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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Monthly Archives: November 2020

Music of the Dystopia

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Cry Freedom" (1997), "Fantasy" (1978), "Land Of Confusion" (1986), "Silent Running" (1985), "Welcome To The Terrordome" (1990), "Zombie" (1995), Afrofuturism, American Dream, Dave Matthews Band, Delusions, Dystopia, Dystopian, Genesis, Mike + The Mechanics, Narcissism, PE, Public Enemy, Self-Reflection, Silent Running (1972), Subversive Music, The Cranberries, The Matrix (1999)


Screen shot, Silent Running (1972) poster, November 24, 2020. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/mediaviewer/rm3505217792/).

Music has nearly always been a dreamscape from which I could envision alternative histories, sense multiple futures, uncover possible presents, feel and find my best self.

It has also been a place for revealing the naked, uncomfortable truth of humanity’s existence in real life. If one were to take the music of the late 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the R&B that clearly outlined the combination of migration, poverty, heroin addiction, the Vietnam War, police brutality, unemployment, miserly government social welfare and urban living would be one way to go. If one were to take the eclectic British and Irish pop and rock of the 1980s, those folks illuminated the connections between rising conservatism, austerity meant to cut the social safety net, and the normalization of government oppression, corruption, and infiltration into the private lives of everyday people.

It all adds up to one simple yet very scary truth. Our world, the one in which my mother birthed me, the one in which I have grown up and grown older, has always been a dystopia. That’s it. All this talk of technological innovation, of moral and philosophical advancements, of a post-World War II, West-led democratized, globalized, capitalist meritocracy is simply The Real-Life Matrix pulling the dystopian world over our deluded, narcissistic eyes. And nearly everything in the world of mainstream news and journalism, in everyday national and international politics, in formal education systems, and in every single iota of American and global popular culture.

Except in the occasional and deliberate attempts made by artists and authors to expose the underworkings of this Matrix. I have written far too much about those authors of late, from Sarah Kendzior, Mona Eltahawy, and Leta Hong Fincher to Kiese Laymon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Derrick Bell. Truth is, I felt and sensed this truth in music even before I had read Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or William Faulkner’s short stories about racist White men sleeping in beds for 20 years with the dead bones of their incestuous mothers. Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues {Make Me Wanna Holler),” Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City,” and Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto” brought the dystopian of Black life in the US to my attention long before I knew what the prefix dys- even meant. The contrast between this and the Afrofuturism of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy” and “Boogie Wonderland” of the late-1970s wasn’t lost on me, even though it would be nearly 15 years between these songs and my reading of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

 

But the 1980s hit me and my family as hard and fast as a government coup in Brazil or in Trump’s version of the US. It’s wasn’t just that it was our apocalypse. It revealed that the American Dream was a nightmare for so many people. It opened up my 100 billion neurons to the possibility that there could be no American Dream, no rise of the West, no Euro-American hegemony over the world without it being a dystopia for billions of people in the US, in Europe, and around the world.

It was also the decade of the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, “We Are The World,” Bob Geldof and Live Aid, Farm Aid, and protests for South African divestment. So it seemed normal for groups of White guys in bands to write music, play instruments, and belt out lyrics like the ones below from Mike + The Mechanics’ “Silent Running” (1985).

Don’t believe the church and state
And everything they tell you
Believe in me, I’m with the high command

The post-apocalyptic movie of the same title from 1972 was apparently on Michael Rutherford (guitarist of Genesis), et al.’s minds when they decided to work on the lyrics for this song. The idea that someone from the future would communicate with their ancestors in the past to resist the forces of totalitarianism and propaganda in order to preserve the path to a better future? Boy does that sound like the stuff of Octavia Butler, Derrick Bell, Kiese Laymon, and Colson Whitehead (not to mention, Tomi Adeyemi in her Children of Blood and Bone), where ancestors and descendants can somehow have confabs in real life! All in an effort to swap ideas, to conjure up solutions before we understood the problems, to recognize that time is nonlinear, and so are we.

As a teenager who saw more than most that the Reagan Years were part of the dystopian present, and not a return to American greatness, “Silent Running” was refreshing, if also incredibly scary. I was like, if these White guys from the UK and Ireland get it, then why don’t folks in America get it? At least, the folks I saw at school and in running my errands every day.

But it wasn’t just Mike + The Mechanics. A lot of music from the 1980s and 1990s was subversive, including the more obvious Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” to KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, Alanis Morrisette, and The Cranberries. It was just that the less subtle, the Billboard Top 40 hits and the B-side non-hits stood out for their double-meanings. When I stripped away the male bravado, the love and the lust and the loneliness from the repertoire of rap, R&B, hip-hop, and ’80s pop I listened to, the subversive was the remainder.

