Whew, you’d better stay away from “one in a million” by guns n roses then!
Of course, the two songs are very different, but if you have ever only heard the “radio” version of OIAM (which still doesn’t get played on radio) and then hear the original, you’ll shit yourself.
They’re completely opposite in intent and usage. Dire straits are poking fun at an idiot saying the things in the song. Axl Rose was saying what he thought in the worst possible way. Dude is batshit, and a homophobe. Well, was for sure, I guess even someone that much of an asshole could have changed by now.
Kinda sucks because the song itself isn’t bad, just really nasty. Like, as a slice of life from a person that’s full of anger and hate and wants to run away from his self generated fears, the song is successful. It paints a realistic picture of not only the person that wrote it, but of people that think like that. It’s just really hard to listen to because of that accurate slice of hate.
This comment is NOT AT ALL intended to excuse anything that Axl has said, sung, or thought. But in the late 80s and early 90s it wasn’t just the cultural norm to saw insanely offensive things about gay people, but they were actively demonized in huge swaths of daily life. I can not imagine how it felt being gay, bi, or otherwise queer but I have to imagine it was petrifying. If something happened to you, the cops were unlikely to investigate. Songs, TV, even news papers made fun of and offensive comments about gay people.
The cultural shift that’s happened over the past 40 years is pretty incredible. Not saying we don’t have further to go, not saying things are good now, just noting where we’ve come from just in my own lifetime. Axl might still be a POS, and he’s absolutely out of his mind. But shit like that was so pervasive.
Absolutely! It wasn’t at all unusual, even for other slurs. But gay slurs were outright common. Ffs, even in 91, my high school had a gym class playing “smear the queer” and that was the gym teacher calling it that. It wasn’t a secret, it was right out in the open. And that really was about the mildest kind of bullshit gay people had to deal with.
My best friend in high school was/is gay (still my best friend, still gay lol). He was mean as a snake, so nobody was dumb enough to directly attack him, but it was a real fear that it could happen, or that it could end up a planned attack by enough people when he was alone that his willingness to fuck people up wasn’t a deterrent.
By about 93, I had been going to the closer gay bars with him, and ended up bouncing at a few when I moved to the city for a while. It could get ugly fast at those places. Here in the south, the acceptance of gay folks still isn’t where it should be, but back then, we would have assholes showing up specifically to beat gay people. I’ve got a few scars from trying to keep our patrons safe and alive. All of us at the big drag club ended up with scars.
The sheer ease with which some of those sociopaths would drive into the city specifically to try and hurt someone they didn’t even know was disgusting. The police response was utter bullshit. A couple of times, people damn near died while we tried to keep things under control because the cops didn’t care. At least the ambulance people were fast, those folks were incredible, and always got there before the cops, despite being located farther away.
It’s one of the reasons I can’t bring myself to hate Axl. I’m amazed I didn’t end up thinking that way too, if I’m being honest. My family were mostly cool with gaydom (that’s an actual thing my aunt said once), but they still looked at it with pity and condescension. “Those poor people”. I have to laugh at it a little or it would make me sad.
My understanding was both Mark Knophler and Axl Rose were doing the same thing, writing a song from a dumbass bigots perspective, it’s just that people hate Axl and automatically ascribe the worst motives (despite a literal black man playing guitar on that GNR track).
Ehhh, Axl has gone on record about when and why he wrote the song, and why he used the words he used. He outright said that he didn’t like gay people unless it was lesbians he could watch because that’s his fetish. He did say that he was only using the slurs to point at part of the groups, but the way he said it was still both racist and homophobic.
Slash has said on the record that he objected to the song, and wished it hadn’t been made, but that (at the time) the band didn’t interfere with each other creatively. He also didn’t play much on the track, btw. Afaik, Axl wrote all the acoustic guitar on it, because he’s stated on the record that he sucked at the guitar and was essentially just strumming two strings. I’ve never seen any breakdown of who played what on the recording though, so I can’t say who is playing on the track.
However, Slash has also said that while he didn’t like the song, he wasn’t pissed at Axl because of it. But you can’t use that as a guideline for the song being acceptable or not because a shit ton of other musicians were quite vocal in their objections at the time (including the band that toured with them during that era, Living Color).
