Pixies: Just the Latest Rockers to Make Violence Against Women Look Cool (Et tu, Brute?)

[ismnotwasm]

(Part of me is screaming "NOT The Pixies!!!, I guess I'll just go listen to some OTEP to feel better)


""I had a bad reaction to your public hobby writings," some snide, cracked alterna-nerd first whines and then roars as the music lurches into scruffy, scratchy surf funk. The alterna-nerd is Black Francis himself, and the song is "Bagboy," the long-awaited first new Pixies song since 2004. Though Kim Deal has sadly left the band, fans are still elated at the comeback--and the video by Lamar + Nik gleefully channels that fuck-yes-finally energy."

It shows a young, grungy kid (flannels!) frolicking in and trashing a comfortable, middle-class, suburban home: bashing lamps with a baseball bat, shooting silly string, and even (in the most vivid visual moment) filling the tub with milk and fruit loops and taking a bath. In the final scene, we see him through the window cycling away, and then the camera pans over to a black woman tied up in her bedroom. The kid wasn't just trashing his own digs; he was engaged in a brutal kidnapping and home invasion. How awesomely punk rock is that?

If you have a problem with cheering for a white kid terrorizing and humiliating a black woman, then your answer might well be, "not that awesome." My friend Bert Stabler, an art critic, made this point at my website the Hooded Utilitarian over the weekend. As Bert says, "in Chicago, where I live, there's a long history of police torturing black people- we live in a country with lots of black people in jail. There's also a long history of housing discrimination against blacks." And, of course, that's not just Chicago; the United States has a long, extremely unpleasant, countrywide history of terrorism aimed at black people who attempt to move into middle-class housing.

You could argue that the "Bagboy" video is a critique of that--that it deliberately links white alterna-rebellion to sexualized white racial violence in a screw-you-fanbase move analogous to taunting Pixie's classics like "U Mass." Lending support to this view, perhaps, is the fact that Lamar, one of the creators of the video, is black, and the woman in the video is his sister, as he explains in a note he generously left on Bert's post.

There are a couple of reasons to think that Bert is right, though, and that this video celebrates white-kid violence rather than condemns it. First, in his response, Lamar rejects the notion of racial critique altogether, instead insisting that race and gender are no longer relevant or useful categories.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/pixies-just-the-latest-rockers-to-make-violence-against-women-look-cool/277570/

[bench scientist]

1. WTF Pixies really?

Glad Kim left ( again)..I'll console myself with some Le Tigre.

[Texasgal]

2. Bummer!

I love the pixies!