In Tamsin's head it all began with an 8 oz bottle of water and some inappropriate arm lowering. My opinion is much less clear and far more skeptical....
The time was about 930 at night, Hartsfield-Jackson airport, security checkpoint 1. Initially things seemed quite calm and level headed- boring even. I entertained myself by creating back stories and modus operandi for the other passengers, while simultaneously comparing our progress to that of an unusually smiley girl in a lavender t-shirt. Matter of fact, I silently gave the TSA attendants credit for their polite and friendly attitudes. Without the help of an older TSA lady with frizzy blonde hair we might have lost my race altogether! Lavender shirt girl had picked the right line and grabbed the holeshot. At the wire we entered the conveyor line just before her. To be clear she ended right behind us! Being the relentless competitor I am, I turned and smiled uncomfortably. Somehow my smirk did little to suppress her perma-grin. Marijuana... it's strong stuff.
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As the frail pale teenager in front of me exited the security machine I quickly headed in. This was an important trip and I felt justifiably excited to begin. Upon my exit I made an apparently imposing move toward the conveyor, which elicited an order to "step back !" from the attendant. He gazed carefully at the device's accompanying screen. Then he mumbled something while poking at my pockets and swabbing my hands. Once the swab passed a test I was finally allowed to proceed to my things, which Tamsin had attentively grabbed off the conveyor. Unfortunately they too had found a fault in the eyes of TSA, the aforementioned 8 oz of H2o. "Put all this aside", I thought. There is a higher purpose.....
"Uncle... Uncle... Uncle Daaaaavid"! This is how our precocious little Ruby begins any and every one of our interactions throughout the trip. Initially it felt silly and well meaning. Later it occurs to me that she's still learning to use these words... The last time we were together she was much less verbal and a bit slower on her tiny toes... Some time Saturday I vowed to let no more than six months fall before our next visit. By then she will no doubt have a college degree and a French boyfriend with a bad attitude!
But four days come and go in a hot flash of dress up games and family dinners. When we find Dana and Ruby at the park facing the intended locale for our last supper, I realize that I can hardly feel the passage of time. Hugs, cries, gifts, and taxi cabs spin before me too fast. Tamsin finds me gazing wistfully out the window assuming that I'm already in kid-o withdrawal, maybe I am. Yet consciously my thoughts focus on the speed of it all. How have we come and gone so far? Or have we?
The words "Deep Racial Anxiety" fill the bottom of a large flat screen TV leaving the top to depict a big orange confederate battle flag rippling in a fast moving wind. Moments before a 50-something TSA screener named Lucky let me know that he'd "been expecting me". Yeah that's right sports fans. Little ol' David: never arrested, never wanted, never even cautioned. The black guy taunted by the black members of our high school lacrosse team with the euphemism "Snowflake". It was my "lucky" day. "Randomly" selected for an additional security screening.
The result was what I would call a completely intentional security harassment. Of course some of you may call that "playing the race card", a turn of phrase I've always found unendingly humorous. For the simple fact that it implies that there is always some other card to play. Perhaps the Jack of Personal Accountability or the Queen of Who Gives a Shit. Or that it's a good idea For me to continue playing cards at all. History, and my mother, tell me that I should merely fold my cards and live to play another day...
For a moment, let's play a different game shall we? What if I was randomly selected, accidentally swabbed, and unnecessarily searched? My skin color and age played no relevance. What do we gain from making everyone skeptical and afraid? Oh, and worse still... COMPLIANT?! They say we are safer, but of course we have no data on how many plots are thwarted. There is no way to extrapolate a degree to which we are more safe. And what is "safety" besides a lack of danger or a lack of pain?
I have repeated numerous times that I want to live long, stay weird, and tell my stories. Yet in the most simplistic terms we are created to be born, to live, and to die. If the stuff in between the first (born) and the last (die) is little more than a pleasant avoidance of pain, loss, or danger than I think the only true course of action is to live a life that mimics a quick dramatic take off and a hard destructive descent. At least that way niece Ruby will never have to see Uncle David rubbed across his chest by a man in a uniform with purple latex gloves.....
Oh, and PS- I would strongly recommend living a life with as little plane travel as possible!! These people are fucking nuts, shit-for-brains, mf’s!! There’s no telling how many weapons could wind up on a plane guarded by folks who are bothered by a nerd from Ohio with an overnight bag and a Kindle.....
I don’t know if other people have moments of WW(enter initial)D the way I do. Those bracelets were a genius idea... However many Christians have just enough understanding of the bible to make me worry what they might do when thinking: What Would Jesus Do. But I digress, being a casual student of history I have a degree of perspective on various time periods and their goings on. Moments ago I stumbled onto a television performance by a band called London Grammar. To me that name sounds like either a thinly veiled British public school advertisement or a punchline about cockney accents. The group is fronted by a gorgeous blond singer with a voice that splices Kate Bush and Sharon Boyle into something you might be called “Hipster Female Croon”. She is flanked by a commensurately enigmatic guitarist and the obligatory gaunt keyboard dude in black.
London Grammar’s music is a convincing approximation of 80’s synth pop, much in the style of the aforementioned Kate Bush. Leaving me asking the question: WWAEPSD. To recap that is, What Would Angry Eighties Pop Stars Do. Perhaps they aren’t angry at all, but I can’t help but think they have mixed feelings about being aped so succinctly. Musicians like Bush, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Brian Eno, or Phil Collins invested heavily in synthesizers. These were early days and there was no way to get into the market cheaply. Purchase of each new expensive instruments directly funded the creation of the next generation. Synths were big bulky things often weight 50 lbs or more, failures were a daily occurrence, circuits often caught on fire, and worst of all these instruments were very complicated to use.
