Say whatever you want about Michael Jackson. He was one bad MF, and his dying at 50 after having apparently drifted out of the solar system long before then is one of the greatest losses pop music will ever know. Since there are, at the moment, approximately 17,448,293 reverent online tributes to the late King of Pop, I will keep this short.
Like so many, I remember when I Want You Back hit the street and was blaring from every loudspeaker in existence in 1969. We were all jabbering to one another about this superhuman 11-year-old boy who sang as if he had already lived a hundred lives of heartbreak. Maybe he had. And of course there was the song's body-melting orchestration with strings and every other instrument known to man, and that gorgeous Phil-Spector-on-steroids intro that practically had you weeping before the singing even started. And the so-called B side? Who's Lovin' You, one of the great shattered-heart songs of all time. I challenge you to make it through the extended vocal coda, with Michael finally breaking upward a full octave at the end, and keep your composure.
But we know all of this, and all that came after. And we all have our perplexity about What-The-Hell-Happened-To-Michael, with the nose and the skin and the whispery perpetually pre-pubescent voice and the chimp and the Lisa Marie marriage and the baby on the balcony and the allegations about little boys at Neverland and the rest of the awful circus. A beautiful genius of a black man literally sliced into a creature we couldn't recognize. It's a story partly about race, partly about family, partly about Hollywood, partly about outer space. That's the story, mind you, the narrative we thread together. The truth, though, is something we will never know. Even the most definitive autopsy and toxicology report will never give us, really, the cause of Michael Jackson's death. If you know what I mean.
So, as with every death, we are left with what he left us.
In the documentary film Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger delivers the best summation of the meaning of Hendrix's death -- and, almost presciently, of Michael Jackson's death -- I have ever heard. Jagger basically says, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here: I don't know anything about Jimi's private business or whether he was a casualty or any of that. All I know is he was the best rock act, the most original, and I miss him, and I wish he was still here. And that's it.
Yeah. That's it.
There is a poem, written by one James Ryder Randall in 1861, that calls for Maryland, a slave state, to secede from the Union and to join the Confederacy. The poem refers to President Abraham Lincoln as "the despot" and "the tyrant." It pleads for Marylanders to take up arms on behalf of the Confederacy against "the northern scum."
The poem, set to music, is today the official state song of Maryland, and it has been since 1939.
I don't know how many adult Marylanders and singing schoolchildren know that "Maryland! My Maryland!" (sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum") is basically a cursing fit aimed at Lincoln (isn't there a monument to him somewhere near Maryland?), at the Union, and at the northern threat to the slaveowning South. I myself didn't know this until just a few days ago, when the local paper carried news of the latest try at squaring the state anthem with a century and a half of human rights progress. And I've lived in Maryland for 25 years (which, in fairness, is 1.7 seconds in Maryland time). I mean, who reads all nine stanzas of a bad histrionic rhyming poem? Who actually listens to and thinks about the words to such parochial martial jingles?
But I'm making excuses. Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon Line, and it was (and still is in many places) Confederate-friendly turf in which there were bloody riots when the Union Army marched through Baltimore on its way south (pictured above). One of the men killed in the riots was a friend of the poet Randall. Hence the weepy, vengeful poem. And hence its continuing regional audience. No getting around it: When the Mid-Atlantic state in which one resides figures it's okay in the 20th and 21st centuries to pin its official pride on the glory of the Confederacy, this is a fact that a citizen (say, a blogger) pretty much has a civic duty to know.
And now the cheeky efforts to end the reign of a name-calling Confederate battle cry as the Maryland state song have resurfaced in 2009, with the State Senate boldly discussing the prospect of naming a commission to study the possibility of changing the lyrics. This move has come up against charges of "political correctness" and "historical revisionism," the former of which is standard screw-social-progress rhetoric but the latter of which has some merit. I personally think altering a long-existing poem to make it palatable to the civilized world, as some in the State Senate seem to want to do, is a coward's way out. As a poet myself, I feel the hair stand up on my neck at the thought of trying to play off an altered work as the real thing.
I say ditch the ridiculous poem altogether. It may have inflated the chests of bitter Marylanders in the years of backlash against Union triumph, and its lyrics may have sat just fine with the official Maryland mood in 1939 amid brutal white supremacy and legal segregation. But in 2009 this song is an anachronism, an offense, and an embarrassment. It is way past time for a new Maryland state tune, preferably one more or less in synch with the broadly-accepted moral imperatives of, say, the past 50 years. I'd say that's not a radical expectation.
What is radical, though, is the fact that this issue is even controversial.
Come to think of it, do you know all of the lyrics to your own state song?
Imagine dozens of musicians playing outdoors -- some known and some not, street players and studio players alike -- all playing the same song together at the same time even though they are scattered in countries throughout the world, and all connected electronically so they can hear one another in real time, with cameras filming each of them simultaneously so that you can watch it all at once. And remember, all of this is happening not in wired studios but outside: on streets, in fields, on balconies.
Maybe you knew about this. I've just learned about it. It's called Playing for Change. It is an organization that, in its own words, is "dedicated to connecting the world through music by providing resources (including but not limited to facilities, supplies and educational programs) to musicians and their communities around the world."
