Rocker Patti Smith’s song, “Rock N Roll N*gger,” has suddenly been removed from all streaming services. It is not clear when the controversial song disappeared from streaming services, nor is it clear if the artist had any role in its removal, according to Far Out magazine.
The song first appeared on Smith’s 1978 album, Easter, and is reportedly meant to speak to the way black people and other “outsiders” have been treated in the music industry.
According to an interview in Rolling Stone from the year the song debuted, Smith revealed that she had a very broad and quixotic definition of the N-word in mind when she wrote the song.
Smith felt the word just meant “outsider,” or someone with “soul” as opposed to being strictly a racial epithet. Indeed, in her Rolling Stone interview, Smith insisted that British rocker Mick Jagger qualified to be a n*gger.
When asked how Jagger could be considered a n*gger since he hadn’t “suffered” like African-Americans, Smith scoffed and insisted he qualified as much as anyone.
“Suffering don’t make you a n*gger. I mean, I grew up poor, too. Stylistically, I believe he qualifies. I think Mick Jagger has suffered plenty. He also has great heart, and I believe, ya know, even in his most cynical moments, a great love for his children. He’s got a lot of soul,” Smith said.
“I mean, like, I don’t understand the question,” she added. “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*gger.’ I don’t have any kind of super-respect or fear of that kind of stuff. When I say statements like that, they’re not supposed to be analyzed, ’cause they’re more like off-the-cuff humorous statements.”
Smith also gave a strange definition for the word on the original 1978 liner notes to her album that featured the song.
“N*gger 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*gger,” the liner notes read.
Smith has also claimed that she intended to “reinvent” the word and use it for a less hateful reason.
“You could have called Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci a n*gger– 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 said in 1996.
“I was taking this archaic use of the word n*gger and sort of reinventing it,” she exclaimed. “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.”
The song remains on the album for purchase but the official version seems to have been removed by Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music, according to Rolling Stone. In addition, the cover versions of the song by artists including Marilyn Manson, Esham, the Oxydants, and Trent Reznor, remain on streaming services. Versions uploaded by YouTube users still appear when the title is searched, but the song no longer appears at Patti Smith’s official Youtube channel.
To date, Patti Smith has released no comment on the matter.
Like many other aging rockers, Smith has been a reliably left-wing political activist, especially where it comes to attacking Donald Trump.
In 2017, for instance, Smith claimed that with Trump in the White House, it made her feel “tainted as a human being.”
Last year, Smith also joined notorious antisemite and ex-Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters in the accusation that Israel was engaged in the “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.”
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