 So, across the pond, spaz is short for spastic. The spaz that I grew up with as a teenager in the 90s. Come on, spaz. No, we're doing your thing. I'm being like a total laundry spaz. He's a spaz. Where it meant that you were like maybe a little bit random. It could even be in terms of endearment. Is not the same as the spaz that's used in African American vernacular English, where it basically means that you're about to fight somebody. So we don't use that term in the U.S. the way that they do in the U.K., which is where this shortening to spaz has become the equivalent of a slur. Probably the closest analog in American English is like retard. It carries that type of weight. In early summer 2022, Lizzo was called out by an Australian activist for using the word spaz in her new song, Girls. Lizzo made her to emphasize that she herself as a fat black woman in America had experienced oppression and language-based oppression. She did sort of remind this activist from Australia, which side her progressive red was buttered on. I've had many hurtful words used against me, so I understand the power words can have, Lizzo said in a statement posted to Instagram. I'm proud to say there's a new version of Girls with a lyric change. Just seven weeks later, Beyonce got berated for using a similar phrase, spazzing on that ass, and her song Heated. Fans never heard from Beyonce herself because Lizzo sort of primed a pump for her. Beyonce didn't, I think, really have much of a choice to be responsive in the way that she was. Two major artists altered the lyrics to their songs. They erased the word spaz in post-production after the album had already been released, after activists from Australia and other locations across the pond where spaz is a much worse word than it is in the U.S. objected and said that it was ableist. This is a rapidly advancing new frontier for the suppression of free speech and artistic expression. Rosenfield writes in a new article for Reason magazine, stop spazzing out about spaz. It's something beyond burning books, something beyond destruction. It's stories and songs and films cut apart and written over, leaving no trace and no remnant of whatever used to be. It wasn't unheard of for an artist to alter their lyrics after the fact. You could expect them to respond to you that they were sort of a moral authority, this idea that you needed to be able to look up to artists not just because you enjoyed the art that they made, but because they were supposed to represent some kind of a role model to you as the listener. They were supposed to reflect your values, you know, morally, politically, et cetera. I think that people got not just used to but maybe a little bit drunk on the realization that if they made enough noise, they could kind of emotionally blackmail artists who were concerned with reputation management into doing their bidding. On the one hand, people who like music or like books, who like to consume culture. And on the other hand, you have people who want to control culture, who want to go back to the artist and say, I don't like what you did here, it offends me, change it. There is virtually no overlap between these two groups. They have completely separate sets of motivations, completely separate things that they're trying to achieve when they engage with the given work. Artists are left at the nexus of this where they want to be creating work for the former people, people who genuinely like art, but they are subject to the whims and the punishments, the consequences meted out by the latter group. And I don't think that this is a great environment in which to be trying to create much of anything, let alone create it bravely. Taylor Swift's new video for her song, Antihero, is facing controversy over a song where she steps on a scale that reads fat. Critics are saying she's promoting so-called fatphobia, but her supporters are pointing out how she's always been open about her struggle with her own eating disorders and the video reflects what she sees, not what you see her see. Taylor Swift chose to alter the scene in her music video where she is standing on a scale that reads fat, to her just simply staring at her disruptive and disapproving doppelganger. This actually strikes me as maybe the most tragic example of this happening on a contemporary landscape because here is a case of not just a word being used in a context by one person where another person says, well, in our culture, that's offensive. This is a woman talking about her own personal history, revealing something that is painful about herself and exploring that through her art and the idea that she is gonna be scolded and made to change her work because other people didn't like the way that she was negotiating her own pain in her artwork. That just strikes me as wildly inappropriate. By being able to pull back your original work and change it in real time so that the digital copy that gets released on streaming services, which is the way that most people now consume music is not just different, but it seems like it's always been that way. It's basically creating a second reality. There's a sense now that maybe nothing is permanent. Art isn't going to be permanent anymore. That it will update itself in accordance with contemporary sensibilities. So if something, and it becomes offensive, well, we don't have to reckon with that as an artifact of an earlier time anymore. It is insidious that this is happening in such a hidden way. There's no bonfire of books. If somebody like Beyonce does not take a stand on her right to create She Pleases, there's very, very little hope for anybody else, including artists who are just emerging, who are just developing and trying to take risks, but can't or are too afraid to.