Playing Pretend

I encountered Eminem's "Stan" yesterday. (Although, to be sure, I don't make a career of living under rocks.) I'm not really into hip-hop and rap, and have always tended to pass on artists who built reputations as being intentionally transgressive, so I'd never really paid any attention to Mr. Mathers' work or the controversies he sparked. But when listening to "Stan," I found it really interesting, and so set out to learn more about it. And from there I learned that the video for it was pretty heavily... redacted for general consumption.

But the Internet being the Internet, it wasn't hard to find what I'm given to understand is an original release version, and watch it. And, as I'm sure you've guessed, I'm not really sure what all the fuss is about. Okay, I'm old enough to understand that one person's cautionary tale is often viewed as another's how-to video. When I worked with children, back in my twenties, one of the more senior staffers once told me that the problem with telling kids "don't do drugs" was that all they would hear was "do drugs." And it's a legitimate concern, to be honest. After all, there are people who use the word "stan" to proudly self-define themselves as superfans of something, despite the fact that Stanley Mitchell is clearly not intended to be a role-model for anyone.

But for all that the story of "Stan" is that of a obsessive fan whose anger at perceiving themselves to be ignored by a celebrity who they feel owes them something culminates in a tragic murder-suicide, the eight-minute video is more poignant than over-the-top. There are Lifetime movies that are more disturbing.

Watching Stan's disintegration over the course of the video (which is a really excellent exercise in short-form storytelling, both visually and lyrically), I started to wonder if a general sense that the rough edges of society must never see the light of day leads to people feeling alone in what are really common situations. While I'm sure that people driving themselves from bridges with their pregnant girlfriend locked in the trunk is far from an everyday occurrence, abusiveness that escalates to fatal violence isn't. And a general attitude that children need to be kept within a world that pretends that this doesn't exist renders them unprepared for the eventuality.

It was an debate that simmered constantly when I worked with children. While policy was to limit their exposure to things that adults deemed too distressing or unpleasant, for the population that we were working with, many of them had already experienced abuse of some form or another, and were likely to experience it again once they aged out into the world around them. And it's hard to prepare someone for something while maintaining that its entire existence is fictional.

There is something about American society, I think, that prevents it from looking itself in the mirror on a regular basis. I don't claim to be above being put out when the person who looks back at me in the mirror is the person who I am, rather than some person I might wish to be, but I understand that if I am to have any hope of reconciling the two, I have to know my starting point. This is simply how it works. I think. But maybe I'm incorrect about that. After all, humanity has made it this far and the pretense shows no sign of going away.

Hey, Slick

I was listening to Stevie Wonder's Living For The City today. It's a song that I've heard a thousand times. It received fairly regular airplay when I was growing up, and I have it on CD. The song itself has a narrative arc, with an interlude in which an unnamed protagonist (whose voice reminds me of one of my uncles) arrives in New York City. Things start going sideways the moment he disembarks from the bus, and he winds up being sentenced to prison for ten years.

While the main thrust of the song is about the difficulties of being Black in the United States of the late 1960s into the early 1970s (the song was released in 1973), one part of it stood out for me today after listening to parts of a recent episode of the NPR podcast It's Been A Minute. Sam Sanders was talking about the tendency, in Black art, to avoid negative portrayals of Black characters, hoping to avoid giving racist critics ammunition for attacks on the broader community.

In Living For The City, someone offers the protagonist $5 to "run this down the street for me." That someone, judging from their voice, is also Black, and since the sirens can be heard closing in even as the person presses the unspecified package on the protagonist, it's a safe bet that it was understood that being caught with the goods would mean going to jail. Paying closer attention to the song today than I had in the past, I realized that Stevie Wonder was also pointing out another pitfall for Black people in the United States; the willingness of other Black people to use them as fall guys and patsies.

Sure, this habit can also be laid at the feet of American racism, but I think to do so absolves people of the responsibility that is required to actually take advantage of how far they've come. It's an interesting tightrope that I sometimes observe people walking, attempting to retain a sense of Black agency while avoiding a general sense of blameworthiness. I once read an article about some research into how reading about White Privilege lessened sympathy among social liberals for poor white people. It takes a careful reading of the piece, but I think it's valid to guess that the effect that the researchers were seeing comes from the idea that a perception of agency lessens sympathy. In this case, it would make sense for people to seek to limit the perception of the agency that certain groups possess. Yet casting them too much as victims runs the risk of portraying them as unable to make use of any tools that might be given them.

But I think I'm getting away from the point. Once I was paying attention, I found Stevie Wonder's inclusion of this bit to be a subtle, but incisive commentary, given that it wasn't strictly necessary for the whole narrative to work. The protagonist could have simply run afoul of racist police officers and courts, and the story would have still come together and made the broader point.

