Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Greg12 posted:

the chorus seemed so stupid and racist

The Offspring posted:

So don't debate, a player straight
You know he really doesn't get it anyway
Gonna play the field, and keep it real
For you no way, for you no way
So if you don't rate, just overcompensate
At least you'll know you can always go on Ricki Lake
The world needs wannabes, ah
Hey, hey, do that brand new thing
Maybe I'm missing something (because honestly I don't get, like, half the references in the song) but what's the racist bit?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Anne Whateley posted:

You could also have congenital syphilis, for example. That was the ostensible reason for testing and often the actual reason. Even if you were already loving and both had it, they wanted to test you and cure you before you started making babies. Because babies with syphilis can be hosed up in a wide variety of ways, and often just dead.

See also the first segment of this 1941 educational film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac8xEUdiQbI

Also relevant to this thread because holy Hell, vintage Italian stereotypes in full repulsive play

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

Tiggum posted:

Maybe I'm missing something (because honestly I don't get, like, half the references in the song) but what's the racist bit?

Ricki Lake...duh.

I'm perfectly cool with making this thread about Offspring songs, unless it's considered off-topic and you gotta keep them separated.

Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

Krispy Wafer posted:

Ricki Lake...duh.

I'm perfectly cool with making this thread about Offspring songs, unless it's considered off-topic and you gotta keep them separated.

Well there's Don't Pick It Up by them which features a reference to Pat from Saturday Night Live, and is definitely homophobic or transphobic.

Oh, the 90s. When we treated gay panic as a joke.

Greg12
Apr 22, 2020

Tiggum posted:

Maybe I'm missing something (because honestly I don't get, like, half the references in the song) but what's the racist bit?

give it to me baby
uh huh uh huh
x3
all the girlies say I'm pretty fly for a white guy


in a song that seemed enough like "rock dudes" singing about how it's admirable to stand apart from "non-white" trends. The only other words I can remember are about how the guy who turns his back on distortion guitar, frosted tips, and gas station shirts suffers the indignity of the people he looks up (wrongly, in the view of the singer) to "kick[ing] his lilly rear end."

A reference from older media lost on this modern audience: Ricki Lake specialized in bringing on white kids who acted and dressed in a stereotypically black/rap/"gangsta" way and mocking them and then making them over to look like a Party of Five or Dawson's Creek cast member by giving them baggy sweaters from Structure.

I barely remember the song. I remembered it as an example of how racialized fashion and music taste was then. You all remember the actual words and not just bits that stood out while overhearing it 20 years ago. I just was trying to say that the part of the future where anybody can dress like anything or be into anything because the internet has made all music and fashion accessible to anyone is good, and that people might not recognize that tastes were coded and limited by race.

Lead out in cuffs
Sep 18, 2012

"That's right. We've evolved."

"I can see that. Cool mutations."




Greg12 posted:

give it to me baby
uh huh uh huh
x3
all the girlies say I'm pretty fly for a white guy


in a song that seemed enough like "rock dudes" singing about how it's admirable to stand apart from "non-white" trends. The only other words I can remember are about how the guy who turns his back on distortion guitar, frosted tips, and gas station shirts suffers the indignity of the people he looks up (wrongly, in the view of the singer) to "kick[ing] his lilly rear end."

A reference from older media lost on this modern audience: Ricki Lake specialized in bringing on white kids who acted and dressed in a stereotypically black/rap/"gangsta" way and mocking them and then making them over to look like a Party of Five or Dawson's Creek cast member by giving them baggy sweaters from Structure.

I barely remember the song. I remembered it as an example of how racialized fashion and music taste was then. You all remember the actual words and not just bits that stood out while overhearing it 20 years ago. I just was trying to say that the part of the future where anybody can dress like anything or be into anything because the internet has made all music and fashion accessible to anyone is good, and that people might not recognize that tastes were coded and limited by race.

The song was a commentary about white people appropriating black people's culture. It was tongue-in-cheek, light, and didn't really dive deeply into the topic.

And ... society in the USA is still deeply racialized. The fact that you can go on the internet to see what people of different ethnicities and social classes are wearing doesn't mean that we live in a post-racial utopia.

You're wading into a gigantic briar patch without seeming to be very aware of it. I would strongly suggest you at least do a little reading first.

https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/02/colorblindness-adds-to-racism/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/05/white-parents-teach-their-children-be-colorblind-heres-why-thats-bad-everyone/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/

Greg12
Apr 22, 2020

Lead out in cuffs posted:

The song was a commentary about white people appropriating black people's culture. It was tongue-in-cheek, light, and didn't really dive deeply into the topic.

