A Christmas Dilemma

 

I received the above Xmas card which contained the following greeting:

 

Have yourself a savage little Christmas

Make the Yuletide fierce ...

 

I liked it and put it under the tree. But my American friend, Winona, who is far more alert to the racial politics of art and language, said it was inherently offensive on multiple levels. 

 

She explained how, for example, the image plays on white fear of the dark-skinned Other - portrayed here as an ape crazy gang member - and how the word savage is one that belongs to the lexicon of white supremacy and colonialism and is used to denigrate marginalised communities, dehumanise indigenous peoples, and justify genocide.  

 

My (tentative) suggestion that perhaps the meaning of the word had changed over time and had now to be considered within a different cultural context [1], wasn't met with much sympathy or given a great deal of consideration. 

 

Neither was the idea that perhaps it was just an amusing (if slightly disturbing) picture and that the sender of the card was simply referencing an album by Bow Wow Wow [2] and the popular Christmas song by Martin and Blane [3], without wishing to insult or upset anyone. 

 

It doesn't matter what the intention of the sender is, she said, going on to argue that even those who perpetuate the myth of the noble savage and celebrate primitivism are still part of the problem [4].

 

All of which leaves me with a dilemma: do I leave the card up and fall back on a free speech defence; or do I take it down and concede that Winona's politically correct case is just that - i.e., right and proper. 

 

I don't want to seem like an insensitive jerk flaunting their white privilege. But, on the other hand, nor do I want to become the kind of  woke snowflake who self-censors in order to virtue signal. I suppose the liberal compromise would be to leave it up, but hide it behind the other cards with their anodyne angels and innocuous robins ...  

 

    

Notes

 

[1] Savage - or sometimes savage as fuck (SAF) - has been used as online slang for some time now in order to characterise something as brutally honest, or ruthlessly hitting the nail on the head. It can also be used to indicate you find something extremely positive in a similar way that the term fierce is used within gay slang. 

 

[2] The Bow Wow Wow album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy was released on RCA Records in October 1981. Click here to play the opening track 'See Jungle! (Jungle Boy)' and/or here to play ('I'm a) TV Savage' (both written by Matthew Ashman, David Barbarossa, Leigh Gorman, and Malcolm McLaren).

[3] The popular Christmas song 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' was written in 1943 by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and introduced by Judy Garland in the MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1944). The lines parodied from the second verse originally read: 'Have yourself a merry little Christmas / Make the Yuletide gay'. Click here to play Sinatra's version from the album A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra (Capitol Records, 1957 - remastered in 1999).     

 

[4] Winona has asked me to cite the following work by Ter Ellingson; The Myth of the Noble Savage, (University of California press, 2001). 

      In this study, Ellingson - an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington - shows how the myth of the noble savage did not, in fact, originate with the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and only really took hold as an idea when resurrected as a racist trope within mid-19th century British anthropology. See Amelia Hill's review of Ellingson's book in The Guardian (15 April 2001): click here. 

 

  

Sid Vicious: My Way

Sleeve art for the 7" single release (Virgin Records, 1978) 

from the album The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979)  

For many people, the most memorable scene in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is the one in which Sid Vicious gives his own unique interpretation of that sentimental slice of cheese made famous by Sinatra: My Way.  

Whatever one might think of him, there's no denying that the 20 year-old Sex Pistol gives an astonishing performance and embodies a look and a moment of punk perfection on stage at the Olympia, Paris.

Indeed, even Paul Anka, who wrote the song - adapted from on an earlier release by Claude François and Jacques Revaux - conceded in an interview thirty years later that whilst he had been somewhat destabilized by Sid's version, he nevertheless admired the sincerity of the performance.

And French pop's greatest poet and pervert, Serge Gainsbourg, who witnessed Sid's finest few minutes on stage, was so smitten that - according to Malcolm - he thereafter kept a picture of him on his piano, alongside that of Chopin.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know. And whether Sid ever did anything his way is, of course, highly debatable; philosophically speaking, the very idea of free will determining an individual's actions seems dubious.

One suspects that had it been his decision, Sid would have covered a Ramones track and that the choice of this particular number was therefore McLaren's. Still, it was a good choice - and a fateful choice; for Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, the end really was near ... 


See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch Sid's magnificent performance of 'My Way'. 

Note: Sid's firing of a gun blindly into the audience at the end of the song is a nod towards André Breton's idea of what constitutes the simplest act of Surrealism and is evidence of how the artistic and philosophical roots of the Sex Pistols lay in Paris as much as London and New York. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's Parisian adventures in 1978 as a kind of punk flâneur, click here.