Clawfinger have stopped playing the single that made their name, and Zak Tell has set out the reasoning at length.
The song came out in 1993, on Deaf Dumb Blind, an album that sold more than 600,000 copies. Its title is a racial slur, used in the lyrics to attack racism rather than to carry it, and in 1993 in Europe that reading went largely unchallenged. “I don't really remember much of a particular reaction at all,” Tell says of the time. “It was a very different time.”
What changed is not the band's view of the song. “We're totally fine with the song. We know what we stand for,” he says. The change is how a song travels now. “The problem is everyone else out there who doesn't know, and all of a sudden sees a 10-second TikTok clip. And all you get then is the chorus. And it gets taken totally out of context.”
From there his argument is about who should be speaking. The subject is bigger than a three and a half minute song, he says, it deserves to be addressed properly, and maybe five white Scandinavians are no longer the people to address it. The band have not disowned the song and say they still think it is a good one. They have simply taken it off the stage, out of respect for the fact that people hear it differently now.