April 2008 Archives
And the Winner Is...Donny Hathaway, Mr. Soul
I've spent better part of that last 20-years--what seems like a lifetime--trying to write about Donny Hathaway. It's not as though I haven't written about Hathaway, but Hathaway's music, his Soul really, demands a level of emotional commitment that, frankly, overwhelms the logic of my vocations as writer and critic. I mean, after listening to Donny Hathaway sing and moan and hum and caress that piano/Fender Rhodes, what the hell else is there to write about?
Take for instance Hathaway's "Giving Up"--a song written by the late great arranger Van McCoy (he of "The Hustle"). Beginning, something like a dirge--and with Hathaway that always seemed his way, the pace and timing of his ballads akin to some centuries old funeral hymn--the song's second verse takes on a second musical life (or is it that a second sight) as Hathaway and his rhythm section, in seeming double-time, against the real-time of Hathaway's voice, narrate the heart palpitations of a man on the brink of losing his mind. And you know he's on the brink when he admits in the third verse, "whether she knows or not, she really needs me too," only to bellow a sinister laugh in admission that he's on the other side of his sanity. And then the song literally collapses into the familiarity of a fully-blown Blues groove.
"Giving Up" is a signature example Of Hathaway's ability to summon the well-spring of black musical idioms and bring them in conversation with emotional darkness of his Soul. And it is perhaps that darkness that has led so many writers to take their own (critical) lives, in an attempt to capture the emotional depth of Hathaway's art. This is what, in part, Ed Pavlic suggests in his brilliant and moving prose poem, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press).
Lacking the kind of archival material (beyond the music, of course) that has helped many a critic to bring Soul Men past alive on the pages of books and magazines, Pavlic, an award winning poet and scholar, was forced to use traces of Hathaway's emotional DNA (provided by the music, of course). As Pavlic writes in the acknowledgments, "Much of this book is a kind of dance between what I needed to know and not know about Donny Hathaway in order to find out what I had to say...the basic truth of the book is what I've made from the sound of Hathaway's voice, the rhythm of his work."
According to Pavlic, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced started as an attempt to write a biography about Hathaway, but as Hathaway's spirit seemed to stonewall attempts to get the story right/write, he gave in to the calling of the music. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced traffics in all of the rumor and innuendo surrounding Hathaway's life and tragic death (including his bouts with mental illness), but rather than read like a speculative fiction about the man, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced instead animates the traces of truth that Hathaway's music revels in.
In one particularly compelling section called "Interview: Graveyard Shift: Carr Square Projects: July 20, 1980: St. Louis, MO," Pavlic imagines a reporter traveling to the place where Hathaway grew up, querying residents about Hathaway's legacy the year after his death. One resident recalls seeing Hathaway in concert:
Women in the audience would call out to him when he'd pause/Other Women would answer them/Men didn't say a word/I know I didn't/The women'd have themselves a ball, a party, almost like they're watching themselves on stage/Not the men/He'd take your life like you knew he took his own life/He'd wrap it around his fist and lay it up side your head
Here Pavlic recalls those fabulous live recordings of Hathaway, in which the voices of the women in the crowd were always so audible--continuous "call and response" moments--and yet rarely do we hear the voices of the men. It is this attention to seemingly matter-less detail--what were these men thinking about, as Hathaway probed the very essence of their existence?--that provides Winners Have Yet to Be Announced so much of its--and I hate to use this word--authenticity or rather sincerity to borrow a thought from John L. Jackson, Jr.
Donny Hathaway remains an enigma among popular music audiences as his most well known songs, "Where is the Love?" and "The Closer I Get to You" are award-winning duets recorded with Roberta Flack. While those songs are brilliant in their own right, they capture little of the emotional and spiritual depth of Hathaway's own recordings. Hathaway's full length recordings like Everything is Everything (1969), Extensions of a Man (1972), and in particular Donny Hathaway (1970) demand a level of musical commitment, that there was little chance that he was going to earn a popular following, even as giants such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Jerry Butler sang his praises.
Ed Pavlic's Winners Have Yet to Be Announced shines a bright light on the legacy of a man, whose music has unfortunately been long removed to darkened corners of Soul's yesteryear. The book's title is taken from an obituary for Hathaway that appeared in the Washington Post: "the door to the room was locked and there was no evidence of foul play...He was nominated for a second Grammy in 1978. Winners have yet to be announced."
