Patti Smith’s controversial song ‘Rock and Roll N*****’ removed from streaming
Patti Smith‘s controversial song ‘Rock and Roll N*****’ has been removed from all streaming services, although the official date of when this happened and Smith’s involvement in the decision remains unknown.
The track appears on the singer’s 1978 album Easter, which contains her best-selling hit ‘Because The Night’. Smith’s contentious song is still available when the entire album is purchased physically or digitally. On the track, Smith refers to figures such as Jackson Pollock, Jesus Christ, and Jimi Hendrix as the racial slur, using the term to describe feeling outcasted from society.
In the liner notes of Easter, Smith wrote: “N***** no invented for color it was MADE FOR THE PLAGUE. The word (art) must be redefined — all mutants and the new babies born sans eyebrow and tonsil … any man who extends beyond the classic form is a n*****.”
The punk poet has defended her use of the word, which she has sung in live performances as recently as 2019. In a 1978 interview with Rolling Stone, she referred to Mick Jagger as a “n*****’, stating: “On our liner notes I redefined the word n***** as being an artist mutant that was going beyond gender.”
When the interviewer suggested that Jagger hadn’t “suffered like anyone who grew up in Harlem,” she replied, “Suffering don’t make you a n*****,” she said. “I mean, I grew up poor, too. … Ya think black people are better than white people or sumpthin’? I was raised with black people. It’s like, I can walk down the street and say to a kid, ‘Hey n*****,’ I don’t have any kind of super-respect or fear of that kind of stuff. […] I do feel words can outlive their usefulness, unless we redefine them.”
In 1996, she continued her defence, saying: “You could have called Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci a n*****– people that created art for the palace but had to come in the back door. Beethoven was not allowed to come in through the front door of the palace.”
She continued, “I was taking this archaic use of the word n—-r and sort of reinventing it. It was the idea of taking a word that was specific and hurtful to people and obliterating it, blowing that apart and reinventing it so it was more like a badge of courage. Like the kids did with the word punk. It was part of my group’s attempt to break the boundaries, to obliterate labels.”
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