Jingle-Bell Stop

It is now, finally, the Day After Christmas. And that means the End of Christmas Music until Black Friday of 2020. It seems more like a respite than the status quo, for some reason. But while attempting to guard my mental health against the constant onslaught of "Holly-Jolly Christmas" and "Silver Bells," it occurred to me that jingle bells, or perhaps more accurately, sleigh bells, have become entirely associated with Christmas, rather than winter more broadly.

As I understand it, the purpose of bells on a sleigh was not festivity, but safety. Horses may not be completely silent, but they don't make that much noise, even when in motion. And both hoofbeats and sleigh runners can be very quiet in deep snow. So while "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" presumes either murderous intent or negligence on the part of Santa Claus, a fast-moving sleigh will not stop quickly; an old woman who steps into the path of one that she didn't hear coming is likely to come to grief.

Returning to the point, the realization that there's nothing particularly "Christmas-y" about sleigh bells becomes a reminder that many of the songs that we associate with Christmas, such as the now-controversial "Baby, It's Cold Outside," are simply about Winter itself. And winter, here in the northern hemisphere, has just started. I admit to not being all that up on the modern music scene (I have a theory that holds that all of the music in a genre that you're not that into all sounds the same.), but it seems to me that Winter music is, effectively, a sub-genre of Christmas music, and thus locked into the same Black Friday to Christmas Day constraints that genuine carols inhabit.

So while Winter may be just beginning, songs about it are mainly an Autumn phenomenon.

BBS

I've been listening to several of my old CDs recently, revisiting music that I haven't listened to in some time. One thing that I've learned is that listening to songs for the music produces different results than when one listened to songs for the lyrics. I don't really know why I hadn't paid much attention to many of the lyrics to the music in my CD collection prior to this point. Maybe because I tended to use it more as background noise than anything else. But when I'm driving, I'm more in the market for something to actively listen to.

One thing that stood out for me is how many songs could be charitably described as "bitter breakup songs." I'm kind of surprised that they aren't considered a genre unto themselves, given how common they are. I was listening to one soundtrack album that appeared to have no less than four; which seemed excessive, given that the movie in question had nothing really to so with romantic relationships, let alone the breakup of one.

I'm perhaps fortunate in these songs not really speaking to me; I've never had an angry breakup with a former partner. But I wonder if the event is as common as music makes it out to be. After all, a common viewpoint is that there are so many bitter breakup songs because of the ubiquity of bitter breakups. Which would be something of a shame. Although I suppose that like anything else, songs about being okay with life wouldn't be very big sellers.

Undelivered

Recently, I listened to Arrested Development's debut album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... It was the first time in at least a decade, if not two. I'd picked up the CD back when I was still a twentysomething living in Chicago, and other than Tennessee, didn't really remember much about it, other than overall, I'd somewhat liked the music and that one track could be seen as calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government. (That had always been my go-to when people would argue that the United States had a draconian approach to freedom of speech.)

Now that I'm fiftysomething, I find myself listening much more carefully to the lyrics of songs than I used to, and that's given me a different understanding of 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... The general theme of many of the tracks is something of a polemic on the proper way to be Black. It strikes me as something that was going around at the time, but I will admit to not recalling it all that well, as I had a tendency to tune such messages out. Even today, I find it somewhat tiresome, even when set to otherwise good music.

3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... sets forth a vision of being Black that is self-consciously different from what it understands being White to entail. But it also places itself at odds with the burgeoning "gangsta" ethos that had been gaining traction over the previous five or so years, especially in the track People Everyday, which draws a sharp distinction between "Niggers" who, in the song, behave in a stereotypically "gangsta" fashion, and "Africans," who are Arrested Development's preferred mode of being Black.

Most of this went right past me when I was listening to the CD back in the 1990s. I liked the music, especially the track U, which had a fast and upbeat tempo, but didn't really connect with the broader message that the band was attempting to convey. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. Arrested Development's particular brand of alternative hip hop never seemed to catch on, although I understand that the broader form survives in Southern hip hop, a form that I'm not particularly acquainted with, although I've heard most of the singles that have made the charts. Now that I'm older, and perhaps more attentive to such things, the message is more clear.

In the end, it's another reminder of the difficulties of trying to drive broad social changes as a musical artist. In the same way that Prince and Janet Jackson had their attempts at activism effectively drowned out by the accolades for their prowess as musicians, the same thing happened to Arrested Development. The music was lauded, but the message appeared to go mostly unheard.

When We Were Young

On weekend mornings, when it's not raining, I like to go for a walk to get in some exercise. Treading the trails alone can be boring (I'm not really the meditative type) and so I usually take something to listen to. For the past few months, this has been music. (Podcasts may make a comeback in the future, if I decide to take up a more leisurely pace again.) My typical go-tos have been Prince and Janet Jackson; their music tends to have beats that drive an energetic walking pace.

