Yobismycopilot

I'm just here to say I don't have a dog in this race but I found the episode exhausting. I'm glad they at least acknowledged that they were basically sweating and yelling the entire episode.

I appreciated their conversation on the use of the N word and Quentin's explanation for why he felt ok to use it. I agree that it has not aged well, and wasn't ok at the time it came out. I was 19 when Pulp Fiction came out, and I am embarrassed to admit that quentin's use of it in the movie led to my using that word IRL (as a white dude). I did not and do not identify as racist (but who does? and saying you aren't racist as a white person in america is like saying you aren't a capitalist) and didn't intend it to be hateful or hurtful to black people. I saw it as a way to reclaim a hateful word and take the sting out of it. I was also consuming (but not actively living/participating in) a lot of black culture at the time and felt that my proximity to that culture plus the frequency certain people in that community use the term meant that it was totes ok for me, a white kid, to use it. Thankfully i grew out of that stage. But all of this is just to say that tarantino's casual use of a hateful slur 100% led to clueless white kids thinking it was ok to casually use it.

I never understood why Hammer, who went platinum with "Please Hammer Don't Hurt em," changed his style up to copy Dre, who, when "Funky Headhunter" was released had sold a fraction of what "Please Hammer" had sold. I feel bad for Hammer because he got ridiculed for doing what rappers were lionized for doing ten years later - selling out as much as humanely possible. Can you imagine if Eric B. had endorsed vitamin water in 1988? Never would have happened. Also, part of the reason for Puffy's wholesale sampling was that by the mid-90s it was too damn expensive to sample snippets of music anymore. Samples cost so much that it was more cost-effective to take the whole damn song and essentially remake it. On a side note, I was in class one day and the cafe next door played "In Da Club" on repeat for three hours. That is up there with water boarding in terms of effective and cruel torture techniques.

I'm not arguing that white people should have the right to use the word, or that black people need to alter their behavior for white people. I'm just saying that when the term is constantly used to refer to african-americans in mainstream rap songs, it sends a conflicting message about the propriety of the word. In all the outrage and disgust they were expressing in the podcast about white people using the word in clearly non-racist contexts, i think it would have been worth discussing if its ever problematic for african-americans to use it. And I'd disagree that nothing black people have ever done ever influenced the behavior of white people. White people constantly take their cues from black people in terms of style, fashion and language.

I agree that white people shouldn't say the n word, and shouldn't whine about how they can't say the n word. However, given that most african-american rappers say that word constantly, it seems a little disingenuous for them to be surprised and upset that their white fans use it. Maybe the best way to get people to not use that word would be to not use it yourself. Just saying.