In my family-level apocalypse and resistance against my stepfather, the subversive helped. In the disconnect between the normalcy of magnet-program-learning among a cabal of Benetton-commercial-wannabes, the undercurrent understanding that this fakery belied a world very much like the one in The Matrix. The lyrics, the synthesizers, the heavy guitar strums and the drum rolls meant something different to me than anyone I knew growing up could imagine.

It wasn’t just “Silent Running” for me, nor something that hit like a sledgehammer like Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” that hit the radio waves my senior year of high school. There were others. For more than a decade, there were others, including:

  • PE, “Welcome to the Terrordome“
  • Sting, “Love Is The Seventh Wave”
  • Dave Matthews Band, “Cry Freedom“
  • The Cranberries, “Zombie“
  • Peter Gabriel, “Biko” and “Shaking The Tree”
  • Des’ree, “Crazy Maze“
  • James Blake, “No Bravery”
  • Seal, “Future Love Paradise” and “People Asking Why”
  • U2, “Bullet The Blue Sky”
  • Arrested Development, “Tennessee”

In the years after I finished my doctorate, I didn’t forget these songs, and may have taken on some more obscure ones by Floetry, Coldplay, U2, Bryan Ferry, Pharcyde, The Fugees, among others, along the way. Popular music has become more vapid and craven and corporate as the leaders in our world have made their taste for a dystopia that advantages them more and more obvious. This position is probably why I can’t find a nod to the dystopian in Rihanna, Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, Rick Ross, Beyoncé, Gary Clark, Jr., or Chris Stapleton (although Solange’s and Missy’s music videos at least contain subversive and dystopian wisps).

This world is the dystopia that has always been. And those of us who talk to ourselves while speaking out at the same time have been trying to get everyone else to see it and sense it all along. I should know. I’ve been talking to myself since my week of homelessness at 18, and speaking out as the world has lurched itself toward calamity for nearly as long.

I Was Never Good at the Popularity Contest

17 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Afrocentric Education, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Black Action Society, Marc, Molefi Asante, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Pitt, Popularity Contests, Temple University, Writing


Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

If I so chose, I could be a jealous-hearted bastard, and look at every achievement of all the folk in my life as, “Well, good for you, asshole!” But I learned a long time ago, maybe even when I was at high school’s end, that the main person I have to compete and contend with is me, that I am exhausting enough. Vying for popularity, kudos, or power was never a big thing for me. It was a game I’d almost always lose, for enough reasons to make my pre-Christian and depressed self actually jump off that bridge and end it all. What I learned by my mid-twenties was to allow myself a moment or two of envy, to feel like life was easier for those who achieved what seemed like cheap and easy success and fame. And then I’d think, But that’s not what I want for me. That’s their path, not mine, no matter how many parallels and similarities there may be between them and me.

What helped me get there is a story of plagiarism, of ideas, if not of actual words. It’s a story of my first attempt to publish an article as an adult, my first foray into the world of popularity, of ideas, of writing, and of extreme disappointment. It began the summer before grad school at Pitt in 1991. My friend Elaine egged me into this work, after a long and hard final semester of undergrad and three weeks on a starvation diet while working full time that April and May (I stretched $30 over 20 days). I began work on what I hoped would be my first article, comparing ideas around Afrocentric education with the broader idea of multicultural education.

The piece was originally to be her and my response to what was then a major controversy involving research into the revision of New York State’s social studies curriculum. The New York State Department of Education had given a committee the task of figuring out how to make the state’s K-12 curriculum more inclusive and representative of the state’s tremendous racial, ethnic and other forms of diversity. 

By July, I had gone from disinterested to fully engaged, minus the young woman in whom I no longer had an interest, now working on a piece that had become much more academic than we had originally intended. By then, I’d already learned the names Leonard Jeffries, Asa Hilliard III and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I’d read articles from the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about Jeffries’ name-calling, Schlesinger’s incredulousness about calling slaves “enslaved persons,” and about the committee in general getting along like hyenas tearing at a dead wildebeest.

By the end of September, they would produce One Nation, Many Peoples: A Curriculum of Inclusion: Report of the Commissioner’s Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence. With all my revisions out of the way, I’d produce my first publishable document since elementary school. I titled it “Comparing Afrocentric and Multicultural Education: Why American Education Needs Both.” I had reviewed much of the leading literature in the field at that point, between James A. Banks, Cherry McGee Banks, Christine Sleeter, Robert Slavin, Maulana Karenga, Frances Cress Welsing, 

I mailed it to three journals, including the Journal of Black Studies. It was then that I realized that one of the folks whose writing and research I had referred to in my review was also the editor of the journal. It was the one and only Molefi Kete Asante. He was also the founder and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies (now Africology and African American Studies) at Temple University in Philadelphia. His The Afrocentric Idea (1987) was half the basis for my understanding what Afrocentricity could look like as pedagogy at the K-12 level.

