WTF, Youtube? TW: violent racism
So you probably know my predilection for listening to Youtube's automatic playlists starting with a song I know. They tend to drift and it often dismays me to find out where we end up. But usually that's just an esthetic problem. Today I got a shocker.
I started with Gid Tanner and the Skillet Licker's "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" which is a nice and kind of innocuous old dance tune. I have to be careful with Gid Tanner because while he does sing a verse about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree (in "Pass Around the Bottle") and who can blame him, I've never been sure whether that was a true hatred of the Confederacy and the traitors who ran it or whether that was supposed to be a characterization of someone else's sentiments, and there's more than one verse in various other songs that embody crude racism. So when something comes up with that it in, I skip: man's been dead for years, there's no dealing with him now. "Fly Around M Pretty Little Miss" and "Give the Fiddler a Dram" do not have that, by the way.
Youtube likes to mostly play the same things for me, so there's a pile of Doc Watson and Dock Boggs and a nice little surprise with The Tarriers who I didn't remember at all (first interracial group? folk group? on tv) and I'm relentlessly skipping all the goddamned lady-murdering ballads.
Okay now comes the shocker. I know I shouldn't drive hits there so don't go and listen to this unless you're committed to flagging it, okay? Because this piece of inflammatory garbage has been floating around for at least four and a half years, has been upvoted over two thousand times,and you don't even want to know about the comments. Let me tell you a bit about it first. It's called "Coonshooting boogie." Already you're uncomfortable, right? The artist is listed as ARYAN. Now you know for sure, don't you. I needed more than that before flagging it so I listened to bits of it. If it was subtle, I'd have to explain it, right? Not subtle. First random line I listened to was enough: "shoot em up good, shoot em up bad, hand a noose over that coon's head."
I have flagged it and Youtube's flagging menu is dumb. You have to choose violent or racist.
Do us all a favor if you're up to it-- go flag it. It's right here. It's got more than two thousand upvotes. More than two thousand times some actual human being has come across this piece of shit and said, yow, this is awesome.
I started with Gid Tanner and the Skillet Licker's "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" which is a nice and kind of innocuous old dance tune. I have to be careful with Gid Tanner because while he does sing a verse about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree (in "Pass Around the Bottle") and who can blame him, I've never been sure whether that was a true hatred of the Confederacy and the traitors who ran it or whether that was supposed to be a characterization of someone else's sentiments, and there's more than one verse in various other songs that embody crude racism. So when something comes up with that it in, I skip: man's been dead for years, there's no dealing with him now. "Fly Around M Pretty Little Miss" and "Give the Fiddler a Dram" do not have that, by the way.
Youtube likes to mostly play the same things for me, so there's a pile of Doc Watson and Dock Boggs and a nice little surprise with The Tarriers who I didn't remember at all (first interracial group? folk group? on tv) and I'm relentlessly skipping all the goddamned lady-murdering ballads.
Okay now comes the shocker. I know I shouldn't drive hits there so don't go and listen to this unless you're committed to flagging it, okay? Because this piece of inflammatory garbage has been floating around for at least four and a half years, has been upvoted over two thousand times,and you don't even want to know about the comments. Let me tell you a bit about it first. It's called "Coonshooting boogie." Already you're uncomfortable, right? The artist is listed as ARYAN. Now you know for sure, don't you. I needed more than that before flagging it so I listened to bits of it. If it was subtle, I'd have to explain it, right? Not subtle. First random line I listened to was enough: "shoot em up good, shoot em up bad, hand a noose over that coon's head."
I have flagged it and Youtube's flagging menu is dumb. You have to choose violent or racist.
Do us all a favor if you're up to it-- go flag it. It's right here. It's got more than two thousand upvotes. More than two thousand times some actual human being has come across this piece of shit and said, yow, this is awesome.