http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 17 Nov 2006 07:58:22 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/11/17/075822.php Robert LashleyTo protest their founder's execution, a group of Crips in Tacoma, Washington destroyed a valuable chunk of their community. The building that once housed The Northwest Dispatch, Tacoma's longstanding black newspaper until only recently, was badly vandalized with it's windows smashed, insides torn up, and outside walls sprayed with Crip insignias that indicated the group had not yet given up their two-decade long war with Tacoma's Black community. In it's heyday, the Dispatch was run with an iron but loving fist by Virginia Taylor. Even though the paper went south after she died, she remained a vital community figure. Her face is painted on a rainbow mural across the street from People's Park, the epicenter of so much of the violence that has haunted black Tacoma for so long, and the symbol of when that small area of the city made the entire town one of the most dangerous places to live in the country. On the night I saw them last December, they all stood there within a block and a half radius on the same street: the picture of Taylor, one on a bright beautiful painting highlighting community points of light, the park, and the wrecked Dispatch building, a symbol of the Crips showing just how little one of those points of light meant to them.A year after Williams' execution, I contrast what I saw that night with the pageantry outside of the facility in which Williams was executed. The Crip father might have meant one thing to all those too aware of gang activity, but inside that gilded circle of celebrities, politicians, and activists, he was Sacco, Vanzetti, and Alfred Dreyfus rolled into one. The dynamics regarding their complaint were tired enough to make even the most sympathetic of liberals groan: university academics and activists romanticizing a black outlaw while enacting in an orgy of emotionalist radical street theater. Nearing the minutes leading to his death, drum circles were being played, spoken word poems were being read in protest, and scores of people were actually crying as if an injustice actually happened. Even Tookie's law team and academic supporters got in the act by screaming at the family members of the victim that they had killed an innocent man.Personally, the night Williams was executed, I got blind drunk and cried my eyeballs out. I didn't do it because Williams was going to die, nor did I do it in protest of the radical politics of Williams' supporters. I did it because those supporters and those civil rights organizations that used so much emotion and exerted so much energy to defend Williams lifted nary a finger in protest of the hundreds of thousands of black lives either ended or destroyed by Williams and the millions of black lives that his gang ended up tormenting. No drum circles have ever been played for the young men caught up in the death vise of Williams' gang because of poor fathering, poor schooling, and no culpable opportunities. No emotional, angst-ridden poems were written and spoken for the single mothers trying to raise those young men, or the young women in these neighborhoods that aren't getting any love and support from those young men, while being bombarded with vicious imagery from MTV and BET in the process. No tears were shed for the elderly black folks in countless neighborhoods in America who are imprisoned because of Crip activity; people scarred by both Jim Crow and the project industrial complex; people who served as the backbone of working class black communities before crack hit those communities harder than a Joe Frazier left hook; people who can't go outside or do regular human activities on the fear that they might get robbed or shot. For god sake, just thinking about that makes me want to take a drink.The Crips, those romantic outlaws that Williams' amen corner cried and bled for, have done more damage to the black people they supposedly love than any of them could comprehend. Much of that ignorance from black leadership has to do with the outlaw fetishizing nationalism that the black political establishment adopted in the post civil rights era. Many people believed that Black America had to begin anew 40 years ago, led by a critical male intelligentsia whose sole goal and purpose was to express their anger at the white man and teach the unwashed, unlearned masses pure rage, the only expression they deemed fit for black thought. Another part of that ignorance comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of those leaders and that select circle of "modern civil rights intellectuals" come from communities where they don't have to deal with Crip activity. To many of them, however, that's beside the point: the Crips and the people who are victimized by them aren't people, but bargaining chips. The students playing in the drum circles can get status as "community activists." The professors writing "poetry" and going on national television can get tenure, and the lawyers who throw temper tantrums in the execution scene can get money and notoriety.It would have been something, however, if conservatives had mounted a reasoned defense of the people Tookie victimized, but they didn't. On the night of his execution, conservative pundits from FOX , CNN, and MSNBC either took the usual route in either assuming that a group of educated loons spoke for 30 million people, played up the criminality and threat Williams was to their communities, or brought up the idea that it was a double standard that Williams wasn't charged with a hate crime in killing four non-blacks. I have as little a stomach for the professional race lobby as anyone in America, but they can't force and bogart their way to studio airtime. There comes a point