'People say I hate white people': comedian Ziwe on her provocative new show
How many Black friends do you have? Can you name five Asian people? Did your ancestors own slaves?
If you don’t have the answers to these questions, you might find a new live show by Ziwe Fumudoh, who goes by the stage name Ziwe, incredibly uncomfortable.
Then again, discomfort is the raison d’être of the show, which sees Ziwe grill her guests over 30 intense minutes on Instagram live, asking them awkward, difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible questions on race and sexism.
Her guests have included many a liberal white woman whom the internet loves to hate, such as the food columnist Alison Roman, the influencer Caroline Calloway and the actor Rose McGowan. But her guests recently have also included Jeremy O Harris, who wrote Slave Play, and the comedian Dana Donnelly.
The live, interactive nature of the show allows viewers to chip in, so as guests fumble over questions such as “Qualitatively, what do you like about Black people?” viewers can – and do – roast them in the comments section.
Roman apparently likes the way Black people dance and cook – but we’ll never know more because Ziwe stopped Roman short, simply saying: “I’m doing you a favor”. These moments – when Ziwe steps in to save her guests – are a brief reprieve for those who find the show lacking in generosity.
But her questioning does, at times, feel torturous. Asking Roman (who faced a backlash after she called Chrissy
Teigen and Marie Kondo – two Asian women – sellouts) to name five
Asian people was never going to go well, and even if Roman could name 10, it wouldn’t be particularly illuminating. So what, exactly, is Ziwe trying to achieve with this exercise?
Ziwe says she does not want her guests to fail, but she does believe in asking hard questions. “What comes out in my interview tactics is I’m actually trying to be nice, to be kind, to educate, not shame, necessarily,” she says. “Sure, I do it in a way that is really confrontational, but my goal is to help and heal people. I get comments like ‘Ziwe, you hate white people and you’re the devil.’ I don’t think those people necessarily understand the concept of my show or have watched a longer clip,” she tells me on an early morning phone call from her Brooklyn apartment.
There are moments when her frank questioning captures something that sensitive questioning cannot. After Caroline Calloway proudly exclaims that she is fed up with white people pretending they’re not racist, Ziwe’s sharp reply – “Oh, so you’re a proud racist?” – reminds us that bragging about doing the bare minimum shouldn’t be commended.
After Roman’s numerous defenses for her recipe for a bastardized curry (ingredients: chickpeas, coconut milk, turmeric) which she calls a “stew” – ignoring the recipe’s roots – it was refreshing to hear Ziwe ask: “Would you consider yourself the Christopher Columbus of food influencing?” “No, I wouldn’t,” said an irked Roman, who went on to define a curry as complex, while “a stew is a generic blanket term for like a thick soupy liquid dinner”.
Lest you think she is too harsh on her guests, there’s a method to this exchange, Ziwe argues. “Calling someone a proud racist, it’s radical – it seems very cruel and intense and violent but I am actually making the statement that like, ‘Hey, we need to name this thing that is sort of plaguing our nation or else we are doomed.”
Some argue that making people feel embarrassed is not a good way to tackle racism, but that often overlooks the other person in the debate: the person who is afflicted by a racist, sexist or homophobic comment, but has to prioritize the feelings of the offender above their own.
In other words: why are we more worried about being called a racist than being racist?
Considering she is a comedian, not an activist, to burden Ziwe with the far from enviable task of curing racist America with her show could be considered presumptuous. Why should her job be to change minds, rather than make people laugh? But she tells me it is supposed to be political during our interview, so I send her a text after our call and ask her whether the accusation is ever leveled at her:
“Ziwe, I’m wondering, do you ever get people saying things to you like: ‘If you really want to change minds this is not the way to go about it. You’re putting people off; you’re probably only talking to people who agree with you.”
“Nothing that literally, but here is a tweet I got tagged in,” she replies, sending me a screen-grab of a tweet,
in which someone says: “I struggle to see how things like Ziwe’s ‘gotcha’ tactics are helping anything at all.”
“How did that make you feel? Do you buy it?” I ask.
