Jack Tragic-White Nigger Rising (1989)

 

Artist: Jack Tragic

Title: White Nigger Rising

Label: Old Nick Productions

Format: CD

Cat #: 68 IOU 1

Year of Release: 1989 

Country and Year of Edition Issue: US 1989

Listed Condition: VG+/VG+

Sell Date: 8/2/21

Sell Price: $14.99

Discogs Last Sold: 3/13/21

Low: $10.45

Median: $14.64

Average: $14.99

High: $19.00

Current low price: $11.99

Current Number on Sale at Discogs: 5

Have/Want: 10/6

Where Sold: Chicago, IL

Time it took to sell: 10 years

Where and When Bought: NYC St Marks Venus Records $1.00 sticker on it early 90's

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: A-

Sad To See It Go: No

"He who feels it, knows it"-Bunny Wailer

"You gotta hear the Jack Tragic.  It's fuckin' relentless" said someone I knew coming home from a 12 hour minimum wage record store shift.  At some point a couple years later, I found a dollar copy in the cheap bin, the stickers of price reduction mounting.  I had to hear it to see how relentless it was.

It's easy to throw this in the racist, undiscussable bin from the title alone, but this alone makes for a complicated discussion.  I could wimp out and not discuss it, but fuck it, I bought it for a buck and sold it for $15.  Why?   It ain't a white power record.  It's a white power-LESS record.   

Outlier punk one time got a pass from proper outliers, even New Hampshire's G. G. Allin, who certainly used the "N-word" in an explicitly racist manner.  Even the non-racist Chiswick Skrewdriver that charted in the UK won't make the cut based on Ian Stewart's later ties to the National Front and the militant hard right approach in the Rock-O-Rama years.  

How can one cartoonishly be more extreme to blatantly offend people?  Piss on your label executives leg while he fills in on guitar?  Jack Tragic comes off as a kinder, gentle G. G., from a kinder, gentler state (Connecticut).  This record is a laundry list of white people problems and race relations are, thankfully, not the topic of concern here.  This isn't to say the use of the epithet is artful the way Patti Smith wanted to be "outside of society" or the way John Lennon took it to the lower regions of the Billboard top 50 to make a feminist statement.  

This is a class statement from the wrong side of the tracks.  The album title is gutter usage from someone who also wants to kill himself ("Death Wish"), use the cops to end his cheating wife's relationship before he kills the both of them ("Drop A Dime") and also killing more established, accepted white outliers ("I Kill Hippies" which urban legend claims Spin Magazine cited to be one of the 100 Greatest Punk Singles of All Time with their single from 1983).  Urban legend also has it that garage reissue mainstay, Crypt Records,  was going to put this out before more mannered heads prevailed.  I bet they distributed it.

Jack Tragic doesn't stop merely at offending.  No, he pushes the buttons to be hated by all of "polite society" in a way that is so pan-expressive that one has to acknowledge the pathological honesty.  I sure as hell don't wanna hang out with him.   "Milk Carton Mistress" takes on child molestation from the position of the molester.  The album opener "Homo Parade" at it's face is anti-gay, except when you get to the crux of the lyric, the anger is caused by the gay person not listening to him, just walking away.  Jack seems a bit hurt as he rails  "You are gay! You've got AIDS! You're gonna march in a HOMOSEXUAL parade" Jack emphasizes, as if he wasn't clear the first time with the truncated slur.  Could Jack be a latent homosexual?  Were the Bad Brains any more progressive in worldview that same year of release when they did "Don't Blow Bubbles?"  

Jack doesn't CALL anyone a racial epithet.  He is aiming inward as part of a self-loathing suicidal mantra.    Some would say the concept alone is racist and exists due to the entrenched corrupt class structure that brought you redlining and rusty separate bubblers and they may very well be right.  In Jack Tragic's world, there is a special place for those white people at the very bottom even if they can sneak in by marriage or friendship into the nicer neighborhoods of Hartford. This social hierarchy was by design at Tragic's birth: to make an example for others to toe the line, whether prison, work, or the streets. 

The title track rails, one lunatic waving his fist against all.  "Say I'm a racist?  Asshole! I WAS on FOOD STAMPS!  I WAS on WELFARE!"   After lots of title repetition and guitar outro, the studio banter left behind has Jack uttering one thing.

"That sure was stupid."