Tag Archives: Pop Culture

High Falsetto Highs and Lows

25 Monday Apr 2011

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I know that I’m weird, a freak, and if I were a quarter-century younger, a bit geekish. Well, maybe a geek in a tall man’s body with fourteen percent body fat. Music is one of those things that separates me as weird. Not just because of what I listen to from moment to moment. Smooth jazz to R&B to hip-hop soul to ’80s pop to ’90 White male angst grunge to rap to divas like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. Few people I know — much less males, much, much less Black males — have any appreciation for eclectic musical tastes. But they’ve had almost no tolerance for my high-falsetto singing voice over the years.

Puberty was the reason I discovered it all. My closest friends and wife don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to be able to hold a tune. That in sixth, seventh and eight grade, I sang with my elementary school and middle school chorus. I was a baritone, and a decent one at that. But the voice changes of puberty cracked my voice and sent it into high falsetto in ’83, ’84 and into ’85, whenever I did try to sing.

So I went with it. Once I reconnected with music outside of school in the ’80s, I sang mostly in that ear-splitting, shaky and unevenly high tone and pitch to everything I liked. And that made me stand out, mostly as the weird guy with the Walkman that my fellow Black males made fun of for not being cool. Did I care? Sure, in an obvious, I-know-I-don’t-fit-in kind of way. But, did I care? For the most part, no. I knew enough to not walk down certain streets in Mount Vernon and certain part of the high school singing in that voice, walking to the beat of my own internal music box.

That voice was my release. As awful as I sounded in it, as imperfect and grating my tone, as much of a strain as I put on my cords, it was one of a handful of ways for me to experience happiness, joy, laughter. Other emotions besides rage, fear and anger. That’s what singing Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” and a-ha’s “Take On Me” well outside my normal vocal range did for me. It gave me a high without the benefit of pot, and a low without the benefit of friends.

Singing in high falsetto still brings a natural high. Except now, I laugh at myself while doing it, and I don’t care about the people who think I’m a freak because I sound like a buffoon. Damn right.

Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie”

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Mr. Mister, “Kyrie” Single Cover, August 8, 2010. Vanjagenije. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the image’s low resolution and because image illustrates subject of this blog post.

Twenty-five years ago this week, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” made it to the top of the Billboard pop charts, making me goofy and giddy beyond belief. March ’86 was the beginning of a great month of music for me. I bought my first Walkman — a Walkman-knockoff really — from Crazy Eddie’s on 47th and Fifth in Manhattan, as well as the first of what would be about 200 cassettes of my favorite music. Not to mention a ton of musical experimentation — most of it bad, goofy and un-listen-able for even the musically impaired.

For many of you, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” would likely fall into that last category. It was semi-religious rock at a time when the closest thing to that was Amy Grant. It was Creed a whole decade before Creed, but with better musicians. It was a group of studio musicians putting out a breakout album that actually stood apart from the super-serious or super-sugary music of the mid-80s. It was a perfect storm for a sixteen-year-old in search of inspiration beyond the chaos of 616 and the lonely march toward college via Humanities and Mount Vernon High School.

“Kyrie” was one of two songs that kept me in overdrive in and out of the classroom through most of my junior year at Mount Vernon High School. Simple Minds’ “Alive and Kicking” was the other song. It almost became my mantra in the months that straddled ’85 and ’86. Every time I heard that song, especially the album version, was like going on a game-winning touchdown drive at the end of the fourth quarter. Studying was time to throw screen passes or seven-yard slants, to run the ball on a power sweep or on a draw play. It was methodical, the drums and synthesizers, and put me in a determined, methodical mood as I prepared for a test.

But Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” was magical. Short for “Kyrie Eleison” Latin/Greek for “Lord have mercy,” it became my go-to song for every big academic play I needed to make for the rest of the year, even for the rest of high school. “Kyrie” combined all of the elements that my vivid imagination relied on. My faith in The One, my hope for a better future, lyrics that made me think, music that evoked a big play, like throwing it deep and completing it for a game-changing score. It was as methodical as “Alive and Kicking,” but the bigger bass guitar and heavier synthesizers as the background gave me the feeling that God’s grace was with me wherever I went and whatever I did. It was a true underdog’s song.

