Rock n' Roll N*****

Notice anything missing? Track 6 has been grayed out and is no longer playable.

My reaction:

In 1978 Patti Smith released the album “EASTER,” featuring a song that has only gotten more controversial with age. That song was called “ROCK N’ ROLL NIGGER.”

(I know with today’s sensibilities you’re supposed to put a bunch of asterisks after the N but I’m going to keep it true to how it was originally spelled out on the album’s track list.)

In case you need a refresher, here it is—

Unsurprisingly, the song proved controversial. And what did it mean, anyway?

I won’t get into the merits (or demerits) of Patti Smith using such a slur for her song. Admittedly, even Smith’s own explanation is a little…shall we say…hollow? Even nonsensical—

Here’s her being interviewed

Reporter: The other day you said that if anyone was qualified to be a nigger, it was Mick Jagger. How is Mick Jagger qualified to be a nigger?
Smith: On our liner notes I redefined the word nigger as being an artist-mutant that was going beyond gender.
Reporter: I didn't understand how Mick Jagger has suffered like anyone who grew up in Harlem.
Smith: Suffering don't make you a nigger. I mean, I grew up poor too. Stylistically, I believe he qualifies. I think Mick Jagger has suffered plenty. He also has a great heart, and I believe, ya know, even in his most cynical moments, a great love for his children. He's got a lot of soul. I mean, like, I don't understand the question. Ya think black people are better than white people or sumpthin'? I was raised with black people. It's like, I can walk down the street and say to a kid, “Hey nigger.” I don't have any kind of super-respect or fear of that kind of stuff. When I say statements like that, they're not supposed to be analyzed, 'cause they're more like off-the-cuff humorous statements. I do have a sense of humor, ya know, which is something ' that most people completely wash over when they deal with me. I never read anything where anybody talked about my sense of humor. It's like, a lot of the stuff I say is true, but it's supposed to be funny.

Let’s for the moment set aside whether Patti Smith is at all qualified to “redefine” a word that comes with such massive amounts of cultural baggage. The point is she did, rightly or wrongly, and the song went on to be quite popular, regardless, used in movies such as Natural Born Killers. Pitchfork listed it as among the top 500 songs between 1977 and 2006.

EASTER is probably my favorite Patti Smith album. It’s also the first album of hers I ever heard. But I hadn’t listened to it in a while. When I went to turn it on, that’s when I discovered that the song in question had been removed.

Patti Smith, to my knowledge, has not commented on this, and who knows, maybe the removal was her decision. It’s impossible to say whether this was an episode of post-2020 censorship or Patti Smith changing her tune and deciding she had been in error. Regardless, I am against it’s removal, and the reason is very simple—the song is indicative of a time, of a set of circumstances, of a moment in cultural history, and the problem with the digitation of older art is that we then get the option to whitewash history and make it appear as something other—something cleaner—than it actually was.

There is an irony here. On the one hand activists want us to constantly remember America’s racist past (to be clear I don’t think Patti Smith is racist) and yet they want to remove any evidence that that past existed.

And it’s not just about race and racism either. It’s a redefining of reality to match modern sensibilities, and I must say some of the ways this has manifested I find off-putting.

ALL art is indicative of a time and a place and not only the artist who made it, but also who the artist was at that point in their career.

The end credits of certain Ellen Page films have been changed to reflect her new identity (Elliot Page). The end credits of the new Criterion release of BOUND has been updated so that instead of being directed by “The Wachowski Brothers” it was now simply directed by “The Wachowskis.” This fundamentally changes who the art was made by, and where we were as a society.

I think art should exist as a kind of time capsule, and it’s unfortunate that we are changing it decades later.

That’s not to deny that there cannot be an argument for doing so. Activists would say “but she was always Elliot Page” or “The Wachowski Brothers were never who they truly were.” Okay fine. But it was the name they created that art under.

It’s like the removing of statues from public places because the historical figures they represent weren’t savvy enough to live by 2020’s standards. This, despite the fact that these men still created the liberal democratic institutions that most Americans would still wish to preserve. They were some of the most brilliant political philosophers in history, in fact.

What do you all think? Should song’s like Smith be excised from existence?

Sound off in the comments.

In the meantime, here’s Marilyn Manson’s cover of the same song, which IS still available on streaming platforms.