The song LL Cool J regrets making: “I completely blew that one”
If you listen to the music of LL Cool J in any capacity – or have even baseline heard of the rapper – it will come as no surprise that musician has a song he regrets making.
“I mean, I damn near don’t even want to bring it up,” LL said in a 2024 interview with Vulture magazine. “But if I have to it would be ‘Accidental Racist’. Yo, I completely blew that one.”
The 2013 song is from country singer Brad Paisley’s Wheelhouse album, produced by Paisley and co-written by himself and LL, who also features on the track. It almost immediately attracted controversy for the manner in which the lyrics discuss racism.
Including lines like “If you don’t judge my do-rag / I won’t judge your red flag” and “RIP Robert E Lee but I’ve gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me, know what I mean”, the MC, whose decades-spanning career was one of the first to achieve commercial success within the rap genre, is aware he significantly “missed the mark” of conveying race relations in the USA.
“And it always bothered me because my intention was absolutely not how it came off,” he continues. “I feel like it was like having a hot date with a vegan and setting everything up wonderful and the first thing the chef brings out is a big, juicy steak. But you think it’s vegan still, you know what I mean?”
While Paisley’s verses discuss understanding and unpacking racism from a white person’s perspective, with lines that cite “I’m proud of where I’m from but not everything we’ve done” and being “caught between southern pride and southern blame” – broad statements, but not necessarily unsympathetic – critics at the time were particularly focused, and subsequently confused by, LL’s contribution.
With a line written and performed by LL that goes “if you don’t judge my gold chains / I’ll forget the iron chains” that implies the two-time Grammy winning rapper believes street aesthetics and the slave trade are in any means comparable, it’s no surprise that he still regrets it a decade later. “It’s one thing to fail,” he says, “it’s another to fail when you’re looking to do the right thing and you’re looking to say the right thing.”
Despite the controversy the song garnered across the country, LL acknowledges that Accidental Racist found considerable chart success, peaking at 23 in the US Hot Country Songs and 77 at US Billboard Hot 100. “And then it goes Gold, which is really fucking bizarre,” he says. “I don’t even have a copy of the plaque. I never even asked for one. Like, I made songs that just weren’t great songs. OK. I can live with that. But to have a song that garners that much attention and actually negatively impacts the way people perceive my intention was the worst.”
The track also found its way outside of music and onto the American comedy circuit. The Colbert Report featured a parody of the song titled ‘Oopsy Daisy Homophobe‘, and Saturday Night Live also parodied the song during their Weekend Update segment, with Kenan Thompson playing LL and Jason Sudeikis as Paisley.
“It was just the idea that, somehow, I was trying to appease racists. Yo, bro, that is not what I meant. The iron chains and the durag… It was just a bad metaphor. It was just all wrong,” Cool J concluded.