The British National Party (BNP), a tiny, ultra right-wing political group in the UK has sparked anger across the music business by using the song ‘I Predict A Riot’ by the Kaiser Chiefs as the soundtrack for one of their propaganda videos on the website Youtube.com.
A BNP spokesman denied that the video had ever contained a Kaiser Chiefs song claiming, “This isn’t the type of music our party would ever want to be associated with, like rap music we think it’s wrong to play this stuff. What’s wrong with Beethoven?” This reminds me of the argument I had with a neo-Nazi in the Red Lion one evening where he tried to convince me that rock and pop music are bad because they’re both ‘black music’. What an idiot.
The Kaiser Chiefs have yet to confirm whether they will be taking legal action against the party. The video has since been withdrawn from the Youtube.com site after complaints were made about its content. Despite this, there remain a large number of unpleasant, racist films hosted at the site as well as hundreds of members actively involved in posting racist, fascist and homophobic comments to videos and fellow users alike.
It strikes me as very odd that the people who run Youtube.com find nudity disgusting but organised, political racism passable. How can it be that the site’s editors can delete a film with a handful of expletives in it, yet films featuring such disgracefully racist material stay intact?