“I disagree, but I encourage those who don’t approve of my tactics to join me in finding positive ways to effect change. I’m just doing my best like everyone else,” she says.
Ziwe argues there are no wrong or right answers on her show, just honest ones. “The questions are designed to be impossible because ultimately the way that we are dealing with race is impossible. To pretend that you don’t have a racist bone in your body, that’s a fallacy, that is not based in reality,” she says as she suppresses an exasperated laugh. “It’s not an impossible question if you just say what you think,” she says.
There are, obviously, incorrect answers. The internet has a furious appetite for wrongdoing: people are swallowed whole for making mistakes, and people often love to pile on, to admonish the wrongdoer. When this happens, there is no compassion, no context, just right and wrong – only, right and wrong constantly changes, and people’s moral compasses expand, shift and change overtime. At least her guests are showing they want to learn.
But Ziwe doesn’t really believe in cancel culture. “People who get ‘cancelled’ never really get cancelled, right? They get a lot of press and they are trending on Twitter but I don’t know if we see legitimate repercussions in their lives,” she says. “I think if you say racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist stuff then yeah, people are gonna be mad at you, and you shouldn’t be surprised or go home like a boo-hoo baby and cry.
You deserve everything that comes to you, right?”
This is a confusing set of statements, and relate to the main criticism that can be made of the show. If cancel culture is not real – with its victims suffering no concrete consequences outside of having their profiles elevated as the internet obsesses over them for weeks – it would be fair to ask whether Ziwe’s show feeds that publicity machine. Some will say there are impacts (Roman’s New York Times column was suspended after her comments about Teigen and Kondo).
Still, to describe the show as simple “gotcha” comedy or a show based on the celebrity status of the formerly “cancelled” misses the mark. Ziwe’s former show, Baited, also used reductive questioning to remind us of our racial biases. In it, Ziwe deliberately race-baits her guests as a device to make people think about the way that we discuss race.
In one episode, the tables are turned: Ziwe is interviewed by the completely un-baitable comedian Aparna Nancherla, who tries to get Ziwe to do something racist. They play a game where Ziwe has to help Nancherla guess the name of a celebrity – normally an ethnic minority with an accent. Ziwe seems uncomfortable, but she won’t bite.
“I want the audience to see these excruciating, hard questions and say, ‘Hey, how would I answer that question?’ I want to point out my guests’ racial biases, the audience’s racial biases and my own racial biases. I am constantly trying to critique culture. So if you’re asking me who am I laughing at? Everyone! Including myself, always!”
It might be cringe-making to watch, but Ziwe warns that she doesn’t want you to just feel angry at Caroline Calloway when you watch her interview – she wants you to think about how Calloway is a product of the world we live in.
She wants people to come away from the show equipped to have these conversations – something she could not do when she was younger.
“I remember going to prep school, going to university, and I didn’t have the vocabulary where I could have these really tough conversations to really confront racism. I didn’t have the vocabulary to defend myself,” she says.
For her, the show is not just radical, it’s a kind of therapy: “I am trying to think about my younger self. How would I want to defend that version of myself? I hope I am doing that for my audience too.”
with girlfriend Annik Honoré – and the impact on his mental health: “Doubting, unsettling and turning around … disturbing and purging my mind.”
21. Day of the Lords (1979)
Evidence that the huge artistic leap that occurred between Joy Division’s contributions to A Factory Sample and Unknown Pleasures was not solely down to producer Hannett’s idiosyncratic vision: they simply hadn’t recorded material as majestic and controlled as Day of the Lords before.
20. Atrocity Exhibition (1980)
Some albums’ opening tracks lure you gently in: Closer’s smacks the listener in the face. Six minutes of twisted guitar noise, hypnotic bass and thundering drums, Atrocity Exhibition’s melody, such as it is, is entirely carried by the vocals, forcing your attention on the frankly horrifying lyrics: bedlam, genocide, the violence of the Colosseum.
