Counter-Currents
2,100 words
We all know that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But does it follow that when you understand the culture of critique, every Jew looks hostile? Of course not, but, boy, it’s kind of tempting to think that way, isn’t it?
I think Tobias Langdon might have given in to that temptation a little bit in his engrossing essay “The Spinal Solution.” In it, Langdon posits that Rob Reiner’s 1984 satirical rockumentary This is Spinal Tap, while legitimately funny, is “at least in part a Jewish satire of goyim and their ludicrous ways.” He points to the film’s Jewish director and the fact that two of its three lead actors are Jews, and concludes that there is some culture-critiquing afoot.
I disagree.
While This is Spinal Tap is a satire created mostly by Jews, and hostile anti-goy satire does exist (Langdon brings up the excellent example of Sacha Baron Cohen), connecting the two in this case stretches credibility a bit too far in my opinion. I don’t find a secret Jewish agenda in Spinal Tap — despite how I appreciate Langdon’s effort to root one out. Not all satire needs to be hostile (Langdon admits “there seems to be affection in the mockery”) and not everything created by Jews must have sinister ulterior motives. In the case of Spinal Tap we have a satire that stays within the bounds of its subject matter, and, in many cases, points to Truth — sometimes even in a profound manner.
Comparing Spinal Tap with Cohen’s Borat can help clarify this distinction. When Cohen ‘satirizes’ white people, he tends to portray them as both cruel and racist. The former violates the ethics of civilized society, and the latter violates taboos that Jews themselves established and continue to police. The “Running of the Jew” scene in Borat is a great example of this. So is the scene in which a young white man is captured saying racist things in jest after having had a few too many drinks. In Cohen’s worldview, there is a distinct white-nonwhite or Gentile-Jew divide, and the former groups continually infringe upon the latter — never the other way around. There is a clear anti-white agenda at work here, as well as a discernable Jewish identity on the part of the director. We know this because most of the film’s humor relies on the chauvinistic gentile nature of its subjects. Replace these subjects with black or identifiably Jewish ones, and the humor fizzles. Cohen works within the insidious tradition of Jewish writers and filmmakers which makes bashing white gentiles the very point of their art, while portraying Jews (and non-whites in general) as blameless. My review of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust delves further into this particular bias.
Spinal Tap, on the other hand, operates entirely in the absence of race. David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, Derek Smalls, and the others are spoofed not for their identity as white gentiles or because of their cruelty or taboo-breaking, but for their vanity, pettiness, thickheadedness, pretentiousness, and other amusing peccadillos which were common among rock stars in the 1970s and 1980s. They praise a fellow rocker when they meet him in a hotel lobby, but call him a wanker once he’s out of earshot. They claim to have “armadillos in our trousers,” but an airport security guard reveals that armadillo to be a cucumber wrapped in tinfoil. When asked about the dwindling sizes of the band’s venues, their manager pompously explains that the band has become “more selective with their audience.” Nigel Tufnel boasts about how his amplifier “goes to eleven” but is quickly exposed for not understanding basic math. The bandmembers pay homage to Elvis Presley by singing “Heartbreak Hotel” at his grave, but fail to realize that they are actually disrespecting the King’s memory when they botch his song.
This is all very funny. The filmmakers adhere to the classic comedic formula of finding a lovable mediocrity (Ralph Kramden being the twentieth-century archetype), puffing him up with pretense, and then knocking him down just to see the goofy look on his face. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. And we shouldn’t hold the Jewishness of the director and stars against them if this is all that they do.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s novel Charity’s Blade here.
I think the question we should ask is this: If the satire found in This is Spinal Tap evinces a hostile racial agenda on the part of the artist, then what satires don’t do this? Does Oscar Wilde treat his upper-crust subjects any differently in The Importance of Being Earnest? How about the P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves novels? Do these have an “anti-goy” agenda as well? Bertie Wooster and his family qualify as goyim, after all.
Are we willing to hold Eric Idle to the same standard for his role behind the Rutles? All You Need is Cash spoofs with Beatles with the same kind of verve found in Spinal Tap, yet because Idle is not Jewish (and neither was his collaborator, Neil Innes, apparently) is this all just good clean fun in comparison?