It was like I was singing a high-falsetto, four-and-a half-minute prayer whenever I played “Kyrie.” Some of my classmates, as usual, didn’t appreciate whatever deeper meaning I saw in the song or in its lyrics. See, my being Black and high-pitched singing to it was another obvious sign of my weirdness. Yet somehow, when it came to music, I didn’t really care what any of them thought.

As I went off to college and became more sophisticated in my understanding of music, I realized that there were some songs I couldn’t completely part with, no matter how goofy or out-of-date the music video was. “Kyrie” was one of those songs for me. I didn’t play it regularly by the time I’d reached my mid-twenties, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t sing to it in high-falsetto while shopping at Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh when the song would come on over the PA system.

Once iPod and iTunes technology became part of my household in ’06, I uploaded the old song and listened to it regularly again. I’ve wondered from time to time what would the sixteen-year-old version of me would think about me at forty-one. I’ve achieved more, and been hurt and lost more, than I could’ve possibly imagined a quarter-century ago.

It’s taken me more than twenty years to fully understand Richard Page’s lyrics about “would I have followed down my chosen road, or only wish what I could be?” The answer is both. Life is a funny and winding journey, even when on the path of the straight and narrow. Christian or atheist or of some other faith, it’s always good to hope that someone is there to watch over us, to protect us, even our younger selves from our older and allegedly wiser versions of ourselves. And that’s what I here now when I listen to — and sing high-falsetto still to — “Kyrie.”

Deep Race 9

30 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Star Trek: DS9, "What You Leave Behind" Screen Shot, November 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law because this screen shot is used for limited illustrative purposes in identifying the theme of this article.

I just finished re-watching the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series via Netflix, probably one of the more underappreciated Star Trek franchise shows, not to mention underappreciated during the good-old ’90s. Since the middle of June, through the death of my sister, teaching, writing and revising different pieces and Boy @ The Window, I re-watched all 176 episodes (although, admittedly, I’d missed most of the seventh and final season in ’98-’99, between travel and a long job search).

This was easily the Star Trek series with the best acting, the most interesting story lines, and the most complicated in terms of moral choices and the complexity of humanity (and the universe more broadly). I gained an even greater appreciation for Avery Brooks — who’d previously been known as Spenser: For Hire’s Hawk character — Terry Farrell, Alexander Siddig and the rest of the cast as they grew the show over the course of seven years.

But you can’t find the series anywhere in the cable TV universe. It’s as if it disappeared in a singularity — a black hole for the layman. Even Star Trek: Enterprise, a terribly written series with mediocre acting on its best days, can be found in rerun syndication. I can’t help but think that Avery Brooks’ position as the lead actor in the series has a little something to do with my inability to find DS9 on TV.

The lead cast, dealing with complicated issues in ways that some have written would’ve made Gene Roddenberry spin like a top in his grave, may have made many uncomfortable in our intolerant of anything serious times. Race, genocide, oppression, the darker side of human — maybe even alien — nature, the idea that not everything in the distant future will be paradise. All too much for those who prefer their liberalism brewed in a ’60s era coffee machine.

The last five months of using Netflix to relive a piece of ’90s culture was wonderful. Watching classically trained theater actors on the small screen, watching religion, science, race and conflict brought to together so nicely. It made me want to give James Lipton a call to get him to interview Avery Brooks, if he hasn’t done so already. After watching the series finale last week, I felt like I lost a dear old friend again.

