I didn’t say he stopped privately being racist or misogynist; I don’t know Lou Reed personally. I said I doubted he was still a violent, wife-beating asshole if Laurie Anderson happily stayed married to him.
1 Like
Y’leave one comment on BoingBoing when you’re half-drunk and trying to get to sleep in the middle of the night…
oh no! More confirmation that creative people are difficult! I can’t fit the world into my tidy little boxes of good and bad. What ever will I do? I know… I’ll listen to some Velvet Underground.
1 Like
OMG, he’s so right about creep… It does just get into our souls, especially that little crunchy guitar part (though the Amanda Palmer ukulele cover is pretty popular too). Also, 7 people just drove into the bay killed me…
I do think that that song and lots of Lou Reed’s stuff (especially the early stuff) does speak to a particular sense of alienation that (rightly or wrongly) lots of sort of middle class white kids feel. It’s especially keen if you just don’t fit in for whatever reason (as was my own experience as a kid). But that sense of alienation from the mainstream culture has also been commoditized and sold as mainstream culture since at least the 1960s. And it worked well not without reason, because many people do feel alienated. But they are unwilling to do the work to change it and would rather make their own sort of social spaces where they don’t have to deal with any problems, but their own. But claiming that status of social outcast can at times just be a means of avoiding responsibility for how the world actually operates - like if you feel alienated, then you can say that those things that reinforce racial and gender disparities aren’t yours, and therefore it’s not your problem, when, yeah, it often still is your problem. I have to say that Elizabeth Grace Hale made that point coherently in A Nation of Outsiders.
But it seems to me that outsider culture can be used for good, too. If you want to build alternative institutions to the ones that exist, make them inclusive from the ground up.
5 Likes
Thanks, very interesting, and I think it really is a hell of a lot easier for all of that to happen to and with white listeners. The more or less exclusive whiteness of the scene’s participants at all levels makes that kind of alienation for people who aren’t white, well, alienating! But you also get into more about it that’s white then just the race of those involved. Ironic, isn’t it, that those who seek affirmation of an outsider status remain so firmly within the boundaries (physical, mental, emotional) of whiteness. Partly, I suppose, because white people so rarely think accurately about what it means for them to be white. They rarely realize that if they weren’t white, they’d probably often be doing and thinking and feeling other things then what they do and think and feel.
1 Like
You replied to me with that, but I can only interpret it as a complete non sequitur. Are you willing to explain it?
Yeah, and I think that’s been a problem with these various scenes, historically and today. There have been instances where race becomes a key issue, but that’s usually because it’s on the social radar for some reason. A good example is the rise of competing “rock against” campaigns in Britain in the late 1970s - the rock against communism movement that pulled on just this white, working class alienation we’re talking about and the counter rock against racism that punk and reggae artists in GB put together (which had the support of bands like the Clash). Actually a really good movie about how that actually came to be is the film This is England, which is about a kid who gets involved with a group of skinheads after his father is sent to the Falkland’s war and shows how the British National Party attempted to play off that skinhead, working class alienation. It’s probably the best of the skinhead movies that I’ve seen that doesn’t just make that subculture a caricature.
But in the 80s, many punks who were also activists focused on the rise of Reagan and Cold War 2, which included a new arms race and a new focus on nuclear war, while the problems of black youths were largely ignored, I think. Meanwhile, bands like Bad Brains came under fire for their sexism and homophobia - which of course was common across many hardcore scenes, which were deeply masculine and at times out and out racist and misogynistic - even though we probably wouldn’t have hardcore without Bad Brains.
But there was a very good reason why people like William Pierce and Enoch Powell were able to pull in young white men, because they played to that sense of entitlement and working class anger evident in the late 70s as deindustrialization started. Even in the 90s, you could feel a very real struggle for those very people between the anti-racist punks and those who were deeply racist. I think there was less of that in Atlanta proper because of the demographics of the city, but the hammer skins and their white power bands had some serious sway out in the sticks where I was. And they were all white, male, working class guys who little prospects for upward mobility. And here is some guy coming along with easy answers on who to blame for all that, which includes inclusion and a sense of belonging and respect which they don’t feel they were getting from mainstream culture. Race split a lot of scenes, in other words. There were people who were actively anti-racist, but they tended to just fight with the neo-nazis who tried to crash the punk party, and then there was everyone else, who kind of just didn’t care.
It’s a complicated problem, I guess. But yeah, more often than not, there isn’t this cognition that you’re still within the boundaries of whiteness, because the only people really thinking in those terms were actually the racists! They very much construct an identity based on whiteness consciously, and those who want to reject any association with the white power movement that tended to attempt to infect the punk scenes just wanted nothing to do with that, ignoring how they were already constructed in whiteness…
3 Likes
Not always! 
