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.