19. Autosuggestion (1979)
“Joy Division sounded like ghosts,” offered Manchester writer Bob Dickinson in Jon Savage’s oral history This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else. Never more so than on Unknown Pleasures outtake Autosuggestion, six minutes of backwards guitar, echoing drums and a vocal reliant on long, mournful notes that slowly reaches a frenetic climax, topped by Curtis’s repeated invocation: “Lose some sleep and say you tried.”
18 A Means to an End (1980)
A perfect example of post-punk’s subversion of disco’s relentless four-tothe-floor beat – Joy Division’s manager Rob Gretton was apparently a great collector of US dance singles – A Means to an End’s lyrics seem to conflate Curtis’s personal situation with warfare, a subject he returned to again and again, as
The syndrum – the perky “bing-boo” noise voguish on disco records circa 1979 – was an unlikely addition to Joy Division’s sonic arsenal, but it works to striking effect on Insight. Bizarrely, it sounds as desolate during the verses as Curtis’s melancholy croon of “I remember when we were young”; elsewhere, it was manipulated until it sounded, in Morris’s memorable phrase, “like a flock of marauding pigeons”.
16. Digital (1978)
A mammoth leap forward from the Ideal for Living EP, Digital is the sound of Joy Division carving out their own unique space in the post-punk landscape: clipped and hypnotic, driven by Hook’s bass – the guitar colouring rather than driving the song – it keeps building to a series of stark, intense climaxes, during which the emotional mood shifts from claustrophobic to distressed
15. Twenty Four Hours (1980)
A last burst of nervous energy before the dark, enveloping calm of Closer’s final two tracks, Twenty Four Hours features Curtis’s voice floating over a ferocious double-time rhythm that keeps collapsing, as if it can’t carry the weight of the emotional desolation in the lyrics: “Look beyond the day in hand, there’s nothing there at all.”
14. Heart and Soul (1980)
A bold masterpiece of understatement, Heart and Soul’s cloudy sound – mists of electronics, a vocal swathed in echo, a listlessly strummed guitar – refuses to build to any kind of climax: it just drifts along, atmospheric and ghostly. If you want to make a claim for Joy Division’s influence on goth, this is the place to start.
13. Candidate (1979)
Joy Division were famously put through the wringer by producer Hannett
during the making of Unknown Pleasures, but the results were startling, as evidenced by the becalmed but unsettling atmosphere he created on Candidate – the guitar chaotic and feedback-heavy, but low in the mix – that only serves to heighten the lyrical anxiety.
12. Ceremony (1980)
Slower and darker in tone than New Order’s re-recording, Joy Division’s version of Ceremony is still lighter and poppier than anything on Closer, although such things are obviously relative. Nevertheless, you can hear the makings of an epic single that might have followed Love Will Tear Us Apart in breaking the band to a wider audience.
11. Disorder (1979)
There is an oft-repeated line that Joy Division sounded like the decaying environment of late 70s Manchester. You can hear it on the superb opening track of Unknown Pleasures, its taut rhythm and streaks of electronic noise conjuring, as writer Savage put it, “endless sodium lights and hidden semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites”.
10. Isolation (1980)
On Unknown Pleasures, synthesizers ornamented Joy Division’s sound: on Closer, they started to become their sound. The chaotic live versions of Isolation and Decades included on Still showed the drawbacks to this approach, but the studio take is fantastic: a brutal machine-like beat, an icy hook, Curtis’s voice drenched in queasy effects.
9. New Dawn Fades (1979)
New Dawn Fades is among the greatest songs on Unknown Pleasures. Its thrilling surges of power – guitar slashing, Curtis’s voice becoming harder and more impassioned – carry a disturbing lyric: “A loaded gun won’t set you free,” he sings. “So you say.” Covered by Moby, it improbably turned up on the soundtrack to the 1995 Robert de Niro film Heat.
8. Decades (1980)
Decades appears to conclude Closer on a note of calm: it glides along, richly melodic, thick with synthesizer. The lyrics, however, offer a distressing depiction of soldiers suffering from what would now be called PTSD: “We knocked on the doors of hell’s darker chamber / Pushed to the limit we dragged ourselves in.”
