I haven’t been in a car in awhile, so I’d forgotten that there are three songs you can count on hearing on the radio on any drive through Michigan longer than an hour. “Glory Days,” “Jack and Diane,” and “Proud Mary.” Something maudlin but defiant about time moving forever forward is at the core of what rock music has always been about, and of these three classic rock tracks, I’ve always felt Creedence got the balance just right: “And I never lost one minute of sleeping, Worrying bout the way things might have been.”
Of course, Creedence also had the exceptional luck of having Ike and Tina cover their song two years after it was released, in a fantastic showstopper of a performance that converts the swamp lethargy of those turning wheels into burning hip gyrations, Tina spitting out the lyrics like firecrackers. I heard the cover first, and that version always sounds like definitive one.
Creedence makes great driving music, the riverboat/interstate analogy works perfectly to endow whatever mundane task your headed to with a glint of rebellion. But seeing a man with tight twists and a superman t-shirt turn it out with Tina’s version last night at a gay karaoke bar gave driving music another meaning entirely.
Ike and Tina start the song “nice on backup and easy,” Ike almost parodying Creedence by drawling out “rolling on the river” slow as molasses, before th band abruptly switches to an up-tempo dance version that jolts you out of your torpor and drives your body into ecstatic motion. Tina repeating the lyrics in both idioms lifts the spirit up through a sort of parallax view on life’s vicissitudes: two equally valid viewpoints on a single phenomenon that cannot ever be reconciled with each other.
I always know which one I want to see, hear and feel.
My new article on Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, is now up at The Scholar & Feminist Online, and it’s in good company, nestled between articles by Lani Guinier and Angela Davis! It’s a bit intimidating to see my name next to such icons, but I’m delighted and privileged that the guest editors, Kim F. Hall and Christine Cynn, invited me to participate.
The issue, entitled “Rewriting Dispersal: Africana Gender Studies” is a wonderful interdisciplinary mix of scholarship, essays, and creative work, so please check it out.
Tavia Nyong'o, The Amalgamation Waltz (Minnesota, 2009)
In honor of the publication of my first book, I’ll be devoting this blog to matters of cultural hybridity, multiracial politics, and spectacles of “mixed race” for a while. I’ll pick up on current events and new publications, both popular and scholarly. And I’ll try to address issues I didn’t get to take up in the book, or that I’d perhaps approach differently now.
Performance shot of Keith + Mendi Obadike’s fantastic Afropop-rock ghost story musical which closed Saturday night at The Kitchen. I’ll post a full review later.
Performance shot of Keith + Mendi Obadike’s fantastic Afropop-rock ghost story musical which closed Saturday night at The Kitchen. I’ll post a full review later.
After two weekends on the road, I’m back to some domestic tranquility with the art educator, two rambunctious dogs, and my record collection. First up: Amadou & Mariam’s Welcome to Mali. I slept on this duo for awhile: the way they got introduced to world music audiences seemed too cute by half: boy meets girl at the school for the blind, and the rest is history.
My bad. Their music is as gorgeous and driving as the best that has come out of Bamako. The opening track of the album, produced by Blur’s Damon Albarn, is a kind of amuse bouche, foregrounding Mariam’s voice against a “spookily disembodied … musical landscape” that somehow obviates the tired “fusion” label. This isn’t your father’s Graceland, but two fine musicians working confidently with a range of collaborators, from Albarn to Somalia’s K’Naan.
Also caught Extra Golden a week or two ago live in New York. You heard it here first: benga is the new black.
5. Learning the original lyrics for Big Rock Candy Mountain from Graham Raulerson.
4. Learning from Fred Maus that the proper response when handed that “Time’s up” slip of paper is: “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
3. Being upstaged by my own video clip of Kalup Linzy singing in the bathtub: I’m pretty sure that got bigger round of applause than I did.
2. The resonances between Maureen Mahon’s paper on Ronnie Spector, Diane Pecknold’s on Linda Martel and Karen Shimakawa’s on Enka sensation Jero. They all spoke to how racially mixed bodies, or just bodies singing in the ‘wrong’ genre, open up necessary, transnational and comparative historical conversations about race and the music industry.
