Samuel L. Jackson has responded to Joe Rogan’s use of the N-word in several episodes of his Spotify podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
Earlier this month, India.Arie shared a compilation of clips that featured Rogan using the N-word repeatedly and describing a Black neighbourhood as being similar to the Planet Of The Apes movie.
Rogan has since apologised, telling his Instagram followers. “There’s been a lot of shit from the old episodes of the podcast that I wish I hadn’t said, or had said differently. This is my take on the worst of it,” he wrote in the caption for the six-minute video.
He started by saying this was “the most regretful and shameful thing I’ve had to talk about publicly,” before going on to say the compilation shared by Arie is made of clips “taken out of context of twelve years of conversations on my podcast.”
“I know to most people, there’s no context in which a white person is ever allowed to say that word and I agree with that now. I haven’t said it in years.”
In a new interview, Jackson said it was “wrong” for Rogan to use the slur.
“He is saying nobody understood the context when he said it,” the Pulp Fiction actor told The Times, after which he rolled his eyes, according to the interviewer.
“But he shouldn’t have said it. It’s not the context, dude – it’s that he was comfortable doing it. Say you’re sorry because you want to keep your money, but you were having fun and you say you did it because it was entertaining.”
He was then asked whether Rogan’s use of the N-word lacked context, to which he replied: “It needs to be an element of what the story is about. A story is context – but just to elicit a laugh? That’s wrong.”
The use of the N-word isn’t the only controversy Rogan has been caught up in as of late. Around the same time as the aforementioned , Spotify came under fire for hosting Rogan’s podcast, its biggest podcast in the US and many other countries, with an estimated per-episode listenership of around 11million people.
Last month, Neil Young requested the platform pull his catalogue, citing “false information about vaccines” being spread on the platform and specifically targeting Rogan’s podcast. “They can have Rogan or Young,” the singer-songwriter wrote in a post on his website at the time. “Not both.”
Following Young’s exit, artists including Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Young’s former bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, and more also withdrew their music from Spotify, and the company’s stock had fallen by 13 per cent when it reported their fourth-quarter earnings earlier this month.
In response to the controversy, CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify would be adding content advisories to podcast episodes discussing vaccines, directing listeners to the platform’s dedicated COVID-19 information hub.
Meanwhile, a new report indicates that Spotify may have paid at least $200million for the exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcast, double the figure that was previously reported.
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