The Silent Treatment

21 Monday Jun 2010

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Source: Screen Shot from The Roots, “Silent Treatment” Music Video, Geffen, 1995

Right after the MVHS graduation ceremony at Memorial Field in June ’87, it started. I’d walk down the street to the store, and bump into one of my suddenly former classmates, say “Hi,” and get no response at all. The few times I bumped into a certain Ms. Red Bone, she’d stare straight at me, then straight through me, all as I said “Hi.” She just kept on walking, as if I had phased out of our space-time continuum into a parallel universe. By the beginning of August, I honestly thought that these people, my classmates for so long, were showing their true colors. They just didn’t like me, not me because I’d been a Hebrew-Israelite or me because I was poor or me because I listened to Mr. Mister. It was all about me, something within me that they detested.

“You can’t pay any attention to that. They’re all just jealous,” my new friend E (see “The Power of E” posting from August ’08) said when I told her about the ghost treatment over lunch one day. She and I worked for General Foods in Tarrytown that summer.

“Of what? Of me?,” I asked in disbelief.

“It’s because you’re not trying to be anybody except yourself,” she said.

“That’s a good theory,” I thought, but I didn’t really believe it. E was fully in my corner, and much more obvious about it than anyone else.

This pattern of treatment had only occurred two other times. Once was in sixth grade, after I came to Holmes with my kufi for the first time. My best friend Starling stopped talking to me, and refused to even acknowledge my presence for nearly two weeks before our second and last fight. The other was earlier in my senior year, in the weeks after the final class rankings were posted. Some in the Class of ’87 were upset with me because I was ranked fourteenth in our class. Three of them responded by not talking to me at all. They’d walk by me in the hallways, looked at and through me, and kept going without so much as a nod. That went on from mid-December through the beginning of March.

The Black “Party All The Time” folks in my class, the popular and dapper folks, snickered whenever they saw me. So I guess that they decided that to acknowledge me after graduation would me contaminating themselves with the knowledge that I was still alive, still figuring things out, still not cool enough to be bothered with.

Three years later, I bumped into one of these folks on my way home from my summer job with Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in White Plains. I was walking home to 616 on East Lincoln, having just gotten off the 41 Beeline Express. It was after 6:30, and I was beat from another day of database work and my research preparations for my senior year at Pitt. Coming in the opposite direction toward North Columbus was a party-all-the-timer, a popular, slightly light-skinned dude named J. Since I assumed that he would walk by me as if I were thin air, I started to walk by him as if he weren’t there.

Surprisingly, J stopped me and said, “Hi, Donald.” He said that he needed to talk to me, to tell me that the path that I walked in high school, while weird, was a better path than the one that he was on. He told me about his mind-bending experiences at Howard, about his dropping out and need to take care of some serious emotional and mental health issues. After a year of work at Pitt and in Westchester County, I could tell, too.

At first, I was taken aback. I mean, this was a guy who laughed at me for nearly six years, who’d never lowered himself to so much as to give me a thumbs-up while in school. Now J was sharing the most intimate of details about his life with me? I asked him, “Why are you telling me this?” Among the other things he said, the thing that stuck with me was, “Because you’re true to yourself.” I gave him a handshake, and wished him well.

That was nearly twenty years ago. I guess that J and others were under a lot of pressure — peer pressure, girl pressure, family pressures — to be cool, to be successful, to be something other than themselves. None of this justified how they treated me back then. Nor does it justify how any of them may see me now. I’m just glad the only silent treatment I get now is from my wife when I’ve taken a joke too far. At least I know that she’ll talk to me again, eventually.

A Casually Uncasual Fan

12 Saturday Jun 2010

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Fans in the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Munich, Germany. Source: René Stark http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Something’s happened to me that I can’t explain. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s the beginning of my youthful decline. Or maybe it’s the fact that none of my teams did very well in the regular season or playoffs this year so far. Whatever it is, I find myself not caring much about American sports these days.

I haven’t watched a single minute of the NBA Finals this year, and don’t plan to either. I care only slightly more that the Celtics win only because I can stand Kobe Bryant and the Lakers even less. I didn’t watch a single minute of the Stanley Cup Finals, didn’t watch the French Open, haven’t watched baseball in years, and have tired of the 2010 NFL season three months before it starts. What’s wrong with me?

