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Interpretations:Your Racist Friend

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Racism is bad! Great insight Flans! When people say the Giants are twee this is the kind of song they're thinking of. Good horns on the Deelite remix though. (Mr Tuck)

i say take this song literally.

Wow thanks incredible deduction -Ed

This is a stretch, but it suddenly occurs to me that this song may in part be taking a shot at Elvis Costello. The lyrics:

"your friend apologizes he could see it my way. / he let the contents of the bottle do the thinking / can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding"

along with the talk of sounding like a hypocrite, remind me of the famous incident where Elvis Costello called Ray Charles a blind, ignorant nigger, then later apologized, saying he was only trying to get a rise out of the person he was arguing with, and blamed it on how drunk he was. Costello has always been a vocal opponent of racism, and produced the Specials self-titled debut on which there is also a song called "Racist Friend". -NCS

This song depicts a situation that nearly everyone can relate to. Getting stuck talking to your friend's friend (who happens to be a racist pig). -AJK

More of an observation than an interpretation. I always wondered why the line wasn't: "He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking, / can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only drinking"

I think it's because you expect it to be like that. There's a line in the song "Castle on a Cloud" from Les Miserables (for lack of a better example):
"There is a room that's full of toys / There are a hundred boys and girls"

I think the "Can't shake the devil's hand" refers to a situation along the lines of:

"Man I hate all those dirty, rotten *blank*s, they're totaly ruining this whole gawddam COUNTRY!!"

"Hey! My good friend is a *Blank* and I take offense to that!"

"Calm down, I has only kidding"

"only kidding" is sort of an all purpouse, weaksauce "out" for rude comments like that.

The term "weaksauce" is, itself, "weaksauce". Please don't use it anymore, ever. Thanks.
Nice tolerance there, buddy.

Agreed. I can't believe _I'm_ saying this, but I think this song is literally what it sounds like: a guy goes with someone else to a party, meets a friend of that someone, and the friend says something nastily racist. The narrator takes umbrage, the friend tries to apologize, it's incredibly awkward. The narrator leaves the party, disappointed that his new-found friend or girlfriend has a friend who's clearly a racist and not shy about it. I think "This is where the party ends" might have the implication that not just the party, but our relationship, since you tolerate that sort of ugly behavior without protest, but otherwise, kind of straightforward.

I don't think this is some statement about social justice, I think it's about that weird situation all white liberals have been in, where someone in a social setting offers you a rather ugly opinion on another race or culture, and you object, and it becomes so awkward you have to leave. ~Christina Miller, October 2005

I don't know if this song is meant to be taken completely at face value, that seems too easy for TMBG. I tend to interpret it as a play on white reactionary politically-correct types. Perhaps the narrator was at a party and heard someone make a racist remark and, though everypne was offended by it, the narrator felt the need to get on a soapbox and give a moral lecture to the guy, or the friend of the guy as the song suggests, in front of everyone just to show how noble and un-racist he is. Or, perhaps the "racist friend" was making an ironic and clearly anti-racist joke, or even just having a conversation about racism where a racial slur happened to be mentioned, and the narrator overheard and felt the need to berate the person and his friend without considering the context. And the last stanza could be the friend "apologizing" just so the narrator will shut up. I think this could easily be an unreliable narrator song where the narrator is the one being inconsiderate and narrow-minded by feeling the need to assert how smart he is for not tolerating racism.

I don't know if all the lyrics necessarily suggest that interpretation, but they do strike me as being overly pretentious. The line "I know politics bore you" sounds especially like "I'm a much smarter and better person than you and I'm letting know that in front of a group of people." I dunno, what do you guys think. :\ - extrafacelol

I know that there can be some, but the more I look into this song the less I see an interpretation other than what this song sounds like: he has a party at his house, invites friends, and one of his friends (lets call him Steve, I guess) brings another friend. He cannot stand Steve's friend, for he's bringing up some racial slurs or maybe just plain being racist, and if he tries bringing up a topic (politics?) it bores Steve and they get all racist again, you know, something like that.

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