Alibi, a bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, recently made the news for banning solo patrons after 9pm. But it’s worth noting what else the landlord frowns upon — or rather, who else. “No sportswear/trackies,” wrote the landlord, Carl Peters. “No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.”

Roadman? To the uninitiated, the term generally refers to a young, working-class black Londoner wearing a black puffer jacket, a dark tracksuit, black Nike Air Maxes. The look fuses the casual with the athletic. He might be carrying a manbag and wearing a face covering of some sort. He mostly listens to grime and drill music and he speaks a kind of Multicultural London English (MLE), often sneered at as “roadman English”. Yes, that guy.

In the 2000s, the roadman had a negligible presence in the mainstream. He was very much associated with grime culture (Run the Road, a seminal early grime compilation, was released in 2005). Since the 2010s, however, the figure has stepped into the mainstream, thanks to films and TV shows like Anuvahood and Top Boy, and the rise to prominence of drill music. Michael Dappah’s caricature of a roadman in his satirical 2017 song “Mans Not Hot” was a turning point. It turned the figure of the roadman into a meme, made him loveable even, pushing many signature phrases into everyday speech and opening the door to TikTok trends like the “roadman parliament” and “roadman translation“. Luxury fashion brands, always keen to make money from black-originated trends, have put out streetwear inspired by roadman chic. So what was once a niche, underground, street identity and sub-culture associated with inner-city black youth has morphed into a mainstreamed, commercialized aesthetic and memeified trope.

Take, for instance, Stormzy’s McDonald’s advert from earlier this year. The advert encouraged people to “order like Stormzy”: to march up to the counter and use his distinct roadman English lingo: “mandem”, “ting”, “fam” and so on. The joke, of course, was that white English people, especially those who don’t live in London, don’t talk like that, perhaps even aren’t supposed to. I wonder how it would go down if Harriet from Oxfordshire strolled into her local McDonald’s and tried speaking like this.

But the roadman — or as British-Nigerian comedian Nabil Abdulrashid’s referred to him in a skit, “the gentleman of the road” — is an authentic British figure, part of a subculture that grew within a much wider multicultural urban milieu. The term derives from Jamaican patois — to “run di road” is to be in control of a particular area — signifying its origins within black Caribbean culture. His ancestors are the “rudeboy” and the Yardie, who were for a time the bogeymen of black criminality in British society. The rudeboy, forged in the street-gang-infested shanty towns of Kingston, symbolized the rebellious culture of Jamaica’s post-independence youth, who crossed the Atlantic into Britain in the Sixties and Seventies through the post-Windrush immigration wave. Known for their sharp suits and pork-pie hats, and immortalized in the ska and rocksteady music of the era, the rudeboy archetype soon became at the center of sensationalized discourse around mugging. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Yardie, likewise a product of the Jamaican diaspora, became the evolution of the stereotype, encapsulating all the fears white British society harbored about black British youth. For the writer Jeffrey Boakye, the Yardies were seen as “ostentatious gunmen obsessed with cars and jewelry, speaking in broken English from a former colony and completely unconcerned with the safety of the majority white public.”

More specifically, and as its etymology implies, to be a roadman is to be someone who is “on road” — the British equivalent of being “hood”. This means that the roadman operates in the mean streets of the post-industrial urban metropolis. To “do road” may mean to sell drugs, to be involved in petty street crime, to play drill music loudly in public, and to keep an eye out for the “opps” — gangs of rival roadmen. The roadman’s calling is not a glamorous one. “Doing road” means struggling and hustling to survive in an unforgiving world by any means necessary, which will take its toll. The rapper Berna, who was raised in an East London council estate, put it this way: “And the gang do crimes cause crime pay / Can’t wait for the day we don’t have to / But if one don’t die it’s a nice day / So I always gotta watch how I move”. The roadman knows his life is a vulnerable one, that he always has to look over his shoulder: but he knows he cannot admit weakness.

