been reading a fair amount about Nina Gordon's cover of NWA's Straight Outta Compton in the blogs recently, most of which seems to fall into three camps: 1) it's full of fun n frolics or 2) pastiche/irony/postmodernism is dead... 3) Nina's use of the word nigger is racist bile.
it's the 3rd i'd like to bring to the table... i've read a few blogs suggesting she should either 1)never have covered this song or 2) she should have changed the words (i'm assuming they generally mean the N words - people seem alright about allusions to incest with your female parent)
now number 2) seems absurd... surely changing the words is taking the song even further out of it's cultural context? which leaves me to consider number 1) should she be allowed to cover it as a white gal? is she committing some awful gaff ?
i don't know... seems to me that music / words etc ought not to be sacred because that seems to lead to badness of Rushdian proportions but then I've also rooted through all the old Orwellian / Wittgenstein 'Language is Powerlessness' arguments and come to no great conclusion...
some people seem to think that Nina's cover is the aural equivalent of Gollywogging or the Black and White Minstrel Soul but i'm not convinced that this kind of appropriation is any different from the wholesale 'ambient' sampling of Sufi Prayer (i'm thinking of how it's used in Natural Born Killers, for example), aboriginal chants, native american pipe motifs etc etc... i mean do people think that Trent Reznor was taking the piss out of Sufis?
Is another culture's music able to be used to an effect other than that which it was intended? even a comedy one? I have a tendency to think anything goes but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...
And what about Kid 606's cover? Has anyone had a go at that?
Vanilla Ice?
it's the 3rd i'd like to bring to the table... i've read a few blogs suggesting she should either 1)never have covered this song or 2) she should have changed the words (i'm assuming they generally mean the N words - people seem alright about allusions to incest with your female parent)
now number 2) seems absurd... surely changing the words is taking the song even further out of it's cultural context? which leaves me to consider number 1) should she be allowed to cover it as a white gal? is she committing some awful gaff ?
i don't know... seems to me that music / words etc ought not to be sacred because that seems to lead to badness of Rushdian proportions but then I've also rooted through all the old Orwellian / Wittgenstein 'Language is Powerlessness' arguments and come to no great conclusion...
some people seem to think that Nina's cover is the aural equivalent of Gollywogging or the Black and White Minstrel Soul but i'm not convinced that this kind of appropriation is any different from the wholesale 'ambient' sampling of Sufi Prayer (i'm thinking of how it's used in Natural Born Killers, for example), aboriginal chants, native american pipe motifs etc etc... i mean do people think that Trent Reznor was taking the piss out of Sufis?
Is another culture's music able to be used to an effect other than that which it was intended? even a comedy one? I have a tendency to think anything goes but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...
And what about Kid 606's cover? Has anyone had a go at that?
Vanilla Ice?