Fuck you, and fuck all the like-minded sheople like you who inhabit Stereogum looking for the "hey isn't my comment cool and contradictory" pat on the back. And fuck everyone involved with making what was once a great website boring and difficult to use. I'm out. Laters.
No, ignorance definitely applies to anyone who would say something like this in our current gun crazy culture.
"Or we’ll just get shot on stage by some rogue renegades and that’ll be pretty crazy, too."
I didn't really care much about this band before I read that, now I don't care at all.
Apples and oranges, really. Death Grips was (is?) just "weird" because their music and lyrics were not structured in a way that was easily digestible for most people. They weren't, to my knowledge, actually offensive (unless you just really disliked their music) in any way. Die Antwoord, on the other hand, have done many things lyrically, visually and in their interviews that (to Americans, at least) can easily be viewed as offensive and derogatory.
In regards to point one, times have changed. Any number of band names, several mentioned in this comment section, wouldn't fly by so easily in this age of the 24-hour news cycle where everyone has a blog and an opinion.
How about spending 15 minutes reading something instead of trying to come up with witty comments for Stereogum articles. Does this sound like something you would want to name your band after?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong
Many Viet Cong units operated at night, and employed terror as a standard tactic. Rice procured at gunpoint sustained the Viet Cong. Squads were assigned monthly assassination quotas. Government employees, especially village and district heads, were the most common targets. But there were a wide variety of targets, including clinics and medical personnel. Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế, 48 killed in the bombing of My Canh floating restaurant in Saigon in June 1965 and a massacre of 252 Montagnards in the village of Đắk Sơn in December 1967 using flamethrowers. Viet Cong death squads assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam; the real figure was far higher since the data mostly cover 1967-72. They also waged a mass murder campaign against civilian hamlets and refugee camps; in the peak war years, nearly a third of all civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities. Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Vietcong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century"
The Tet Offensive:
"Viet Cong entered the cities concealed among civilians returning home for Tết."
"In January and February 1968, some 80,000 Viet Cong struck more than 100 towns with orders to "crack the sky" and "shake the Earth." The offensive included a commando raid on the US Embassy, Saigon and a massacre at Huế of about 3,500 residents. House-to-house fighting between Viet Cong and South Vietnamese Rangers left much of Cholon, a section of Saigon, in ruins. The Viet Cong used any available tactic to demoralize and intimidate the population, including the assassination of South Vietnamese commanders."
I can't believe that anybody who posts at the 'gum was dumb enough to give that an up vote. You do realize that Isis, the band, was not named after ISIS, the Islamic extremists, right? Like, come on people, really?!
Glad I read all the comments on this one, because I was going to make the same point. Three quarters of everything they've ever done or said has been viewed by someone as controversial, weird, or wrong on some level. I don't think I would even know about them if it wasn't for the fact that they were constantly doing something controversial enough to get some press.
I'm an American and I find it offensive EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. a black man or woman says nigger, or nigga, in a song when they could easily use any number of other words. Their rationale for using that word is exactly the same as that presented by Ninja. So get out of here with your righteous indignation.
Also, what is a "twee oddity", and how exactly does it apply to Chappie, a movie I'm quite certain you haven't seen yet.
Should those of a different age and/or musical taste be denied the joy and happiness one can find by listening to the music they love. Not that I agree with your assessment of what age bracket listens to their music, or that music should be put into an age bracket to begin with, because I don't.
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