7. Shadowplay (1979)
Shadowplay was the song Joy Division chose to play on their first TV appearance in 1978. You can see why. Its murky atmosphere, its vision of a car journey not as a means of escape, but an alienating experience, underscored presenter Tony Wilson’s assessment: “Joy Division is the most interesting new sound we’ve come across.”
6. The Eternal (1980)
Robert Smith’s favourite Joy Division song (its cloudy, synth and pianoled sound was clearly an influence on the Cure’s album Faith), The Eternal was inspired by a child with Down’s syndrome who lived near Curtis in Macclesfield. Both beautiful and deeply moving, it depicts his struggle to communicate with remarkable empathy.
5. She’s Lost Control (1979)
Opinion is divided as to whether the definitive version of She’s Lost Control lurks on Unknown Pleasures or the subsequent 12-inch single: either way, its shattering lyrical depiction of a woman in the throes of an epileptic seizure, its electronic rhythm and its unremitting bassline, are a spectacular achievement, the work of a rock band who sounded like no one else.
4. Dead Souls (1979)
“A duel of personalities that stretch all true realities, it seemed like he was two people,” noted Bono after meeting Curtis, an incisive depiction of his fractured character. Dead Souls is almost unbearably intense, its Stooges-y riff churning away behind an increasingly desperate-sounding vocal. Essential, difficult listening.
3. Transmission (1979)
Transmission has almost nothing to it – two chords, a three-note bassline, an icy synth drone – but the sheer power it builds up over the course of four minutes is extraordinary: a mounting wave of tension that is finally broken with Curtis’s anguished yell of “and we can dance!”
2. Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980)
The writer Paul Morley recalled his reaction to hearing Love Will Tear Us Apart live as one of shock: “Oh my God, this is a fucking great pop song.” But its unique power comes from the fact that it was pop warped to Joy Division’s specifications rather than vice-versa. Its catchiness concealed a strikingly blunt, agonising, inconsolable depiction of a crumbling marriage.
1. Atmosphere (1980)
It seems bizarre that Joy Division initially gave their greatest song away to what Curtis called “a French limitededition magazine-cum-record thing”: Sordide Sentimental, that released only 1,578 copies of it. But then, incredible songs were coming in profusion to Joy Division at the time: Atmosphere marked the start of a remarkable burst of creativity that no one – except possibly their lead singer – realised would be their last. It is stately, emotive and epic. Moreover, there is an airiness to its beauty and a faint hint of optimism in its lyrics, both noticeably absent from their other later songs: a last, gorgeous flicker of light, before the darkness irrevocably descended.
it, anyway – arena floor to sci-fi ceiling – and who wants to see it empty? It doesn’t mean anything without people there. Without music. To go downstairs (from our office behind the organ) and into a packed auditorium is to be pitched into another world, that world lit up by the surreal interplay between opulent architecture and the intense spontaneity of live performance.
I’ve seen Nine Inch Nails cast in towering, leaping shadows as the squall of Copy of a reaches a climax. I’ve seen Seu Jorge play it impossibly intimate: perched on a tiny platform ringed with lights, the building shrunk tight around him. I was there the night that Chvrches drowned the Hall in synths, Lauren Mayberry triumphant against the backdrop of opera boxes, heir to 145 years of history. Now I’m like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner, banging on about stuff he remembers.
In the month before lockdown, I spent nine days following alt-folk act Big Thief around Europe. It was a long and lovely last hurrah: sweaty masses roaring in unison, teenagers sobbing at songs of crystalline purity, and the most exciting band in the world reinventing itself every evening. It took seeing them live to realise what a political album their last one was, as if it had secrets that could only be communicated in person. They pushed their sound to the extreme in both directions – the lighter songs trod on eggshells while the heavier ones exploded.
And that is the magic of the medium: immediate, questing, heightened, moving and communal. Music can be magnificent on record, but live it is something else entirely. Four months after lockdown, plenty of us could use the catharsis of a concert. I plug the gap eagerly but inadequately with streamed shows and Spotify – working from home now an endless, solo listening party. Meanwhile, the future remains uncertain, but I keep one eye on the horizon, waiting for the band to come on.
• Rick Burin is a writer and senior press manager at the Royal Albert Hall