In this sense, being a roadman is both an accusation and an achievement. Yet he is also a figure of parody, derision and pity. The roadman exists within a hierarchy within the criminal underworld — alas, for him, he is at the bottom of it. He is just entry level. A few echelons above him in his social ecology is the badman, who lives by his own code. Being called a badman is an accolade. The badman is tough, fearless and dangerous. His reputation for violence and dominance earns him respect on the road. He is discreet, but everyone knows not to mess with him. It’s like being an alpha: something you can call someone else, but never yourself.

Plenty of roadmen talk a good game and think they’re a badman; that is until they meet a real badman. In Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, there’s a scene where one of the main protagonists, played by Charlie Hunnam, confronts a bunch of machete-wielding roadmen who have a phone containing crucial information. They refuse to give Raymond back the phone, even as he offers money for it. With some bravado, they warn him to go away or they’ll cut him up — until he pulls out a compact sub-machine gun to demonstrate who really is the apex predator. The scene has spawned a small internet subgenre of “roadmen meet real gangsters” compilations.

Still, due to social media and general cultural commodification, the roadman “look” and the roadman lifestyle have somewhat become divorced from each other. Many young people, and not just in the main cities, adopt the roadman aesthetic, speak a multicultural English dialect, and listen to grime and drill without being a part of that life.

And if London was the social laboratory where the roadman was born, the phenomenon is no longer contained to the capital.  The roadmen of Birmingham will speak “Multicultural Birmingham English” (MBE); similar to its London equivalent but adapted to a Brummie context. The chav subculture of the 2000s (racially coded as white and out of London) has largely been subsumed by roadmanism. You even have white poshos from the Home Counties who cosplay as roadmen to appear more “authentic”. Indeed, the racial imagination has always been fascinated with blackness as a source of Dionysian vitality: from minstrel performers to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G. To connect with “blackness” is supposedly to connect with one’s elemental impulses — a momentary means of escape and rebellion from a repressed white, Protestant, bourgeois mode of existence.

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It’s tempting to reassess the roadman in this light. Given that “integration” is a consistent if vexed topic in our national discourse, it has been argued that roadman-ism might be one of the few (sub-) cultures within Britain that can easily integrate, or rather assimilate, newcomers. For one, it has a low barrier of entry. It’s genuinely inclusive and open to new influences. To be a roadman doesn’t mean assimilating into blackness. It is really a pan-ethnic subculture, in many ways the default youth culture of the super-diverse cities that immigrants and their children encounter. For second- and third-generation immigrants who are alienated from both the mainstream national culture and the native culture of their parents, being a roadman offers an identity, a surrogate tribe (a mandem), something to “belong” to. Perhaps, then, roadmanism is the closest thing there is to a British melting pot.

But I’m not sure this is a model of integration that should be championed. The roadman is also a champion of ignorance, parochialism and shallow machismo. Newly minted roadmen who plunge deeper into that life will aspire to be a badman, often laboring under the delusion that doing “badness” is how you express just how masculine you are — and that you become “someone” through inflicting damage on the “opps”. That inevitably will lead to bloodshed and devastate communities. Crime and urban violence is a young man’s game and it is young men who are its biggest loser: 83% of teen victims of homicide were killed by stabbing in 2024; young men (aged 18-24) were eight times more likely to be killed by stabbing compared to young women.

The function of roadmanism, as Mark Fisher once wrote of hip-hop, is to operate as an “anti-mythical myth”. The Weltanschauung of the roadman has no room for sentimental idealism. It reveals life for what it supposedly really is: a social Darwinist struggle where only the fittest survive. Why was Henry Hill so enthralled by the gangster life in Goodfellas? It wasn’t just the money and flashy goods. It was a sense of freedom and excitement — of no longer being a non-player character in a dead-beat job.

And so the roadman “vibes” have transcended their working class black British origins to become the cosmopolitanism of the lumpenproletariat. The best remedy for it is a dynamic civil society that inspires young people to reject this nihilism. To translate their talent and graft into society’s gain. To realize that they can be free in society rather than acting against it. To discover meaning and purpose. Until such a thing exists, the roadman life will be the life that purposeless young men fall into. White middle-class people may laugh at the memes — but out on the road, baleful consequences will follow.