And ... society in the USA is still deeply racialized. The fact that you can go on the internet to see what people of different ethnicities and social classes are wearing doesn't mean that we live in a post-racial utopia.

You're wading into a gigantic briar patch without seeming to be very aware of it. I would strongly suggest you at least do a little reading first.

https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/02/colorblindness-adds-to-racism/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/05/white-parents-teach-their-children-be-colorblind-heres-why-thats-bad-everyone/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/

psychology today?! you don't think very much of me :(

It is quite a leap from me clumsily trying to say:

"White people no longer police other white people's enjoyment of rap. It seems like a teen today would not recognize the subtext of Pretty Fly for a White Guy, while my peers and I understood it very clearly because we lived in a world with things like Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake each spending an hour every weekday on national television policing white people's enjoyment of rap."

to you quoting me as saying:

"We live in a post-racist colo[u]rblind society where all inequity has been erased and human success or failure only comes from the individual's Ayn Rand bootstraps."

How did we get here? A post.

------------------------------

The white parts of Orange County, where the Offspring is from, were the epitome of white flight sprawl and were as racist as Rhodesia.* The Offspring are part of a subgenre of music that suffered from Gen-X brain poison about authenticity and resisting trendiness. (That subgenre was also exclusively white and very clueless about it.) The trends they resisted were things like rap and RnB becoming the top selling records instead of distortion guitar music. The song expresses this by mocking white people for adopting black and chicano styles. I interpreted that as an expression of the reactionary Orange County of white flight, defense industry, B-1 Bob, and Falling Down policing the separation of white and non-white culture.

You can hear this sentiment in lyrics that say "homies" will beat you up if you are white and seen wearing the wrong clothes--that's racist! That's the kind of thing that the people who did white flight say.

So maybe "Pretty Fly" is lighthearted, but I really don't think it's a woke commentary on appropriation. It's pretty vicious, but its viciousness is hidden in lost context and cultural references that are lost on modern audiences .

Thus ends an embarrassingly long post about a hit song from 1999 that I wrote for two reasons:
1. I was upset that a stranger on the internet said that I don't know what structural racism is because I wrote about a way that the marketing of music now seems different from how I remember experiencing it in the late 90s.
2. when I said that a song struck me as racist 20 years ago, lots of people said it wasn't, and I wanted to think about why I thought that back then.

*Before you leap to the conclusion that I think racism doesn't exist again, I use the past tense because I have no idea of the demography now. I am saying that the demographic racial composition of the areas may be different, not that racism is solved and that we live in a colorblind utopia. Please don't send more Atlantic articles.

Greg12 fucked around with this message at 23:41 on May 5, 2020

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Opening with a claim that Orange County, CA is as racist as Rhodesia is a take straight from the surface of the Sun.

FreudianSlippers
Apr 12, 2010

Shooting and Fucking
are the same thing!

I mean both are highly segregated and founded on settler-colonialism.

Milo and POTUS
Sep 3, 2017

I will not shut up about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I talk about them all the time and work them into every conversation I have. I built a shrine in my room for the yellow one who died because sadly no one noticed because she died around 9/11. Wanna see it?
Orange County is insanely racist tbcf

Yngwie Mangosteen
Aug 23, 2007

Milo and POTUS posted:

Orange County is insanely racist tbcf

This doesn’t reduce the absolutely apocalyptic temperature of that take.

Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

When you realize you're getting into a hole, you might want to stop digging.

You're not really making sense because it seems like you're talking about multiple issues, but you're not really talking about the song. You're projecting your views onto the song, and you're not letting the song speak for itself. Just give it up. Okay.

We know that you don't really get it anyway.

Scudworth
Jan 1, 2005

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super lemons.

Dinosaur Gum

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Ah yeah you’re right, I went back and checked - he gets a full test done while he’s there but the required one is just blood. It still struck me as really odd and archaic. And they lied about the reason? So weird.

My parent's wedding album (mid 1970's) has their result letters in it, not just shoved in, there is a page specifically to put them along with other paperwork and the marriage licence. They forgot about it, and found themselves having to explain all this to me when I found the album as a kid. There was no lying here anyway, the letters specifically say SYPHILIS TEST.

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!

Scudworth posted:

My parent's wedding album (mid 1970's) has their result letters in it, not just shoved in, there is a page specifically to put them along with other paperwork and the marriage licence. They forgot about it, and found themselves having to explain all this to me when I found the album as a kid. There was no lying here anyway, the letters specifically say SYPHILIS TEST.

