obligatory

* This post reworked 5 April 2021 because I didn't like the traffic it was getting possibly/probably from people searching on the 'n-word', which I had quoted freely throughout.

I was walking to the train this morning (though as it transpired a bus came and I got that instead) and I was thinking for no reason I can glean about The Fall and specifically the song ‘The Classical’ which is on Hex Enduction Hour and which contains the line, ‘bring on the obligatory n-----s’. I seem to remember (though this may have been a bit of puff) that at the time that record came out, story went that Motown were about to branch out into new wave or something and they were this close to signing The Fall and they heard the line about obligatory n-----s and said no. And that there was a bit of a thing about how out of touch they must have been at Motown because they didn’t ‘get it’. (This is in the Wikipedia article on the album).

But it also occurred to me, 35-something years later, that I don’t ‘get it’ either. As much as I am resistant to gut reaction shutting down of artistic expression, I have to admit the obligatory n-----s thing does bother me, I guess because even if you suspend all evidence to the contrary even if it’s possible that the ‘n-----s’ in question aren’t black people (btw there is nothing to say that they’re not, and when did some version of ‘n-----s’ show up that wasn’t a black person? Elvis Costello’s ‘white n-----s'  in ‘Oliver’s Army’?) then it’s still some kind of rejection of a recognizable racial-ethnic-cultural group, a group that we (or at least the narrator) has to endure despite their difference.

I guess if I thought about it I imagined that the ‘n-----s’ in the evoked scenario had been incorporated, to the narrator’s disgust, out of political correctness (not that this was a known phrase in 1981) and that their inclusion demeaned us all. But that was a copout; I just didn’t know.

There are things you can wonder about how much the artist needs to explain his or herself and, as I said above, the freedom of the individual to say what they want in art, but really, fuck that shit. I looked up Hex Enduction Hour on Wikipedia to see whether there was any discussion of controversy re ‘obligatory n-----s  but no, although the phrase is mentioned alongside another ‘call to arms’ type song, ‘Crap Rap 2/ Like to Blow’ in which Mark Smith describes himself (?) as the white crap that talks back. I mean, cool. Against what? ‘N-----s’?

April 2021 thought: Reflecting a little more, I feel that back in nineteen-eighty-whenever I felt that there was some kind of sense in which everyone in the mainstream entertainment industry was a 'n----r' of some sort - I mean I had been brought up on that excruciating 'Woman is the N----r of the World' song etc - and so had MES probably - and that black people, or any people who are forced to play their race and/or class in the entertainment industry - also engages with that category/limitation/type. To the extent that I had to think about it in nineteen-eighty-whenever, I think that's how I regarded it. But I actually despise the cop-out of 'well, it was a different time', even though of course as a historian that's all I ever think about - what a 'different time' tells us about our time. But MES, like all of us, ended up bound to his own myth about himself. Best possible interpretation - that he thought he, and the other members of the Fall etc, were 'white n-----s'. I actually don't think that's what he thought, though. He thought black people who played music and sang songs 'for' white people were 'obligatory n-----s'. 

March 2022 thought: I realised that this whole thing was poisoning how I felt about The Fall, and I was getting sick of hearing about them and had no wish to hear them - one of my favourite groups ever. I read an article in The Quietus that didn't really solve any issues on the 'obligatory n-----s' thing except insofar as it said that, if Mark Smith was racist, he never expressed racism in any other song, or apparently any other comment, before or since - and also made the point that a lot of, perhaps all, The Fall's songs were really in the voice of another narrator/observer. The article then pointed out that the one real time he was contemporaneously asked about the line, he totally failed to acquit himself honourably and instead complained about being forced to watch token black people on television. But, I have decided to train my thinking away from the distaste felt about this business. Hex Enduction Hour isn't my favourite Fall album anyway, This Nation's Saving Grace is, with The Wonderful and Frightening World..., Grotesque, Dragnet, Perverted by Language and Middle Class Revolt just some of the ones I would consider better. 

* I discovered on Wikipedia as well that Stewart Lee thinks Hex Enduction Hour is the best record ever made. He’s smarter than me, so I am probably wrong. Or he has just never listened to the ‘obligatory n-----s  bit.