Yet if the demands for accountability are only growing shriller, Kneecap’s story is nothing new. Once an artist moves from cult status into the mainstream, all while continuing to challenge accepted narratives, a reaction is sure to follow. Amid the apologies and the caveats, then, Kneecap now faces the same question as any radical artist on the precipice of stardom. Do you soften your edges for access, or hold your ground, and risk the establishment’s wrath?

In many ways, Kneecap’s difficulties feel specific to our cultural moment. The band has been accused of glorifying violence, of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. These are charges they’ve denied. Either way, it comes as no surprise to me that this pro-Palestine, anti-government trio are in a bind. As a professional working in various capacities as a writer and performer, I can tell you right now that using your platform to either criticize Israel, or express solidarity with innocent Palestinians, comes with risks.

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I’ve been reported to the police for taking part in fundraisers for medics in the Gaza Strip. I’ve been accosted by a chief executive, and delegates at a conference, for using a keynote speech to urge a politically neutral organization to join calls for a ceasefire. Scheduled appearances were mysteriously canceled, and organizers have had to bulk up security in case protesters turn up.

The tensions Kneecap speak to arise not just from the strength of feeling around the war between Israel and Hamas, but the strong sense many of us have that our political class collaborates with major media players to stifle debate. It creates a culture whereby any criticism to the prevailing narrative — that anything Israel does is morally justified — becomes futile and where raising your voice against the systematic brutalization of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip starts to feel dangerous.

In this context, then, Kneecap become a case study in how thought and speech are regimented — and, in the generalities anyway, it’s nothing new. Transgressive artists have long been made examples of and punished for their politics. Sinead O’Connor’s career was derailed after she tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, in protest of the Catholic Church’s abuse cover-ups. She was right, but she was ruined. The Dixie Chicks were boycotted, threatened and driven off country radio after criticizing the Iraq War. NWA had the FBI on their backs.

And so the list goes on. In every case, craven politicians join a growing media chorus of condemnation, rendering the acts in question too toxic to book. It’s the same story with Kneecap, with the very journalists who defend edgy comedians like Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais — and their right to say incredibly offensive things we all know are part of an act — now expecting us to believe Kneecap are some kind of quasi-paramilitary group.

Beyond the media outrage, meanwhile, Kneecap’s predicament ironically speaks to the band’s success and their clear desire to cross into the mainstream. That’s why we’ve seen statements issued and apologies offered — public relations maneuvers aimed at minimizing the commercial impact of negative coverage. Though the group certainly wish to retain their radical credentials, it’s also clear they’ve been pushed into a far more defensive position than they’re comfortable with, or indeed than their fans are used to.

For example, while the band has emphasized that it stands in solidarity with Palestinian civilians, and oppose Israel’s bombardment and occupation, they do not support militant Islamist organizations. Yet, such distinctions rarely matter once the wheels of the media outrage machine begin turning. The point is not to understand or debate Kneecap’s actual views, but to frame them as toxic enough that venues, festivals and collaborators all feel pressured to abandon them.

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And though I loathe the confected outrage of many a blowhard on this issue, the wicked dilemma Kneecap now faces is arguably one of their own making. They’ve sold themselves as countercultural and gained a loyal global following as a result. This boxes them into a specific set of responses — none of them free of risk. By being seen to back down, even slightly, in the face of a concerted political and media effort to paint them as terrorist sympathizers, they risk alienating their core support, thus weakening the very leverage they have in the music industry. Alternatively, doubling down will effectively mean being blacklisted from major festivals and media outlets for the foreseeable future, even if they do at least retain their integrity and links to the fanbase.

Despite the calm collectedness the band and their manager are keen to paint, then, there’ll now be panic behind the scenes. And no wonder: life-changing opportunities are now on the line. Of course, for the group’s hardcore fanbase, the answer is simple: fight the power. But it’s never quite as simple as “stand your ground” versus “sell out”.

