Problematic!
Viet Cong, a band yours truly featured around here not too long ago, has had an Oberlin show cancelled, due to their allegedly-offensive name.
(Me, I think it’s one of the few bandnames that I’ve heard recently that WEREN’T completely godawful).
The venue promoter uses “problematic” and “appropriation” at least twice apiece in an open letter explaining the reason for the cancellation (follow the links in the P4k story to read it).
When you are following in the footsteps of Joy Division, I’m not sure how a name like “Viet Cong” can be any more “offensive”; historically-speaking, it’s my sense that in the popular imagination there’s more moral ambiguity inhered in the Viet Cong.
And Viet Cong isn’t a slur, so I don’t see this as like, say, “Redskins”.
(And what do we make of Siouxsie Sioux, appropriating Native American tribe names like that?)
(And shouldn’t the promoter of a venue called the “Dionysus Disco” show more respect to the Greeks?)
I didn’t mark this one MD, so go nuts in comments.
“We have decided to cancel the N.W.A. show due to our Dean finding out what the acronym stands for.”Report
I want this shirt so bad, but I have kids now.Report
that shirt is amazing. and apparently got c+d’d to death by the police.
he mines this particular vein of stupidsmart fairly well.
http://subliminalsf.myshopify.com/collections/allReport
The jokes work on so many levels. It is sublime.Report
The Cobain shirt actually had me drop my jaw.
Hats off, gentlemen. Hats off.Report
That Richard Pryor t-shirt is just plain wrong.
It’s like having Jimmy Swaggert with a handful of bills and “Wanna Screw?” as the caption.
Which is to say, it can be done, but why?Report
That sentence sounds so quaint and twenty years ago. Today’s kids have learned to protect themselves from contact with questionable aspects of the outside world. Such progress.Report
I remember thinking, “Shit, some veterans are not gonna be happy about this name,” when I first saw it pop up on Songza. This is not expect it to be offensive to Vietnamese people, though I suppose it might be for similar reasons to those I thought would make it piss off some vets.Report
I’m trying to think of any analogues in recent times – like, I don’t know, naming your band “Al Qaeda” or “Mujahideen” or something.
There was a band a few years back that was originally calling themselves “The Muslims”, but they changed it to “The Soft Pack” before they released their first full-length. Nobody really kicked too hard about Christian Death or the Jesus and Mary Chain back in the day…Report
Yeah, I imagine in the 80s I’d have seen “Viet Cong” and thought, “No!” Of course, back then there were Vietnam vets involved in pretty much every aspect of my life. Today it just seems like an historical name, but then people in a group with that name never tried really hard to kill me.Report
“Blondie” was named after somebody or other’s dog…Report
A few people have pointed out that naming a team “Pirates” would have, at various points, been akin to naming a team the Jihadists.Report
“Nobody really kicked too hard about Christian Death or the Jesus and Mary Chain back in the day…”
well, i mean, i’m about as big a fan of a few explicitly anti-religion bands as anyone and all that but, like, the ross douhat style jesus nerds aren’t wrong when they say no one cares about making fun of christianity. it’s pretty old hat at this point.Report
There’s no one called the “Taliband”?Report
I can see how Hiroshima might piss off the pro-H bomb crowd, in much the same as Toronto pisses of the Miller Lite people, and Boston would piss off . . . well, … everybody.Report
That should be “I did not expect,” not “this is not exect,” whatever that would mean.Report
Aren’t a lot of Vietnamese Americans refugees or descendants therefrom?Report
This seems like maybe an overreaction.
There probably are people who will rant about Siouxsie Sioux, but I have not met them. There seems to be a general understanding that that was then and this is now.
I wonder how many people are aware that Siouxsie covered “Strange Fruit”? (And did so rather well in my opinion.) Can you imagine the outrage!
It’s funny about the “Dionysus” thing, as I think white folks overestimate the degree that Ancient Greece is part of our “tradition,” given that they were a Mediterranean culture broadly rejected in the Middle Ages, where their knowledge was nurtured by the Muslims far more than the Christians, but then they get gathered up and presented as the first step toward White European civilization. Seems kinda bogus to me.
(Obviously the line is supposed to go Greece -> Rome -> Christendom -> Modernity, and sure, fine. But still. Why not Egypt -> Greece -> Persia -> Islam? Point is, we don’t own the ancient Greeks.)
