On Racism in America

I live in the South. In my town there is a park named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, that has a really big statue of Forrest in the center of it, and his body underneath the statue. Earlier this year in Tennessee, my home state, Chip Saltsman, the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party sent out a Christmas CD to members the of RNC which included a song called “David Ehrenstein’s ‘Barack the Magic Negro.’” The song was written by Paul Shanklin, a native of Memphis, my hometown. Some call the song daring, while others call it racist. I fall into the latter category. I won’t repost the song on this page, but you can find it pretty easily through a google search. I invite you to make up your own mind. I’ve heard white people use the “N” word rather liberally. If you try to correct them, they’ll say, “Why can they call each other that, but I can’t?” One thing I can tell you for certain, it sounds a lot different when they say it, than it does when Dr. Dre says it in one of his songs.
I’ve been around a lot of racists in my day. Society has not been purged of it. Some might even argue that it has gotten worse. Post 9/11, little white boys and white girls joined hands with little black boys and black girls, but not in the way that Martin Luther King Jr. would have ever dreamed. Content of character was forsaken for color of skin. Arab Americans became the target of violence. Of course, it still hasn’t been clear sailing for African-Americans, even with the election of Barack Obama as the first black President. Sadly, both races are to blame.
As I write this, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was recently arrested. Lucia Whalen, Gates’ neighbor, observed him and his driver attempting to forcefully open his front door, which was stuck. Believing the two men to be intruders, she called the Cambridge police. From this point, I don’t really want to continue the story, partially because the American news media has reported extensively on it and partially because I do not want to risk bias. Gates apparently accused Sgt. James Crowley of being a racist. Sgt. Crowley claims that Gates was being irate and refused to cooperate with him. Crowley’s police report on the incident is available on The Smoking Gun, and while it is only Crowley’s version of the events, I encourage everyone to look at it. A few days later, President Obama accused the Cambridge police of acting “stupidly” during their arrest of Gates.
I imagine it is pretty frustrating to have to deal with the police simply for trying to get into your own home, especially after you have just returned from an overseas trip. If you have ever seen one of Henry Louis Gates’ documentaries on PBS, then you know he usually exudes a rather calm demeanor. It is probably also frustrating to have deal with someone screaming at you and accusing you of being a racist, when you were simply trying to do your job. I applaud President Obama for inviting both men to the White House for a beer so they could talk it out, and I applaud both men for accepting the President’s offer.
As we have sat distracted by the incident involving Gates and Crowley, Judge Sonia Sotomayor sits in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. After making a statement about “a wise Latino woman,” and a ruling on a case involving firefighters in Connecticut (that I actually disagree with her on), she is now facing nuanced accusations of racism by men like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions. She’s not the first Supreme Court justice nominee to face these accusations. In 2005, Justice Samuel Alito’s wife left his confirmation hearing crying, no longer able to face the accusations of racism hurled in her husband’s direction.
We are definitely living in a world were Affirmative Action is still needed, but what do we with the current predicament that we are in when every race now seems to have their very own race card? As the Republicans ponder how bad Sonia Sotomayor will be for white Americans, and Henry Louis Gates accuses Sgt. James Crowley of racial bias, our society rapidly moves into the direction of chaos. I feel like we should be over this by now.
Maybe we went wrong in the 90s. There were two cases that seemed very clear cut: Rodney King and O.J. Simpson. Sure King’s behavior prior to the events of that video that all of us who lived through the 90s have etched into our brain was unnecessary, but so was the officers continued beating of him once he was already on the ground. I have no doubt that their job was stressful. Maybe race had nothing to do with their attacks on Rodney King, but for years we had heard of the African-American’s quite tumultuous relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department and that video seemed to be evidence that that these stories were not simple folklore created by rappers. Three of the five officers were acquitted leading to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Then there is the case of O.J. Simpson. Throughout his trial, he never seemed to show sadness or remorse for the passing of his ex-wife. A bloody glove was found on his property that matched another bloody glove found at his ex-wife’s condo. Blood was also found in his car which he claimed was from shaving. By 1994, O.J. Simpson was hardly an A-list celebrity. He claimed that he was framed by the police. His attorneys even implied that one of the detectives who investigated the case, Mark Fuhrman, was a racist, and might have framed Simpson for those reasons. They did produce tapes with Fuhrman using the N-word, but reason still stands that O.J. did it, and a civil case as well as a book Simpson attempted to publish seem to imply the same thing.
I understand that Simpson and King’s cases were two entirely different ballparks, but what they did share in common was that an entire community who was oppressed had their eyes on both of them. The other thing the cases shared in common was that they showed a flawed judicial system. O.J. had the money to be found innocent. Rodney King was a nobody, so in the eyes of the powers-that-be it really didn’t matter. In both cases, though with different results it seemed that color of skin was chosen once again in favor of content of character. Though if we are to be honest, the idea of race in the Simpson trial was simply a distraction. It was really all about class. In 2008, forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in my hometown, we saw our first black president take office. David Ehrenstein’s L.A. Times piece that inspired Paul Shanklin’s song implied that Obama was not Black enough. He was a “Magic Negro” like Will Smith who made white people not feel guilty. He wasn’t scary like Al Sharpton or Snoop Dogg. Some claimed he wasn’t a true African-American. His father wasn’t descended from slaves, but was a Kenyan immigrant. Others worried he was too Black, because of Jeremiah Wright.
Obama won because he did leave race out of it. He tried to keep the discourse focused on his platform, and Sonia Sotomayor also seems to be handling herself quite well with the Senate Judiciary Committee. What I think the majority of American voters liked about Barack Obama was where he was not willing to take the conversation. Maybe that was what Jessie Jackson and Rush Limbaugh could not understand. As the liberals in the media tried to attack Sarah Palin because her daughter Bristol had become an unwed mother, Obama cried foul. A candidate’s family was off limits. This may have nothing to do with race, but it does have everything to do with a change in the discourse, and though Obama may have slipped when stated that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly,” he has been quick to try to put out any fires that could relate to the Henry Louis Gates case. This, I believe, is the change we voted for.