As creatives, we hope to have our cakes and eat them too. We want the visibility, the critical acclaim, and the big performance fees. But we also want to be seen as unwavering in our principles, and unscrupulous in pursuit of artistic integrity. Once a radical act begins to gain traction beyond pub open-mics — when a wider audience starts paying attention — everything changes. The decisions get heavier. The risks get real. And that visibility, often romanticized from the outside, can be extremely stressful. A lot of radical artists don’t plan for this moment. It comes as a shock. They’re propelled into a space they never expected to inhabit, and they arrive carrying principles that don’t always map neatly onto the pressures and expectations that follow.

Suddenly, the stakes aren’t just ideological. As Kneecap is doubtless now discovering, livelihoods are involved: your own, your partner’s, your kids’. You’ve got a label to deal with. You’ve got tour managers, stage crew, new fans, and media people around you, many of whom have very different values and priorities. The freedom to just steamroll your way through, to say “to hell with it all”— that becomes much harder to exercise when other people depend on your success to pay their bills. And despite their rebellious aesthetics, bands like Kneecap are professionals with aspirations of their own, not least a desire to be financially secure.

And, especially for a group from West Belfast, when someone from your community finally breaks through, there’s often a silent burden to carry: represent us, but don’t get it wrong or you’ll have hell to pay. Kneecap didn’t ask to be role models or political lightning rods. They came up from a place where art, humor, trauma, and resistance blur together. West Belfast isn’t a backdrop: it’s the very soil they grew out of. Their use of the Irish language isn’t decorative, it’s an act of cultural reclamation, an assertion of identity in a postcolonial context that still cuts deep. Their solidarity with Palestine comes from that same instinct: to back those being brutalized by a far more powerful force.

Ultimately, then, Kneecap will have to decide what matters more: global recognition in a fickle, spineless industry, or holding true to their principles. If you want to be mainstream, you have to make sacrifices, and few acts can have it both ways. Even Eminem went pop eventually. Unrelenting scrutiny comes with any public platform. Kneecap exercises their freedom of speech to say what they believe, but there are always consequences to raising your head above the parapet. Other people will exercise theirs to condemn, marginalize and punish. That’s the way free speech works.

Artists won’t always get it right, and when they do fuck up, it’s appropriate that they should acknowledge their mistakes. Integrity comes not just from staying true to our beliefs, but also from admitting when we’ve crossed a line. We’ve all said and done stupid and offensive things. In the end, though, that’s not the issue. The issue is that, as a result of expressing views about Israel regarded as controversial — but which are in fact entirely mainstream — Kneecap now has every editor in the country instructing hacks to trawl through every lyric, every interview and every act of public flatulence, looking for proof these guys are something they aren’t.

Who knows what Kneecap will do next. I don’t envy their plight. But I do know this: the system rewards outrage only when it can be commodified. It tolerates rebellion as long as it’s aesthetic. The moment your politics cut too close to the bone, you’ll find out just how tolerant the liberal cultural sphere really is, and who your friends really are.

My daughter, who wasn’t born when it came out, can recite every line, including the time-capsule references to Dick Cheney’s heart condition and a disrespectful Moby video. As Eminem gobbled up the detritus of American culture like Pac-Man, many of his jokes were doomed to age badly, but you don’t need to clock the allusions to get a kick out of his mischievous vitality 20 years later.

Eminem was so central to pop culture in 2002 that he could legitimately launch an album with a song about the importance of his return. Nobody inspired more arguments. Rappers had inflamed politicians and the press before, but none had done so with albums that sold 25 million copies a piece.

The furore over Eminem’s first album was large enough to be the central theme of his second, and the fuss around that one fuelled the third. A bridge-builder of sorts, he managed to unite Christian conservatives with feminists and LGBTQ groups. The Sun accused him of promoting “torture, incest, murder, rape and armed robbery”. (Not just rapping about these subjects, by the way — promoting them.) The editor-in-chief of Billboard condemned him for making “money off the world’s misery”. Culture warrior Lynne Cheney told a Senate hearing: “It is truly astonishing to me that a man whose work is so filled with hate would be so honoured by his peers.” Sadly, the line often attributed to George W Bush (“the most dangerous threat to American children since polio”) was a fabrication, but it was sufficiently credible to appear as the epigraph in Anthony Bozza’s bestselling 2003 biography Whatever You Say I Am. At least Eminem’s notoriety predated social media. If Twitter had existed back then, it might have fried his brain beyond repair.