1. Disagreeing with everything David Thomas said … and hanging on to his every word.
“And then you told me that my pain entertained …” — Stew “Working the Wound”
I’ve always thought Gnarls Barkley’s second album, The Odd Couple, was the most slept on record of 2008. So when, inspired by Guillermo E. Brown’s song “Shuffle Mode” to do just that this morning while walking the dog, and having “Blind Mary” from that very LP spin up as the second tune, I got to thinking again about the class I just taught on hip hop, and how I kind of missed the mark and why.
We talk about hip hop misogyny but in the very limited way it always gets discussed: either defensively or reductively. And I think we took at face value the gangsta front of current hip hop, without thinking about how artists like Cee-Lo fit into the mix of what is more than just a particular genre, but a whole culture, even a way of life. We are used to thinking about female singers like Mary J. Blige and even Erykah Badu as hip hop, but male singers are still classed as R&B or Pop.
Or were prior to a certain notoriously vocoder-heavy album from hip hop’s current crown prince. If most critics followed Kanye down the rabbit hole of his misogynistic self-pity on 808s and Heartbreak, it was in part because his resort to singing seemed to admit a male vulnerability back into the rap that all the braggadocio had tried to disavow. If his masochistic display caught on so well, it was not only as the hipster’s alternative to Lil Wayne, but also because Kanye’s brand of narcissistic display cannily reconciled male abjection with the ever-compelling image of the fly guy onamove. Love Lockdown always reminds me of Lisa Stansfield’s Cole Porter cover, Down in the Depths (on the 90th floor) from the original Red, Hot + Blue album. Reclining in glamorous deshabille in posh, plush surroundings is one way of admitting your “softer side”; but its hardly a radical reimagining of gender roles. That’s probably why 808s was both so popular and critically acclaimed.
When he sings on “Heartless” of “the coldest story ever told” about a man “who lost his soul to a woman so heartless” its sounds like the fairy tale that is, complete with “Dr. Evil” a.k.a. the Wicked Witch.
When Cee-Lo goes into similar Grimm’s Brother territory on “Surprise,” the effect is far more chilling:
Now the ending to every story is most enchanting
Now whether its heaven or hell I wear it well
Please forgive me for rambling
I just wanted ya’ll
To know that I don’t know it all
So when that big o’l smile ends up
Being just a disguise
Don’t be surprised …
Can you imagine Kanye admitting to the actual vulnerability of “not knowing it all”? But that’s the starting premise of Cee-Lo’s compellingly unsettling performance of masculinity on The Odd Couple. The video for “Run” hits it perfectly: Dangermouse’s addictive beats set the body rocking hard enough to withstand the sheer anguish of Cee-Lo’s lyrics. Run, he’s a natural disaster …
But this isn’t just a “tears of the clown” act. It’s also another way of imagining desire between men and women outside normative heterosexuality. Take Blind Mary:
She has never seen the sunshine
Yet she’s getting along just fine
She’s not staying, she’s just passing through
Hey, do you mind if I follow you?
[Chorus:]
I love, Mary!
Blind Mary, marry me
I love, Mary!
I heard a voice say catch me if you can
Before you know it I was holding her hand
It’s harder to imagine than understand
How she knows exactly who I am
She’s my friend, she doesn’t judge me
She has no idea I’m ugly
So I’ve absolutely nothing to hide
Because I’m so much prettier inside
The thing I love about this song is how it binds male abjection to love for — rather than contempt and hatred for — women. Cee-Lo turns a cliche (inner beauty) on its head by showing how the society that ostensibly extolls it actually continues to stigmatize the blind and ugly. The whole theme of the album — running, following, catching up, moving on — are perfectly summed up here in a singular, heterotopic love.
Blind Mary isn’t a song about (f)ugly pride or disabled rights. It’s about the glamor of certain folks who have figured out how to live in a different sort of ordinary, and how their example, in itself, calls us out from our limited self-conceptions into a different way of being. An odd couple indeed.
The requisite trip to YouTube turned up a couple covers of this tune, to my surprise, the most affecting for me is this by Durand Bernarr. At first its a little American Idol, what with all the melisma. I’m simultaneously compelled and jarred by seeing this world-weary song resituated in the emotive utopia of the teenage bedroom idiom. But as I stay with it it gets better, and when the video segues to a dub version Bernarr performed out in a club, an environment which makes him seem both older and cooler, I have a feeling I would have loved to have been there to hear it live.
Here’s a young woman singing the song. love that the reason she gives is “cuz I know ain’t nobody else ever going to sing it.” That’s so brown punk!
My new article on Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, is now up at 