when constant presence of race baiting loons on the television isn't as much about what is wrong with them as it is about what a great portion of America wants black people to be. Although Larry Elder was right when he said Tookie wasn't being charged with a hate crime because he was black, his elevation of those four people who he killed, a grotesque tragedy in its own right, over the hundreds of thousands of lives he helped either kill or ruin, shows as much a disdain for those victims of gang activity as those students, professors, and lawyers could ever drum up.For me it comes down to what those vulgar Crip hieroglyphics sprayed in the old Dispatch office mean, and they mean radically different things to different groups. In the eyes of too many liberals, that graffiti only means the cry and struggle of downtrodden young men. In the eyes of too many conservatives, it means the moral poverty of a people and a culture. In the eyes of the people in that Tacoma block and neighborhood, however, those Crip insignias mean they have no rights that gang members respect. They are in a territory partly occupied by those gang members, and they better not even think of doing anything about it under the threat of violence and even death. If you, dear reader, have your opinion fall in either of the first two categories, and refuse to acknowledge the third, I will not stoop to say that you should check your conscience; for if you do, you don't have one at all. Culture55917@blogcritics.org Fri, 17 Nov 2006 07:58:22 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/07/22/091436.php Robert Lashley"I call Aretha our lady of mysterious sorrows. Her eyes were incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her Depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don't pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical genius." (Jerry Wexler)While at lunch last year, a grad student girlfriend of mine asked me a chilling question " If you substitute food for heroin," she said "just how different is Aretha Franklin from Billie Holliday." It forced me to take a microscope to my own idolization of her, and what the great female artists of black music meant to the world and the terrain of history. For the past 40 years Aretha has been hoisted on a pedestal of fanatical idolatry and suffocating demands. No performer in the history of African American art has ever had the expectations as had Aretha by her audience. Her body of work isn't a matter of critical record, but of nationalist fervor. Aretha's artistic stratosphere is a place where she can do no right and do no wrong at the same time; where she is supposed to provide uncontested life affirming inspiration every single time she steps on stage or else. The constant demand for perfection would stilt the growth of any performer; and it has for her work over the past 25 years which, to put it nicely, has been erratic. (Although her last two albums have been very good.)But to completely abhor the world Aretha lives in would discount the fact she has done so much, reached that stratosphere of perfection so many times, gone so deep into the psyche, and touched the deepest part of so many people's souls her fans couldn't help but fanatically idolize her. If black culture's basic roots lie in the matriarchal aesthetic of the black church, Aretha Franklin had a hold of more branches than most everybody. At her best, she isn't just a great artist, she's a historical figure. Lady soul. The Queen of soul. The last of the great female gospel communicators, (Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Marion Williams) who single-handedly gave a people back a piece of their culture. When she got her first gold record, Martin Luther King was her presenter (she later sang at his funeral). The overwhelming immediacy of her art has made her a pop culture deity; its personal nature has made her like family to her fans, who worry and fret about her like she is their flesh and blood. But in a way that reverence rings slightly hollow, because in the end we (her fans, myself included) are not really members of her family but idolaters of her beautiful art. At her best, her music has been so vibrant, visceral, and easy to understand you forget the complicated inner workings and machinations one must have to make art this universally understandable in the first place. And speaking for myself, the deeper I look into her life and work, the more I realize in order to earn the title of "queen of soul," she had to pay a terrible price. I have to take you back to 1966. Brother Ray had just kicked heroin and came back on the charts with a failsafe, risk free pop album. Otis Redding was revolutionizing pop music everywhere in the world but the U.S. top 40 charts. James Brown was just beginning to redefine musical minimalist polyrhythmic composition. James Carr was in his manic-depressive prime. Motown was at its apex, the hit factory at its mightiest before Berry Gordy's dictatorial pop constraints would force it to grind to a halt. And Aretha Franklin was a struggling jazz vocalist, going through hell. A gospel prodigy with a huge underground reputation, she married Ted White, a smooth talking hustler from Detroit who served as her Svengali/manager/personal dictator. Throughout the early to mid '60s, White cajoled her into making overly mannered jazz records; the kind of "tasteful" yet patronizing crossover 45s that underestimated its audience. He also made Ike Turner seemed like Mr. Rogers. From the pages of Soul, Sepia, and Time Magazine to the personal accounts of her closest friends (family, Jerry Wexler, various producers, and friends) you could hear stories of vicious public and private beatings and a disciplinary streak that would give the marquis de Sade pause (he would force her into a room for four days