I think it is all good fun (although, Langdon makes the point that Spinal Tap is less clean fun than it could have been). Regardless, both films do not impugn the humanity of their subjects, only their petty vanities which come across as funny when viewed at a distance. When Idle, as the Rutles’ documentarian Stanley J. Krammerhead III, Jr. visits the Mississippi Delta to uncover the blues roots of the Rutles, he encounters an old black blues singer who tells him that he had singlehandedly influenced the Rutles. The singer gets hilariously undermined, however, when his wife accuses him on camera of lying. She then claims he had said the same thing about non-blues acts such as The Everly Brothers, Frank Sinatra, and Lawrence Welk. The subject being spoofed here is not black people in a racial sense but the fairly well-known trope of garrulous blues singers playing a little loosy-goosy with the truth. In the same satirical spirit, the members of Spinal Tap proclaim the greatness of rock n’ roll while getting lost on their way to the stage.
It seems to me that if the satire in This is Spinal Tap is illegitimate because of a hostile agenda, then we would have little room for satire at all.
Langdon then pursues an interesting argument:
But laughter is also used to promote sexual depravity in Spinal Tap, which may have struck an early blow in the campaign to normalize anal sex among heterosexuals.
He supports this by quoting the lyrics of a Spinal Tap song called “Big Bottom,” a piquant paean to pleasantly plump posteriors. I have been aware of this song since Spinal Tap came out, and never once did I associate it with anal sex. Some guys are into girls with big butts — there’s nothing in the lyrics that suggests otherwise. And with all the crass innuendo in the song, wouldn’t the writers have indulged in that if they wished to imply something other than traditional intercourse? How hard would it have been to rhyme “I’ll take us up my way” with “Down your Hershey highway” anyway? Stink, sink, pink; taint, ain’t, saint — the opportunities are endless. Not to describe a song like “Big Bottom” as innocent, but within the context Langdon brings it up, I think it is.
Furthermore, it’s not without precedent. Here are some lyrics from the 1978 Queen hit “Fat Bottomed Girls” which also does not mention the unmentionable:
Are you gonna take me home tonight?
Ah, down beside that red firelight
Are you gonna let it all hang out?
Fat bottomed girls
You make the rockin’ world go ’round
Hey I was just a skinny lad
Never knew no good from bad
But I knew life before I left my nursery, huh
Left alone with big fat Fanny
She was such a naughty nanny
Heap big woman, you made a bad boy out of me
Hey hey!
Woo!
Langdon then takes the curious tack of accusing Reiner and the film’s stars of attempting to normalize pedophilia through the Spinal Tap song “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You,” which, admittedly, has questionable lyrics. But if this is all he has, then his case is fairly weak. Pedophilia (or, really, sex with pubescent yet technically underaged girls) was already a thing in rock n’ roll by the time This is Spinal Tap came out. Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had had their moments, as did Led Zeppelin. Ted Nugent allegedly adopted his seventeen-year-old girlfriend just so he could have sex with her. David Bowie, Bill Wyman, Iggy Pop, the list goes on. And how else can we interpret the following lyrics from the Rolling Stones song “Stray Cat Blues”:
There’ll be a feast if you just come upstairs.
It’s no hangin’ matter
It’s no capital crime
I can see that you’re fifteen years old
No, I don’t want your ID
So is it Spinal Tap that’s attempting to normalize this kind of behavior? Or were certain rock n’ rollers already kind of doing this to some extent already? Yes, the reference in “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You” to a four-foot-tall girl who still has her baby teeth is creepy, and Langdon is correct to ding Spinal Tap for it. But there is another explanation for this besides Jewish exploitation: bad taste. The filmmakers got carried away in this song and thought they were funnier than they really were. Why ascribe something to evil when stupid will do just as well?
My argument boils down to this: the satire in Spinal Tap is fair game because the film accurately portrays its subject matter. (Check out this Key and Peele skit which fails because it doesn’t do this.) The film hit home for many in the rock industry, as painful as that must have been for some. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler was embarrassed by Spinal Tap and admitted that the scene in which a band member threw a tantrum over the catered food at a concert was quite real. U2’s The Edge claimed he didn’t laugh during the film, he cried — because it was so real. In light of all this truth, the fact that most of the film’s creators are Jewish should make no difference.
