Worse Than Appropriation: What Do We Do With Great Art From The Dark Ages Before Modern Racial Sensitivity?

Nothing illustrates the gulf that exists between the political factions in modern society quite like the same statement being reported to mean different things depending on which media outlet reports said statement. Sure, they can report the same event differently, but you’d think that when someone is directly quoted, their words would be a matter of record. Not so. You see this most often when famous artists discuss the hoary old chestnuts of political correctness, censorship, and cancel culture.

“If I wrote that song today, maybe I'd think twice about it… People hear that word go off like a bell and accuse me of something that I didn't intend.” That’s what new wave rocker Elvis Costello told The Telegraph a few weeks back, referring to his 1979 hit Oliver’s Army, and the word in question is the N-word. Now, depending on whether you follow right or left-wing media, he was either bemoaning the modern censorious left, or acknowledging that things change, and that some words cause hurt, and are therefore not acceptable. Personally, I am still not sure which interpretation is correct.

Oliver’s Army is an anti-war protest song about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and a “white N*****” is apparently a very old derogatory term for an Irish Catholic.

A similar political Rorschach Test accompanied news that The Rolling Stones had retired their rape and slavery-referencing hit Brown Sugar. Mick Jagger was wisely evasive about his reasoning, blaming the complexities of arranging a set list; although he said back in 1995 that he’d never write the song now. His evasiveness didn’t stop frequent anti-PC paranoiac Piers Morgan from accusing the Stones of surrendering to the “Woke brigade”.

Keith Richards, on the other hand, was more forthcoming and more critical, expressing bemusement at the controversy. But he still supported the decision not to play the song, saying he did not “want to get into conflict with all of this shit”.

Let’s get one thing straight… Retiring these songs is the right thing to do. The N-word is not okay. It’s not my place to explain why; people with my skin-tone have only to understand that it’s not okay under any circumstances. As for Brown Sugar, we’re talking about The Stones second most played song, frequently the final number of their shows, belted out with 60,000 people singing along and pyrotechnics. It’s hard to imagine that as anything but a glorification of its subject matter. This is fundamental unambiguous wisdom that all working artists must understand these days. And in reality, it has always been this way (i.e. the N-word has never been okay), but there was a time when our culture’s understanding of these strictures was less certain.

One classic rock cult hit that’s never had its reckoning is Patti Smith’s Rock ‘n’ Roll N***** from 1978. I love the godmother of punk, and if she’d only found another word to use, this song would be one of the greatest songs ever written. But alas... Rock 'n Roll N***** truly breaks my heart.

The song does, however, illustrate the blindspot many white artists had at the time to issues of racial sensitivity. It’s cringingly clear that in using the word, Smith means a rebellious and honorable outsider. She even claimed in the liner notes to have redefined a n***** as “an artist-mutant that [who is] beyond gender”, and gave Mick Jagger as an example (what hath that man wrought?)

To wit:

Jimi Hendrix was a n*****

Jesus Christ and Grandma, too

Jackson Pollock was a n*****

N*****, n*****, n*****, n*****

N*****, n*****, n*****

(It was considered as a single, as it went over well live. Yikes!)

Patti Smith was not the first to equate the hardships of counterculture rebels with the black experience, and then to apply that unspeakable epithet to them. That notion probably dates back to Norman Mailer’s 1950s essay The White N*****. This is not a defense of Smith, Mailer and his essay are rightly cancelled too, the white n***** is a ridiculous notion that requires no understanding of privilege to entertain. But the world that Mailer had forged was the world in which Smith wrote that song.

(Side note, Rock ‘n’ Roll N***** is still a fixture of Smith’s Live shows... Patti Smith, from a fan who scaled a fence to visit St Marks Church in-the-Bowery when it was closed for renovations, just to see where you first performed, please for the love of god, cut this shit out.)

There’s a less serious parallel in the way bands like The Clash and Blondie appropriated hip hop in ways which I am sure they thought were complimentary. Blondie’s Rapture and The Clash’s The Magnificent Seven both date from 1981; while Rapture features a verse in which Debbie Harry raps, The Magnificant Seven is entirely rapped. And it’s clear in both songs that the artists love and respect hip hop culture; Rapture even references Grandmaster Flash and Fab 5 Freddy. But there’s also a sense of entitlement to be heard in these songs, as if white rockers could simply adopt a vocal style, and make a rap record. Those songs, while I love them to bits, also have a whiff of a white saviour complex about them; as if these artists believed that hip hop required their platform to be exposed to mainstream audiences.

Sure there are plenty of white rappers nowadays, but there is also a long, complex, and dynamic cultural discussion about how not to appropriate. White rappers, for the most part, seem to understand that they’re participants in a black artform, and there’s a wider hip hop culture that they need to credit and honour. Hip hop is not a costume to be put on, even if you are implicitly acknowledging that the costume is really cool.

But The Clash and Blondie lived in the same world as Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and The Rolling Stones - a world without the benefit of today’s cultural conversations around race and intersectional progressivism. The world that we live in today, that they missed out on, is one in which teens on Tiktok can share progressive concepts and theories that taken a university-level course in the 70s and 80s (if they even existed). “They didn’t know” is a very weak defense of bad actions, But if you’re the kind of classic rock sad boy who needs these songs in their life, it’s all the defense you need.