The Smoking Gun'spolice report concerning Henry Louis Gates' arrest:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html
David Ehrenstein's column "Obama the Magic Negro"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein19mar19,0,5335087.story

On Walkter Cronkite

Last Friday an old journalist died. Truthfully, I’m not sure why this bothers me. When Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News for the last time on March 6, 1981, I hadn’t yet celebrated my second birthday. Hell, when he covered The Battle of the Bulge for the United Press my own grandfather was only sixteen. It just seems odd to me that I am even thinking about it. Sure, for the world at large, he was an icon, but my world was Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings. Uncle Walter didn’t visit me as often as he had my parents and grandparents.
Sure I suppose he was still there, contributing to CBS occasionally, as well as NPR, CNN, and The Huffington Post, though truthfully, I’m not sure that he has been on CNN (with the exception of maybe being a guest on Larry King Live) since I’ve watched it, and his appearances in print and radio media just aren’t quite the same. Honestly, my feelings on The Huffington Post are mixed, and while NPR is probably a better place to get your news than CBS, can you imagine how different Cronkite’s report of Kennedy’s assassination would have been over the radio rather than on television?
Sure we would have still heard the the emotion in his voice, but to actually watch the look on his face as he read, “From Dallas, Texas. The flash apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 pm, central standard time.” The visuals of seeing the removal of his glasses after this, as he looked up at someone working in the newsroom. You can tell at that moment, he was at a loss for words. “2:00 eastern standard time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.” Then putting his glasses back on, he looked down at the papers on his desk. For a moment, he can’t even look at his audience. He looks as if he is going to cry but fights to maintain composure.
“Vice President Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has preceded,” he said, while nervously playing with his glasses. This was a time when there were only two other television networks for people to get this information from. Imagaine the pressure on him that evening, in having to report the death of a very popular President. His glasses almost seemed like a defense mechanism for him. It was as if they were a way for him to temporarily hide his face from the audience watching across the nation. Uncle Walter had to seem strong for America. He, even more than Vice President Johnson, had the ability and the power to make Americans feel as if everything was going to be okay at that moment. It was Cronkite’s job to look calm for an entire nation, and while he was visibly shaken by the news of Kennedy’s death, he maintained his composure. Finally, he removed his glasses, and said, “But presumably he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the thirty-sixth President of the United States.” Of course, the most striking thing about watching this video, is how unsensationalistic it seems. Cronkite’s coverage of Kennedy’s death should be used a text book model for how to cover a story like this.
Since Cronkite’s death, we have heard about how President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America,” after Cronkite declared the Vietnam War unwinnable on the February 27, 1968 broadcast of the CBS Evening News. We no longer live in a world where journalists have the power to keep our politicians in check. Since Fox News premiered in 1996, we have heard their talking heads scream and cry foul at every move made by Presidents Clinton and Obama, and we have heard the hysterical rants of Keith Olbermann concerning President Bush on MSNBC. Cronkite’s power was that he remained mostly non-partisan. His job was to to report the news, fairly and accurately, and his skill at doing this is why his special commentary on Vietnam held so much power.
I guess this sort of begs the question for me of how would the current generation have reacted to Walter Cronkite if he were still sitting behind the news desk today? Would we have abandoned him as an obsolete model and changed the channel to watch Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann with their cameramen positioned outside of the offices of Michael Jackson’s doctor? Would Cronkite have even spent as much time covering the Jackson story as the modern media has? How much time would he have given to Anna Nicole Smith or O.J. Simpson? The modern news world is not the same game that Cronkite played.
On a recent appearance at The Daily Show, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams said that when he was a child, he wanted to be Walter Cronkite when he grew up. Type some variance of the phrase “wanted to be Walter Cronkite” into Google, and numerous blogs and magazine articles will pop up, with their authors essentially saying the same thing. I suppose that if you think about all of the novelists who claim that they want to be the next Updike or Faulkner, or all of the bands who claim to be highly influenced by The Beatles, it sort of makes sense why no modern journalist has been able to do what Cronkite did. Journalism is, after all, an art, like music and literature. How can anyone be expected to top what has been set as the standard of the best? Still, with all of the conservative and liberal bias that runs rampant through the modern media, it would be nice to see our modern journalists at least try.
When Cronkite was once asked if he had any regrets, he said, “Well, I regret that in our attempts to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation.” That, unfortunately, is the way it is.

