… seem like they may be racist, as they seem to be (I don’t know, myself) a stereotype of native African language. That made me think of Superman by the same group:
I know a story, eh , about a Little fellow named Rodríguez González, a little Swiss fellow
Swiss?
Si, that way we don’t offend nobody
So even in the song, it suggests it’s offensive.
That got me thinking about the Witch Doctor lyrics. Ooh eee, ooh ah-ah, ting tang, Walla-walla, bing-bang is a Euro-American version of what ‘African’ languages sound like. Seems a bit insensitive nowadays.
OTOH, WitchDoctor and Zulu Wairrior seem respectful, other than the ‘English making fun of indigiounour languages’ thing. What do you think?
On Deezer (and I’m sure on other streaming services, too), on the “Easter” album the song is not-playable. Though I have the CD that still contains it.
Even back when their songs first came out, I hated Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Today, they all sound especially rape-y or like pedo anthems. ick ick ick
My daughter was just telling me yesterday that she can’t listen to Into the Night, by Benny Mardone anymore. I remember liking it when I was, I dunno, about sixteen years old.
I saw them when I was in third grade. No, I didn’t completely understand the lyrical connotations at the time. I wonder if the Church Of God did- the venue was their Warner Auditorium at Anderson College.
It was an unfortunate choice of word. If you pay attention to the song, it’s clear that there’s no racial meaning in context; she uses it as an umbrella term for certain types of people who are, in one way or another, “outside of society.” I get that she would have wanted a word that packed some punch, but still. A lot of folks don’t pay attention to what lyrics actually mean, and a word like that will just sort of jump out at you and take over the song (in the not-attentive-enough listener’s head). And, you know, I’m not going to argue that you’re wrong if you want to say it wasn’t her word to redefine.
It’s a rousing rock-n-roll number, too, but I’m surely not going to drive around town blasting it out my open car windows.
There’s also “Woman is the N___ of the World” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but I don’t think many people were too keen playing it in the first place. My bass teacher Gary Van Scyoc played on the record and even he didn’t like it.
And the version of Jerome Kern’s “Cotton Blossom” (from Show Boat) that begins “N____s all work on the Mississippi.” (Later performances changed this to “Colored folks work…” and then to “Here we all work…”)
The problem with the song is not that she uses the n-word in a racist way (she doesn’t, and I’m not a person who is triggered by the word itself, in any context), but that the whole song is a case of cultural approbation. She basically says that the rock’n’roll folks are hated and discriminated against like black people in America without taking into account that the rockers chose to live out of society (which she admits to with the line “Outside of society, that’s where I wanna be!”), while the Black community is actively excluded from society by mainstream America. And that’s bad and gives me pains listening to the song, although I really like it musically.