The thrill is gone, as BB King would say. I used to live and die by my teams, especially the Knicks. With them playing three Game 7s in the ’94 NBA Playoffs, my emotions were on a roller-coaster ride with every game. There were games back then that left me hoarse from screaming at officials, with my jaw clenched after a loss, in orgasmic euphoria after a win.

The last time I felt that way about anything in any sport was when my Steelers won the Super Bowl last year (2008-09 season, that is). Even then, I felt so bad for Kurt Warner, Larry Fitzgerald and the Arizona Cardinals. They gave their all to win that game. I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have felt anything for any opponent like that twenty years ago.

I think that it’s not so much that I’m getting older or have become more mature. It’s that I no longer need the spectacle of sports to jump-start my imagination or get me off the couch to exercise. I prefer the sound of my long-distance two swishing through a net over the sound of it on TV. I prefer the dread and challenge of a three-to-four-mile-run over sitting on the couch and figuring out what defensive scheme is being run before most quarterbacks do. I have become, sadly, a casual fan of spectator sports.

So, where do I go from here? It’s not as if the NFL’s going to become dynasty driven again, or that there are a bunch of teams in the NBA with enough talent to challenge the — yawn — same old teams that compete for rings almost every year. The baseball ship sailed for me years ago, and I’d probably have to go see a Capitals game in person before I’d enjoy watching hockey again. Maybe it’ll be the World Cup, or the US Open (golf), or watching Noah knock down an eight-footer. I’ll bet on that last one waking me from my slumber.

Our Flat-Butt Society

08 Saturday May 2010

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Flat-Butt Truck

Picture a world in which the only ingredient needed to achieve beauty was a flat butt. Imagine that this flat butt would guarantee more than an easier time in dating, marriage, and beauty pageants. A flat butt makes it easier to do well in school, to find comfortable fitting jeans, and to gain access to higher education, quality health care, better homes, and steady employment. Now imagine that those who have oblong butts, round butts, bubble butts, or some other combination of butt shapes have limited access to education, employment, medical care, housing, well-fitting clothes, and beauty pageants. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But, despite the numerous exceptions, we live in a flat-butt society.

We assume that flatter is better because some dead person created it as our ideal vision of beauty centuries ago. But this dead person created this standard without the benefit of interacting with people with other kinds of butts. Today we find ourselves in two worlds: the make-believe world of flat butts, and the real world of multiple kinds of butts. Hundreds of years of conditioning have left most in our society with the impression that a flat butt is a good butt and that other butts—especially round and bubbly ones—are unhealthy and symbolize low intellectual stamina. We need to dig up this dead person and ask him a few questions about his flat-butt vision.

Take the symbols of beauty for our culture. Whether male or female, they usually have flat butts with big chests. Round, shapely butts equal obesity as far as most of us are concerned. The ideal flat butt is one that is firm and muscular, an extension of a firm and muscular back. It’s one that a rubber band would boomerang off of. Has anyone ever seen a Miss America or Mr. Universe with anything other than a flat, muscular butt? Between so-called supermodels like Heidi Klum and Gisele, Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, and the constant fawning over Hollywood actors, the women and especially men that are with them should feel extremely lucky. At least, that’s what we’re told by advertisers, journalists, reporters and commentators nearly every minute of every day.

There are of course exceptions to the flat-butt rule. These anomalies are often exotic and rarer than gold, but not the flat-butt norm. The popular press and hip-hop videos tend to cover these unusual people as ones who have exceptional derrieres. This only reinforces the idea that flat butts are normal and within everyone’s reach, and that anyone who doesn’t have a flat butt and isn’t exotic simply isn’t attractive. It’s no wonder that non-flat-bottomed men, women, and girls are spending millions for doctors to suck the fat out of their butts.