On Alternative

I’m not sure when exactly I first realized that the term Alternative in reference to music was bullshit.  Maybe it was when I was sixteen and working my first job at a local supermarket.  One of my co-workers was trying to convince me to go see his band, and when I asked what they sounded like his response was, “We’re sort of an alternative to alternative.  But God I hate that word.”  By that time, the word Alternative did little for me.  I had already bought and eventually sold back too many albums from shitty bands proudly waving the Alternative rock banner to be fooled by this term again.  I was sixteen years old and turned on to a new contrived form of music: pop punk.  

Still, there were CDs hidden in my collection that I owned that I never would have told my punk rock friends I had.  Records like Radiohead’s Pablo Honey and The Bends, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish and Siamese Dream, and the entire catalog from Nirvana.  (It may seem odd that one would have to hide records as respected as these, but one thing you should understand, there is no one bitchier and more elitist than punk rock kids without pubes trying to prove how cool they are).  Alanis Morrisette, The Gin Blossoms, Hootie and the Blowfish, and 311 had all reared their ugly heads to the mainstream, and when someone talked about how they liked Alternative at this point, those were the sort of bands they were referring to.  There was no OK Computer, The Smashing Pumpkins were starting to experiment with their not so awesome electronica period, and the Seattle grunge scene was now retro.  For all intents and purposes, Alternative rock was dead.  It was adult contemporary.  Kenny G and Steve Winwood with younger faces.  

As for me, I never really thought about the term Alternative much.  I followed pop punk into things like the older street punk, and hardcore.  Eventually, I found my way into the late ‘90s version of emo, which put me right on the doorstep of indie rock.  Alternative rock radio stations began to fade.  You heard Alanis Morrisette played alongside Rod Stewart on the adult contemporary stations, and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam played alongside Led Zeppelin and Guns ‘N’ Roses on stations that referred to their format as Rock.  The Alternative section in record stores vanished, and now when looking for a record like The Smith’s Meat is Murder you might have to flip through a few CDs from Santana and Skid Row before you found it.  

