The N Word

2 months ago, I was in a sweaty, jumping, swaying mass of people who heard Patti Smith and her band perform the album 'Horses'. This was a momentous occasion in  my life. Patti is one of the few non dead people on my bedroom wall (the other non dead person is Iggy who I saw a day after Patti, so yeah I can just go ahead and die now)

But this isn't about Horses. This is about a song off Easter called Rock and Roll Nigger. 

This is one of the first songs I heard of Patti's, lead by a Marilyn Manson cover (Nowhere near as good as the original but yes, I was in a raging Manson phase at the time as an angsty, morbid, manliner loving teenager. For him obviously the most powerful line was 'I have not sold myself to god' from Babelogue because of course he was the 'all American antichrist'). The leadup to the song began with the delirious Babelogue which begins 'I haven't fucked much with the past but I've fucked plenty with the future' as the crowd starts leading Patti with their frantic clapping, each egging the other on, Pats increasing her tempo, till in heart she's a 'Moslem' and an American artist who has no guilt. No (white) guilt. An American Artist. It only recently struck me to analyse what it meant to be an American artist with no guilt who has a song with one of the ugliest words in the English language as it's title. Go ahead, say it in your head. Just the sound of it is ugly. And despite Patti's redefinition of the word in this song, it sounds nothing but ugly as she spits it out nigger nigger nigger nigger rock and roll nigger. The song started forming links with other things I had read and heard and I decided to write. 

The song is a glorification of being 'outside of society'. Fair enough. As someone who has had her share of shit thrown at her throughout her life, unwanted pregnancies, poverty, pain, artistic confusion, hunger, failure in love and art, condescension hurled her way and having broken through it, you think she's earned her right to be willfully on the 'outside'. Yet while adopting an outsider stance, she could be alienating those who she's trying to identify with.

Disclaimering - I've never been to America and don't really pretend to understand race relations there. Here in India, where we still use 'kaala' to berate our own people as well as black people who we encounter on the metro, near Saket or in Khirdki village, most people's interactions with black immigrants/tourists is pretty limited. We stare, gawk, snigger, avoid, pretend to be comfortable and cool on public transport. That said, let's get into what this song makes me feel and what questions it raises in my head, shall we (since this blog is mostly a one sided conversation)

From the get go, we know she's using the word in her own way to mean a transgressive, radical, status quo smashing, scandalizing, freespirited person. Cool. We get that part. 'Those who have suffered understand suffering and thereby extend their hand'. What she proposes is a society outside of society, of those excluded from the mainstream of society. Like Jimi Hendrix, Jesus Christ, Jackson Pollock and grandma too. Jimi and Patti herself ultimately got absorbed in the respectable canon of rock, Jesus did pretty well for himself and Grandma Smith I'm sure was pretty rock n roll. [Just an aside, the song right after this is ironically enough called 'Privilege (Set Me Free)]. Patti gets lost in the valley of pleasure and the infinite sea where measure for measure love spews from her heart talking about how the true cost of art and transgression is to be outside of society.

In her liner notes (which you can find quoted here)  in her characteristic Rimbaud/Kerouac lovin free versing, not always sense making style she says the 'word must be redefined'. 

Sure Pats, but are you the one to redefine it? Let's here these young black folks out who have something pretty relevant to say (in reference to Krayshawn) The part that really stuck out for me was the girl who says 'you wanna act like you wanna be a nigga then be a nigga and live a nigga life'. When I was thinking about writing this, it really made me think of how this song just could not be written today, not because we still don't have a fucked up fetishization/mythologizing of blackness but because blackness in America is under a kind of siege, in light of events like the death of Trayvon Martin, events at Ferguson, Baltimore and other instances of violence against black people. And because blackness is now something that is being fought to be defended, whereas in popular music of the 60s and 70s it was something that was being appropriated in the pursuit of 'hipness'. And here I'm not saying things were better back then, or that black artists didn't resent their music being co-opted (We see the same story in Swing vs Bebop) definitely not, it's just that there was a discourse of white people trying to be 'hip' to blackness and black music in a different way and how a form of music invented by black went 'pop'. For example, I was reading Keith Richard's 'Life' last month. Throughout that book he goes on and on about how basically he's a black man in a white man's body, how much he loved and respects black musicians (all the while conforming to 'groovy' stereotypes about them) and some real bullshit about caring black mamas and babes who smother him with their tits and affection during the long hard tours.

