Sir Paul McCartney was unintentionally racist in his youth.
McCartney is now a politically correct vegan, but he admits he wasn’t always such a decent chap growing up in working class Liverpool, England in the 1940s and 1950s, and confesses it was common for members of his community to use hateful language when discussing people of other ethnicities.
“When I was a kid, you were racist without knowing it,” he admitted during an interview with Event magazine.”It was just the normal thing to use certain words you wouldn’t use now.”
However, it donned on Paul later that saying specific words, which are now considered derogatory, to describe people of colour did incredible damage.
“Along the way we suddenly realised how it would make the people you were talking about feel…,” he explained, “and then the penny dropped. And I think that happened for a lot of people. Certainly a lot of people in my generation used language you wouldn’t use now.”
Paul’s revelation comes on the heels of the controversy surrounding All Day, his 2015 collaboration with Kanye West, Allan Kingdom and Theophilus London.
The tune was slammed by critics largely because Kanye repeated the word ‘n**ga’ over 40 times in the lyrics, but following the song’s release, Paul stood by All Day, claiming he remains happy with how the track turned out.
“People like Oprah (Winfrey), who’s a little conservative about that stuff, said, ‘You shouldn’t do it, even black people shouldn’t use that word’,” he recalled during a chat with BBC Radio 4 in May (16). “I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s Kanye! And he’s talking about an urban generation that uses that word in a completely different way’.”
“It’s the context,” he added. “So I was actually pleased with it.”
——————————————————————————————————————————————
Never miss a story! Get your free Noise11.com daily music news email alert. Subscribe to the Noise11 Music Newsletter here
Listen to the Noise11 Music News channel now at iHeartRadio
Follow Noise11.com on Facebook and Twitter
NOISE11 UPDATES are now in Apple News
