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Love it, but seriously conflicted

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    Love it, but seriously conflicted

    I've been working on the long-list for my Christmas card CD, and I'm wringing my hands about this one:

    Diamonds — Johnnyswim.

    It's been a serious earworm since I first heard it, and it continues to be played frequently when I need a serious kick up the ass. OTOH I've intellectual reservations. It's not that it's Christian rock exactly, but lyrics like this make me queasy:

    We're the fire, from the sun
    We're the light when the day is done
    We are the brave, the chosen ones
    We're the diamonds, diamonds
    Rising about the dust.

    You've taken down
    So many others
    Oh but you'll know my name when you see it
    And in these ashes I'm stronger still
    You'll learn to feel my pain, yeah you will.

    I can relate to the positivity of the chorus, in a kinda "we're all in the gutter but some of us look at the stars" kind of way, though anyone who refers to themselves as "chosen ones" I'd ordinarily cross the street to avoid. But the other verse gives me the creeps. Exactly who's being threatened, and why?

    So I'm in two minds that are poles apart right now. Which is OK I guess. I might include it anyway and write a liner note about my conflictedness.

    Anyone else have reluctant favourites that strike them in a similar fashion?

    #2
    Oh, plenty of grime and hip hop causes me a fair amount of uncertainty. I take over one of the classrooms at the gym for some training and often plug in my phone for spotify playlists. I do wonder what other people may think if they actually pay attention to the lyrics rather than the vibe of the music.

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      #3
      I do find Run to You by Bryan Adams and Saving All My Love by Whitney very catchy despite loathing everything about cheatin' and self-justificatin'.

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        #4
        The first two verses of Bruce's "I'm on fire " sound seriously dodgy if taken out of context

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          #5
          "Brown Sugar" has a fantastic tune, but the lyrics are incredibly racist and misogynistic. And seeing Jagger prancing and pouting like a good-time idiot while he sings about slavery and the systematic rape and torture of black women marks him out as a truly vile man. And he can't claim a misguided youthfulness that made him write those lyrics. The Stones still play that song ("...just like black girl should" is now "young girl"; which makes no difference, really), so he owns it. "Brown Sugar" makes people dance and sing along, so that makes it OK, evidently. Mick said yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, wooo indeed.

          And then there are the rapey lyrics of "Under My Thumb"...

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            #6
            Oh, Le Mick's lyrical misogyny is epic. Brown Sugar, Stupid Girl, Yesterday's Papers, Out of Time, The Spider and the Fly, Under My Thumb and others I've no doubt forgotten. Fortunately (for me) I've never been overwhelmingly attached to any of them, so never felt personally conflicted.

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              #7
              Musically related, but not directly about the music, I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie, but have always been put off by the use of the swastika.

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                #8
                "Young Girl" by Gary Puckett etc. Fab record, but highly iffy for obvious reasons.

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                  #9
                  A substantial proportion of the Beach Boys' catchiest numbers were, in terms of their lyrics, nauseating celebrations of anti-social irresponsibility by privileged rich youth. As an anti-petrol head who hates dangerous speeding drivers and flashy car show-offs I have in mind mainly "Little Deuce Coupe" and "Fun Fun Fun". But I'm more generally a curmudgeonly mildly ascetic book worm who resents the vibrant antics of sporty airheads, so I also hate (lyrics-wise) all the much larger subset of their songs about surfing and other mindless moneyed hedonism. |

                  On the other hand, you know, the songs are very harmonic and catchy.
                  Last edited by Evariste Euler Gauss; 08-09-2017, 19:46.

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                    #10
                    When I first heard 'Fun Fun Fun' I had no idea it was about cars. I thought it was about a tea party. "We'll have fun fun fun till daddy takes the tea bird away".

                    Per thread, 'Sun Arise' by Rolf Harris.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by caja-dglh View Post
                      Oh, plenty of grime and hip hop causes me a fair amount of uncertainty.
                      I really like the musical energy of the Geto Boys' early stuff but as I've got older find it increasingly difficult to disregard some (well, most) of the lyrics.

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                        #12
                        Pollywannacracka is a wee bit problematic as well. And it's hardly unique on Fear of a Black Planet.
                        Last edited by Lang Spoon; 08-09-2017, 21:42.

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                          #13
                          There's some shockers spread across PE's early albums. Sophisticated Bitch is awful. I always imagine Chuck D trying to explain it in Derek Smalls' voice, a la Sex Farm.