Obama Elitist? I'm Hearing Something Else
Tags: Barack Obama, Elitist, Hillary Clinton, John McCain
So in a recent conversation, Barack Obama tried a little too hard to make that connection between the disaffection of the white working class and the white poor, and their proclivity to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" as a way to make meaning of the diminishing returns of their lives. Guns and religion and "the other," the Senator from Illinois argued were the comfort foods of choice for many. The fact that Obama suggested that some folk in these communities might be tad bitter, should not in and of itself raise any eyebrows, but the speed and derision that the presumptive (I'm sick of this word) Republican nominee John McCain and New York Senator Hillary Clinton asserted that Obama's comments were "demeaning" and Obama, himself, out of touch, suggests that there is something else at play.
There's no small irony that two of the wealthiest members of the Senate would describe a former community organizer as out of touch. But McCain and Clinton's responses have nothing to do with the black and brown urban poor that Obama broke bread with in Illinois, but rather the white working poor and working class in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where high-wage jobs are scarce and hope, increasingly even scarcer. I would argue that none of the candidates, including Senator Obama, are really in touch with what's happening in small town America.
For instance, look how middle-class Philadelphia suburbanites have suddenly become the charmed constituency in the forthcoming Pennsylvania primary. Indeed Senator McCain as recently as at three weeks ago argued vehemently that the Federal Government should not alleviate the financial woes of those in the very communities that Obama talked about, who are losing their homes in record numbers. Bitter? I bet more than few in those communities are bitter in response to the Federal Government's essential bailout of Bear Sterns.
In a country where God and the flag are held in the highest esteem and any bitterness expressed toward the government--particularly in the post 9/11 era--is viewed with suspicion by some, if not an outright act of treason (think about reaction to Michelle Obama's comments earlier this year.), it has often been easy for marginalized communities of all backgrounds, to identify scapegoats, be it in the form of racial conspiracy theories, anti-Black racism and the kind of xenophobia expressed in response to illegal, and likely legal immigration.
In any other Presidential campaign and in any other historical moment, the depiction of an opposition candidate as "elitist" and "out of touch" is slick and potentially effective politicking; it's the reason why Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, dumbed-himself-down in 1992. But the assertion that Barack Obama--an highly educated, upper-middle-class and articulate black man--is an "elitist," is really code for "uppity nigger." In terms of instigating anti-Black racism and violence in this country, few things were more potent than the perception that black people, and black men in particular, did not know their place--whether it be an act of "reckless eyeballing" or too prideful of a demeanor.
What McCain and Clinton are essentially signaling to the white underclass and working poor is that "this nigger thinks he's better than you." But these attempts are part of a dated racial politics that is increasingly giving way to what Ellen McGirt of Fast Company Magazine calls a "postboomer society" where Obama is reflective of an attempt to move "beyond traditional identity politics." Still, it's hard to imagine that there won't be a symbolic "lynching" in Senator Obama's future.
Hearing (Thinking) Black Death
The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson's new book April 4, 1968 reads: "You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death," to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There's a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death. Perhaps more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death--the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments--all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it's been in the province of black creative expression--Black Genius more broadly--that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea death, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right.
When the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 "Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?" it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle. "Were You There?" was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang its words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible.
"Were You There?" was featured on a brilliant recording by the late Max Roach called Lift Every Voice and Sing, which paired the legendary drummer's regular jazz band with the JC White Singers. "Were You There?" begins as a dirge--a literal death march--musically transporting listeners to the horse-driven carriage that so many boldly walked behind on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in April of 1968. But just as you could imagine the collective black body politic kneeling at yet another grave, for yet another murdered soul and succumbing to an unfathomable despair, the song's tone changes. Like the phoenix, the collective black body politic musically rises and when the JC White Singers ask the subsequent question, "Were You There, When They Rode away the Storm?" the place and space of death--the physical and psychic--had been transformed into something like a freedom--a freedom not explicitly in the traditional sense of the world, but something more philosophical as simply represented in a phrase like "I'm--We're still here."
Roach's Lift Every Voice and Sing was among the many recordings released in the aftermath of King's murder. Nina Simone's "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)" is perhaps the most popular and one that was written explicitly with King's murder as inspiration. In the middle of Simone's live 12-minute version of the song, she directly addresses the crowd, recalling the then recent deaths of John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, and Otis Redding. Simone then asks aloud, "Do you realize how many we have lost?"--reinforcing the idea that at the time of King's murder, Black Death was literally in the air.
The power of these songs--cultivated in the darkest and most dire moments of black life in the Americas--is that they are so easily recalled at moments of great distress. These songs were not simply emotional responses to loss, but really an important intellectual response--the way that Blackness thinks death.