It isn’t anyone ascribing anything to him (axl), it’s what he himself has said in interviews, and on stage.
In later interviews he’s outright said that he as a person was a rage junkie (abridged version lol, he did a lot of interviews), and absolutely had hatred for gay people as a whole. He’s given multiple reasons for that, and none of those are self-contradictory. However, none of them excuse his behavior towards gay people.
As far as other things he’s said about his racial beliefs, I don’t know if it’s fair to say he’s full on racist, as in hating black people or any given ethnic group. What is fair to say is that his excuses for use the n slur in the song amount to stereotyping and was certainly intended to attack at least the black people he was stereotyping.
Now, I’m pulling this from having been a fan of the band since they broke into national awareness, and all the stuff I read and heard along the way. But, the interviews are usually available online. I know the Rolling Stone magazine stuff is. There’s still concert ,footage of him from the era ranting about being accused of bigotry, though that was pretty much just him saying “fuck you” to anyone that didn’t like him.
Very specifically, Axl has said that he wrote it from his own perspective, talking about his experiences and his anger. The “one in a million” sections of the song are him repeating something said to him in real life because he was a raging asshole (again, he’s said that on record).
So, the worst motives being ascribed to him aren’t ONLY because he isn’t well liked. Hell, I’ve still got the vinyl of Lies, and have the rest of the pre-breakup albums on at least CD, if not multiple formats. I don’t hate Axl, much less the band.
Knopfler has also been open about how his song was written, and it’s intent. It was, just as you said, holding up the kind of speech and behavior in the song to ridicule. That’s been his public stance on the song from the beginning, and it has never changed afaik. The lyrics support that stance. He’s told the story of writing down many of the lines from the song after hearing them in person by another person. The lyrics are saying that the musicians on stage and screen are the yo-yos playing Hawaiian music, so the f slur in the song would be directed at Knopfler himself even if he was writing from his own perspective.
I know, that’s a lot of words for a decades old song lol. But anyone that was a fan of the band back then had to negotiate the matter. My best friend still hates Axl because of the song. The debate about exactly how bad the lyrics are was a nearly daily thing for a few weeks after the EP came out. I never hated Axl, I don’t waste my hate on strangers very often (and never on strangers that can’t really do anything with whatever bullshit they spew). But I get why people do.
Work like it’s a crippling addiction - it’s not as though crackheads have miserable lives, their bodies literally falling apart as their minds figuratively do the same, until they either muster the incredible willpower to endure the intense suffering required to drop the habit, enduring lifelong consequences, or die an early death.
I suspect the same with Area 51. They used aliens to cover up even worse stuff. Like torture techniques, biological weapons and other stuff banned by international accords like the Geneva convention.
They were covering up the news about the ocean srreams possibly dying by 2025. They did it to cover up the news that they’re officially destroying the planet.
You do realize the media could run a week straight of news about ocean currents dying and half the population would challenge whether or not we even have or need ocean currents.
Ocean “currents”? I ain’t never seen no goddamn “currents” in the ocean, boy. Have you? They just be sayin’ these things to keep us distracted from how their undloadin’ trucks full of illegals in are country to steal are jobs and sell drugs and live off of welfare!
Right, great idea - let’s all just give up and jump from the top of a cliff headfirst into rocks. No, wait, what I meant is bad idea. Horrible, horrible idea.
“Oh, your job isn’t paying enough? Well, have you tried stealing from your family? Your grandma has a social security check coming, right? Oh, your family doesn’t talk to you anymore, huh? Well have you tried selling your neighbor’s car stereo? What about his propane grill? How about stealing tube socks from Walmart and trying to sell those on the street to anyone who walks by? Still not cutting it, huh? I don’t know man, maybe it’s time to try sucking some dicks.”
These memes seem a lot less clever if you’ve ever been close to someone whose life got snowed under by addiction, or lived in a neighborhood that has a crack problem. Seeing real crackheads really hustling is pretty fucking bleak. They’re not getting ahead. They’re not winning. They’re burning everything with even a shred of value to service their addiction, including family and personal relationships.