Anyway, appropriation is a real thing, and on the whole I think it is good that we talk about this, but golly do college-aged activists do a lousy job with it.Report
appropriation is a real thing
I…am not totally sure about this, when it comes to art.
Or at least, I can be convinced it’s a real thing, but not that it’s necessarily a bad thing; cultural miscegenation is just how art works. Or should.
By all accounts, Elvis loved “black” music and took every opportunity to both give black artists credit, and give them a hand up where he could. For some reason, Mexican kids love the quintessentially-English (Irish) Morrissey beyond all reason. Who am I to tell them they can’t identify with that, or that they are doin’ it rong?
About the only exception I will make is for Clapton, who made his money off the blues but is kinda a racist. Screw that guy.
But I don’t like his music anyway.Report
How is Clapton racist? (I really don’t like the guy or his music and really have no attachment for him whatsoever. But I had never heard that about him and am curious to know more.)Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism
Report
thanks glyph!Report
@veronica-d The idea that Medieval Europeans rejected the Greek and Roman philosophers and the legacies of Antiquity is a myth. A lot of Western Christian theology incorporated Platonic philosophy and they were positively mad about Aristotle by the 1200s once they got a hold of his writings. The knights were very fond of comparing themselves to the heroes of mythology and references to Gods and heroes were abound in Greek poetry. Muslims did preserve and translate a lot of the writings of antiquity but so did the Byzantine, or more properly Eastern Roman Empire, which was the direct heir of the Greco-Roman tradition. The Muslim world eventually decided reject Greco-Roman thought in its entirety around the time of al-Ghazi, who originated a lot of the Islamist ideals when he held that reason and faith were incompatible. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church generally followed St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine that reason and faith were compatible. This eventually led to the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment by a long, curvy, and torturous but definite road.
Modern Western thought and society owes much more and has many more direct and indirect links to the Greeks and Romans than other places in the world. The Muslim world was generally been interested in Greco-Roman philosophy in the past but the influence of Greco-Roman thought in the Muslim world today is minimal.Report
Wasn’t Souixsie originally in the London SS?Report
Not sure what the London SS is, but she definitely (as did many in that scene) messed around with Nazi imagery (swastikas etc.), and there was an anti-Semitic lyric early on that she claimed A.) She didn’t come up with, another band member had and B.) Didn’t mean it as anti-Semitic, claiming she understood the lyric simply to mean “skinflint”.
When she realized that National Front types were starting to gravitate to her band she quickly gave up all that stuff, wrote “Israel”, played anti-fascist and Rock Against Racism gigs, etc.
My personal take on it is that she started out a punk kid trying to piss people off, but realized she was screwing up and grew up, but YMMV.Report
Looks like I was wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_SS
But Yeah, I remember some of the imagery going around at the time, definitely piss off your parents punk.Report
I guess the Dead Kennedys weren’t available for a reunion tour.Report
They were Holidaying in C…ah, never mind.Report
Actually, there was an…incident at a recent Dead Kennedys show that makes my “Holiday in C” joke even more apropos.
But it’s not really fit for a family website.Report
ChumpsReport
the entire statement is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fgomHGSQHEaVNrkIWmCGH1-wO61VoGhLnpr9NGCLyWY/edit?pli=1
or not, and say you did. it’s not exactly a stunning piece of rhetoric.Report
Wow! What a condescending, unaware dick that guy is!
When you’re in a band and a gig gets cancelled last minute, it sucks. You had a contract to do a job and they’re backing out. Whoever was coming to see you is pissed. You’re pissed. It’s unprofessional. But really all Ivan Krasnov would have had to do- really the only decent thing to do- would be to contact the band and say, “look, we can’t go forward with this show because there are some people complaining and I’m between a rock and a hard place here, so I’m very sorry. This is bad for me too.” Having been in a similar situation once with my band, that totally sucks too, but at least they’re being semi-professional.
Instead, he announces it on social media!!!! He doesn’t even talk to the fishing band! Instead, he announces on social media in this completely condescending way that he’s been reëducated and he is now disturbed by their lack of political sensitivity! When he was the one who fishing booked them in the first place!! I would be LIVID.Report
Well, at least we got to win this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWSuEFYRDBgReport
Update: Gang of Four (natch)’s Andy Gill weighs in.Report