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The Great Billie Eilish Uproar Explained

I happened to come across a Guardian piece about the controversy swirling around pop singer Billie Eilish. Here it is:

Billie Eilish has apologised after a video surfaced appearing to show her mouthing a racist slur....In the video, Eilish appears to mouth an anti-Asian slur featured in Tyler, the Creator’s 2011 song Fish, and is filmed speaking in an affected voice. In her apology, Eilish, the youngest artist to ever record a James Bond title track, said she was “13 or 14” in the videos and did not know at the time the slur was a derogatory term.

Holy cow! The Guardian isn't shy about printing obscenities, so this must be something really bad. But what? Other articles I googled seemed similarly shy, so finally I just looked up the lyrics for "Fish":

Slip it in her drink and in the blink
Of an eye I can make a white girl look chink...

That's it? This whole affair, lengthy apology and all, is because Eilish mouthed the word chink five years ago when she was 14?

We really all have too much time on our hands, don't we?

40 thoughts on “The Great Billie Eilish Uproar Explained

  1. Justin

    You could write about this instead? It's almost newsworthy.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/politics/pentagon-troops-somalia.html

    "As a result, nearly five months have passed since the United States has carried out any airstrikes in Somalia — a sudden and significant pause to a drone war there that stretched back to the Obama years. The cessation is offering an unfolding experiment in what it means to permit Islamist militants to operate with little intervention — and generating mounting impatience among military officials chafing at what they consider to be lost opportunities, officials said."

    Five whole months without airstrikes! God forbid! Those chafing military officials... when will they apologize?

  2. 7g6sd2fqz4

    Kevin Doesn’t Like It Therefore It Is Irrelevant, vol. 5842.

    Relax your body dude, she’s not going to be “canceled”

    1. Keith Ellis

      This "get off my lawn" thing Kevin's been doing lately has bothered me enough that I've gone from checking his blog first thing every day to checking it last or not at all.

      I'm guessing that the evil dex and related have put him into a grouchier mood and now, on his own personal blog, he's much more likely to get things off his chest this way. I'm sympathetic for that reason, but I'm both finding it kind if a drag just on the basis of tone, but also irritating because I strongly disagree with it politically.

      I've said this before, but there are already more than enough people who are daying these sorts of things, not the least including Fox News. I very clearly recall the complaints about the excesses of PCism in the early 90s — I was among the complainers — but, in retrospect, it's clear to me that making a guss about it was much, much more common than PCism itself and that it functioned as an integral part of the backlash against progressivism in the 90 and 00s.

      1. Yikes

        Kevin's just going through the stage where (1) he can't understand how in the world we got to a place where Donald Trump was President (see, e.g., all the Fox News posts), and (2) is trying to point out some way to carve off a few of the Trumpistas in the hopes that by carving out the R base a bit they won't come close to winning again.

        Unlike many of the rest of us who realize that ship has well and truly sailed.

      2. hat

        Excess wokeism will cause a backlash against progressivism no matter what. The best thing we can do to mitigate against this is to loudly proclaim, "We think this is crazy too!" People need to be aware it's only a small but vocal group on twitter, not the majority or progressives. It may seem annoying when Kevin writes about something like this instead of real issues, but being silent only makes the problem worse, as it lets the right fully dictate the terms of the conversation.

        1. 7g6sd2fqz4

          the problem is that he’s ginning up the controversy solely because he’s annoyed by it. nobody is canceling her - she apologized yesterday and nobody even remembers it happened today. her new album is going to go gangbusters - which is what happens almost invariably whenever a public figure is “canceled”.

          talking about shit isn’t bad.

        2. Crissa

          Do you ever check who is promoting this stuff?

          It wasn't black people or black organizations echoing the complaints against Senator Sheldon Whitehouse,

      3. iamr4man

        Note the time stamp. What do you do when up all night? Perhaps a little light reading? If you had a blog might you comment on its?
        I have the original art from a 20’s era comic and it’s subject is what we would call PCism, so you are right, there is nothing new under the sun.

      4. ScentOfViolets

        I joke about even vs odd Kevin, but I'd guess it's just some rhetorical rigor. It's good practice to argue the other side and prosecute with extreme vigor, amirite?

  3. Atticus

    The girl must be canceled! All good leftists, come gather your pitchforks. Is there a statue of her anywhere? If so, it must be toppled!

  4. dilbert dogbert

    Chink reminded me of Nip.
    One of my NASA co-workers of Asia heritage, used to hop up and say: "There is a little Nip in the air"

  5. Joseph Harbin

    It's a good thing that casual use of certain derogatory terms is deemed not acceptable. Point taken.

    But the new rules about what is acceptable or not are confusing, and the all-too-eager enforcement squad of those rules may need to rethink what it's doing. I would think that a 14-y.o. girl's choice of song lyrics to sing is exempt under the statute of limitations, even if years later she becomes world famous.