Another dead expert decided that a flat-butt person, as the international symbol of beauty, also was more athletic and intelligent. Because those with flat butts already were in the top positions of our society, it was self-evident that anyone without a flat butt lacked intellect or leadership ability. This expert assumed by scientific observation that people with non-flat butts couldn’t lead in science, society, or sports because their butts would get in the way. Over time, those with non-flat butts became leaders in the athletic field, but only in areas where intelligence seemed unnecessary. It’s likely that this deceased expert had a non-flat butt and spent much of his life obsessed with flattening it, wanting to become part of the flat-butt elite.

We can even see the penetration of our culture’s flat-butt philosophy in clothing and in our public spaces. Go to any clothing store in the country, and one will find it almost impossible to find trousers, slacks, jeans, pants, skirts, shorts, and underwear made for people with oblong, round, bubble, or mixed butts. The closest approximation to bottoms for the non-flat-bottomed male or female are ones made for the overweight, another population that fails to meet our society’s beauty standards.

We design our public spaces with flatness in mind. Take a look at the interior, exterior, and posterior of any public transit system in the country. A flat butt fits better in the molded seat of a bus or train than a round one. Public transit vehicles themselves have flat features, especially their rears. Public restrooms have toilet seats with flat butts in mind, as any non-flat-butted person can attest. And only someone with a flat butt would design slides in public parks for children with flat butts. Kids without flat butts tend to get stuck on these slides because the slides aren’t built with enough flexibility to accommodate other kinds of butts.

Sexual relations is one area in which the divide between flat butts and bubble butts (at least) has softened in recent years. It appears that some flat butt people are actually attracted to people with round, even jiggly butt cheeks. Yet this attraction only goes so far. Despite the mixing of flat and round and the recently discovered coolness of the non-flat, thinking in this area for most flat butts remains flat. For them, flat is phat-in beauty, culture, intelligence, and in some cases, athletics. The round, oblong, bubble, and mixed butts still have a long way to go.

What those with round butts need are pioneers to prove that like the world, the ideal for butts is variety and balance, not flat as the ideal. Proving this may require studies that show that a round butt provides long-term health benefits or has no genetic connection to intelligence. Chiropractors could show that those with non-flat butts have a greater chance of avoiding spinal degeneration than those with flat butts. Geneticists with round and flat butts may need to show that the round butt gene is the dominant one while flat-butt genes are recessive. Engineers can prove that rounding off buses and trains will make them more aerodynamic and energy-efficient, and deeper seat moldings will save millions in caring for our backs. Whatever the innovation or discovery, it’s up to the round butts of our nation to make this flat-butt society more round.

Banning the Term “Legislate Morality”

23 Friday Apr 2010

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I love Michael Wilbon’s work as a sports journalist, columnist with The Washington Post, as a commentator on the NBA on ESPN/ABC, and as co-host of Pardon the Interruption (PTI) on ESPN with Tony Kornheiser. I’ve loved his work for a bit more than two decades, certainly in comparison to Pope Lupica and the other holier-than-thou sports reporters and columnists out there these days. I find him refreshing as a journalist and writer, and an unabashed and unafraid host when it comes to how sports and American society intersect.

But I found myself bitterly disappointed in Wilbon’s “can’t legislate morality” comment on PTI on Wednesday, April 21. Wilbon said this in response to the NFL’s six-game suspension of two-time-Super Bowl-winning-quarterback and Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger for the latter’s violation of the league’s personal conduct policy. The NFL “shouldn’t legislate morality,” Wilbon said, as Roethlisberger “hadn’t committed a crime.” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the league, and the Steelers ownership were all “overreacting,” according to Wilbon. Well, Wilbon has certainly earned the right to be entitled to his opinion. But, as my wife has said to me on countless occasions, Wilbon’s also entitled to be wrong.