So, did they have the syph?

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Scudworth posted:

My parent's wedding album (mid 1970's) has their result letters in it, not just shoved in, there is a page specifically to put them along with other paperwork and the marriage licence. They forgot about it, and found themselves having to explain all this to me when I found the album as a kid. There was no lying here anyway, the letters specifically say SYPHILIS TEST.

People immigrating to the US are checked for syphilis to this day. I had it done. (Negative obvs :smugdog:)

Moo the cow
Apr 30, 2020

Scudworth posted:

My parent's wedding album (mid 1970's) has their result letters in it, not just shoved in, there is a page specifically to put them along with other paperwork and the marriage licence. They forgot about it, and found themselves having to explain all this to me when I found the album as a kid. There was no lying here anyway, the letters specifically say SYPHILIS TEST.

Why would you want to display this? It's was a legal requirement, so it's not like it was something to boast about.

The only use I can see is for pulling the album out and embarassing your spinster-sister at family gatherings, who could not get married because she was a dirty-whore.

Scudworth
Jan 1, 2005

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super lemons.

Dinosaur Gum

Moo the cow posted:

Why would you want to display this? It's was a legal requirement, so it's not like it was something to boast about.

I think it's exactly that, and as the thread title suggests. It was such a normal and mundane part of the wedding paperwork that everyone had to do and didn't think anything of it. It was a total afterthought.
Definitely not something anyone would imagine struggling to explain 20 years later after the tests stopped and the std was nearly eradicated.

(and it's the only part of the album I'm interested in keeping now. I'm framing those weird papers when they die)

Fish of hemp
Apr 1, 2011

A friendly little mouse!
This just begs the question that why syphillis was such a big deal that it could deny marriage?

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

It might have killed your bambino

Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?
I'm afraid to admit this, but this thread helped me learn why there were blood tests.

I thought it was to make sure you weren't actually related. You know, so you don't accidentally marry your sister or something.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Fish of hemp posted:

This just begs the question that why syphillis was such a big deal that it could deny marriage?

It's a slow burning disease that may not be obvious outside of the second stage plus it can gently caress up babies big time.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Cemetry Gator posted:

I'm afraid to admit this, but this thread helped me learn why there were blood tests.

I thought it was to make sure you weren't actually related. You know, so you don't accidentally marry your sister or something.

I don't think the blood tests they could do at the time were capable of determining degree of relation.

Moo the cow
Apr 30, 2020

Lemniscate Blue posted:

I don't think the blood tests they could do at the time were capable of determining degree of relation.

I thought large parts of the US historically weren't too bothered about the whole 'marrying your sister' thing.

Lead out in cuffs
Sep 18, 2012

"That's right. We've evolved."

"I can see that. Cool mutations."




Midjack posted:

It's a slow burning disease that may not be obvious outside of the second stage plus it can gently caress up babies big time.

It was also (eventually) fatal before antibiotics.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Lead out in cuffs posted:

It was also (eventually) fatal before antibiotics.

And you’d go insane before it killed you. Possibly blind, too!

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
An end stage AIDS patient looks awful. An end stage syphilis patient looks horrifying.

Noses? Who needs them. Just breath straight through a gaping hole in the middle of your face.

Greg12
Apr 22, 2020

Cemetry Gator posted:

When you realize you're getting into a hole, you might want to stop digging.

You're not really making sense because it seems like you're talking about multiple issues, but you're not really talking about the song. You're projecting your views onto the song, and you're not letting the song speak for itself. Just give it up. Okay.

We know that you don't really get it anyway.

Art doesn't speak for itself or come into being from a void. It's an artifact of its context.

Here it is from a professional music journalist, written during the tour for Americana. It starts on Page 88:

https://books.google.com/books?id=3R7GZ8ghL8wC&pg=PA88#v=onepage&q=pretty%20fly&f=false

"It's a cry from the marginalized white rock sector... What we have here is the great premillennial Disco Sucks song."

And "Disco Sucks," like "Pretty Fly," is about straight white guys being mad that their distortion guitar music isn't the hottest thing.

Scudworth
Jan 1, 2005

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super lemons.

Dinosaur Gum

Greg12 posted:


Here it is from a professional music journalist, written during the tour for Americana. It starts on Page 88:

Did you actually read this because Dexter Holland says, in that thing you just linked to prove your point, that the song and video is mostly directed at boy bands of the time appropriating hip hop culture.

