Ultimately, this evasive, self-serving d-bag isn’t worth talking about beyond the general principle of always calling this bullshit out for what it is
But I would like to explain the difference between Cut Hands and Adam Ant, because it's illustrative of what's so wrong with Cut Hands
"Kings of the Wild Frontier" is pure noble savage. The noble savage is dehumanizing, it's an other. It’s a human you define in terms of yourself rather than as their own complete being. It makes native people an idealized relic of the past rather than very much alive and still dealing with racism and often, crippling poverty. The song also, by making the noble savage an ideal for the uptight, civilized white person (its own stereotype) to ease his own suffering, erases the actual, physical suffering of natives. So, none of that is great. However, it’s also relatively benign as these things go. It can even be positive, in a misguided way, in its admiration.
Cut Hands is calling yourself Smallpox Blanket, presenting American Indians in a lurid, sensational way that denies their fullness of being and then hiding behind a dubious claim of anti-colonialism. Cutting Hands is calling yourself Hutu Power and making “extreme noise from Rwanda”. It’s not noble, it’s just savage. Brown-brown, vodou, pidgin. Cut Hands Africa is a place of dark wonder, child soldiers, primitive religion. It’s a place of people getting their hands cut off. It’s not a place of functional human societies with schools and businesses and families. There’s nothing to admire but much to gape at; the horror, the horror.
It's not just one thing, but the entire presentation.
It’s totally possible to use negative, painful symbols in positive or at least nonnegative ways, but because their default meaning is painful and negative, you have to be very clear about what you mean by them. And Cut Hands is the opposite of that.
To quote the famous Achebe essay on
The Heart of Darkness
Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
replace “break-up of one petty European mind” with “self-promotion of one petty European producer”
And Conrad at least had a clear view of the suffering caused by colonialism, if not the ability to empathize with the sufferers as fully human. Cut Hands has neither.
Conrad was also a product of racist times, which shouldn't excuse him, but Bennett, working 100+ years later, should have far less excuse still.
(And of course Conrad was a genius, whereas Bennett is a mediocrity. Just that I wouldn't want to be accused of equating their talents. Only their views of Africa.)