How can rap’s former enfant terrible be turning 50? It wasn’t guaranteed. In 2001, Joan Smith wrote in the Guardian: “Validating his rage, which is what his fans are doing, is hardly going to help someone whose biography suggests he is already some way down the path to self-destruction.” But here is — alive, well and, as of this year, America’s best-selling singles artist of all time.

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Nobody argues about Eminem anymore, which is good for the person but less so for his music. In 2000’s paranoid, semi-sarcastic “The Way I Am”, he declared “I am whatever you say I am,” but now that nobody’s making grand claims about him for good or ill, he seems unsure what he is. After his 2005 singles collection, Curtain Call, he dropped out of sight for four years to wrestle with writer’s block, his grief over his murdered friend Proof and his addiction to prescription drugs. Since returning to music with Relapse in 2009, he has never quite managed to find a convincing second act. The recent Curtain Call II lays bare an ongoing identity crisis as he bounces between throwback provocations, sentimental soft-rock hooks, goofy jokes, lyrical showboating and collaborations with Ed Sheeran and Pink. Some tracks sound great but none has the life-or-death necessity of his early years. “I’m not the person I was at 28,” he told Vulture in 2017. “The passion is still there but the rage mostly isn’t.”

Eminem’s most enjoyable late album is 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a shameless nostalgia trip on which his tongue-twisting virtuosity is not just the medium but the message. When I saw him headline Wembley Stadium around that time, I felt like I was watching an athlete as much an artist. “Rap God” entered the Guinness Book of Records for featuring the most words (1560) in a hit single and included Eminem’s explanation for his initial success: “Simply rage and youthful exuberance/ Everybody loves to root for a nuisance.”

In the same song, he boasts that he’s been having hits “ever since Bill Clinton was still in office”. I’ve read three new histories of the Nineties this year and none of them addresses Eminem in any depth. This is possibly because he debuted at the very end of the decade; but in many ways Marshall Mathers III was a creature of it. Raised in poverty and chaos on the east side of Detroit, he was a teenager during hip hop’s golden age, when microphone technique was paramount. He slogged his way through the independent hip hop scene before finding both his mentor, Dr Dre, and his voice. The whiteness that had been an obstacle (blame Vanilla Ice) became an asset. It enabled him to read as a rock star as well as a rapper, and licensed him to write explicitly about mental health issues. He was closer to Kurt Cobain than Tupac Shakur in that respect, his problems more internal than external. He didn’t deny it. “If I was black I would’ve sold half,” he rapped in “White America”.

The rap battles recreated in his 2002 quasi-autobiopic, 8 Mile, taught Eminem the importance of getting a reaction with every line, and nothing did the job like a bad-taste joke — the more offensive the better. Hence his shock-comic alter ego (or id) Slim Shady. “I’m only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room,” he explained on “The Real Slim Shady”. “The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y’all.” A frequent comparison when he came out with The Slim Shady LP in 1999 was South Park. “Hi kids, do you like violence?” he leered on his debut single, “My Name Is…”, fully anticipating his role as corrupter of the nation’s youth. Shortly afterwards, the question of lyrics and violence, having steadily escalated through moral panics about heavy metal and hip hop, went nuclear with the Columbine High School massacre, as Eminem’s labelmate Marilyn Manson was accused of inspiring the killers.

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Using a technique pioneered by Public Enemy a decade earlier, Eminem performed lyrical judo, turning the backlash to his own advantage. It’s hard to file a case of cultural appropriation against someone who raps, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/ To do black music so selfishly/ And use it to get myself wealthy.” Tough to accuse him of being a bad influence when he has a song called “Role Model”: “Follow me and do exactly what the song says: Smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people and drink.”

Most important, he had “Stan”, an extraordinary feat of in-character storytelling sweetened by a sample of a pre-fame Dido. Here was a song of such undeniable artistry that even the sceptics had to sit up and listen. Giles Foden, the Guardian’s deputy literary editor, compared “Stan” with the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning; Elton John performed it with Eminem at the Grammys. Years later, it gave us a new word for obsessive fandom. “It’s kind of like a message to the fans to let them know that everything I say is not meant to be taken literally,” Eminem explained at the time, with Columbine on his mind.

Two years later, Eminem’s sensitive performance in 8 Mile, with its motivational anthem “Lose Yourself”, made him almost respectable. Anthony Bozza sums up the rapidly changing media narrative: “(1999) Is he a novelty?; (2000) Does he matter; (2001) Should he be stopped?; (2002) How great is he?” He attracted fans as unlikely as Barbra Streisand and Daniel Day-Lewis, who used Eminem records to hype himself up on the set of Gangs of New York. Sean O’Hagan wrote in the Observer: “It is not overstating the case to say that Eminem is as reflective of his time as Bob Dylan was of his; and, in his own way, just as trenchant a social commentator.” Seamus Heaney praised his “subversive attitude” and “verbal energy”.

No artist can ride the zeitgeist for long, nor should any sane person want to, so there’s no shame in Eminem’s career dropping from a boil to a simmer. Time may not have improved him art but it has clarified it. First, his talent is beyond dispute. Even in the heart of the storm he was committed to hard work and craft. He has not inspired many (any?) great white rappers but his technique and emotional rawness are audible in the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator.

Second, it is obvious that controversy was not his motor after all. Unlike the many celebrities who fall from grace when their secrets are revealed, Eminem’s scandal was frontloaded and, despite some legal troubles, mostly stemmed from his lyrics rather than his behaviour. He’s not quite Snoop Dogg, who went from a first-degree murder charge to hosting a cooking show with Martha Stewart, but compared to Marilyn Manson, who faces multiple allegations of sexual abuse, or the endlessly self-detonating Kanye West, he looks remarkably stable and content. When it comes down to it, he simply loves to rap.

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Finally, we know what he believes. You might reasonably see in his early work a harbinger of the white male rage that now fuels the alt-right, including the trollish humour that leaves it strategically unclear whether provocation is an end in itself or a vehicle for genuine malice. In the original song, Stan writes fan letters with what sounds like a pencil and records his final message on a cassette. Now he might easily be shitposting on 8chan and fuming about his latest Twitter suspension. Similarly, “White America”’s vision of a ”fucking army marching in back of me” sounds more sinister than it once did: “So many lives I touched, so much anger aimed/ In no particular direction, just sprays and sprays.” We have a clearer idea now of where that anger can spray.

Nevertheless, I don’t think you can blame Eminem for that, any more than you can pin Brexit on Britpop. Crucially, his rage never included racial animus, and he has never swung to the Right. Having recorded a song attacking George W Bush in 2004, he released an anti-Trump freestyle in 2017 and donated “Lose Yourself” to a campaign ad for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Anyone who’s followed my music knows I’m against bullies — that’s why I hate that fucking bully Trump,” he told Vulture. Eminem outgrew his anger, along with his homophobia and misogyny, rather than nurturing it, and he didn’t get lost in his own black comedy. The listener might not always have known whether he was joking or not but he did, and the joke was usually on him.

In “Without Me”, Eminem presents himself as an obnoxious necessity; a fly in the ointment of early 2000s celebrity culture. “Now this looks like a job for me/ So everybody, just follow me/ ‘Cause we need a little controversy/ ‘Cause it feels so empty without me.” Twenty years on, he’s smart enough to realise that we have more than enough controversy and that that fire doesn’t need stoking. Maybe he became a role model after all.

It all started with “Heated”, a song in which Beyoncé raps about “spazzing on that ass”. Disability activists zeroed in on the verb, which is having a bit of a moment in American pop. Last month, Lizzo came under fire for using it in one of her songs; she altered the offending lyric. When the Australian woman who spearheaded the campaign against Lizzo was asked if she planned to make similar demands of Beyoncé, she answered the question with an op-ed in the Guardian: “When Beyoncé dropped the same ableist slur as Lizzo on her new album, my heart sank.”

This controversy was somewhat mystifying to audiences in America — where both Beyoncé and Lizzo were born and raised. The word spaz has different implications in American English — particularly African American Vernacular English, or AAVE — from the one it has in the UK or, it seems, Australia. In the US, it’s not uncommon to hear people use “spazzing out” to mean going crazy or malfunctioning; the idea that it could be a slur was met with bewilderment by American audiences. And in Lizzo’s song, “Imma spaz” is a warning: she’s about to go nuts. (The whole song, which is about getting in fights, eventually escalates to more specific details about what “spazzing”, as a verb, might entail: “I’ma go Lorena Bobbitt on him, so he never fuck again.”)

The battle over the word has also thoroughly upended the usual deference paid by progressive culture warriors to black women, particularly when it comes to the use of AAVE. The optics of a white Australian coming after Lizzo and Beyoncé, insisting that the black American cultural context for the word “spaz” is superseded by her own, are deeply weird. Lizzo hints at this injustice in her statement about changing her lyrics: “As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me.” The subtext is clear: you may have successfully painted yourself as a victim this time, white lady, but we all know that this isn’t usually how oppression works.

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These linguistic misunderstandings are a hazard of global culture in which the same word may have different meanings depending on where you are, or what language you’re speaking. For example, the periodic public freakouts by parents who have just noticed that one of their child’s Crayola crayons has the word “negro” on it. They are invariably followed by the Crayola corporation explaining patiently, for the millionth time, that all the crayons include colour translations for Spanish-speaking children and “negro” is the Spanish word for black.

You might think that Beyoncé — a woman who wrote a song called “Sorry” in which she refuses to apologise for doing what she wants; a woman who has never shied away from making art that is steeped in black American culture; a descendant of slaves who was one of the most powerful and wealthy entertainers in the world by the time she turned 40 — would have at least as much gumption as the children’s crayon company when it comes to defending her work.

Instead, she capitulated instantly.

The lyrics in “Heated” will be altered, per a statement by Beyoncé’s team. Per a recent Spotify listen, they already have been: the new iteration not-quite-seamlessly replaces “spazzing” with “blasting”. Beyoncé herself hasn’t spoken about the decision, but it’s a fair bet that Lizzo, who is already encroaching on Bey’s status as an icon not just of pop culture but of politically conscious art, had pretty much greased the skids on this one. Beyoncé’s choices were to follow her lead or look like an insensitive clod by comparison.

And as a woman who is both famously protective of her privacy as well as notoriously control-freaky about her public image — up to and including trying to get unflattering photos of herself removed from the internet — the move is hardly surprising. Naturally Bey would prefer to avoid finding herself at the centre of a cancel-culture maelstrom which is personally intrusive, professionally disruptive, and threatens to overshadow the release of the album she spent two years working on.

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That artists can now instantly edit songs because a few hundred people became outraged by the lyrics on social media is, of course, a recent thing, made possible only by the advent of streaming — and maybe one day there will be a black market for bootleg recordings of the “dirty” version of “Heated”, just as my childhood VHS copy of The Little Mermaid became a collector’s item after Disney edited out the now-notorious scene in which the priest officiating Prince Eric’s wedding appears to be sporting an erection. (The official Disney line, which absolutely nobody believes, is that it’s a poorly-drawn knee.) But even as the malleability of digital media means that we can retroactively edit out anything, anytime, for any reason, it’s hard to overstate how bad it is for art if the consensus becomes that we should.

The mistaken identity aspect of this particular controversy — the fact that activists insisted on ignoring the unique cultural context of “spaz” in order to take offence — certainly adds an extra layer of absurdity to the whole enterprise. (Imagine a group of American social justice warriors bewailing the horror of every scene in British cinema where someone asks for a cigarette using a certain f-word.) Additionally ridiculous is the part where Beyoncé is black, and writing in a racially-inflected dialect, which under any other circumstances would command absolute deference from the white progressives who are now demanding she alter her art to suit them. But the fact that it’s easy to make fun of this controversy also obscures what makes it toxic: a callow betrayal of the ideals and the legacy that have made American culture into a global force.

The US has always been a place where artists insist on their absolute freedom to create work that is provocative and daring and, yes, even offensive, and even objectively so. American music is Jim Morrison singing “girl we couldn’t get much higher” on the Ed Sullivan Show after being explicitly told not to, and laughing it off when an enraged Sullivan confronted him after the set. It’s Frank Zappa calling Tipper Gore and Susan Baker “the wives of Big Brother” during the Senate’s “Rock Porn” hearings, and railing against proposed legislation that “reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of toilet-training programme to house-break all composers and performers because of the lyrics of a few”. It’s Smack My Bitch Up, and Fuck the Police, and Papa Don’t Preach, and W.A.P. And as a culture, we have always fiercely defended the right of artists to engage in irreverence, heresy, and obscenity, understanding that these freedoms are necessary to the creation of fearless work.

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Meanwhile, the pressure to change a work of art to be more sensitive falls disproportionately on women, who are, for some reason, expected to be receptive to such demands. A list of musicians whose “offensive” lyrics were changed not only skews heavily female but shows the comparatively high bar a man’s song has to clear to be subject to the same sort of backlash; consider the nature of, say, Taylor Swift’s offence (“So go and tell all your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine, I’ll tell mine / You’re gay, by the way”) versus Michael Jackson’s (“Kill me, kike me, don’t you black or white me”.) ​​The double standard surrounding the lyrical depiction of women, and women’s bodies, is so wild that Meghan Trainor was savaged for not being body positive enough in her 2014 song “All About That Bass” — the same year that Drake, on Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint album, received no criticism at all for announcing his predilection for Rubenesque women who “wanna suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you”.

But women’s contributions to the culture are less valuable, their work assumed to be eternally open to revision in a way that makes it less serious than men’s. What gives us the idea that if it’s a woman, we may not just demand but expect apologies for how she uses language in her lyrics? What are we to conclude when the most powerful female musician in the world is expected to compromise her artistic integrity lest she hurt somebody’s feelings?

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Meanwhile, the conversation surrounding this new album has swiftly come to resemble that cautionary fable about giving a mouse a cookie. A second alteration to Renaissance has also been announced — this one the removal of a sample of the 2003 song “Milkshake,” after singer Kelis complained on Instagram that the song had been stolen. (The two men who actually wrote the song had been credited — as had Kelis, for performing it.) At the same time, Monica Lewinsky suggested on Twitter that while Beyoncé is making changes, perhaps she should also remove a reference to Lewinsky’s affair with then-President Bill Clinton from her 2013 song “Partition”. And why not? “Partition” explicitly makes light of one of the most humiliating moments in Lewinsky’s life; surely she has just as much (if not more!) claim to righteous offence as the activists who cannot recognise that the word “spaz” might mean different things in different contexts (although this argument may be somewhat undermined by the fact that Lewinsky still proudly includes “rap song muse” in her Twitter bio).

Having signalled that she’s willing to edit her work to avoid giving offence, Beyoncé can expect every single song she releases from this moment forward to be scrutinised. And perhaps more importantly, so can everyone else. Beyoncé and Lizzo have kicked this door open; there’s no telling how many other artists will be expected to walk through it.

And Beyoncé’s Renaissance, far from being a transformative and unfettered explosion of pure expression — a work that allowed the performer, during the pandemic, “to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving” — has been marked out as a place where creative freedom lost ground, and where the censors won. This moment has been stolen by self-appointed culture cops who neither understand nor appreciate what they’re tearing down, and who are drunk not on the power of the music, but on the petty power trip of successfully blackmailing a famous, gifted musician into changing her art because they said so.