Joe Rogan

I couldn’t give a shit about Joe Rogan. To me, he is an unfunny, roided-out asshole who does a podcast for dimwitted bullies. Just a baseline of my POV, if you are into MMA (which he is), I think there is something fundamentally wrong with you. I’m not going to say you can’t enjoy MMA, that is your right. I’m saying you are sick in the head, and I probably don’t want to have anything to do with you. So Joe, and his work product, hold no interest for me. He is unfunny, sexist, and stupid. His opinions are often backwards and ignorant. He also has a tendency to present misinformation as fact.

Back in the day, I used to watch him host Fear Factor, where, under the guise of a gameshow host, he would peer pressure wannabe actors and fitness models into ingesting deer penises. That was considered entertainment in the early aughts. Once that spectacle became tired, I was done with him. Yet, apparently, the greater world was not. Apparently, some 10 million people listen to his stupid show.

I don’t watch or listen to his podcast. I’ve seen clips. I’ve seen and read some news stories. I’ve taken the word of people that I trust who know more about it than me. Bottom line, I don’t have the time or interest in listening to his bullshit to have the expertise to say he is garbage…but I’m going to say he is garbage anyway. I’ll put it this way, the stench of garbage around him is strong enough that I can make that association.

Over the years, expert or not, I’ve seen that he platforms, promotes, cosigns, and amplifies garbage ideology in what he might frame as “an intellectual pursuit of interesting and novel ideas”. I know enough about him to know that he does not see himself as the “idiot comedian” he will claim himself to be in his mea culpas when his work product creates public “backlash” or “blowback”. In default mode, he is an arrogant, successful “businessman” who thinks that he is right and clever and masculine and dominant…like so many people I get to “enjoy” in this…What do I call it?…Life experience?…Culture?

In short, he is a boorish boor.

Anyway, he’s a 100 million dollar boorish boor to Spotify, who wanted an exclusive, edgy Howard-Stern-type with a big following of demographically attractive men for their audio streaming app.

By the way, I love me some Howard Stern. Go figure…I guess I’ve lost all my credibility now…Woops!

Anyway, Neil Young made his stand. I “stan” for Neil Young. The best thing to come from this whole mess is that I’ve been enjoying some prime Neil Young cuts that I haven’t spun in a while, but I digress.

Then we got the Rogan n-word compilation from India.Arie.

For the most part this super-cut shows how Joe, over the course of his podcast career, clumsily tried to work in the rarified air of George Carlin and Lenny Bruce…proselytizing their belief that there are no bad words, just bad intentions, and that we must know the difference and worry about that first. And I, like Joe, firmly believe in what George Carlin and Lenny Bruce were putting down. Yet, I listened to and respected the wishes of the vast majority of people of all colors all over the world who don’t want to hear that word glibly bandied about by a dumb white guy trying to make a semantics argument…and this goes double for dumb white guys who used to make their living feeding deer penises to desperate, aspiring fitness models.

Here’s the deal, you substitute the term “the n-word” when invoking that word, and then say “that word” when it is understood what you are talking about…until you’ve made your point…if you really think you need to make a point…which you probably don’t. It’s not that hard.

Apparently, Joe Rogan just recently figured this out.

Anyway.

We get to the latest clip. Joe Rogan, in 2011 or thereabouts, telling a “funny” story about going to a movie theater in a predominantly black neighborhood to see Planet of the Apes and making the “joke” that it was like he “walked into the Planet of the Apes”…because there were black people in the theater.

Yipes. That is some racist shit.

Now to be fair, immediately after he said it, he called it out as a racist observation, and the rest of the story was him claiming he had a great experience with the black people he’d just offhandedly dehumanized (I’m not sure if that venue then became his new must-go movie theater…We’ll have to ask).

Yet it still makes me sick, because I just think about the segregation, red-lining and white-flight, and all the related incarceration, murder, abuse, and collective trauma theretofore, that led to the basis for that “joke”.

But it hit me on another level, too. It immediately reminded me of the 1991 Rodney King beating.

There was a 1988 movie called “Gorillas in the Mist”, about primatologist Dian Fossey.

One of the officers on his way to that Rodney King beating, Laurence Powell, on the police radio said that his previous call, a domestic dispute concerning a black family, “was right out of Gorillas in the Mist.”

You see? It’s the same hateful, racist joke…with the premise being that black people are some other type of primate, and not fully “human”. Funny how those two minds, Rogan and Powell’s, found such a similar “joke”. Come to think of it, Rogan probably has a lot of listeners like Powell. And all of these people would tell you emphatically that they are not racists. Sure.

That “joke” is the legacy of the ideology of American colonization, American slavery, and American genocide…Ya know, in “funny” “joke” form. It’s all the stuff the Republicans are trying to ban our children from learning about with their CRT witch-hunt, because America is the best and Jesus.

And I don’t necessarily think that Rogan meant it that way, but goddamn it he should have known better by 2011. It just shows what a dumb asshole he truly is. And I’m sure he knew that “Gorillas in the Mist” story from the trial, but I guess it didn’t hit him the same way it hit me. Maybe I’m not watching enough MMA?

So that’s that. I just wanted to put that out there. I want to be very clear; I don’t want to see Joe Rogan deplatformed. I don’t like him. I think he says and stands for a lot of things I find repugnant and dangerous, but I don’t think the solution is his “cancelation”.

So, what do I want? I want platforms like Spotify to be responsible for the exclusive, flagship content they produce and promote. If they want to pay an “edgy” shithead 100 million dollars to be a big part of their branding, they should have enough brains to pay another person or team a lot less money to monitor and remove misinformation from the show, and review its back episodes too, to make sure what they are now married to doesn’t self-destruct their business’s reputation. You know, like what responsible TV networks have done for years (…now just how successful TV networks actually are at this is a conversation for another day…but they do have people).

It’s one thing to provide a conduit through which some third-party’s content is received. It is another to pay for the production of the content and be its sole provider/promoter. Here’s the difference, the latter makes you more culpable for that content. One would hope techie billionaires would know the difference…but I guess they’re all too busy trying to “disrupt” to give a shit. They play that Section 230 game to shirk their responsibility. I hope that game’s days are numbered…but techie billionaires seem to have a way of making our representatives sit on their hands on this issue…You see, sitting on your hands can pay nicely.

Spotify should clean their house and remove misinformation from their exclusive content. They won’t. They’ll just make sure to pull out all the n-words. I’m sure that will help to end the pandemic.

Anyway, fuck Spotify and fuck Joe Rogan.

Long live Neil Young, CSN, Joni Mitchell and that guy from the E Street Band.

I’ve never had a Spotify subscription, and I never will.

Feels good knowing that.