Disco was also a mainstream white culture theft n' bleaching clean up of the funk movement sooooo

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

It was also (eventually) fatal before antibiotics.

We’ll get back to that point soon enough.

The last time a novel class of antibiotics for gram‐negative bacteria was developed, JFK still lived.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 01:50 on May 8, 2020

Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

Greg12 posted:

Art doesn't speak for itself or come into being from a void. It's an artifact of its context.

Here it is from a professional music journalist, written during the tour for Americana. It starts on Page 88:

https://books.google.com/books?id=3R7GZ8ghL8wC&pg=PA88#v=onepage&q=pretty%20fly&f=false

"It's a cry from the marginalized white rock sector... What we have here is the great premillennial Disco Sucks song."

And "Disco Sucks," like "Pretty Fly," is about straight white guys being mad that their distortion guitar music isn't the hottest thing.

When someone tells you to stop digging, you don't go and say "It's okay, I got an even bigger shovel!" You stop digging!

I don't know what point you're trying to make because you're not making a point. You're quoting a music journalist. Which does not make that interpretation valid, nor is it a meaningful argument. At best, it's an appeal to an authority, but since when did I give a gently caress what Spin thinks? The whole article is not meant to be a serious reflection on "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)" but rather it's meant to be a promotional piece for the band. Because that's what entertainment journalism is. Often times low quality nonsense written to drum up press for a band that's doing hot or could be hot.

Listen to the song again and tell me exactly what part of "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" is about white guys being mad that "distortion guitar music isn't the hottest thing." Except don't tell me because nobody cares. Don't quote a loose interpretation, or your memory of what the song is about, or what you think the song is saying. Quote the exact part where Dexter says "This guy should listen to distortion guitar music only."

I quoted it before, but I will quote it again - "He needs some cool tunes, not just any will suffice. But they didn't have Ice-T, so he bought Vanilla Ice." Jesus loving Christ, it spells it out right there. The song is saying "Hey, this guy doesn't get rap. He's going for something that was sanitized for white kids so they could have a rapper just like them!" In fact, the lyrics suggest that Ice-T is a good rapper, and that his music is actually cool. That's the point. It's a guy faking being cool.

It's also tied to the idea of whiteness. Throughout American history, you can see white people appropriating other cultures because it's supposed to be cool, but they show a lack of understanding. There's nothing less cool than someone who is just dressing the part.

But you go on and keep quoting Spin. I mean seriously. You think that a professional music journalist's interpretation of a song means anything? Seriously. All it means is that they can write a coherent loving sentence without pissing themselves or pissing off the people who pay the bills. You got a lot to learn about entertainment journalism, my friend.

Kazzah
Jul 15, 2011

Formerly known as
Krazyface
Hair Elf
I fear that one day, people will no longer understand that Silent Hill 2 is about the trauma of circumcision, and will fail to appreciate its genius.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



More double downs in this thread than a KFC drive thru.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Hey let's stop this dumb slapfight about dumb stuff.

FreudianSlippers
Apr 12, 2010

Shooting and Fucking
are the same thing!

Grand Fromage posted:

Hey let's stop this dumb slapfight about dumb stuff.

Closing down PYF entirely seems a bit too harsh

Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?
I just watched Married to the Mob, and yeah, there was a time you could enter the terminal even if you weren't flying.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Cemetry Gator posted:

I just watched Married to the Mob, and yeah, there was a time you could enter the terminal even if you weren't flying.

You could go right up to the gate up until lunchtime September 11, 2001.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
I'm pretty sure Friends had episodes where they got to go straight up to the gang plank and then had later episodes where Ross had to buy a plane ticket to anywhere just to get to the gate. So that's a pretty good time capsule for a 10 year period in America.

neaden
Nov 4, 2012

A changer of ways

Krispy Wafer posted:

I'm pretty sure Friends had episodes where they got to go straight up to the gang plank and then had later episodes where Ross had to buy a plane ticket to anywhere just to get to the gate. So that's a pretty good time capsule for a 10 year period in America.

Chandler, but yeah.
One of my favorite examples from this from friends is in season one Ross gets an pager and everyone else makes fun of him. He's not a surgeon or something, why would he need to be able to be contacted 24/7!

Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

neaden posted:

Chandler, but yeah.
One of my favorite examples from this from friends is in season one Ross gets an pager and everyone else makes fun of him. He's not a surgeon or something, why would he need to be able to be contacted 24/7!

Oddly enough today, it's still mostly doctors that have pagers.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
East Berlin and West Berlin.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply