Posted on 04/12/2013 7:09:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song. Paisley performed the song as a dialogue with rapper LL Cool J, now a star on the CBS drama "NCIS: LA." He says he wrote the song when he felt he had to defend wearing a T-shirt celebrating the country band Alabama, a shirt with the Confederate flag on it. In the song, he tries to suggest to a black man he met that the flag just says he's a fan of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Paisley sings, "I'm just a white man comin' to you from the southland / Tryin' to understand what it's like not to be. I'm proud of where I'm from but not everything we've done / And it ain't like you and me can re-write history." LL Cool J wrote his half of the song, and replies in part: "I guess we're both guilty of judgin' the cover, not the book. I'd love to buy you a beer, conversate and clear the air."
Cheesy? Sure. But isn't this the kind of Kumbaya sentiment liberal elites embrace in their quest for racial harmony? Yes, that's what they say. But when it's what you offer, they react with their true colors.
It was quickly trashed as racially clueless. NPR's new race and culture blogger Gene Demby, fresh from The Huffington Post, quoted comedian Patton Oswalt's tweet: "Can't wait for Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's next single 'Whoopsy Daisy, Holocaust, My Bad.'"
Oswalt must have been mocking the clunkiest line in the song, when LL Cool J alludes to slavery by saying, "If you don't judge my gold chains / I'll forget the iron chains." NPR's Demby complained, "A lot of people felt as if it was kind of shearing off kind of the rough edges of our history."
Comedian and Current TV host John Fugelsang tweeted Paisley should have "gone with original title 'Well-Intentioned But Totally Ignorant Institutionalized Racist.'"
If one wants to see both institutionalized racism and an embarrassing attempt at whites trying to pander on race, I'd rather recommend "The Jimmy Fallon Show" on NBC.
Dennis Coles, better known by his rap persona "Ghostface Killah," was introduced with great enthusiasm by Fallon, before performing his song "I Declare War" from the new album "Twelve Reasons to Die." He was joined on the microphone by "Masta Killa" and "Killah Priest." Fallon even announced there was a "Twelve Reasons to Die" comic book soon available for sale -- because it's never too early to sell the drug pusher/gangster lifestyle to children. That's their Kumbaya.
"I Declare War" was not an exceptionally violent rap song. It was a very typical violent rap song, with profanity and N-words, boasting about shooting and killing.
This was how NPR defined the concept behind the album, "the creation myth of a black superhero set in 1960s Italy." Ghostface "leaves to start a black syndicate, falls in love with a boss's daughter and makes a ton of money importing cocaine. For these crimes, the criminal organization he came up in murders him and dumps his body in a vat of acetate. His former friends press 12 records from his remains, but when those records play, his vengeful spirit arises. Though he was rebuffed and disrespected in life, in legend the Ghostface Killah becomes immortal."
It should be seen as "totally ignorant institutionalized racism" for record executives to make millions of dollars selling an assembly line of poisonous music that glamorizes a violent criminal lifestyle. After many decades in which tens of thousands of young black men were gunned down by other young black men, how can it be said that country music is the genre that's terribly insensitive to what's happening on this war front? This rolling slaughter is now the "rough edges of our history," and the popular culture glorifies it, romanticizes it and commodifies it.
Brad Paisley-shredding NPR is streaming this whole album on its website, applauding how it features "jangly, tumbleweed guitar that warms the cold-hearted comic book-style violence," and hailing one song for how our alleged hero Ghostface Killah "bobs and weaves with the track, but he maintains a forthright and basically conversational sentence structure, which, when he's describing the ways he might murder your children, really twists the knife."
NPR's reviewer is probably referring to the song "Murder Spree," which is a grotesque listing of vicious murder styles -- from dismemberment to pushing brains out the back of a human head. Spin magazine praises its "mix of brute violence and graceful eloquence."
This country is sick and getting sicker. Don't blame Brad Paisley and LL Cool J.
He’s a country pu$$y. Nice wife, though...kid uglier than a bag of dirt.
Brad Paisley = Justin Bieber with a cowboy hat. Loser...
It must be pretty bad if both the left and the right think it sucks.......
Now excuse me, I have go play that knock-out game.
I like Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy’s performance of Ebony and Ivory for a racial harmony song!
From Jonah Goldberg:
EXCERPT:
I can’t really second-guess the music critics. It is not a great song from what I can tell. Though is it really the “worst song ever,” as several critics have said? It seems to me that “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)” is catchier but substantively less redeeming.
Which is to say that Paisley — with an accompaniment from legendary rapper LL Cool J — is striving for something important. The song is a ballad about a white Southerner trying to reconcile his Southern pride and his rejection of racism. It begins with a scene where a black barista at Starbucks takes offense at the Confederate flag on the white narrator’s shirt. “To the man that waited on me at the Starbucks down on Main, I hope you understand/When I put on that T-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I’m a Skynyrd fan.”
Paisley defends the song as an effort to — you guessed it — start a conversation. Personally, I think art that has to be defended on conversation-starting grounds probably isn’t art. Conversely, I’m inclined to think that any song with Paisley’s message would be denounced and ridiculed. Right or wrong, letting the South off the hook for its racial sins is not something that interests many of Paisley’s critics. The fact that Paisley (and LL Cool J) made the critics’ job so much easier doesn’t change that.
Something similar can be said about the reception to Rand Paul’s appearance at Howard University this week. Here, Paul did exactly the right thing by making his case to a politically unsympathetic audience of minorities. Though, at one point, he miscalculated a bit in an exchange where he assumed his audience didn’t know that black civil rights pioneers — including the founders of the NAACP — were mostly Republicans. Howard, one of the nation’s premier historically black colleges, is one of the few universities where the average student probably would know that stuff.
Much of the criticism of Paul centered on speculation about his motives. He’s just trying to soften his image! He’s using the audience as a prop! To which the only intellectually honest rejoinder is: Maybe he is! Isn’t that what politicians do?
Both Paul and Paisley are doing exactly what liberal politicians, civil rights activists and editorial boards have been demanding for decades. Paisley contributed his best effort for a “frank dialogue.” Paul reached out to minorities, engaged in the conversation and didn’t take blacks for granted. No one should be shocked that neither effort settled anything. That’s how conversations are supposed to work, but not, apparently, the kinds of conversations the conversation-starters have in mind.
A+ on your post.
You are black and I am white
You are blind as a bat, and I have sight
Side by Side, you are my amigo, Negro
Let’s not fiiiiiiight.
I really like Brad Paisley and have since his song He Didn’t Have To Be. To equate him with Justin Bieber really is an insult.
No, this isn't "Kumbaya" - too much real in this song - flaws exposed ... a tentative reaching out ...Liberals will hate this song.
A liberal song would carry the delusion that all problems are solved and we love each other ... no flaws, no work involved, nothing ugly or untoward... just unicorns and purple skies forever... holding hands - being idiots...
“Anti-racism” is and has always been a fraud, its always been nothing more than anti-white, racism if you will.
Life is easier when you live White Guilt Free.
“...he felt he had to defend wearing a T-shirt celebrating the country band Alabama...”
Why did he feel the need to “defend” wearing a t-shirt?
That’s how the libs start so many of these types of fights...by asking/requiring/urging/demanding someone “defend” something. That’s where they get a foothold.
Screw a defense. Just smile, turn your back on them, and walk away. Libs hate to be ignored.
Why do people believe that the left (or even some elements of the right) are interested in a a post racial America or racial reconciliation? Where would politicians and activists be if we didn’t have race-baiting as a political tool?
But it’s not.
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