From the late 70’s through the late 80’s artists essentially worked alongside the engineers and designers to create musical sounds and instrumentation which are completely ubiquitous now. So do these warriors of the snyth revolution resent their children for dialing up generations worth of music in seconds on a laptop? Hard to say... I would lean toward saying yes, not simply because I am the one doing the pontificating here, but also because these folks come from a progressive time. They never simply picked up a genre or a record from the past and replicated it for their purposes. From the late 60’s through the early 90’s, these iconic artists and many more were on a dead run of progressivism. Blues-Rock, Folk-Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Prog Rock, Funk, Disco, New Wave, World Pop. Music video should go in there somewhere... but it didn’t fit the rhyme scheme.....
Of course as we oft discuss here at HWS.... the 20th century made off for the sunset 13 or 14 years ago depending on who you ask... I don’t blame London Grammar for anything mind you, they are a hip little band fit for their time and place. Fine, not everyone needs to reinvent the wheel... Few can. But what are we doing in this century if our only ambition is to do what the last one did but with smaller kit (that’s British for “equipment”)? Its a simple formula really... Take pre-war blues, feed it back through Rock n’ Roll, add technology (I.E. louder guitar/bass amplification), and whala! Blues-Rock. Is it an entirely new genre? No. But it is clear progression from the last good idea. Musical genres, like all art periods, tell the story of their time. “Blues” is the baby of slavery, African music, and Christian hymns. Rock n’ Roll is the Post-War-Blues-Technology-Love-Child. Blues-Rock cuts a blend of those two distinct (yet related) genres and tells the story of civil rights, a record industry boom, post 50’s American, and cultural immersion. So what does the 80’s Synth-Pop revival tell us about now? There are no more good ideas...? Art is finished? No, no, no... That’s bullshit. All bullshit. But I will say this... new ideas (that we listeners are interested in accepting) will continue to be harder to come by.
Recently I read about something that a more legit hip-hop fan has probably known for years.... There is a “secret” Wu Tang Clan record on the way! What you didn’t know that?! Apparently you are even less well informed that me! Sometime later this year Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is due to “hit” the public stage. However, this double LP is intended to do something that I am quite sure no record has done before. There will only be ONE... SINGLE.... “copy” of the record issued to the public by the group. This singular disc will come in a very special silver engraved box built by a Moroccan artisan who most often works on gifts from kings and queens to kings and queens. The album has been in the works for 5 years now, and it is a completely separate project from Wu Tang’s other forthcoming record, due for a conventional commercial release, A Better Tomorrow. According to the clan’s undisputed leader, RZA, the ambition for this project is to make a sea change in music: “We’re about to put out a piece of art like nobody else has done in the history of [modern] music. We’re making a single-sale collector’s item. This is like somebody having the scepter of an Egyptian king.”
Supposedly there are a bevy of large museums and venues lining up to host “viewings” of the album, something analogous to the exhibition of a masterwork of visual art. Right here I am going to hold off on any long expletive laden lambasts of such a concept. Your humble scribe is neither appreciative enough of fine art nor a foe to hip-hop. I go back and forth on being a hip-hip fan or not but I am definitely no enemy. Instead I want to try and glorify the lofty goals this album sets out to achieve. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is probably the most overt attempt by an established artists to upset the applecart since Radiohead released the album In Rainbows with “pay as you like” pricing back in 2007. As you might assume, reports vary on the success of this effort. The cynical part of my brain wants to believe the whole thing was a stunt more than anything else. The band’s next Record was released on their own vanity label, Ticker Tape Ltd, which is a subsidiary of XL records. XL is far from what I would call an “indie label”. Their artists Jack White, Vampire Weekend, and Adele.
Wu Tang is putting out another record for conventional release, yes. So they haven’t gone completely balls out. However I think the Shaolin project still puts their collective ass to the flame. Rather than capitalize on it as a “long lost secret album” which would no doubt score commercially, they are trying to suggest a new way. For over a century American culture has treated music as an almost purely commercial device. We almost never give it away or miss opportunities to sell it as individual units. RZA is asking us to consider music as a larger idea, an art form worthy of greater consideration. Everyday since the integration of recorded music into American life we have consistently marginalized it. Music has been ours to have and manipulate however and wherever we want. We don’t have to learn to play it or engage those who do, we simply buy it as needed and at bargain basement prices when compared to other forms of art.
When I think about the future of music, I often feel tempted to try and devise a scheme to blow up the machines and bring us back to the days of lutes and troubadours... But that is nothing more than fantasy. I do wish we could agree to take music out of our ears and out of our pockets more often. Concerts and festivals are obviously great at this but what of Beats audio headphones and Pandora stations? What would happen if there were no more music listening secrets? If I knew yours and you knew mine......
Recently I came across an interview with the grandson of Supreme Court judge Hugo Black. Justice black’s family was essentially run out of their home state of Alabama due to his stance on civil rights. Stephen Black has moved back to Alabama and founded Impact Alabama, an organization designed to involve young college grads with their community. The interview ended with a quote that seems quite fitting for this piece: “The single largest challenge to the future of an ethical country, a moral country, is not terrorism and it isn’t another banking crisis. It is a continuing civic disconnect, in other words more and more American spending less and less personal time with people unlike themselves aimed at goals and initiatives beyond their own self interest. That is poisonous to a democracy”.
I couldn’t agree more Mr. Black, and I’ll tell you what. I will listen to your Iron & Wine if you listen to my Lamb of God....
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