On her June single “GRRRLS,” pop icon Lizzo sang, “I’m a spaz.” Two months later, Beyonce included the line “spazzin’ on that a**, spaz on that a**” on the track “Heated” off her massive new album, Renaissance. Suddenly and out of nowhere, a new cultural consensus formed. “This Is Why Disability Advocates Say It’s Not OK to Use ‘Spazz’ in Lyrics,” read Billboard’s headline. CBS wrote that Bey had used an “offensive term for disabled people.” Rolling Stone called it an “ableist slur.” Several other outlets refused to so much as quote the “ableist slur,” so evil is mentioning it — as of five minutes ago. Readers had to guess from (confusing) context what the new S-word was.
Both women caved and expurgated their artistic expression. Lizzo changed her lyric to “hold me back,” and Beyonce changed the verb in question to “blastin’” and “blast.” Neither change, you will notice, maintains the original intended meaning.
So, what’s the deal? In both cases, the problem with “spaz” is supposedly that it is an instance of “ableism.” As the tweet from an Australian disability advocate that seems to have kicked this all off read: “Hey @lizzo my disability Cerebral Palsy is literally classified as Spastic Diplegia (where spasticity refers to unending painful tightness in my legs) your new song makes me pretty angry + sad. ‘Spaz’ doesn’t mean freaked out or crazy. It’s an ableist slur. It’s 2022. Do better.”
Is “spaz” really an ableist slur? Is there such a thing as an ableist slur? That depends on whether you believe ableism is a coherent concept. Obviously, it is personally unkind to mock disabled people or to set out to make them feel crummy. Don’t be nasty and vicious is just normal advice, and it requires no theorizing. But “ableism” contains within it the idea that it is not worse, just different, to be disabled rather than able. If you watched arms blown off on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan and thought something bad was happening to those soldiers, that’s ableist. Take it from someone born legally blind, healed by 15 years of constant eye-patching: It’s better to be able than disabled.
“Spaz,” from spastic or spasm, is a word that people use to mock or evoke something that looks like an involuntary muscle movement. It’s a fact of life that some people have muscle movement disorders, and the way they move bears description. Culling the word is not going to heal anything. There’s an underlying international language clash behind the attempt to censor it from songs. As Slate wrote in its coverage of l’affaire spaz: “Spaz, as a noun or a verb, can be received very differently by different communities of English speakers. In Great Britain and Australia, spaz is evidently seen as more derogatory than it is by many Americans. The same is true of the related term spastic.”
Aren’t we supposed to respect context, though? We adjust across oceans and cultures, usually. Since when do the Brits’ or Aussies’ sensitivities outvote the power and pride of African American vernacular musical expression? I hate that other F-word very much, but when I am in London and am asked for a cigarette, I know what the score is.
The fight over “ableist” “slurs” does not operate at the level of common sense, however. At a time when weenies, prudes, and illiterates rule culture criticism, concepts such as “ableism” swallow up everything else. This is how we got to a world in which avoiding indecency calls for, in the name of propriety, the line “blastin’ on that a**.”
