Guest Column from Renaissance Horizon:
This is a story I have been following lately. The German band Eskimo Callboy is the first “metalcore” band I have ever liked. Although I only like their brand new stuff.
Metalcore is usually a horrible musical genre that reminds me of toddlers throwing a temper tantrum. Eskimo Callboy published their first album in 2010, and anything they released from 2010-2016 sounds terrible. Around 2017, the band started getting better musically, but the singing was still awful.
A few months ago, Youtube randomly played their video “We Got The Moves,” and I thought it was awesome. This was the first time I had ever heard of the band. I decided to check out the band’s catalog and became very confused. Much of the stuff I found online was awful. It was only the brand new songs that were good.
It turns out the band just got way better in 2020. One of their two original singers, Sebastian Biesler, left the band to pursue a solo career, and Nico Sallach took his place. Biesler is the stereotypical metalcore singer. He even looks like a little kid throwing a tantrum when he sings. The band was much better off without him.
Another song is called Hypa Hypa, which is just the right amount of cheesy and stupid that makes it very entertaining. Eskimo Callboy also collaborated with at least five other bands to help them make their own comedic videos covering the song. Last December, they released “Pump It” about working out. Another great song, with a comedic video.
So just when I found myself telling friends to check out this band, they started posting statements online denouncing themselves as “racist” and suggesting they should change their “offensive” band name.
They announced that certain songs with “racist” and “offensive” lyrics would no longer be played live and would be removed from streaming platforms. YouTubers, who are fans of their older music, say they can’t even figure out what songs the band is even talking about. The only song I know of from the band that should be considered “offensive” is “Nice Boi” which blatantly romanticizes school shootings in the video. The video is is reminiscent of Bobkat Goldwaithe’s 2011 “God Bless America,” which was a left-wing murder fantasy. The people being killed include Trump supporters, a guy with an NRA t-shirt, a Catholic clergyman, popular kids, jocks, etc.
The school shooting video for Nice Boi is still on Youtube, so apparently, they were not talking about that.
Then, earlier this week, they published a whiny Youtube video where they interview Frank Sejersen, a Danish college professor at the University of Copenhagen, so he can explain why the word “Eskimo” is offensive.
Sejersen currently uses the title Professor of Arctic and Greenlandic Studies.” However, in a hilarious twist, he was previously known as a “Professor of Eskimology.” He says that Eskimology was only changed to Arctic and Greenlandic Studies “very recently actually.” This makes the entire video come off as almost a self-trolling parody.
So, the Eskimologist is explaining why Eskimo is offensive. It is such a nasty word that Sejersen needs a lot of time to give his convoluted explanation of the “problems” it poses.
If you follow along, his arguments against using the word “Eskimo” could clearly be applied to the word “White” as well.
Eskimo, he says, conjures up an image of a happy, cheerful guy with sled dogs and an igloo. Why this is “problematic,” I do not know. Maybe it would be less problematic to use an image of a hopeless alcoholic living in a trailer home. Also, the word Eskimo, he tells us, does not appreciate the many diverse individual cultures that exist among the Arctic peoples that span across Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.
I kept wondering if Sejersen was concerned about the word “White” for the exact same reasons. If grouping different Arctic peoples under the singular term “Eskimo” is offensive, then isn’t it also offensive to group a vast number of cultures under the singular designation “White?” Americans just witnessed how problematic the word White is when Black actress Whoopi Goldberg referred to the Holocaust as an act of White on White violence. Outrage ensued.