Before ending this essay I would like to offer two caveats. One, I am fully aware that Rob Reiner is one of our more hateful and committed enemies. If the Trump administration did anything, it caused this flabby walrus of a has-been to show his true off-white colors. The filter flies off of Reiner’s fat face whenever he discusses Trump or his supporters — a revolting spectacle to behold. Here’s a quick taste:
The President of the United States is a racist. He’s made it abundantly clear his re-election is based on white nationalism. If you support him, there can be no distinction between you being a racist and a racist enabler. They are the same.
I wrote all about it in my 2019 article “Meathead Is Right.”
So yes, I am aware that someone like Rob Reiner would have no qualms regarding the kind of Jewish subversion Langdon discusses. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Spinal Tap amounts to that very thing. We would need proof in the film itself, not in the fact that its director turned into an asshole thirty years after the fact.
Secondly, as much as I disagree with Tobias Langdon regarding This Is Spinal Tap, I’m really glad he wrote his essay. Whites need to sharpen their minds when interpreting the art and media we consume. We need to be on the lookout for the anti-white agenda he discusses and be prepared to counter it. And since Jews are the most effective perpetrators of anti-white subversion, we need to be especially cognizant of the roles they play and the themes they tend to promote. Brenton Sanderson’s review of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate is a great example.
We just need to make sure that there’s smoke before yelling fire.
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26 comments
I confess that I read this article with relief. As someone fairly new to the JQ, I never know quite what to think.
Excellent response, SJQ.
I’m with Mr. Bunker.
Good essay. I was never big into Spinal Tap myself, but I grew up with people who found it hilarious, almost profound.
I think discussions about whether some piece of media, a film or TV show with Jewish involvement is anti-goy and therefore bad and therefore ought be rejected sometimes misses the emotional and creative dimension.
I’m reminded of the 80’s character Max Headroom, who it turns out was cooked up by a group of Jews (one even wearing a yarmulke) literally as their golem to be a mockery of white conservative US chat show hosts (and by extension a white audience of these shows). We know this because that’s what they have said themselves. It’s not speculation.
Now the great irony is some of those white chat show hosts were probably doing everything they could to comply with a post-WWII Jewish narrative or were just thoroughly brainwashed into Jew worship anyway, and personally I could never stand any of them. They do deserve mockery, albeit it should be from us. People like David Letterman always made my flesh creep.
But Headroom being blonde and light eyed was not an accident. One of the creators Annabel Jankel wanted his look to be similar to Rutger Hauer from Blade Runner. I think there are even interviews where Jankel and her coconspirators talk about Headroom’s blondness in actual Nazi terms.
Anyway Headroom was coming from an absolutely anti-goy place, but quite a lot of people liked him for his own qualities, there remained a potential in him that was never realized, but briefly touched on in the English version pilot for Max Headroom, a really wonderful piece of Cyberpunk which I saw recently and which was influenced by things like Network, Videodrome and Blade Runner and way better than the US version.
And in this we get a hint that Headroom could almost be an oracle-like figure and potentially a red-pilling figure and that this Jewish golem could even turn on his media masters.
I wonder if that potential was seen by his creators and after that Headroom was constricted to only being allowed to say annoying grating things, and give annoying interviews and became a figure of banality, excess and repetition.
At that time there was no internet and most people were not red pilled on the JQ so people couldn’t analyze where this was coming from. But despite all that and how he was constrained, I think there was a certain organic warmth towards him by a white audience.
And with Spinal Tap, the explicit anti-goyism would seem less to me.
At least if we are aware of what we are consuming and just say ok this stuff came from Jews, it’s coming from a certain place with x amount of hostile subversive intent, we reject and condemn that, but it doesn’t mean it has zero value.
It may have some cultural value to us as Whites. Or it may not. It may have potential in our terms or not. We may feel some warmth towards it that is deserved on its own merits as an independent work, irrespective of the intentions of the creators, or we may find the negatives, the anti-white lecturing and subversion just outweighs everything else.