Oh right, you did say “more often than not.” (Otherwise, thanks again, lots to chew on there…)
2 Likes
Or I guess Black Flag’s White Minority? Or the Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks Fuck off?
1 Like
I think it has something to do with white people. Or, I started thinking about how I wasn’t consciously thinking about how I was white and how things would be different if I wasn’t white while I was doing all the things, and my brain divided by zero, and I thought of Hank Hill.
Try to not think too much about your breathing. Cheers!
Your complete refusal to engage on this topic (aside from the initial dumping of a link to a white supremacist’s scribblings) is . . . interesting.
2 Likes
1 Like
To be totally honest, that song spoke to me at the time because I had just met the woman I was going to marry, but I was being treated for depression. I suppose I could have written those lyrics at that time. I’m pretty sure that if I had to think any harder about how guilty I should feel about feeling so bad despite being on top of the world, you woudn’t have to worry about coming up with acerbic rebuttals…so…happy thought there?
Anyway, yeah. There’s something I don’t get about 90s music, which is how goddamned depressing it was. Those of us who made it to the uni level, mostly white middle- to upper-middle-class kids, had it great! Why were we all struggling so much with our own feelings?
I guess the only reason I rebel against the notion of fighting about white privilege is because personal experience has shown it to be mostly futile. People who “get it” just get it. People like me who “get it” but have it thrown in my face that I don’t, or have people who are angry because I don’t agree on the particulars, I get angry because, hey, the people who have the power really don’t give a shit (see: Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, etc). And the kicker: they have the power, and not only don’t give a shit, but will push back when you suggest that they need to have power taken from them. You confront 100 people on their blatant racism and 99 of them will get pissed off (because dumb people get pissed off easily imho) and tell you why they’re 100% right to hate blacks, Mexicans, whoever.
I don’t know what to suggest. I honestly think I have a problem with the term, because people try to shoehorn it in to everything. Would I dare to go to an Eastern Kentucky family living in a trailer with holes in the floor, and explain their white privilege to them? Fuck, no, because my ass probably isn’t leaving that trailer in one piece.
Anyway, I did it again, I digressed, I derailed, and here we are. Sorry about that, I’ll shut up now. :-/
Have I been acerbic with you?
Anyway, that doesn’t sound as bad as your stated presumption about what I would have to say about the combination of your white male privilege and depression and reaction to a song.
Which is, instead, this: I hope your emotional condition is better now, and also that, some day, white male privilege won’t be what I’m gathering it presently is for you, a very toxic topic. Apologies if that’s presumptuous.
ETA: Okay, now that you’ve edited your comment several times, seemingly in response to this one, I’ll just add that yeah, classism is important too, of course. But that doesn’t mean that it trumps racism, and it doesn’t mean that a discussion about racism should instead be about classism. I wonder if, in a discussion about classism, you would again jump up and say, “You know, white supremacy and white privilege are important too!” Somehow I doubt it, and if you wouldn’t, well, I’ll just leave off with encouraging you to think about that difference. Thanks for sharing.
1 Like
Eh…?
Thank god I’m a Zeppelin fan…
Good for you.
Sorry I offend you by having opinions on music.
Not offended. Just concerned that my taste in music could have been buried deep in my whiteness somehow.
Zeppelin have been honored for decades for their work with ethic musicians and music, not that I personally care, but the lads recordings of yalla and even Kashmir could, technically, give me a pass.
Actually my attraction to Zeppelin’s work was via, you ready?, The Immigrant song…
How about that for ironic?
There is probably quite a lot to be said about the 60s and 70s era of rock, whiteness, and gender, actually. You are talking about a bunch of white guys playing American roots music in societies (US and GB) that have a history of white supremacy and gender discrimination. That doesn’t mean they aren’t talented, or didn’t write great music that deserves accolades. Immigrant song is a great song and I like it - that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about a bunch of white guys (some of whom came from higher social classes) profiting off a genre of music developed originally by black and poor white Americans, many of whom saw not much more than a few hundred dollars in their lifetimes for the work that they did. We can also talk about how women were often treated by men in the music industry - not well, frankly, both women who worked in the industry and those who were fans of the music. That doesn’t mean Immigrant Song isn’t a good song, or that Zepplin now sucks. It’s obviously not the case. Clearly (at least according to the guy who wrote this book) Lou Reed was a grade A asshole - he was also a great song writer.
I think people get confused that when people make critical assessments of art that it’s inherently saying it’s somehow bad, when that’s not the case at all. It’s telling us something about the world we inhabit and hopefully getting us to a place where we can do better.
3 Likes
