Good question from Philip in the comments section of my Kanye/Harry Allen post:
We ran a jokey piece about the Kanye outburst over on Rhapsody, and couldn't publish a shockingly high proportion of readers' comments due to racist sentiment, including use of the N-word.Question, possibly tangential: where does the Black Lips' dude's repeated use of the F-word (in his screed, posted on Brooklyn Vegan, explaining how and why he got his ass whooped by Wavves and/or Wavves' people) figure into this phenomenon? My gut reaction is that when the representatives of "indie culture" (allegedly a fairly benign, center-left community -- hell, even Black Lips are NPR-approved [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100813486]) feel no compunction about dropping F-bombs, we shouldn't be so surprised about the N-bombs flying through mass culture. Whatever kind of "performance" it may or may not be, it's absolutely dispiriting.
I had a similar reaction--I was surprised that few people seemed to cringe at Jared Swilley of the Black Lips' repeated reference to Wavves as a f-ggot (BV's YouTube linking of the f-word notwithstanding). But then again, I wasn't really that surprised. Perhaps the policing of language and profanity--even as it borders on hate (or unless it is uttered as hate?)--now seems like the pastime of a passing generation.
It reminds me of the much-discussed reluctance of the Times to call the excellent Toronto band Fucked Up by their name. How can we even hope to guard against offensive speech nowadays? I find the whole idea of profanity in a digital age, or at a moment when speech becomes "public" in all these new and once-unimaginable ways, to be somewhat quaint and outdated.
I wrote about bands giving themselves unprintable names last year, with Fucked Up being one of the best examples. But as I observed then, there is a line, however faint, that discerns good from bad taste. (For some, that line was band names like AIDS Wolf and Jay Reatard.) In the case of Swilley, the Kanye tweeters et al, I don't have a sense yet of whether this kind of cyber-hate rhetoric is merely questionable taste, or a new, perilous kind of web-permissiveness. Along these lines, it was interesting to see the recent cyber-bullying bill essentially get laughed off the floor. If we assume that people online are always merely blowing off steam--if we think that public speech on the Internet is somehow informal, less important or not really "public"--then will we eventually lose sight of the very ideas that necessitated the creation of hate speech codes or primetime "adult language" warnings in the first place?
Could not help but comment.
Profanity in band names is not all that disturbing to me. We see it out of the mouth of babes regularly. But I would draw a clear distinction between profanity and racist "hate rhetoric". Profanity is not necessarily violent to a specific group of people whereas use of the N-word along with whatever un-PC derogatory term delineates targets.
I do not think that people use hate un-PC racist terms just to blow off steam online. The internet affords people anonymity that causes us to reveal more of our thoughts. We're rarely held responsible to what we tweet. On the other hand, it is always useful to use this internet to gauge what our society's underbelly/internal workings actually look like, beyond the thin veneer of civility and fear of punishment for being politically incorrect.
right - I agree and I hope I didn't sound like I was equivocating cussing to hate talk. the comparison had more to do with the relationship between media and speech...and whether new media (which relies on a sort of democracy of the anonymous) just allows a platform for this kind of "underbelly" that pre-exists, or whether it actively encourages it in some new and indirect way.