This is the music of my college and twenty-something years, and I hadn't really listened to it in some time before adopting it for my morning walks. Listening to Prince's Graffiti Bridge or Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, I was struck by how much it was the music of youth and change.

We are the New Power Generation
We're gonna change the world
The only thing that's in our way is you
Your old-fashioned music
Your old ideas
We're sick and tired you tellin' us what to do

I immediately appreciated the irony. I was 22 when Graffiti Bridge was released. But now I'm 50, and I'm the one who's in the way. And Graffiti Bridge now lives squarely in the realm of "old-fashioned music." (There's always something strange about having music you remember as the hot new track showing up on an "oldies" playlist.")

But the question that I have is: Why didn't we change the world?

Being a member of the unimaginatively-named "Generation X," I've largely been a bystander in the inter-generational (and class) warfare between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. (By the way, did anyone actually tell the Baby Boomers that there was a war on?) Which strikes me as strange; because for all of our grooving out to songs of changing the world and raising our voices in protest, we've become the primary footsoldiers of the status quo.

Looking back on it, I think that part of it is that we never really cared. There's a reason why most of the more socially-conscious tracks from Rhythm Nation didn't make it onto Design of a Decade. We didn't want a call to arms. We wanted to tear it up on the dance floor. (I suppose that "we" should be in quotes, not only because I'm not really qualified to speak for my entire generation; I also don't dance. Rejoice in this.) I don't think that I'd ever actually listened to the music of my youth, in terms of actually attempting to hear and understand the narratives and messages of the lyrics, until a year or so ago.

When I had a somewhat short-lived semi-radical phase, during which I was convinced that "the Establishment" was corrupt and evil, I understood the effects of the policies, institutions and social mores that I disagreed with. But the causes were unknown to me. Again, I think that lack of interest was at work. All I cared to know was that the world was a bad place, and that there were bad people who were willing to stoop to any level to make sure it stayed that way. But then "real life" started to put in appearances. And I had more important things to worry about.

And the same perverse incentives that had created the world that I understood to be so broken enlisted me as an active participant in its perpetuation. Revolutions are messy. And they're expensive. And I became too busy with rent, car payments and the phone bill to set aside anything to pay for the one that my younger self had wanted. And since there was no revolution in the offing between then and now, I'm pretty sure that I can say that few, if any, of the rest of my fellow "Gen-Xers" did things any differently. Rather, we invested in securing our places in the world as we found it. Rather than ragequit and flip the table, Generation X applied itself to learning how to play the game. And some of us played better than others. Here and there, a few people dropped out. Some of us ascended to the highest levels of the corporate power structure. If your borders of age cohorts fall a certain way, there has even been a Gen-X president. But many of us are simply quietly working to maintain, rather than change, the world we live in, and the incentive structures, broken as they are, that (however badly) built it.

The man isn't telling us what to do anymore. We've taken that baton and are running with it. Maybe "we" should do something about that.

Violin Elf

She was really good. I'm not really that hip to violin, but I really enjoyed listening to her play.

I Know, I Know, I Know, I Know, I Know

Yeah, I should leave the young thing alone,
But ain't no sunshine when she's gone.

I'd never really paid much attention to the lyrics of Ain't No Sunshine. It was just another one of those songs that I heard every so often. But one day, I was listening to a playlist that I'd put together of the sort of music that I listened to as a child, I began to realize that a lot of songs used similar phrasings to talk about things, when this didn't simply directly reference one another. The Rolling Stones had put together a compilation album of music that had influenced them, and when I listened to it, it became pretty clear to me that even when the Stones weren't directly making covers of older songs, they were unafraid to lift bits and pieces of them. And over the years, I'd started to notice that it wasn't only they that did this.

The general theme of Ain't No Sunshine is the longing for something that you know isn't good for you. And that lends the song a poignancy that I was unaware of before I'd carefully listened to the lyrics. And a level of universality. Because relationships aren't the only things that we want, that aren't good for us.

Make Me Feel Fine

Blowing through the jasmine in my mind...

I Need A Dollar

The juxtaposition of hard times, unemployment and despair with jaunty, addictive lyrics and upbeat tempo is jarring, but strangely compelling.

The Love is Gone

I was listening to "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)" by Aretha Franklin today. This song, written by Clarence Paul, Morris Broadnax and Stevie Wonder is listed by the Rolling Stones as music that was important to them. And I can see that, it's a great song, and Franklin's vocals give you the idea of the heartache she feels after her lover leaves her.

But it's an interesting sign of the times. What, back in the day, was considered a model of love and devotion to someone, would now be a one-way ticket to a restraining order.