Comedy and offense

[BomberPat]

I think it's all a bit of a silly overreaction on both counts - there is definitely that bit of what you call The Beautiful South Effect, that it's just an old-fashioned singsong and nobody thinks about it, and that maybe that could be a catalyst for conversations about how ingrained misogyny is in our culture, but then if I wanted to tackle misogyny among rugby fans I don't think an old Tom Jones song is where I'd start.

The flipside is that there's a bit of borderline media illiteracy going on, that I tend to associate with more with aggressively right-on TikTok Gen Z-ers than I do with this kind of clumsy bureaucratic decision, where voicing something or telling a story about something in media is interpreted as the creator of the work endorsing those views or those acts. There's been a load of guff among those circles on Twitter lately about Stephen King being racist and problematic for writing about racist characters and child abuse, because people are either too thick or too desperate to have a Big Reckon to realise that you're generally not meant to empathise with the racists and child abusers in his books, whatever you might think about how clumsily he somehow writes them.

I imagine there are comparisons being drawn to Fairytale Of New York, which has a similar problem where it's daft to assume that the slurs used in that song are something that the audience is meant to agree with. The difference there, though, is the experience of being in a room full of people who don't really bother singing along with the rest of the track but really get into that one line is something worth thinking about. I suppose a similar argument could be made for Delilah, but I think the fact that the majority of people seemingly don't know the lyrics outside of the chorus, and don't know what it's about, makes it unlikely that they're reveling in the subject matter.

[Keith Houchen]

7 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I think it's all a bit of a silly overreaction on both counts - there is definitely that bit of what you call The Beautiful South Effect, that it's just an old-fashioned singsong and nobody thinks about it, and that maybe that could be a catalyst for conversations about how ingrained misogyny is in our culture, but then if I wanted to tackle misogyny among rugby fans I don't think an old Tom Jones song is where I'd start.

It’s probably a bit of a smokescreen given the legion of allegations against the Welsh RFU of sexism misogyny and homophobia that have surfaced. 
 

And of course, them updating their playlist has led to inevitable OMG THE WOKES HAVE BANNED A SONG NOW!!!

[SuperBacon]

47 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

It’s “The Beautiful South Effect” isn’t it?

What's this?

[Hannibal Scorch]

4 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

What's this?

 

51 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

It’s “The Beautiful South Effect” isn’t it? Everyone knows the words but don’t pay attention to the words.

 

[Keith Houchen]

3 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

What's this?

I don’t think that was them, that’s from The Nightmare Before Christmas. 
 

Everyone knows the words but don’t pay attention to the words

[BomberPat]

You just have to remember that there's huge swathes of the population that not only don't understand subtext, they barely understand text.

We can all think of examples like Reagan and Trump both failing to understand Born In The USA, or right-wingers being surprised that Rage Against The Machine disagree with them, but for me the ultimate example is The Twilight Zone. The entire reason that show exists is because TV networks wouldn't let Rod Serling write TV dramas about racial issues, so he just put on a surface layer of sci-fi trappings and told the exact same stories without any interference. 

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

There's been a load of guff among those circles on Twitter lately about Stephen King being racist and problematic for writing about racist characters and child abuse, because people are either too thick or too desperate to have a Big Reckon to realise that you're generally not meant to empathise with the racists and child abusers in his books, whatever you might think about how clumsily he somehow writes them.

Given how vocal King's been against Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I'm curious whether this is a bit of astroturfed whataboutery, with well-meaning but unthinking people sucked in once it gained momentum.

I haven't seen it so don't know if that holds up as a theory, it's just a thought that crossed my mind from reading your post.

[Keith Houchen]

18 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

Given how vocal King's been against Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I'm curious whether this is a bit of astroturfed whataboutery, with well-meaning but unthinking people sucked in once it gained momentum

I’m unfamiliar with the phrase, but a rudimentary Google search makes me think in this day and age of bot farms and misinformation, you can’t rule out your thought!

[SuperBacon]

36 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

I don’t think that was them, that’s from The Nightmare Before Christmas. 
 

Everyone knows the words but don’t pay attention to the words

Im completely and utterly lost. What has The Beautiful South got to do with it?

[Keith Houchen]

Just now, SuperBacon said:

Im completely and utterly lost. What has The Beautiful South got to do with it?

People tend not to pay attention to the lyrics of Beautiful South songs despite knowing all the words. The meaning and story of the song is not noticed. Heato has always been brilliant at this. 

[SuperBacon]

I see. You could've just said that in the first place, but you kept it all in.

