Robin Thicke is unapologetic about how rapey ‘Blurred Lines’ is, meanwhile the dude who parodied it issues a public apology for one word.
And that is just one reason why I love Weird Al.
Excuse me but how the hell is spastic even remotely insulting?
So I just recently learned that in the UK calling someone spastic means the same thing as calling someone retarded, only much worse.
If it makes people in the UK feel any better, people in the US literally do not know this (like literally no one I have ever met and/or know). Here being spastic is usually meant to mean something along the lines of acting like a hyper-active child (like running around in circles yelling just because they feel like it please be quiet for just 2 minutes type of child). NOBODY here uses it as a slur.
Since Weird Al is a US musician and the US music industry is pretty non-international, yeah actually I think its entirely possible that none of the people who worked on this song actually knew that spastic was considered an awful slur in some parts of the world.
And I’m like 99.9999% sure that Weird Al is genuinely very sorry that he was accidentally offensive.
LEMME TELL YOU GUYS A STORY
back in about… 2010 or so? Hasbro had a line of Transformers called “Power Core Combiners”. They used this to experiment with some new names, like “Mudslinger” and the ever badass “Smolder”. Towards the end of the line they had a new figure by the name of, you guessed it…
“Spastic”.
Of course all of the Americans and Canadians were like “ok whatever that’s a dumb name”, but all of the Brits and Aussies were totally up in arms. Needless to say we were confused as all hell, leading to massive forum arguments and the like. Hasbro clearly had no idea this was a bad word in some other countries (and, well, how would they), so they agreed to change the name of the character (by placing a sticker over his name on all of the packages, I’m dead serious).