Paul McCartney Makes Bold Racial Remark After Backlash

The Beatles icon Paul McCartney discussed facing backlash from his colleagues for his decision to appear on a song with Kanye West that excessively used the N-word in a GQ interview. McCartney said he ultimately felt that rappers like West had ‘re-appropriated’ the word. McCartney also worked with Rihanna. “I mean, Rihanna is something else. She’s cool. So it was a great thrill, actually. I loved it. I feel a kind of privilege that they think I’m worthy of their world. I know I’m worthy of my world, but I didn’t know that they think I could fit.”

The song “All Day,” brought new challenges. “The big surprise was the use of the N-word,” McCartney says. (Multiple use, too. Forty-four times, to be precise.) Some people around McCartney saw this as a problem—”They said, ‘You can’t be connected to this'”—and McCartney suggests that he looked into the issue with some care. “There’s basically two schools of thought: One, that the N-word has been re-appropriated by black rappers and they’ve sort of taken the sting out of it. And the other point of view is Oprah’s point of view, which is that any use of the word denigrates black people, and I can see that, too.”

In the end, he decided to go with it. “I thought, you know, ‘It’s urban poetry. It’s Kanye.’ I like the record. I thought he did a really good job on it.”

Source: Brett Buchanan/alternativenation.net