Against type. Really, really against type.
I got my twelve gauge sawed off.
I got my headlights turned off.
I’m ’bout to bust some shots off.
I’m ’bout to dust some cops off.
…
I got my brain on hype.
Tonight’ll be your night.
I got this long-assed knife,
and your neck looks just right.
My adrenaline’s pumpin’.
I got my stereo bumpin’.
I’m ’bout to kill me somethin’
A pig stopped me for nuthin’!
That’s rapper Ice-T, from the original version of album Body Count (1992) before the track was removed, under pressure, by their label, and the artist was likewise dropped. T, when quoted, said “I’m singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain’t never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it.”
So art, yeah? It’s really jarring, though, and seems more provocative than when Fred Durst sang Break Shit to a crowd of intoxicated vandals.
OK, same year. Grunge vocalist Scott Weiland (white) pens and records these lyrics:
I am, I am, I am
I said I wanna get next to you
I said I gonna get close to you
You wouldnt want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too?
…
I am a man, a man
Ill give ya somethin that ya wont forget
I said ya shouldnt have worn that dress
…
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
Here I come, I come, I come
As far as I know, Weiland never justified that one. Sober band-mate Robert DeLeo explained that Weiland was singing in the first person of an “idiot” who would rape a woman, and that it was fictional and not misogynist. Idiot? Idiot? That’s like my moron doctor telling me, when I was educating her about the possibility of modifying her triplicate prescriptions, that someone could do that “If they wanted to be mean.” Don’t worry, that will get its own post. But Idiot?
So me? I went so far as to skip the Weiland song sometimes on the CD, if I wasn’t too distracted, and it wasn’t the great! acoustic version. Ice-T? I loathed and boycotted him, and I still haven’t heard the fucking song. Years later. No clue. Heavy metal beat or what?
I was raised in a very conservative Christian suburb of San Diego with deep racial tensions — honors kids at the high school were being arrested for forming KKK factions, and, as a first-order approximation, all Mexican kids were gang wannabes. (Seriously, if I were under the kind of social pressure the poor Hispanic kids were under, I’d play the part, too. I’d like to talk to some of them now, the bullied ones — but, oddly, they don’t show up at reunions.)
Why the double standard? Because Weiland’s lyrics rhyme slightly better? No, La Mesa, baby! Or, more honestly, because I was a poser pastor’s kid in La Mesa who always wanted to be “the good kid”. That act didn’t stick very far into college, by the way.
OK, Richard Belzer. Whoa, huge turn, right? Stay with me please. My good friend Nathan (hi!) and I watched an anthology of comedy club performances, from comedians and comediennes who later became stars, that somehow some two-bit production company got the repro rights to. Belzer’s doing his routine — and fucking drunk? Not sure, but Nathan and I both looked at each other wondering the same thing. Did he do drunken rants onstage? Anyone know?
Anyway, Belzer tells a “Pollock” joke, and when the audience boos, he quips, “Yeah, like they’re the smartest people on the planet. Like there’s no reason for the stereotype.”
OK, the tie-in. Marcia Gay Harden guest-stars on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, playing a white supremacist. Really great role and great performance. She is interviewed one-on-one by Fin and Munch — that is, Ice-T and Belzer. She’s spewing white supremacist hatred at them that I was flabbergasted got by the censors. They sit there, stoically taking it. The twist? Harden is a federal agent undercover, and later, after killing one of the real supremacists, she apologies to Munch and Fin. I guess that’s why she was willing to take the role. Fin nods, shakes her hand, and says, “We’re good.”
So, Law & Order: SVU? Somehow they never went with the slogan Where the black cops are cop killers, the Jewish cops are racists, and the white supremacists are U.S. Marshals! Funny, that.
Email subscription
February 11th, 2008 at 12:32 am
And “Hi!” to all the email subscribers who read the notification email that stops towards the end of T’s lyrics and though, WTF is going on at mcgees.org?!
February 11th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Anyway, Belzer tells a “Pollock” joke
Pollock joke?
Pollock joke?
It is to your credit as a sensitive liberal dude that you spelled “Polack” incorrectly. I’m totally going to make jokes about it on my comedy alblum.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:06 am
And, of course, I mess up the html.
Try to be a smartass, and you end up looking like a dumbass.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Here’s the difference between Cop Killer and Sex Type Thing.
Both artists are playing a role, obviously, but the role that Ice T plays is cast in a positive light by the artist, while the role that Weiland plays is cast in a negative light by the artist. Scott Weiland doesn’t say “I didn’t do that, I just want to do it sometimes.”
In either case, I think that the fury over Cop Killer was wildly misplaced. You never saw white politicians lining up to denounce Johnny Cash for shooting a man in Reno (just to watch him die, no less!).
February 11th, 2008 at 10:22 am
It is to your credit as a sensitive liberal dude that you spelled “Polack” incorrectly.
Oh, uh, thanks, I guess. Yeah, don’t think I’ve ever seen that in print. Firefox doesn’t like that one, go figure. I should have had a clue when Pollock wasn’t flagged. Anyway, I fixed your html.
Scott Weiland doesn’t say “I didn’t do that, I just want to do it sometimes.”
Scott Weiland didn’t say shit. Which was kind of my point. It was left to his band-mate to try to fill in the gaps — ineptly, at that. And I don’t think T was saying “It’s OK to shoot a cop.” That’s not how I read it. He didn’t say, “If things don’t get better, niggas are going to have to start capping some pigs.” I’m pretty sure that theoretical line has too many gs in it (ha!). The bassist for Rage Against the Machine, however, was quoted as saying “If things don’t change, people are going to have to start mailing bombs or something.” And again, I had Rage albums.
But the blind eye to Johnny Cash — with his drug addiction, imprisonment, outreach to convicts, violent lyrics, and everything — has always really thrown me. The Dixie Chicks said something way more sedate than shooting a man in Reno, and people were lining up to denounce them. Is it that whole white male thing again?
February 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Scott Weiland didn’t say shit.
That was probably for the best, given where Scott Weiland’s head was during that particular period of music history. Questions about song lyrics would probably have been answered with offers to trade sexual favors for heroin.
Is it that whole white male thing again?
Could be. Alternately, it could just be that most people rightly figured that Johnny Cash could do whatever he damn well wanted, ’cause he was Johnny Cash. Also, even agreeing with what the Dixie Chicks had to say, I can’t say that I was surprised by the response that they got. America was insane, and it didn’t matter that the people denouncing the president weren’t white males. Any country singer, regardless of race or gender, would have gotten the same reaction to what they said. The further history takes us from 2001/2002, the happier I am.