Malcolm McLaren, the infamous promoter of the Sex Pistols — and of himself, of course — recently passed away at the age of 64, from cancer.
Steve Sailer has quite a bit to say about McLaren and his sense of humor:
I always liked best Malcolm’s own 1983 minor hit single Buffalo Gals, which pointed out explicitly what I’d been saying since about 1979: rapping sounds an awful lot like that most uncool of all musical forms: square dance calling.
McClaren took the 1840s minstrel show song Buffalo Gals, which had evolved into a square dance call, and had some some New York rappers back him up while he rapped it (this was back in the early days before the racial wall hardened, when white people, such as Blondie, Talking Heads, and the Clash, were allowed to rap):
Buffalo Gals go round the outside,
Round the outside, round the outside
And dozey-do your partnersTo make sure nobody missed his point, McClaren’s Buffalo Gals video features footage of square dancing. (Here’s an even better video of a Buffalo Gals square dance on the Lawrence Welk Show.)
I assumed that the world would now get the joke: rap was descended from minstrel shows and the dorkiest of all white forms of music: square dance calling. What more could shame black people, after four years of hip-hop, into going back to something they do very well, singing? Perhaps popular music would finally climb out of the rut of rap, the novelty music gimmick that had refused to die?
I was wrong.
And that was one of Malcolm’s better ideas.
Speaking of McLaren’s better ideas:
Around 1980, McClaren came up with the good idea of building pop music on top of tribal rhythms from Burundi, first for Adam Ant, and then he took Ant’s backing band away, including the prodigious drummer David Barbarossa, to form Bow Wow Wow. There was always speculation that Barbarossa’s album tracks had to be multilayered in the studio, but when I saw Bow Wow Wow around 1981, he was moving his hands faster than any drummer I’d seen.
But Malcolm could never have too much controversy, so he hired a 14-year-old girl to be a lead singer and promoted her as a sex kitten. At the show I attended in LA, she blew her voice out painfully on the second song, suggesting to me that 14-year-old girls shouldn’t be on rock band world tours.
Sailer, of course, always looks for a racial or ethnic angle — and tends to find one:
Anyway, when I was reading McClaren’s obituaries yesterday, being reminded of how far he’d gotten in the garment and entertainment industries on sheer chutzpah, I decided to look up more about McClaren because I thought it was striking that he could have the most stereotypically Jewish career imaginable, yet be a Scotsman named Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren. Pointing this out would be good way to shatter stereotypes!
But, then I worried that I ought to check his maternal line and his upbringing before saying this in public. To my surprise (although I shouldn’t have been surprised), when I looked up McClaren on Wikipedia yesterday, I found:
McLaren was born to Pete McLaren, a Scottish teenaged war deserter, and Emmy (née Isaacs) in the suburbs of post-World War II London. His father left when he was two and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, the formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers, in Stoke Newington. McLaren told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, that his grandmother always said to him, “To be bad is good… to be good is simply boring”…. When he was six, McLaren’s mother married Martin Levi, a man working in London’s rag trade.