What the Playing for Change musicians do publicly is perform. Globally. Simultaneously. On location. I have no idea how they technologically pull this off. All I know is that you need to stop reading this and watch their rendition of "Stand By Me" right now.
Thanks to Mushim for the tip.
"Some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people... and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up."
-Pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, as quoted by his manager Harry Colomby
For more, see this 1958 Down Beat Monk profile and this Monk bio by Robin D.G. Kelley. (Scroll down on that page for Kelley's piece.)
Thanks to Phil C.
In my latest blog-free zone, I spent a good chunk of time returning to seriously playing the drums after having laid off for decades, which led me to one of those pointless questions we ask ourselves: in my case, "Why the %##@! didn't I keep on playing drums all these years?" There is, of course, no good answer to such a question, except to say, "Well, hell, I'll do it now." So now I am, along with my uphill foray into the saxophone, and I've never been happier.
I'm telling you this because one of the side-effects has been my spending a whole lot of time lately on YouTube, which for musicians is your basic heaven: free video clips of virtually every major musician (and a lot of minor ones) of the past 100 years either playing the music or talking about it. As I said to a friend the other day in the midst of my belated plunge into this addiction, YouTube is like an unofficial national archive of everything: music, politics, art, history, film, humor, how to make cabbage rolls or restore a Ford Falcon.
Which brings me to Eric Clapton and public racism.
I like Clapton the musician. A lot. To me, he is the most melodic of rock guitar soloists, and also among the classiest of the legions of white blues-based rock guitar gods who founded their careers on the music of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, and other black American blues immortals. While white rock fans were scrawling "Clapton is God" on bridge abutments in England, Clapton and a handful of other white guitar heroes (the late Duane Allman comes to mind) were insistently, in concerts and interviews, acknowledging their debt and their homage to the black musicians from whom they gained their inspiration and their fame. Clapton continues to do so to this day. (The classic contrasting example is guitarist Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, who pirated the black blues canon and never looked back.)
But it turns out, as I learned just recently but many already know, that Clapton has had a virulently racist thread in his public life as a musician. At a concert in Birmingham, England in 1976, at the height of his alcoholism, a drunken Clapton ranted at length into the microphone in support of politician Enoch Powell and Britain's infamous National Front, a radically racist organization that called for white power and that cheered mob murders of nonwhite immigrants.
I'll let Clapton's words themselves, quoted here with the citation, tell the story:
So there it is.
Clapton has deservedly taken searing public heat for this. As far as I can tell he has never fully accounted for what he said and why. Sure, being drunk and a junkie makes for atrocious behavior, but it does not create vehement racism out of whole cloth. In his recent autobiography, Clapton mutters grouchily about his Powell outburst, and he complains that he was unfairly branded as a racist as a result. But he provides nothing like an explanation.
So we're left to wonder why a white man who has spent his entire career paying tribute to black genius would take a prolonged public stand praising something close to white ethnic cleansing.
What about it, Eric?
We interrupt this blog for a few words about Isaac Hayes. Dead on Sunday at 65. Co-wrote "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and "Soul Man." Bald-headed soul and his own ideas about chains. I Stand Accused. Theme from Shaft. By the Time I Get to Phoenix. An 18-minute hit song. Rap before it had a name. And yeah, South Park. He had just completed a movie with Bernie Mac, who died Saturday. What to make of that. Why ask. Listen instead.
Drumming feels good.
It's like feeling your body talking. Putting your insides out there without having to say anything.
That's why people flock to drum circles. Like the one in Meridian Hill Park -- AKA Malcolm X Park -- in Washington, D.C. where I took my djembe drum on Sunday and where you'll find me and dozens of other drummers on any given Sunday this summer. Along with folks who dance, flail, play other instruments, or simply watch and listen and groove.
It's tribal, for sure. You've got a head drummer, a master who sets the beat and who keeps everybody in line, including the show-offs who tend to overdo it and the wannabes who can't keep time. You've got a collective drive where we're all synchronized and yet we're each playing our own music. You've got society in action: leadership, cooperation, lots of noise, lots of mutual listening, and a sense of shared destination that brings up a cheer at the end of every 10- or 20-minute jam.
I heard about this drum circle from my friend Luis, and I headed down there last weekend for the first time with my djembe – a type of African drum that's now popular – despite the limitations of both my instrument, which can't compare to the tone of some of the hand-carved beauties that surrounded me, and my amateurish technique, which had my hands throbbing in pain within a half-hour. I had the time of my life for two hours. I didn't take any photos -- including the one I fervently wish I'd snapped of the tiny toddler playing bongos on her daddy's knee -- because I was too wrapped up in the rhythmic rush. (The photos you see here, taken at the same park at other times, are by others.) But I'll remedy that on a future Sunday.
See you there soon.
I give Bill Cosby a hard time for what looks to me like his one-sided ranting about dysfunction among some black youth. But I also give Cosby his propers: not only has he given away a ton of money to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and been a tireless champion of jazz as America's chief art form, but at his most brilliant he is one of the funniest people alive. Check out this vintage Dick Cavett Show clip on YouTube of Cosby doing a riff on his having sat in as a young drummer with jazz titan Sonny Stitt.
Thanks to David for the link.
