" or "sexist" is not the point, because cultural racism and sexism are not dependent on people's conscious motivations to exist, and failing to see the history of exploitation in this sort of imagery w/r/t both black female bodies and female bodies generally is the kind of unintelligent oversight that could only come from a white dude's privileged perspective.

yeah but the contrast to that is that coyne was naked (unerotically, admittedly and maybe obviously) in one of his own videos a while back. i dunno what his stance on casual nudity is, and i suspect he hasn't put much thought into the cultural distinction between male and female nudity, but it still adds a bit of a complication to the situation. (xp to contenderizer.) (also lex probably mostly otm there.)

reminds me of so many hack male artists whose entire art centres around unclothed women "because the female body is so beautiful and a work of art" zzzzzz

"because the female body is so beautiful and a work of art" jizzzzzz

i feel like these questions are separate from the discussion of coyne's and badu's bad behavior as twitter personalities. like, badu could be acting badly on twitter, and the release of the video could still be exploitative of her and her sister.

This is kind of the point I was trying to make, although obviously in a completely ineffectual way. People have been making judgments itt about who was wronged by this on a professional level without fully understanding what had happened yet. Which is fine to discuss on a flip and gossipy level. If, however, the topic turns to discussions of sexual or racial exploitation, the conversation stands the risk of becoming really ugly if the tone remains flip and gossipy. My entire concern was with trying to do my little part in preventing that from happening. I never said it shouldn't be discussed, and I never said it was a boring or worthless topic of conversation.

since the topic was pretty dead before his contributions, i'm going to posit that deric was stealth trying to turn this into a race gender thread bc a) he feels strongly about the issue or b) he feels strongly about enjoying ilx clusterfucks

― Mordy, Friday, June 8, 2012 11:51 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is that kinda "don't think about an elephant" thing

holy shit

i hadn't heard about this

i thought there was a new EB album announced or something :/

thing is with the lips, and i do love soft bulletin and embyronic a lot

but ultimately, i always got the vibe that those dudes were kinda just southern druggie dudes masquerading as artist you know? like not that they didn't do ART, but like i kinda feel like ultimately they are like way more frat dude redneck type of dudes than their little precious falsetto psych would suggest.

like i feel like they are one of those bands were some nerds would be oh i'd love to meet them and we'd talk about os mutantes until the sun came up and those dudes might just want to get wasted and get a BJ or something

not that i know em or anything but i dunno, just a vibe, so this isn't that surprising in a way

and for my fairly worthless 0.02, wayne comes off as a total fucking dick in this whole thing and i'm pretty flabbergasted than anyone who read this whole thread (as i just did) would think otherwise.