[Keith Houchen]

Just now, SuperBacon said:

but you kept it all in.

Because I couldn’t find a toilet or a Quality Street tin. 

[Chris B]

42 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

I’m unfamiliar with the phrase, but a rudimentary Google search makes me think in this day and age of bot farms and misinformation, you can’t rule out your thought!

Astroturfed = pretend grass root movements, making out they're far more widely believed than they actually are. They make a lot of noise with a lot of fake accounts. Often used to normalise hatred of immigrants, women and queer people, and also to make Zack Snyder movies.

 

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

There's been a load of guff among those circles on Twitter lately about Stephen King being racist and problematic for writing about racist characters and child abuse, because people are either too thick or too desperate to have a Big Reckon to realise that you're generally not meant to empathise with the racists and child abusers in his books, whatever you might think about how clumsily he somehow writes them.

I'm as big a Stephen King fan as you'll find, but he's also a well-meaning gent of a certain age, and he's done some stuff that reads awkwardly in the past (he's had multiple black characters that have interacted weirdly with a secondary voice that's more stereotypically black in a really weird way, and the finale of IT is what people keep going back to on the child thing - while it's awkward as fuck, I also think it's a very different piece than ). What I think sets him apart is that he does seem to take things on board and genuinely try to improve, which is a rarity.

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, Chris B said:

and also to make Zack Snyder movies.

The absolute monsters. Hangings too good for em. Thanks for the explanation, it’s really helpful!

[BomberPat]

Oh, King's written some right shit, especially in the days of being too coked up to remember half of it, but it's usually well-meaning liberalism from a man of his age or, at worst, a kind of magical negro trope, where the stuff going round recently was basically, "he writes slurs and about child abuse, we need to talk about how Problematic he is", because there's a real trend among Gen Z types to push "woke" criticism to prudish extremes, this sense that to write about or show something is to endorse it wholeheartedly.

Somebody tried to "cancel" Hunter S. Thompson (or, at least, did the tedious "we need to have a conversation about..." bollocks) a while back over a passage from Hell's Angels that, yes, was absolutely sexist and horrific, but the reading of which completely overlooked that it's supposed to be shocking and horrific. I don't think it's astroturfing, but I do think it's either a lack of media literacy combined with a need to see all media as inherently either Wholesome or Bad, or just terminally online kids chasing the dopamine hits of stumbling upon some new discourse about a legacy media figure. 

I don't know if I'm doing a very good job of explaining all of this, because I'm worried about skirting too close to "kids today" or complaining about "woke", when the problem isn't the drive to critique the morals and content of an artists work - which I think is broadly a good thing to be doing - so much as that many of the people loudly attempting to do that lack either the nuance or the analytical tools to meaningfully do that; though I recognise now I'm veering into elitism and snobbery and gatekeeping territory. It's an issue that I think sits alongside a lot of terms that seep out of academia and into general discourse, and then get misused and watered down to the point that they become almost meaningless through repetition and misuse - whether that's "cultural appropriation", "emotional labour", or, going back further, "political correctness" - it's people using terms and concepts they don't fully understand to make critiques that rely on only a surface level reading of the text, and only a surface level understanding of criticism. Definitely being a snob now.

Ultimately, I think "there are problematic elements to Stephen King's early writing, in his tendencies to objectify women, rely on stereotypes, and use racist language as a lazy shorthand" is a valid criticism and a conversation worth having, while "Stephen King uses a racial slur and sexual content about minors in his writing, therefore he is literally a racist and a paedophile" is an absurd failure to understand context, and this bizarre and increasingly common assumption that to express something in art is to endorse or empathise with that which is expressed.

And that brings us back to Delilah. It seems daft to condemn people for singing a song about a murder, unless the assumption is that in singing that song they are somehow condoning the act - and it's doubly daft to assume that while also acknowledging that most people don't know what it's about in the first place! Is the problem that it's too sing-song and joyous about it (which, again, still relies on the assumption that the singer shares the beliefs and emotional state of the character in the song), in which case, would the more deranged Sensational Alex Harvey Band version be more acceptable? And if the problem is just that it's a song that celebrates or condones murder or violence, then where does that leave Bohemian Rhapsody's "Mama, I just killed a man", or Johnny Cash's "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die", or Cop Killer, or Stan, or Nebraska, or Mack The Knife, or Don't Mess Around With Jim, and so on and so on ad nauseum. They are only problematic if we assume that writing (or singing) about something is inherently the same as endorsing or sympathising with that thing.