As the world went digital, I never payed much attention to the genre section of iTunes when buying MP3s or uploading old CDs until a friend of mine posted this status update recently on Facebook: “Micheal Joseph Flanagen feels very satisfied about eliminating ‘Alternative’ as a genre category in his iTunes library.”  The first time I read this post, I simply giggled about it.  Then, I realized I was actually thinking about his post a lot.  A couple days later, I plugged my iPod into my computer and began doing the same thing.  Obsessively, I began changing the genre on every song to something I thought might be more appropriate, whether that term be Dream Pop, Baroque Pop, Shoegaze, or simply Indie.  Truthfully, I try not to think about genres in music as much as I might have when I was younger, but I guess I was a little bothered by the fact that if I chose to purchase a record from Matchbox 20, Limp Bizkit, or Fuel, iTunes would give these bands the same genre classification that they give to the Pixies, Arcade Fire, and The Flaming Lips.

You might be thinking that this whole process of giving every song in my iTunes library a new genre is a project brought on by me having too much time on my hands, and you are probably right.  I freely admit that there are probably better things that I could be doing with my time, but in a way, I feel like I am fighting a good fight.  Alternative, after all, was not a term coined by the musicians themselves.  Its often credited to radio programers in the late ‘80s.  This, to me, is strikingly similar to Sire Records re-titling punk rock as New Wave in the late ‘70s so that radio stations and consumers would not be frightened by the bands they had recently signed.         It may have been a smart business move by Seymour Stein, but in the same way that punk continued to exist as a separate entity from New Wave in the UK through Street Punk and in the United States through Orange County and Washington D.C.’s hardcore punk scenes, the music that was originally dubbed alternative continued to exist as well as a form completely unrecognizable from what MTV, mainstream radio, and the major record labels began to dub alternative.  

Major labels scrambled to find their next Nirvana, and in the process used the elder statesmen of the genre from its days of being known as College Rock as opening bands for the newly signed, easily marketable acts.  The Flaming Lips hit the road opening for Candlebox, but even they fared better than They Might Be Giants who was forced to tour with Hootie and the Blowfish.  Even bands like Pixies, who earned a more reputable headlining act in the form of U2, found themselves playing nearly empty arenas, as the crowds chose not to arrive until the headliner took the stage.  (Note: I am fully aware that U2 existed before the Pixies, and am in now way trying to imply that they are comparable to bands like Candlebox and Hootie and the Blowfish).  

There is this scene in Terry Zwigoff’s film adaptation of Ghost World where Steve Buscemi’s character, Seymour, goes to a sports bar to see an unnamed original Delta bluesman perform.  The blues man is an opening act for a frat boy band called Blues Hammer, a sort of joke rock/blues hybrid band.  The authentic blues man is ignored, yet when Blues Hammer takes the stage, the crowd cheers and begins to dance.  This was the fate that many of the innovators in Modern Rock had to face when taking the stage with their label’s newest pet projects (They Might Be Giants even found themselves booed during some of their Hootie and the Blowfish gigs).  

Of course, the real tragedy of the term Alternative is the bands it destroyed.  Acts like Jawbreaker and Loud Lucy, who had strong underground followings, found themselves picked up by record labels looking to find the next Green Day.  When their sales weren’t up to par, the bands found themselves dropped from the label.  Often the stress of the major labels forced the bands to break up, and their records eventually found their way out of print.  Then there is also the case of  Material Issue frontman Jim Ellison, who took his own life, some believe, because his band was dropped from Mercury Records.

I know I am now treading the waters of hyperbole, but this music is something that a lot of people take as seriously as an academic takes literature.  Music, after all, is typically regional.  Orange County and Washington D.C. have already been mentioned, but also consider Athens, Georgia and it’s relationship with R.E.M., The B-52s, and Elephant 6, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and it’s relationship with Merge Records, and more recently Omaha, Nebraska and Saddle Creek.  Of course, there are no comparisons more obvious than Seattle and Grunge.  Certain cities are often equated to a certain sound, and in 2009, the term Grunge almost seems laughable.  Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit has Kurt Cobain’s face tattooed on his chest.  With a few notable exceptions, the music from Alternative rock’s heyday that still receives radio play is just as laughable as disco, and now Indie, the term that would come to surpass Alternative is moving in a similar direction to include bands like Cut Copy and Paramore under it’s umbrella.   

I’m not suggesting elitism in music, by any means.  I would love to see these bands be able to make a living off of their music.  When I hear The Walkmen, Matt and Kim, Feist,  Grandaddy, and Cat Power songs played in commercials, I get giddy.  I loved hearing The Shins get name dropped in Garden State.  All I truly want is for major labels to not try to market the shitty pop band they just signed as if they are some sort of underground Indie rock heroes.  Am I asking too much?