Brings to mind the Dead Kennedy's Holiday In Cambodia with Jello saying '“Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz, on your five grand stereo. Braggin that you know how the niggers feel cold and the slums got so much soul.” That last part was basically how Keith felt about Jamaica and how gangsta but still totes chill all the guys he hung out in Jamaica were and how they made him feel so at home.

And he's trying to be nice, he really is, these are people he's spent his life trying to be (from his position of white privilege, of course) - but at the end of the day, its these people who he's disadvantaging by co-opting their music. Let's listen to Azealia Banks (who is super articulate, but in a Courtney Love way, you know what I'm saying? That sounds like an insult but I mean it in a good way because you know how I love Courtney and I think Azealia is a moophat/hothead/loudmouth/badass in the same way) talking about basically the same shit.

Another thing I just realized, I just thought of 'coon' as another slur similar to nigger. Didn't know it was more like an Uncle Tom thing. She talks about people she feels are betraying their own people as 'coons'.

Ok, more quotes. Sorry I'm losing focus a bit. Ok, so Lester. Lester my flawed cough syrup guzzling patron saint whose words explode from his fingers faster than he can make sense of them. Lester, the 'Last of the White Niggers', talks about his own experiences of being shitty and saying shitty shit.

Here's a quote but read the rest of it please, it's great.

" If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture- flak hailing on you wherever you go. Ivan Julian told me that whenever he hears the word “nigger,” no matter who says it, black or white, he wants to kill. Once when I was drunk I told Hell that the only reason hippies ever existed in the first place was because of niggers, and when I mentioned it to Ivan while doing this article I said, “You probably don’t even remember-” “Oh yeah, I remember,” he cut me off…"

See, there's not so much for me to say so towards the fag (!!!) end of this as I start getting sleepy and not having an ending for this I'll add quotes because a lot of this started coming together for me in the past few weeks while I was thinking of this. Let's go on to Louis CK on the titular N word of this article.

Ok, so a lot of people think this is him defending the use of the word as is, but if you notice he says 'don't make me say it, just take responsibility for the shitty things you wanna say'. This is not the same way he defends his use of the word 'faggot'. As you've seen in his show he's constantly appalled by racism (example the episode with his 90 year old aunt. Yes I watch Comedy Central on sundays, ok. It was just on)

And as I'm losing focus let me tell you another Lester quote from Main Lines, Blood Feasts blahblah and call it a night. It's pretty much how I feel about privileged/'romantic' dudes (*cough* Mayank Soofi *cough*) writing about prostitutes. Or anyone (myself included) who wants to talk about distant disenfranchised people who we can sign a petition for or have a circle jerk to raise funds for etc. This is Lester reviewing Dylan's Desire, talking about the song Hurricane (after which omfg he rips him a new one about his completely misinformed song about mobster Joe Gallo. Here it is)

'It's always about a martyred nigger and he always throws in a dirty words to make it street authentic. I don't use the word 'nigger' for effect or to make myself look hip (sorry my writing fails me here, I think he said hip) but rather because just like our fathers before us that is all Jackson and Carter have been to him - a human life to exploit for his own purposes'
Ok. A postscript. I realized I never wrote about how the song made me feel. And obviously being the fucking fangirl I am I just happened to read Lester's review of Horses and the way he wrote about it made me want to write. I remember running down the field as I heard her say 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine', rushing through the crowd and dancing, jumping, screaming and doing the Watusi (its not that hard to do actually). As she closed her set with My Generation and screamed 'I'm still fucking here!' and how we are the future (a cliche sentiment that I wouldn't give a shit about if it wasn't coming from a feral almost 70 year old woman with total control over the crowd). I get goosebumps and feel transported to that dark sweaty bouncing undulating crowd dancing with my eyes closed and my hands in the air screaming along to Dancing Barefoot (a bonus)
So what does Rock and Roll Nigger mean to me? Let's rewind to the mid 2000s (yes crank up the time machine, we're going long) where I hear this song and the one thing that got stuck to my mind was 'I was lost in the valley of pleasure. I was lost in the infinite sea' and that line still sticks out to me. It's Patti feeling Rimbaudian and falling in slow motion into the sea of possibility (yeah I know those are different songs). The other question she asks is 'do you like the world around you, are you ready to behave?' I'm still not sure if I'm ready to not behave. Lenny's guitar soars as everyone chants outside of society. The Lenny and Patti dynamic is the best like how she shouts Lenny! And he takes over. They both had the same hair when I saw them.