Well if you think that headline about Bowie is bad, you should see the things that Creem magazine said about glam! One of their nicknames for the movement was Glam-Glitter-Anal Rock. Gary Glitter was described as "the first Anglo-Anal cash-in" in the wake of Bolan + Bowie's breakthrough.
Funny thing is that Creem was a vociferous supporter of glitter 'n' glam (c.f. the sniffy disdain of Rolling Stone and the scepticism of most other American critics). This keep-your-back-to-the-wall type comment probably came from a champion of the New York Dolls.
This theme is one of the narratives in the Lester Bangs collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. It includes a January 1975 piece from Creem, about Bowie's Soul move, that is just boiling over with racism and homophobia.
ReplyDeleteThen in the brilliant The White Noise Supremacists, written for the Village Voice in 1979, Bangs reckons with "what an asshole I'd been", apologises, and tries to persuade his readers not to make the same mistakes.
He's very free with the derogatory terms, as many of the Creem /Noise Boys were.
DeleteBut the mea culpa piece you mention does go a long way towards repentance / reparation.
Part of that was conscious homophobia (Bangs' treatment of Rachael Humpherys in his 1975 profile is what completely severed his already fraught relationship with Lou Reed), but part of it is an unintended effect of the sort of slangy, we're-all-friends-here, supposedly defanging casualness towards epithets that's characterized a significant portion of countercultural discourse from Lenny Bruce and The White Negro to some parts of the present day.
ReplyDeleteThe intended effect is notionally well-meant, to establish the white hipster's commonality (and therefore supposed solidarity) with minorities, but even when it didn't devolve into 'ironic' racism etc., it assumed a chummy familiarity with the pain other groups endured that was inevitably callous (as Bangs himself notes in White Noise Supremacists, the Black people he said the N-word in front of would've been perfectly justified in beating the hell out of him)
Wait 'til you guys discover this Patti Smith song.....
ReplyDeleteVery familiar with it! It has not, erm, dated well. And yet I am pretty certain Patti performed it at her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame not so long ago. Did they bleep the word?
DeleteIt was dated even in 1976 or whenever it was - a throwback to Norman Mailer's "The White Negro".
But I think Patti's use of the term signifies something different from the casual use of epithets by Lester Bangs - I suppose it's more idealistic in a way, while of course laughably presumptuous. It proposes a commonality between all minorities, all outsiders.
This idea was part of the discourse of second-wave feminism. The Black Analogy it was called, or rather critiqued - positing an affinity between different kinds of oppressed experience.
It was rife in the 1960s - I came across an underground paper article called "The Student as Negro".
As I understand, she only performs the 'outside of society' sections nowadays, though she did unaccountably keep the Other Part at least as late as 2014 or so. And yes, it's incredibly idealistic in its own way, an attempt to elevate the subaltern through reclaiming the most loaded epithet of the most oppressed race - conveniently sidestepping whether it was her word to reclaim or not.
DeleteSay what you will about how 'intersectionality' became a meaningless buzzword in the last decade, but the concept itself was sorely needed - it was difficult for even many leftists to fully accept that liberation was not in fact a zero sum game, so you ended up with everyone arguing that their problem was the most urgently in need of solving , and the one tied for most oppression causing with the Big One (if not a little bit above it)
I think that's exactly right about the difference between Bangs and Smith.
DeleteBangs says in his later renunciation The White Noise Supremacists: "I figured all this was in the Lenny Bruce spirit of let's-defuse-them-epithets-by slinging-'em-out". He goes on to explain how he later realised that "those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn't just go slinging them around for effect."
Smith has a line somewhere about the n-word not being used to refer to skin colour. Her examples in the song are her heroes Hendrix, Jesus, Jackson Pollock and, for some reason, her Grandma.
Does her attempted reclamation of the word succeed? Is Smith the right person to even attempt it? YMMV. I go back to one of my favourite Robert Forster songs, When She Sang About Angels, which is about the experience of being a devoted Patti Smith fan even in her most crass or embarrassing moments.
And then there's that John Lennon / Yoko Ono song, which is an even clearer expression of that second-wave feminist discourse you mention.
I was just going to write "and of course there's the Yoko song" but you beat me to it!
DeleteI don't think the Yoko/Lennon and Patti Smith songs are in quite the same spirit personally. Smith seems to be actively (enthusiastically) trying to re-purpose or re-mint the n-word as a catch-all term for rebelliousness.
ReplyDeleteIt's closer in sentiment to White Riot by The Clash - the idea that the anti-systemic aspects of black culture provide a model to be emulated by white bohemian dweebs. This is an idea that goes back to the Beats, IIRC.