But I had problems with that pedagogy. I chafed at the idea that there was any litmus test to what was and was not authentically Black or African. No, I’m not sure if “chafed” is the right word. The idea that anyone — including folks like Asante, Karenga, Welsing, Jeffries, and John Henry Clarke — could arbitrarily decided that ragtime isn’t authentically Black or African, while say, rap and hip-hop was definitively so? It seemed like a bunch of bullshit to me.

I knew why reading Asante’s work made me feel that way, too. Those three-and-a-half years spent living in a Hebrew-Israelite household. Those times were with a man who claimed to be my stepfather, the one who could quote the Torah. All while eating squid and crabs and lobster tails, cheating on my Mom while begetting other kids he never fed, and beating on his “womens”, too.

That’s ultimately what I saw in Asante’s work, hell, in the work of the Afrocentric set across the board. That none of them grew up in Accra, Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Gaborone, Nairobi, or Jo’Burg or were Africanists who spent years and years living somewhere on the continent before committing to this litmus test. Intellectually, it made as much sense as a “reincarnated” Balkis Makeda in her 70s living in my Mom’s master bedroom at 616 in 1984 while we eight lived by rules like me cooking for the family at 14 because Mom had “unclean issues of blood.” Or, this fake-ass Balkis Makeda telling us that we could no longer use Ivory soap because she dreamt about rats gnawing on it. Authenticity has its costs, no?    

I didn’t write all this in my essay, though. I merely wrote that between an authentic African-centered education and an authentic multicultural curriculum, the latter made the most sense in a multicultural nation like the US, in a multicultural state like New York. I justified this because I only grew up in New York State, in and around New York City. I justified it because the fact was and remains, American Black folx are, well, Americans, who have cobbled together a culture of resistance, and joy within that, both multicultural American with shards and pieces of African Blackness, and all at the same time.

Nearly two months pass. The Black Action Society at Pitt had brought in Asante to speak, a week and a half before Thanksgiving. The ballroom BAS used in William Pitt Union was jam-packed. BAS heads Justin and Doug looked so proud of themselves that evening. And Asante was just as full of himself. He spoke for between 45 minutes and an hour, about Eurocentricity, about Afrocentricity, about creating a path where Black boys (and sometimes, girls) could become proud Afrocentric men (and sometimes women). Really, it wasn’t much different than anything I heard from temple during my Hebrew-Israelite years.

Then, he turned to multiculturalism and the controversy over the revisions to the New York State global studies curriculum. Unbeknown to the nearly 300 students in the room — aside from yours truly — he began parroting my submitted article. Not quite word-for-word, though. You see, he used my arguments as fodder for sarcasm while on stage, to point to “how the poison” of Eurocentricity “flows” in multicultural curriculum across the US. Asante believed that multicultural education was a mere euphemism to disguise the “Eurocentric in the multicultural.”

“He stole my ideas. He quoted me to crush me,” I told my friend Marc, who attended the talk with me that evening. Marc thought I was wrong, that Asante wasn’t quoting me at all. Yeah, sure Marc, I thought.

Two months later, I received my first article rejection. It was a week after I finally got my driver’s license, and two weeks before I published my first piece, a book review for a small scholarly journal. It was from Journal of Black Studies. I do not remember what the rejection letter said, but I read it as, “Nice try, but you’re not Black enough for this publication.”

This was my first foray — but hardly my last — into this world, where popularity mattered more than reality, perception more than evidence, and power more than anything.

But I do consider myself lucky. A few months later, I presented another paper at a conference at Lincoln University. Bettye Collier-Thomas was in attendance, and we ended up in a conversation. She invited me to apply for the PhD program in history, where I could work with her and esteemed people like Asante. I listened and respectfully declined. 

A year later was my joint article with Marc about the pitfalls of Afrocentricity. And with it, two months of Asante’s sycophants, er, students sitting in seminar rooms writing scathing rebuttal letters questioning if between the two of us we had enough brainpower to spell Black. To learn from one of his former students in 2007 that my imaginations of what could have happened in Asante’s seminars was actually true? Well, I was so glad he had used my words as a baseball bat to my head back in 1991.

I grew up with phony proselytizers. I didn’t need to follow another one. Plus, where’s my Afrocentric gravy? Does it go with my Jollof and Brussels sprouts, too?

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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