    What about Tyler, the Creator, whose song she was singing, or Frank Ocean, feat. on the original? Are they supposed to apologize too? I will guess not. Nobody expects a hip hop singer to apologize for singing something offensive. Being offensive is part of the deal.

    Billie Eilish (like Lin-Manuel Miranda last week, for a different offense) needs to be "respectable" and remain in good standing with the enforcement squad. She'll overcome this setback and once again earn gushing praise on public radio. The Oscars will be happy to have her back someday.

    Tyler, the Creator's huge audience (his five albums have all reached the Top 5 on the charts) will never ask him to apologize. In case there's any doubt, "chink" is about the least offensive thing in the lyrics of the song in question. A sample:

    Bitches running 'round down, pussy take a trip
    Make her strip, got my dick harder than the unzip
    Tyler swiftly slips his dick inside of Taylor Swift's slit
    Round trip in that pussy, here comes a ticket

    Well, we've come a long way since Lenny Bruce joked about Eleanor Roosevelt's "nice tits" and got thrown in jail.

    No one's going to jail anymore. Some people get upset about Billie Eilish, forcing her to apologize. Some people will be buying the next Tyler, the Creator album. Often those are the same people.

    1. Maynard Handley

      The point of these articles is to force people to bend the knee, to accept who is boss.
      That only works if the person you demand bend the knee will actually submit...
      When you try to the tactic against someone whose response is guaranteed to be "fsck you, I say what I like" all you show is the hollowness of the demand. cf one Trump, D ...

      Hence picking on Billie Eilish and not the songwriter.

      But at some point you run out of Billie Eilish's; and the Aziz Ansari's and Al Franken's wise up to the fact that they just can't win. Like calling everything Israel does anti-semitic, the net result is not to make Israel better off, but to make anti-semitic a meaningless phrase.
      Trump's handling of a similar situation was not an anomaly, but the vanguard of how this sort of thing should be handled going forward. Kavanaugh talked the talk but didn't walk the walk with enough "screw you" attitude; but there will be successors who get both aspects correct.
      You can force Henry to walk to Canossa, but that's not the end of the story...

  6. D_Ohrk_E1

    Maybe you should have a daily quick list of topics that were unnecessary for the news to cover, but nonetheless needed some snark coverage:

    -- The Guardian tells us that Billie Eilish apologized for mouthing racist song lyrics when she was 14 and was a crybaby when she was 4.
    -- Trump Organization sues NYC on account that no one in his company can read a contract.
    -- Ron DeSantis polling better than Trump, because let's be honest here, the only thing better than a tyrannical asshole is a competent tyrannical asshole.
    -- Texas, unsatisfied with being the lone state, has decided to take up the task of building the wall to make Texas lonelier.
    -- NYT science editor reveals age and slips an ear worm into old farts, with the classic headline, "When an eel climbs a ramp to eat squid from a clamp that's a moray."

  7. cld

    It's hard to think of Billie Eilish as truly woke, because she usually looks like she hasn't had her coffee yet, or like she really, really needs a nap.

  8. humanchild66

    While the racist slur is pretty bad, focus on that is really perplexing given how horrifying the lyrics are overall.

    I mean I guess it's not too surprising that a song about sexualized violence *also* has a racialized slur (agains a woman, btw).

    1. Salamander

      What?! That same song was about sexualized violence, but that isn't what people are enraged about??

      Apropos of nothing, I've just finished the Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton, and Sally Hemmings wasn't half of the awful things Tommy Jefferson perpetrated.

  9. Special Newb

    Uh, isn't chink as insulting as spic? Everyone gets to be stupid at 14 so whatever, but to some how say chink isn't a big deal slur is stupid.

    What is up with you this past year?

  10. jte21

    There seems to be a whole PR subcontractor industry in Hollywood now dedicated to guiding people through the proper motions of confession and penance when something like this comes to light. They have to tweet out a response and there's a fixed script that always runs "Although I was only X years old at the time, that's no excuse for the vile racism I projected..." etc. etc.

    The response Elie Kemper issued the other day after some people on Twitter were upset that she had attended a debutante ball as a teenager hosted by an elite private club in St. Louis with a (since disavowed) racist history. Reading her apology, you'd think she'd been photographed at a Klan rally giving a thumbs-up next to the burning cross.

    So I'm going to be a crochety old guy like Kevin and suggest that maybe our time is better spent fighting real threats to racial justice, like Republicans' plot to steal every future election they possibly can, rather than searching YouTube or Twitter feeds for some embarrassing thing to call a celebrity out over when they were immature 14 year-olds.

    1. Salamander

      Thanks for this. It's like the Left is developing its own Dr Seuss and Mr/Ms Potatohead outrage industries. If so, it's a really bad trend. No good can come of having everybody riled up and screaming about, let's face it, TRIFLES.

    2. ScentOfViolets

      Cf the next-to-last episode of Bojack Horseman. Hey, anybody excited as I am about the return of Tuca and Birdie?

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