Zak Tell has explained why Clawfinger no longer perform the single that sold their first album, an anti racist song whose title is the slur it was written against.
Speaking to the IMPACT Metal Channel, he said the band themselves are fine with it. We know what we stand for, he said. We know we are not a bunch of racist idiots. The problem, as he put it, is everyone who does not know, and who now meets the song as a ten second clip with nothing but the chorus in it.
He went further than practicality. Times have changed and people see things differently, he said, and the subject deserves to be addressed properly rather than in a three and a half minute song. Maybe we should not be the people addressing it any more, if we ever should have been.
The song came out in 1993 on Deaf Dumb Blind, which sold more than six hundred thousand copies. Tell says the reaction in Europe at the time was mostly discussion rather than outrage, and that the real trouble came from the other direction: at a Stockholm concert around 1995 a group of skinheads turned up believing the song was theirs, worked out halfway through that it was the opposite, and started throwing bottles at the stage.