And now for the landmine of Posting: the question of racism and popular music.
I lived in England till I was eleven and I don’t believe I met a single person of color in all that time.
I then moved to Lebanon where an Arab could be any skin pigmentation. For instance, I look white, the former Presidents of Egypt, Nasser and Sadat, both had black skin pigmentation. My friends cut through color lines, the first girl I ever fell in love with was a Saudi princess and she had black skin pigmentation.
Except for an African-American friend in France, whose comments about race I found baffling at the time, I had no idea of the depths of racial confusion that roil thru the USA till I came to live here.
But in the lates 70s, early 80s, I would go to the Bronx for early hip hop parties and, after being mugged a number of times, I learnt fast. The effect for me was immediate: I became weary of young black men.
That doesn’t mean I became weary of blacks. Nothing means more to me than music and American popular music as we know it -the biggies, jazz, r&b, rock, is the meeting place of black and white. For me, racism is a form of self hatred. Still, the chasm between the races seems so difficult to close. African-Americans make the same mistake vegetarians make. Vegetarians don’t recognize that carnivories treat animals with the same contempt for life that they treat each other. African-Americans don’t recognize that white people treat black people with the same contempt that white people treat each other.
Blacks, even today, think whites are out to fuck em and they may be right but they are out to fuck em no more than they are out to fuck each other. So when Chris Rock, when Hip Hop stars, try to lay claim to not just the word “nigga” but the sound and the attitude they espouse: when they say this us “ours” and not “yours” they are setting up a different sort of Jim Crow.
Miles Davis dubbing Louise Armstrong an “Uncle Tom” was a type of Jim Crowism… the complaint appears to have been that when playing for a white audience Armstrong reverted to a black stereo type. Davis has gone on the record as hating white people. And with the passing of time bands from Public Enemy to Ded Prez have shown a deep seated hatred of whites. By the time you reach the ebonics, colloquilisms of gangsta rap, there is an intransient isolationism to the music. No Whites or Wiggers appears to be the sign on the wall.
However, teenage white America has long been attracted to the outsiderdom of black music and their purveyors and hip hop crossed over to a mass audience. This left a blacks only vernacular being usurped by a white audience. I just looked up the etymology of ‘nigger” -it comes from the Spanish via the latin word niger meaning black. It is a horrible sounding word but the horror is due to the way in which it was applied. So the isolationist rap performers took back “nigger”, contracted it to “nigga”, used it to mean friend and kept it as an ebonics term BETWEEN EACH OTHER. However, when rap crossed over “nigga” went with it and left African-Americans in the uncomfortable (and bizarrely antagonistic) position of having to make some of their lyrics verbatim for their white audience.
I had thought Lenny Bruce killed the word dead back in the fifties with his “two kikes, one guina, three niggers” skit. And if not that then, surely when the gay community took back “fag”, “nigger” went with it. But, if Chris Rock’s “whites can never use the word unless they’ve been beaten up and shot by a black guy” skit, is anything to go by, no you can’t use it.
More’s the pity because it is yet another way in which the race divide is widened and widened.
I firmly believed that with a person of color (actually, a product of miscegenation but who’s counting) taking the highest position in the land any real discussion of racism -at least from the white side, had been answered. It didn’t exist.
But it still exists somehow. It is still a case, in Biggie’s words, “of either slinging crack rock or got a wicked hook shot” . Again to Chris Rock: there is still no real wealth, wealth that goes from generation to generation, rich? Yes. Wealth? No. It is still a hard financial climb for Black people. It is still a case of insitutionlized racism.
And pop music can’t seem to break the divide. For me, how can racism exist from whites to blacks when Louise Armstrong was black? Can’t you just point to Armstrong and tell the KKK to fuck off? It makes more sense from blacks towards whites (the argument that racism can only occur with power is a touch too sophisticated for my tastes, which doesn’t make it wrong) but still the racial hatred of so many older black people towards whites, towards me, is bizarre.
The hope is the new generation of African-Americans can forge a better relationship with their Anglo (or at least white) fellow country men. A rapper like Kid Cudi, a musician like Will I Am is color blind musically: Cudi appears to use folks like ratatat and MGMT unconsciously, as sounds though not significantly white but more organically backtracking: they are white indie but it is a little irrelevant. Will I Am’s relationship with David Guetta is dissimilar to Dre’s with Eminem’s or Timbaland’s with Timberlake’s, Guetta is changing the layers of sound whereas Eminem and Timbaland are not really adding their perception of the white performers color. Look at it this way: color is irreleant with Will I Am and Cudi to the point where it is invisible. This isn’t true of Dre and Timbaland.
Which leaves a society catching up with a culture.
Dance, hip hop, indie, alt -all these sounds keep on merging and falling away. I posted yesterday about Beyonce wanting to record with Of Montreal and I have been writing about Solange Knowle’s “Stillness Is The Move” for a month now. Even more, Euro Dance and R&B are in the middle of an important marriage.
Every time black and white merges you get beautiful children. Look at President Obama. Look at rock and roll. But in a society that can’t seem to turn to the future, I keep saying “nigga” and you keep hearing “nigger”. Now what?
Comments are closed.