“They can’t find a hole for this pigeon,” soul legend Swamp Dogg says of himself. “But I don’t feel rained on. I don’t feel bad. I still consider myself the most successful failure in the United States, and that’s really not bad at all.” As a musician, Swamp Dogg has become “one of the great cult figures of 20th century American music”, according to AllMusic critic Steven Thomas Erlewine, due in large part to his boundary-pushing, edgy, and gut-bustiingly funny social commentary. The White Man Made Me Do It, his latest LP, continues on in this vein, displaying all of the inimitable Swamp Dogg traits. Below you can stream the title track from the album, which finds Swamp Dogg laying out his insightful and snarky commentary on racism atop a groovy musical background.
Swamp Dogg says to PopMatters, “Although we didn’t opt to come here and be slaves, on all levels it made it mandatory for the black man to seek a better life. Becoming a doctor, lawyer, entrepreneur, inventor, and a million other respectable positions made the white man realize that the world could be better without hanging, shooting and raping; blacks were not just for picking, cutting, chopping…. you get the idea. Nevertheless, ‘My hat’s off to the white man’, because if he had not been so fuckin’ mean and greedy, we might still be slaves.”
The White Man Made Me Do It is out on November 18th via Alive Naturalsound.