I don’t know, maybe it’s a very apt metaphor for capitalism, and what our capitalist system expects of us, but I have no desire to trade the people and things that make my life bearable just so I can brag about having a couple extra dollars in the bank.
Fermi Paradox. Are there aliens? Of course. Are they in our current time and local space? Probably not. It’s it fun to think about? Yes, that’s why science fiction exists.
More importantly, are they a lifeforms that we would even recognize as alive? The chances of an alien being humanoid are even slimmer. Then there’s whether they develop intelligence, whether they care about space, and whether they survive long enough to get anywhere.
If intelligent life exists anywhere else the biggest chance we have of finding anything would be a self sustaining vehicle sent off into space by them at some point. The chances of us being alive at the same time in close enough proximity to encounter each other is almost zero.
If a vessel could wander space endlessly we have a slightly bigger (but still almost zero) chance of encountering it.
This was one of the only cool parts of the film Oblivion. Basically if an intelligence can cross that distance to us it would likely be a digital intelligence. That and if you want to fuck humanity without touching them, crack the moon.
Counterpoint, why do dolphins and sharks look so alike when they have a completely different phylogenetic tree? They separately developed traits that were very well suited to the medium of water. Convergent evolution means that it isn’t entirely unlikely that whatever we may find has similar traits to beings on earth, because we all exist in a universe of solids, liquids, and gasses.
Counter-counterpoint: both species come from the same tree of life, several of their traits taken for granted come from previous species’ adaptation, e.g. bilateral symmetry. When you see, say, a molusk with the same bodyplan as a shark, we can talk about it being a common possibility.
While carcinisation does exist as a phenomenon, I believe all examples involve animals of the same order, i.e. it’s even less extreme than comparing a shark and a dolphin.
It’s a fair point, but I guess we would recognise them, especially if carbon-based.
Think of another issue. We evolved in 6 million years. Assuming it takes 4 billion for the planet to form and organisms to form, that means there’s 8 bln years where civ can start. What’s the chance that they are at a similar tech level as us? Really small.
I disagree with tax & rent being lumped together. I have no problem with my (high) tax rate as it supports education, infrastructure, etc. The outrageously inflated rent goes to the same guy that stole 95% of your pizza in the first place.
While I agree in principle, when tax dollars go to corporate tax cuts, handouts to failing financial institutions, and billionaire lunatics selling snake-oil space-based internet “solutions”, its easy to get disillusioned about taxes.
We absolutely should be taxed to a high degree, but that money needs to be spent on collective benefits, not private corporate interests.
That’s a different topic though! Don’t conflate collecting funds with usage/distribution of funds. We all need to accept that we have to pay (high) taxes. That the upper 10% haven’t paid their fair share in decades and that there is misuse has nothing to do with my tax rate. We need the upper 10% to pay way way more and we need better accountability for usage of the money. Pretty much regardless of where you live on this planet by the way.
Yeah I think playing into the idea that it’s being taken unjustly though is bad. It’s better to portray it like the rich roommate never paying their portion of any of the bills and leaving you to cover it all.
You realize someone has to pay for public infrastructure and services, yes? If corporate interests do not pay the taxes that are typically expected of them, then someone else will have to cough up that money, or services will need to be cut.
“Paying” for tax cuts makes sense in the context of changing budgets while trying to keep them balanced. But no money is ever spent on tax cuts. It’s spent on the public infrastructure and services you mentioned. If you properly account for the money as being used to pay for public goods, then saying it’s also used to pay for tax cuts would be double counting.
Having to pay more for a shared cost so that someone else can pay less… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the shorthand “pay for someone else’s tax cuts”.
Alice and Bob agree to buy a shared lumber splitter. Alice takes a loan to pay for it, which Bob agrees to pay half of. When payments are due, Bob bails and does not pay, and he uses the lumber splitter anyways. Now Alice has to also pay the share that Bob agreed to pay.
Yeah this meme assumes you’re given the totality of your labor value when you aren’t as a wage slave, the majority of your labor value is stolen by the same company paying you the crumbs
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