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

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."

http://www.watergate.com/image/liddy3.jpg

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And oh what a pity the world's not white
Oh what a shame i don't have blue eyes
God must have been a color blind
If i made the world it would be all white...

Jesus loves me
But not my wife
Not my nigger friends
Or their nigger lives
But jesus loves me
That's for sure
'Cause the bible tells me so ...

Ask Charley Pride.

>I mean I feel like a lot of hip-hop, certainly not all of it, but probably most of it deals with inner-city life. Can you really ever claim to appreciate it on the same level of people living in the inner-city if you grew up in the suburbs?

What about rappers from the suburbs like De La Soul, Public Enemy and Ice Cube?

nitsuh do you actually know anyone who listens to rap music?

(I was actually wanting to add on the way to work something kinda about that -- about how even among hip-hop's black audience, I'd venture that like less than 5% are actually living the lives described in some of the music, and less than 25% are even much brushing up on it. What's weird, though, is that the bulk of the hip-hop white people know is primarily about partying and women and making money, an experience that's in no way limited to blackness or the "inner city." White people get hot in here and take off all their clothes, too.)

-- nabisco (--...), November 7th, 2005.

TMI dude

Cocorosie violates a sort of corollary, like "don't be retarded unless it works." White girls dropping the n-bomb isn't always a bad thing but the way they do it is soooo clunky it really kills the song which is actually a fairly good song. (More here if you care.)

I mean nobody's calling Kanye a wigger or accusing him of "acting black"! That's kinda my point here, that neurotic-about-hip-hop white people make it this huge connection about race, even when they know (check whatever's posts) that it's about a cultural experience or whatever (as described by "real"). And for the record I find it just as annoying when black people construct the same linked notions of "real" and "blackness," cause it does the same vaguely dangerous stuff.

100% right, Ethan, except I think the difference that's messing with people is that if you're like a black kid in Indiana listening to hip-hop you still have some kind of imaginary "in" to identify with the stuff that white people somehow build themselves up into lacking. And in both cases that's just weirdo race-linking stuff, more or less.

Meanwhile, three posts in this thread have used the word "retarded" with far less artistic motive.