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ch-scene - Re: "Is Stephin Merritt a racist because he doesn't like hip-hop?"

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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: Bryk <chscene AT bryk.com>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: "Is Stephin Merritt a racist because he doesn't like hip-hop?"
  • Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 16:34:39 -0400

So this whole zipadeedoodah thang got the best of my curiosity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South


Wow! I had no idea that Disney has not released Song of the South on video in the U.S. (although I swear I watched a 16mm afterschool print in the school gym around 1979. Mind you, this was suburban Toronto.)

Disney has clearly internally debated over releasing it as a bottom- line-versus-potential controversy issue, and no doubt there will be much gnashing of teeth over how racist it is, or on the backlash right whether or not it even _is_ racist.

I suspect young American kids today would see right through it to what it is--smug, anachronistic nonsense, albeit with a bunch of enduringly great tunes. (Does anyone care to debate the intractable damage our generation is doing by parking kids in front of the TV to watch DVDisneytainment on auto-repeat until they can recite Ariel like Shakespearean soliloquy?)

I guess what I find most awesome about all of this is realizing that Song of the South has remained in video circulation in Asia and Europe all this time!

So, while Americans engage in asinine culture warfare as to whether or not it's a racist film, EVERYWHERE ELSE we've pretty much internalized the glaring fact that America was and remains a racist culture. Even though it's no longer as blatantly offensive as in the Jim Crow era (ie. when the leading actor of this film did not attend the premiere since he couldn't rent a room anywhere near the theatre), America was and is built on fundamental economic inequities that are self-perpetuating, whether or not those are set to a complicitly racist soundtrack (and I find the Gangsta/MTV Cribs world to be a transparent minstrelsy, cf. "Bamboozled")

Therefore we foreigners can smugly enjoy the movie on its own dubious merits. Pass the popcorn!

dB





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