Relations between the two camps were tense and the Stones entourage ensured the two bands were kept apart. When Guns and Living Colour both supported the Rolling Stones in 1989, Living Colour frontman Vernon Reid made a point of referring to One In A Million during his band’s set. Doesn’t John Lennon have a song ‘Woman Is the Nigger of the World’? There’s a rap group, N.W.A., Niggers with Attitude.
The word nigger doesn’t necessarily mean black. I used the word nigger because it’s a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem. I don’t like being told what I can and what I can’t say. Why can black people go up to each other and say, ‘nigger,’ but when a white guy does it all of a sudden it’s a big put-down? I don’t like boundaries of any kind. Speaking to Del James of Rolling Stone, he said, “I used words like police and niggers because you’re not allowed to use the word nigger. We all know where such prejudice, such hatred and loathing of the outsider ends up just ask Sophie Lancaster…Īxl’s defence was predictable. A song covered by Ian Donaldson, the goose-stepping frontman of neo-Nazi band, Skrewdriver, for Christ’s sake. For men and women judged, picked on and sneered at for their long-hair, tattoos and studs, accused of Satanism, records containing backward messages inducing suicide and the moral collapse of western civilisation. After all, empathy for the downtrodden should be second nature to people hassled by cops, bosses and mainstream society. Naive, too, maybe, was the belief that the rock and metal community was more tolerant, inclusive and humane.