Societies, governments, employers and families “legislate morality” every single day, and have been doing so for as long as there has been a human civilization on this planet. Murder, stealing, banking regulations, adultery, and certainly sexual assault and rape are all examples of us “legislating morality” over the past five millenia. Now, I’m not totally naive — I know what Wilbon was attempting to say (I think). That because Roethlisberger wasn’t arrested, indicted or convicted, that the issue of his alleged encounter with a twenty-year-old White college student whom he helped become incredibly intoxicated is now a moral one, not a criminal one. Yes, this is true. But what would ESPN do to someone like Wilbon in the same situation? What would the University of Maryland system do to me in that situation? Would ESPN let Wilbon continue to show up for work without a reprimand, a suspension, or a quiet termination? Would I continue to teach classes, or would my employer consider not renewing my teaching contract?

We as a people legislate morality in ways that none of us really think about. Like Wilbon, most of us think that crimes are crimes and morals are morals, as if passed down from Moses or Hammurabi completely unchanged for the past 3,800 years. But moral issues have led to things that once were not crimes becoming crimes. The whole notion of illegal drugs or illegal immigrants didn’t exist in this country a century ago. Someone could’ve been a pot-smoking Polish immigrant “without papers” in 1910, and that immigrant wouldn’t have gone to jail. The folks in favor of making marijuana illegal or shutting off immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe didn’t end their crusades (however misguided) by saying, “Well, we can’t legislate morality!”

Or, to use much more recent examples, those White supremacists who said, “you can’t legislate morality” after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For nearly twenty years, those opposed to Black civil rights argued that the issue of Black equality was a moral issue, not a legal or human rights one. Or those from the Religious Right who said, “you can’t legislate morality” when the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision came down in 1973 or in the wake of the growing Gay Rights Movement in the late-1970s. Of course, in both cases, those in leadership who were influenced by what we now call the evangelical movement have engaged in legislating morality since the early ’90s, attempting to roll back Roe v. Wade and putting laws on books defining marriage as only between a heterosexual adult male and a heterosexual adult female.

On the issue of civil rights, desegregation, reproductive rights and gay rights, what is and isn’t moral isn’t just a matter of perspective. It’s also a matter of power and bias and the people who are wielding that power in order to reflect their bias. I’m not saying that Roethlisberger actually committed a crime, or that he didn’t commit a crime. Yet we cannot say that what Roethlisberger engaged in was simply a violation of the generally accepted morals of American society either. Even if seen in the most optimistic light, Roethlisberger brought significant embarrassment to himself, his team and teammates and the NFL. An executive at a Fortune 500 company could no more get away with going on a bender and attempting to have sex in a public bathroom — an incident that somehow becomes public — than Roethlisberger could. So for Wilbon or anyone else to rally around the “can’t legislate morality” flag is somewhere between idiotic and shameful.

The issue with Roethlisberger isn’t that the NFL’s engaged in legislating morality. Nor is it that the district attorney in Georgia wanted to bring a case to trial but couldn’t because of insufficient evidence. The real issue here is that we as a society have made a thick distinction between what is and isn’t moral behavior and what is and isn’t criminal behavior, because they aren’t mutually exclusive. For progressives and libertarians, the distinction is whether one’s behavior is detrimental to the health and lives of other people. Black civil rights, gay rights, and smoking weed are among the things that most would assume would not harm the lives of other citizens, at least in 2010. Having an encounter in a bathroom that leads to another person going to the hospital with bruising and bleeding, however minor, is detrimental to that other person.

In light of this being Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, maybe folks like Wilbon should be more careful when choosing words like “can’t legislate morality.” Not only do we legislate morality, societies will engage in this kind of activity as long as there is such a thing as a society. So I ask that everyone with a microphone and a camera pointed at them to stop talking about legislating morality as if moral values are as set in stone as the Earth orbiting the Sun. You’re merely reflecting your own bias, against women, gays, Blacks, drugs, science. Or in Wilbon’s case, a need to stay out of the judgment fray that moves us from one scandal to the next, a need to get to the day when Roethlisberger throws three, four or five touchdown passes in a game. On that part I fully agree. But say that, Wilbon, because that’s what you’re good at. Don’t say you can’t legislate morality, because last I checked, this isn’t your area of journalistic expertise.