But we sometimes forget that creation is not just the creator in a box somewhere with intentions (in this case Jews looking to mock whites). There is an audience as well and you can’t control how they will respond to things or what that particular film or TV show or whatever will mean to that person as in the case with Spinal Tap.
Reiner here is certainly parodying Norman Jewison the director of Jesus Christ Superstar. The Doral Sea navy cap is something Jewison (a Canadian goy) would have worn on set as a Royal Canadian Navy veteran. Jewison was heavily involved in Rockumentary production.
“Anyway Headroom was coming from an absolutely anti-goy place, but quite a lot of people liked him for his own qualities, there remained a potential in him that was never realized,”
Which brings us all the way back to Reiner and his counterpart ‘Archie Bunker’ in All In The Family. An anti-Goy caricature if there ever was one but ultimately the character most Americans loved rather than his lecturing, self-righteous and progressive Son-In-Law played by Reiner.
Anti-Goyism is a difficult thing to do because the qualities the Jews are trying to lampoon in Gentiles are often the ones we love the most. I think Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men is another example of a character that could have gone the Bunker route but he was clever enough in that to make Nicholson a bit too sinister and one dimensional. Personally I find myself agreeing with every word Jack says in the famous ‘You can’t handle the truth’ speech — especially when Jack overemphasizes ‘Weinberg’ just so Reiner can make it clear that not only is he the villain but he’s also probably some kind of awful anti-semite — but unlike Bunker Nicholson’s character hasn’t become a hero.
RIght. This is exactly right. Well said.
Respectfully, I think you’re giving the benefit of the doubt toward a people who will never reciprocate in kind. We are fighting a race war, not a good taste/bad taste war. Langdon is right. There is something subversive, anti-White and hostile in This is Spinal Tap. I felt there was something ‘off’ about it from the very first time I viewed it. I’ve never laughed at that film and never enjoyed watching it.
If I may add to your “truth is stranger than satire” collection, Ozzy Osbourne is reported to have said he thought the film was a biography of a band hitherto unknown to him; to defend his reaction, he added that the scene where the band gets lost backstage at an unfamiliar venue actually happened to him.
I would love to hear Osborne’s opinions on Jews. He married a mischling afterall. What’s he aware of an what does he turn a blind eye to? And BTW when Spinal Tap was made there was a reasonably big scene that was well aware of Judaism in Rock promotion.
Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, their bassist and lyricist, has (had?) a Jewish wife. I remember reading this story when it came out. It’s pretty funny. You know, so many antisemites walking around Death Valley spewing their hate. Gotta do something about that.
https://metalinjection.net/news/geezer-butler-reveals-exactly-why-he-punched-a-dude-in-a-bar-and-got-arrested
As for underage girls, the Stones’ song is a good example, but I was put in mind of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little School Girl,” from way back in 1937, which I recently heard on a “public” radio station, and wondered “hmm, why hasn’t this been cancelled? Do old blues singers get a diversity pass?” For indeed, it was a very common part of British blues acts, from the Yardbirds to Ten Years After (who included “reworked lyrics leaving little doubt as to what the singer had in mind for the title character” according to an online review), as well as the Grateful Dead and the Allman Bros. In fact, it’s such a common trope that I’m sure the lyrics are just filler, with the main concern, as so often in rock, being the beat. I had to make an effort to recall any song in Spinal Tap with such lyrics, and I hardly think anyone is supposed to be listening to them, unlike obvious parodies like “Big Bottoms.”
The idea that this was a deliberate attempt to suggest pederasty to the goyim reminds me of the MST3k episode for the movie Tormented, where a jazz pianist is being blackmailed for two timing his fiancé: “Oh yeah, like there’s never been a sex scandal in jazz!”
Rob Reiner didn’t become an asshole 30 years after Spinal Tap. He was always an asshole. The part he played in All In The Family was an early example.
He is a big booster of immigration for cheap landscaping and toilet cleaning in his tony Malibu which does not allow for new development and new residents. The classic liberal hypocrite.
I’ve never seen this movie but I mean toward the original article just because of the people we are dealing with and their poor track record.
