The video for Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? has been CANCELLED!

Nell Scovall is the Twatter who posted it - George was trending earlier today (because of Travis Tritt - long story).

This is why Trump will ge... oh who fucking cares, we’re fucked....

Naomi Campbell plays one of the backup singers.

The black bass player was violently hungover the day of the video shoot so his brother filled in (brother was not even a musician)

They can't blame it on George, though, it was Julien Temple's concept, apparently

It was a direct reference to the Minstrel show that was on BBC for decades. If anything, it is mocking it.

Fucking millennials and Gen Z's with NO sense of history at all.

R3 - Naomi Campbell was in I'll Tumble For Ya, I believe. She was a dancer and was 12 - definitely not a backup singer.

Who the fuck is Nell Scovell and why should I care what she thinks?

[quote] It was a direct reference to the Minstrel show that was on BBC for decades. If anything, it is mocking it.

Someone mentioned that in the Tweets but in a "oh that makes it so much worse" kind of way.

R7 - not really - that minstrel show was on until the mid or late 70's.

What's lost here is that he's clearly a white man (people thought it was a woman - seriously) singing to a Caribbean beat and in dreadlocks. There was an obvious nod to that culture and also to how someone out of place gets negative reactions from people.

It's just not that simple - even though it's a video, a lot of context / other is needed.

Apparently, someone on Twitter cited a book where Temple said it was to represent a jury of multicultural peers judging George's appearance and sexuality.

More nuanced than 3 seconds in a video

I know I am going to sound like an idiot bumpkin....and maybe I am, but...

It looks like the men in blackface are actually Black. Since I am (happily) not an expert on the topic, was that common in minstrel shows? I understand the disgusting point of White people in blackface, but not Black. I understand it doesn't make it better, but does it make it different? Does it make it more of a commentary?

Are we making to big of a deal over a nearly 40 year old video?

[quote] Are we making to big of a deal over a nearly 40 year old video?

Yes

Black performers also wore black face.

Wait until the children discover Bananarama.

I seem to remember blackface showing up in several videos in the 1980s and early 1990s, like "Puttin' on the Ritz" which had to remove its blackface scene.

What I remember most is that MTV got complaints in the 1990s when they aired old videos in the overnight hours, because some of those old videos had blackface. They started fuzzing out the faces as a solution, but they also fuzzed out a new (at the time) video where someone was making a political statement by putting a black person in whiteface, and I remember being real confused by the whole thing.

Canceled by whom?

Stupid twats in their 20s who have zero sense of art direction and creative boarding for a video, when applied to the time the video was made, or by twats in their 20s who actually never even saw the video, listen to the boring ass, formulaic shit drones out by Drake every 10 seconds, and think that Eminem is a cultural rap icon, because they’ve never listened to real, OG rap created in the hood in the projects, by genuinely TALENTED BLACK artists, who are the real cultural icons?

These idiots wouldn’t even recognize Boy George if they saw him walking down Melrose, wearing regular garb.

Fuck them. No one who knows what’s up gives a shit.

Well, that’s a reach. I hate to be that guy, but... *yawn*

R10 I think that was also mentioned, that those men actually WERE black......so Nell Scocunt clearly has her head up her twat.

How has THIS not been cancelled yet

R18, well now you’ve brought it to our attention... CANCELLED!

(Who’s Phyllis?)

[quote] How has THIS not been cancelled yet

It was. In 1977.

Taco's Puttin on the Ritz

What on EARTH were any of these people thinking?

I think the Phyllis clip might be the most shocking one of all, though...because I cannot imagine what relevance it has or what the thought process behind it would have been.

Yeah, it's so shocking that for 45 years no one even noticed it.

I think Phyllis gets away with it because it's so weird and blurry that most people don't know what the fuck it actually IS

I don’t think I have seen the Phyllis opening since I was a kid and it must’ve gone over my head completely at the time. It’s surprising to me that this is the first time I’ve even seen it mentioned.

The Phyllis opening is just BIZARRE. The Banarama video is cringe-inducing.

Is it blackface if it's actually black people under the makeup?

If it were done by someone truly literate, the meta commentary beneath it would be staggering in its elegance.

Unfortunately, it probably wasn't.

I thought for sure that Blondie’s “Rapture” video had a guy in blackface but it seems to be an actual black guy with no makeup, I just remembered it differently.

R22, there was a time in the mid 70s to early 80s when throwbacks to 1920s and 1930s culture were really in. I think it must have started with The Great Gatsby. We got all sorts of crazy shit like At Long Last Love and Phantom of the Paradise and empire waist dresses and an art deco revival, and of course Taco's "Puttin on the Ritz."

The Phyllis opener is supposed to hearken back to 1930s musicals, hence the song and blackface tuxedo dudes, but the clips are either from MTM or ripped off from MTM so it doesn't gel.

[quote] If anything, it is mocking it.

How quaint that you think that matters to the woke crowd.

Expecting the woke crowd to understand symbolism is like expecting a dog to speak english. They're borderline autistic, everything must be literal with them, they don't understand nuance.

I for one am suprised that the woke crowd even knows who Boy George is enough to tweet on them. I figured most of those people's knowledge of the world pre-90's begins and ends with Stranger Things.

R29, started with The Great Gatsby? I guess if you ignore Dames at Sea, Bonnie and Clyde, Paper Moon, etc. you could say that.

The 1930s did not really have that kind of number glorifying a leading woman. That is more from the 1960s "big lady" musicals like Hello Dolly and Mame.

Chorus Line rifs on this same idea with the song "One."

[quote]The 1930s did not really have that kind of number glorifying a leading woman

There were tons of such numbers in movies that were all about a leading lady: Glorifying the American Girl, The Painted Angel, Sally, Sweetie, Broadway Melody, just loads of them.

There's a late 1960s movie called Joanna that has a whole song-and-dance number about the leading lady taken straight from late 1920s and early 1930s musicals. They didn't pull that out of nowhere, it was based on actual early musicals. The Funny Girl scene with the whole stage production about the beautiful girl, which Fanny turned on its ear by making herself look pregnant, was based on actual productions where a leading lady was glorified in song. I mean, come on, this was very common.

I'm aware that there were throwbacks to the 1920s and 1930s before the Redford Great Gatsby, obviously (I just named two, Funny Girl and Joanna) but the kind of tacky early 1930s spectacle that Phyllis calls back to didn't make a comeback until the 1970s. There's a difference between Bonnie Parker fashion chic in Vogue and big bombastic tacky musical numbers in blackface.

R33, I know Broadway Melody, Glorifying the American Girl, and Sweetie and I cannot figure out what numbers in them you are referring to. What they had is more like the number you refer to in Funny Girl....which is more about a generic "beautiful girl" rather that a leading lady.

What you may be thinking of is the large number of numbers about "beautiful girls" who are usually unnamed women, not a specific leading lady's character. The Funny Girl number is a spoof of this kind of number. These numbers are about the beauty of women rather than celebrating a specific big lady.

The big lady numbers really are a later phenom. We started seeing them getting popular in the 1950s (such as Hostess with the Mostest.)

I am really curious what examples you have of something like this from the 30s. I love musicals of that period and have not seen this kind of number.