Thou shalt not mock the woke
Apple Music deleted Holly Valance’s satirical song, thereby proving why it was so necessary.
Holly Valance is an unlikely satirist. Yet the pop singer’s latest track, ‘Kiss Kiss (XX) My Arse’, takes aim directly at the pretence that human beings can change sex, and that a man need only declare himself a woman for it to be true. Upon its release the song immediately reached the top of the iTunes bestsellers chart, only to be swiftly deleted by Apple Music. Valance had committed the cardinal sin of ridiculing the establishment.
The song is based on Valance’s 2002 number one hit ‘Kiss Kiss’, now reworked with new lyrics for Pauline Hanson’s animated satire A Super Progressive Movie. This is the song’s opening verse:
‘They say that I’m a he but I’m a she,
Cos I gotta V and not a D,
And I don’t care what people say,
I’ll never be a him or them or they.’
Unsubtle? Perhaps. But let’s not forget that its target is the least subtle ideology that has ever been birthed. This is satirical mimesis; the essence of parody. For Apple Music to delete the track (only to reinstate it after multiple news outlets drew attention to the deletion) surely proves Hannah Arendt’s point that the ‘greatest enemy of authority’ is ‘contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter’.
It is an indictment of the state of the comedy industry that pop singers are left to do the work of comedians. Television panel shows are now bland affairs thanks to the sheer lack of courage on display. The woke movement represents one of the most authoritarian, intolerant and illiberal developments in the recent western world. It demands conformity, peddles fantasy at the expense of truth, and punishes freethinkers. And yet most of today’s comedians are eager to prop it up rather than see it tumble.
They are called ‘regime comedians’ for good reason. They have willingly turned themselves into cheerleaders for the powerful, bolstering those who have bullishly set the agenda, or – as the satirist Chris Morris once put it – ‘doing some kind of exotic display for the court’. It is a great shame that so many of Morris’s former collaborators now fall squarely into this category.
To put this cowardice into perspective, consider the example of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Just one year before he was gunned down by Islamic terrorists, the cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier (known as ‘Charb’), was profiled in Le Monde. Was he not worried, the interviewer asked, about possible reprisals for drawing cartoons of Mohammed? For his answer, he paraphrased the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: ‘I would rather die standing than live on my knees’.
If a man like Charb refused to back down from criticising an oppressive ideology – in spite of the death threats he received on a daily basis – why is it that so many of our comedians are too afraid to tackle the woke? These activists may talk tough online, but in real life they are about as intimidating as a sea sponge. While the impulse to preserve a mainstream career is understandable, it does suggest a lack of genuine vocation if that means ignoring the target that is most in need of skewering.
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