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by Gerontophile View Post
                            "Young Girl" by Gary Puckett etc. Fab record, but highly iffy for obvious reasons.
                            Not really. The guy thought she was of age and when he learnt otherwise, he did the right thing.

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                              #15
                              Yes. From a contemporary PoV The Lovin' Spoonful's Younger Girl is worse.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Benjm View Post
                                There's some shockers spread across PE's early albums. Sophisticated Bitch is awful. I always imagine Chuck D trying to explain it in Derek Smalls' voice, a la Sex Farm.
                                Coincidentally I listened to that album the other day, and just skipped the song. Didn't feel like I missed out on anything, apart from the bit where Chuck goes "Talk like this uh don't talk slang" which is great. Oh, and "She thinks it's classy but it's really a pub", but that's more of a 'funny to UK listeners' sort of thing.

                                The rest of that album is fine, as is the second one. 'Meet The G That Killed Me' is their other standout shocker. You'll note that all these PE songs are among their weakest musically. It's almost as if their hearts weren't really in them, but toxic masculinity made them feel they had to be arseholes (see rock/rap music passim - so much of it is made by groups of young, insecure men).

                                If you want to really cringe, check 1:17 on the video of David Bowie's 'China Girl'. Keep on snorting Dave.

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                                  #17
                                  She Watch Channel Zero on the second one is a bit iffy, and has that insecure little man vibe too. It has its own slightly surreal moment when Chuck starts going on about soap on a rope. Actually, a clock shaped PE soap on a rope would be a great Christmas gift.

                                  There used to be an aftershave called Pub. The bottle looked like a cross between a dimpled pint glass and a beer pump sign. God knows what it smelt like.

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                                    #18
                                    We all know that Laibach are just history-obsessed socialists, right? However, some of their 'flirting with fascism', imagery-wise, takes it about as far as you can get away with.

                                    I still get a little twitchy when I see some of their stuff like that. Beyond that, you've got stuff like November Novelet, which I find really quite unnerving and then ultimately Death In June, who can just fuck right off!

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                                      #19
                                      ABBA - When I Kissed the Teacher

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                                        #20
                                        Mark E Smith is of course a twat of the highest order but I still love The Fall. The lyrics of The Classical are obviously the most 'problematic' which his subsequent attempts to justify only make even worse. "Every programme you see about young people has now got a black boy in it, I have to make a joke about that, I can't help it." Yeah right, Mark, really funny that.

                                        I struggle also with the line in Mott The Hoople's All The Way From Memphis, "Some spade said, rock n rollers, you're all the same" which I don't think I've ever heard challenged and certainly doesn't seem to have been taken seriously enough for radio dj's to be put off by it, even now.

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                                          #21
                                          There are loads.

                                          There are songs which are dodgy due to the artists' sins - Gary Glitter, Pantera. "Sunarise", as mentioned above, is one of those and it is a shame as, like "Two Little Boys" (not as dodgy lyrically, as the title and subsequent circumstances suggest) I love it. Indeed, I want "Sunarise" as part of my funeral but that is the version by The Godfathers so that is OK.

                                          Obviously, loads of 50s, 60s and 70s songs have schoolgirl fixations. The Beastie Boys had loads of dodgy references on the first two albums - at least - "The girlies I like are underage ", "The Sheriff is after me for what I did to his daughter. I did it like this, I did it like that. I did it with the whiffle ball bat." "Took her to the place, threw the mattress in her face" to name three.

                                          The ones where it is slightly different are things like murder ballads where the singer portraying a character. In "Delia's Gone" or "Delilah", the singers are no more promoting violence against women than the writers of, say, "Silent Witness" (which you may think is actually quite a lot). Where it gets a bit more muddled is in cases like "Killer On The Loose" by Thin Lizzy where Phil Lynott (normally a good lyricist) either overstretches himself or just can't stop himself from introducing an element of glamourisation to it.