Here’s some actual Brits appreciating Spinal Tap:
https://youtu.be/njghKh2pzVE
British people so rarely encounter Jews that the subtleties are lost on them. For example Reiner is a huge presence. He’s playing the typical Navy to Documentary maker with that Doral Sea cap. In the US whites will deal with Jews much more frequently and directly. To some extent the band are four goys encountering Rob Reiner, Fran Drescher, Billy Cristal and others. Also this video reminded me how cringe the second act of the film gets. The film is useful in that it reminds you to keep your mouth shut as much as possible around smart arses. Did anyone else notice that Drescher was the exec who tells the band not to put a picture on the album cover? It’s wierd hearing her do her normal voice as a young woman.
I’m with Spencer, to the extent I can recall these films. I saw Spinal Tap in a theater when it debuted in 1984 at the urging of a friend who’d already seen it and loved it. We were going to see something else, but he wanted me to enjoy it, so he saw it again. I knew Reiner was a Jew (and suspected Shearer); had no idea about the Nigel Tufnel character in real life (I still remember that name, though not too much else, after all these years). The one scene I still recall very clearly was the Stonehenge scene. I really was laughing uncontrollably. I also remember the “sit on me love pump”, “patron saint of quality footwear”, and “the looser the cushion, the deeper the pushin'” lines, but not much else. Strange to say, I saw Borat two decades later, and only recall a few scenes (like the one with Congressman Bob Barr, and of course the bag of s— toilet scene). I don’t think I laughed much at Borat. I cannot remember the “running of the Jew” scene at all, not even its concept. (I thought that linked Key and Peele scene, however, was actually pretty funny – but Spencer is right I think for most non-nationalists and non-wokesters.)
This K&P skit is much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSDTmJtE-Bc
In one scene Fran Drescher (who, one could argue, years later played a self-satirizing JAP in “The Nanny”) makes an appearance, as a shrill feminist. She confronts Nigel at a release party for the band’s album, “Smell the Glove,” whose cover art depicted a woman on her knees wearing a dog collar with her nose pressed against a man’s gloved hand. She states that the album cover is sexist. Nigel thinks she’s said it’s sexy–or thinks “sexist” means sexy–and agrees. He’s clueless about, and quite immune to, a PC item (which I found refreshing and funny) while she’s a harsh, holier-than-thou SJW type. This scene could be adduced to support the non-hostile satire thesis. In a stroke of irony, audiences of the film so enjoyed Spinal Tap’s songs that the group turned into a real band and toured. So, if the attempt was to mock white rock bands, that attempt failed. It should be noted that the band in the film flopped at a VFW (AL, or some such) event. The older white audience was repelled by them. The audience was not mocked in the film. I’m going on memory here …
Drescher didn’t come off like a shrill Feminist at all. In fact I’d say she just looked like a sensible Jewess from the record company telling the idiots to change the art which would have been censored. Also the band bombed at a USAF base. But that was more about how sad the creative efforts of the band were to have been booked there at all. Suppose for a moment the film had been made about a group of deluded menopausal women trying to do a Shakespeare Play or a fashionable art exhibit in Soho. The character of the director is a something you don’t notice at first but it’s there and it’s rather telling. BTW Drescher looked quite attractive in the film. Not a shrill harpie. I’d never noticed she was in it before rewatching and spotting the enormous number of cameos.
Surprised no one compared this to The Young Ones’ Bad News moucumentary. Their parody band played Castle Donnington for real:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/bad-news-original-comedy-metal-band
Bad News! Vampire Spunk. Rick Mayal RIP.
Next: Spencer J. Quinn bravely sallies forth to rehabilitate Mel Brooks.
Yeah, no.
As much as I loathe Rob Reiner, I can’t deny he made some excellent films from 1984-92.
And like his Tribesman Woody Allen the Meathead’s films were notoriously (to liberals) un-diverse, having exclusively white and Jewish casts.
How about Ari Avner’s Midsommar: was that a hatchet job against blonde pagans: or is the ethnic composition of the cast and crew just a coincidence?
The fact that we have to pick through poison laced art and entertainment is proof enough that we desperately, urgently need to start creating our own arts and entertainment. Which of course is happening with people such as the White Art Collective. But there needs to be more of it.
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