#ARTFUL ASHES SKIN#

In the age of Decolonising The Curriculum and Rhodes Must Fall, we’ve seen the legacies of Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling robustly contested. South Asian actors have described the humiliation of being told to adopt Kwik-E-Mart diction at auditions and the Apu accent – clickedy-clack cadence, tongue glued to the palate – has pursued me through playgrounds and then pubs, mostly via white people who love The Simpsons as much as I do. This grotesque caricature has gone beyond the 2D confines of animation to shape the real-life experiences of desis. Period.” There are no plans to recast Apu, or write the character out of the show. Dana Gould, sometime co-executive producer of the series, has been unapologetic: “There are some accents that by their nature, to white Americans, sound funny. In the absence of any other form of pop-cultural representation, Groening’s Kwik-E-Mart clerk Apu Nahasapeemapetilon became a simulacrum of all South Asians in Britain and America what’s more, he’s voiced by Hank Azaria, a white guy. The problem with Apu was analysed in great detail in Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 documentary of the same name. I love fictional Springfield more than real-life Britain. Bart’s throwaway campness is more endearing to me than the prospect of my own future offspring.

Mention the words “dental plan” to me at the pub, and I’ll take that as an invitation to launch into raptures about Matt Groening’s latent communism. The Simpsons has shaped my psychology to a degree one would usually attribute to a parent, or a particularly devout upbringing.

Nothing embodies my privilege as a straight woman more than the game of self-deception I play when I hear that juddering beat, singing along to every obscene word – apart from the ones that force queer people to remain closeted. But Romping Shop, with its gratuitous condemnation of same-sex relationships in the opening bars? I think of my LGBT family and friends, persecuted for the mere fact of who they love of Dexter Pottinger, Jamaica’s “Face of Pride”, who was murdered last year. It is just about possible to confect a state of blissful ignorance regarding the dancehall artist when Clarks (a panegyric to the shoe shop) drops. With every stream or album purchase, I know I’m funding a set of values I find abhorrent in every way. Catch me whining, shamefaced, at a house party near you. Yes, stand up all you remorseful fans of Vybz Kartel.

#ARTFUL ASHES SKIN#

My first problematic fave is an advocate of skin bleaching, a homophobe and a convicted murderer. I cannot stand art that is trying to improve me in any way I love Kanye West despite everything and ya Allah, if you place an emotionally repressed white boy in my path, I will date him (admittedly some of these bad habits are more egregious than others). I’ve probably got more problematic faves than defensible ones. We’re talking about cultural phenomena where not only the artist, but also our own pleasure in the artist, is politically and ethically dubious. We’re not talking about harmless indulgences such as scoffing a whole tube of Pringles before bedtime, or autoerotic asphyxiation. As such, the problematic fave should not be confused with its insipid country cousin, the guilty pleasure. A modern-day Domesday Book called Your Fave Is Problematic catalogued examples of transphobic, misogynist and white-supremacist behaviour from supposedly liberal heroes (RuPaul using the slur “tranny”, for example). The problematic fave has its origins in that crucible of millennial woke culture, Tumblr. While the meme of the problematic fave may be five years old, the enduring agony and ecstasy of having one tells us a lot about the way popular culture shapes our entire sense of self. N othing in this life is certain aside from death, taxes and English literature graduates writing in the Guardian and spoiling your enjoyment of things you had previously thought were fine.

Artful ashes