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                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Artificial Hipster View Post

                                            I struggle also with the line in Mott The Hoople's All The Way From Memphis, "Some spade said, rock n rollers, you're all the same" which I don't think I've ever heard challenged and certainly doesn't seem to have been taken seriously enough for radio dj's to be put off by it, even now.
                                            It's probably generational. In the 60s and into the 70s it didn't have the connotations other clearly derogatory terms had. It was even used among American blacks themselves, so we figured it must be OK. Curious, I went and looked it up and found this from a piece on NPR:

                                            "In the late 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, "spade" began to evolve into code for a black person, according to Patricia T. O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman's book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word spade as a reference to blackness was in Claude McKay's 1928 novel Home to Harlem, which was notable for its depictions of street life in Harlem in the 1920s. "Jake is such a fool spade," wrote McKay. "Don't know how to handle the womens." Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman then used the word in his novel The Blacker The Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a widely read and notable work that explored prejudice within the African-American community. "Wonder where all the spades keep themselves?" one of Thurman's characters asks. It was also in the 1920s that the "spade" in question began to refer to the spade found on playing cards.

                                            The word would change further in the years to come.

                                            Wolfgang Mieder notes that in the fourth edition of The American Language, H.L. Mencken's famous book about language in the United States, "spade" is listed as one of the "opprobrious" names for "Negroes" (along with "Zulu," "skunk" and many other words that I can't print here). Robert L. Chapman struck a similar note in his Thesaurus of American Slang (1989). "All these terms will give deep offense if used by nonblacks," warned Chapman, listing "spade" in a group that included words like blackbird, shade, shadow, skillet and smoke.

                                            The British author Colin MacInnes, who was white, frequently used the term in novels like City of Spades (1957) and Absolute Beginners (1959) about the multiracial, multicultural London of the 1950s and '60s. MacInnes has been criticized for his exotification and sexualization of black culture in his books. MacInnes also coined the cringeworthy word "spadelet" to refer to black infants.

                                            As with many other racialized terms, there were efforts to reclaim the word after it had become a slur. Four years after Malcolm X was killed in 1965, poet Ted Joans eulogized him in his poem "My Ace of Spades." The artist David Hammons also explored the negative connotations to the word in his 1973 sculpture "Spade With Chains." Hammons once told an interviewer that he began to incorporate spades into his work because "I was called a spade once, and I didn't know what it meant ... so I took the shape and started painting it." And a character in 2009's Black Dynamite (a spoof of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s) tells a rival that he's "blacker than the ace of spades and more militant than you."

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                                              #23
                                              Interesting stuff, thanks.

                                              I agree that to a degree it's necessary to acknowledge the era in which racist language was used, which is why I have Bernard Manning at least getting to rest his fat arse on Jim Davidson's face in one of the deeper circles of hell. It's the phrasing though which makes the line sound even more offensive, it's not just a spade it's "some spade" who's pissed him off as though this person is representative of the whole of his race, much in the way I'd dismiss some cunt who'd offended me some way or another as being representative of all the cunts out there.

                                              I still have the song on my ipod mind.

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                                                #24
                                                I thinkI picked up on his shame (in the lyrics) rather than his anger, which I figured was directed at losing his guitar. Apparently Ian Hunter changed "spade" to "dude" in later live performances so I guess he did catch some flak.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Originally posted by evilC View Post
                                                  We all know that Laibach are just history-obsessed socialists, right? However, some of their 'flirting with fascism', imagery-wise, takes it about as far as you can get away with.
                                                  Speaking as a Laibach-lover, that's a very good call. 'Having their cake and eating it' springs to mind. And I know at least one of their fans was an actual fascist, cos I nicked his Laibach records. He was very odd. Had a copy of Dead Kennedys 'Nazi Punks Fuck Off' with the no-swastikas armband, and he'd tippexed out the red circle around the swastika. He also liked Crass and Conflict. I was a naive teenager and thought the fascism was an edgy pose for some time before the penny dropped.

                                                  "The girlies I like are underage "

                                                  Wasn't this a pin-sharp cuss of the repulsive Jimmy Page? But yeah, they did some shit. My understanding is that in later years they were very embarrassed about 'Girls' etc. and expressed regret, which I feel backs up my comments about insecure young men.

                                                  The lyrics of The Classical are obviously the most 'problematic' which his subsequent attempts to justify only make even worse.

                                                  Making it even even worser is the fact that apart from THAT line 'The Classical' is lyrically magnificent.

                                                  Nick Cave ('A Box For Black Paul') and Jeffrey Lee Pierce (something off 'Fire Of Love') also used the n-word in songs around this time. Misguided punk edginess striking again.
                                                  Last edited by delicatemoth; 10-09-2017, 00:48.

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