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Love it, but seriously conflicted

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    #26
    Originally posted by delicatemoth View Post
    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.
    They famously annoyed The Prodigy by getting all village elder on them and suggesting that they shouldn't play Smack My Bitch Up at a festival they were both appearing at. It sounded like the Essex ravemen were taken aback in a "But, but, you're the Beastie Boys, you had an inflatable penis," way at the neck of it. There was also the suggestion that Adrock was just trying to impress Kathleen Hanna (fair enough, she's brilliant) although I'd be inclined to believe that the Tibet 'n' tofu version is a more comfortable fit with their private selves than the excesses of the Licensed To Ill era.
    Last edited by Benjm; 10-09-2017, 13:40.

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      #27
      Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
      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."
      And, of course, Curtis Mayfield used the word liberally in "Mighty Mighty (Spade And Whitey)"

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        #28
        Obviously I don't need to tell you he used the n word too in (Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below, We're All Going To Go

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