Cancel culture of tedious posturing
DAVID PENBERTHY
A COUPLE of weeks ago I was lucky enough to do an interview over Zoom with one of my favourite musicians, the great Elvis Costello. We had been allotted 10 minutes but spoke for 24, which was handy as we needed extra time to make up for the bumbling,
Molly Meldrum-esque fawning on my part which marred the opening minutes of the chat.
One of the most interesting parts of the interview involved Costello’s decision to stop playing his song Oliver’s Army in concert anymore, and to ask radio stations not to play an edited version of the song, as many have been doing for almost a decade now.
The song contains the N-word. It does not use it in a hateful or racist fashion, of course, but from a position of deploring racism. The full term in Costello’s song is
“white n.....”, a racist term from the 19th and early 20th century used by the British to describe the Irish. The insult for Costello is a personal one, as it was directed at his late grandfather, who was Irish, while he was serving as a soldier for the British Army.
The backdrop to the conversation with Costello is one of cancel culture, where every week brings new calls from people on the left and the right for books and films to be reassessed, and in some cases shunned, on account of racial content.
Much of this thinking involves judging old standards against modern-day thinking.
Often it is just a simple case of ideological one-upmanship, where people on the left or right merely try to ban things that don’t accord with their world view.
While progressives have gone after everything from Dr Seuss to Fawlty Towers, the idea that politically correct lefties have a monopoly on the cancel culture is flawed.
In the past month there have been cases in the United States where conservatives have tried to ban the Margaret Atwood novel The Handmaid’s Tale for what they regard as an anti-male agenda and its searing portrayal of conservative power. A graphic novel about racial abuse by the author Jerry Craft was banned after conservative parents complained to their children’s school that the book made their children feel bad about the past.
Against this censorious setting, the illuminating thing about talking to Costello was that he almost admitted to killing off one of his own songs out of a sense of exhaustion. He fired up in his frustration at having to deal with people who are either so ideologically obsessed, or so poorly
acquainted with history, that they have no understanding of the context within the song.
Costello had found himself in an unpleasant pincer movement where some people on the left with no knowledge of history or awareness of his lyrical intent had started agitating against the song’s very existence because it contained the N-word.
On the other side of politics, his decision to retire the tune was deplored by right-wingers as politically correct conduct on his part, a form of squeamish surrender, of self-cancellation.
The simple truth is that he’s killed the tune because he’s a polite and thoughtful bloke. He doesn’t want an African-American person or any person of colour to hear that word in isolation and misread a racist insult into it.
His explanation of this process is worth sharing at some length, as it shows the near-impossibility of having a nuanced conversation about anything in 2022.
“I didn’t ask radio not to play it. I suggested that the process of editing the lyric was thereby bending the meaning,” Costello said.
“I used this very provocative phrase which was used during the First World War and before that to
describe Irish people. But as time goes on you have got to think about how that is heard by other people, that single word which they kept underlining the word by erasing it. So people would go: ‘What word do you suppose he is singing?’ Then they would look it up somewhere and find out.
Maybe they don’t know the history of that particular, horrible phrase.
“So I said that after 43 years if you haven’t heard the song and don’t know what it’s about, then it’s about time to have a second thought.”
Costello outlined how tedious discussion of his actions had been.
“I get a bit tired of people on the right and people on the left telling me that I am some kind of hypocrite, or that I have given into some woke mob, whatever the hell that is. People who have real problems, and deal with oppression every day of their life, be it based on colour, class, race, religion – they’re too busy dealing with these things to worry about these stupid arguments.
“I just said: ‘It’s my song, I’m not going to sing it on stage, but I’m not going to come around to your house and scratch it off your record. If you want to listen to it, knock yourself out.’
“I don’t particularly care
whether they play it on the radio. I won’t say I instructed them. I certainly didn’t plead. But let’s just be clear about what words are and what words mean.
“It is my song, it was my song originally, it was my grandfather who that was said to. So don’t lecture me about what my songs mean. Just accept it’s my right as the author of that song to put it in view, and to take it out.
“If you want to be sentimental about it, go right ahead.
“But I didn’t do it because anyone told me to do it. I did it because I have got decency in my heart. I don’t want to offend people because they have misheard what it was I was saying in the first place.”
The summary of all this is that I would rather spend 24 minutes talking to Elvis Costello than another second reading the posturing musings of blinkered ideologues on Twitter who are more interested in taking a public stand than thinking about anything in a layered manner.
As Costello himself concluded in our chat: “If you want to have an argument about history, you have to know your ground.”