straight to write songs.) He had single-handedly wrecked Aretha's relationship with Columbia Records and left her career seemingly in tatters. Yes she was a talent, but who wanted the abusive bully (a racist, too) that came with her? Atlantic Records did. Jerry Wexler had knowledge of Aretha as early as her pre-teen church 45s and when Aretha's CBS contract ran out, he offered Ted White an immense amount of money for her services. After he reluctantly accepted, Wexler picked out some songs for Aretha to record and sent him and Aretha down to the great Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama for recording. White, fearing losing control of Aretha and unwilling to accept that she could make money by singing deep soul, terrorized the studio, and nearly ended the contract before it started. He picked fights with the White Muscle Shoals band members, tried to tell musicians what to play (even though White could barely read music) and showed himself a monster to everyone but Aretha. So instead of ending the deal, Wexler, Muscle Shoals, Aretha, and co. decided to make art out of the situation. And the rest, to use the most shopworn of cliched quotes, is history. Although the first song, "I Never Loved A Man the Way That I Love You" was originally written for a Motown pop cover band, Aretha and the Muscle Shoals crew turned it into an ode of deep pathos that remains timeless to this day. Spooner Oldham's slow, dark and bluesy organ riffs, the muted horns of King Curtis' vaunted rhythm section and Aretha's church piano came together for a voodoo blend of heavy blues and Ray Charles-esque manic-country soul. But I don't have to tell you the primary instrument that carried the song, do I? Whatever happened to cause her to let out all her years of studying under gospel's Dutch masters and the flood of emotions of her abusive relationship in a vocal explosion was nothing short of a blessing. Nothing in pop music has been the same since. In Aretha's liberation with her vocal lines came a whole new language and artistic paradigm to modern pop. Taking Mahalia Jackson's endless range and ability to render immense emotions that you didn't know you had, Clara Ward's breathtaking ability to squeeze feeling through pinpoint phrasing; and a staggering penchant for taking massive vocal risks, Aretha created an art so close to god, I would be foolish to describe it in one sentence. On "Never Loved A Man," she rips through conventional vocal bars with an immense sadness nearly everyone was in awe of but few could understand. She went past modern interpretation and gave her audience something equivalent to blend of deep dark blues and a constant, never-ending full tent revival. All done with a visceral impact clarity and range that still sounds transcendental today. After White freaked out and canceled the deal, only to be cajoled back in the studio with more money; they moved to New York to record "Drown In My Own Tears," an old Ray Charles number. In a way, its the queen paying tribute to him, blending jazz chords, bluesy horns and straight gospel singing into a puree that would sound like ear candy if Aretha didn't sing the song as if she were a moment a way from suicide ("Drown in my own tears.") But was she a perpetual victim? Unlike Billie Holliday, who could sense and feel hell coming closer with every passing day; or Ella Fitzgerald, who created beautiful musical worlds that always seemed like a momentary escape from it; Aretha fought her hell head on, battling tooth and nail to keep her sanity. "Save Me," is the sound of Aretha's inner defense mechanisms telling her that she needed to get healthy right now, whether she liked it or not. More rock oriented than anything on the album, the music serves as perfect compliment to the message. It's less textured than anything on the album and too frenetic to dance to (the guitar riff owes a debt to Them's "Gloria"). But it, along with Aretha, makes the point: sometimes you have to act crazy to keep sane. Is "Respect," the most known R&B song in the history of recorded music, played more than the national anthem? Yep. Played into the ground by oldies radio stations? Yes. Commercialized and watered down beyond belief? Yes again. Butchered by anyone who dares to cover it? That too. Yet after 35 years, "Respect," like virtually all great standards, doesn't lose impact as much as it has morphed into part of the blood stream.. 'Because dammit, after 35 years the song still holds up, play after play after play. The music is exquisite, JB-esque horns, an electric bass that sounds funkier than six days old drawers, King Curtis' blistering tenor sax and Aretha playing piano as if her hands were on fire and the only way she could put them out was by rapid-fire piano chord changes. The vocal, 1/2 girl group sass, 1/2 gospel shout, is embedded in the American consciousness second by second. To this day it still sounds like you are hearing an out of body experience, as if Aretha had been possessed by a higher power to find her own footing. It remains an anthem not just because it touches a universal truth (R.E.S.P.E.C.T.); but the inexplicable emotion and delivery Aretha brings to it expands that truth's definition. The rest of the album is filled with sublime instances where you can hear the foundation of her talent take shape. "Soul Serenade" and " If I Lose This Dream" are Aretha finally mastering the jazz-pop fusion that seemed just out of grasp in her CBS days, before she would waste beautiful vocals under mannered pre-planned phrasing and prepackaged formula. Here, she just lets loose but still keeps strong vocal form; sounding more like a looser Ivy Anderson (a singer in Duke Ellington's band in the '40s) instead of a stiff Doris Day knock off. With her breathy vocal style and picture perfect tone on "Serenade," she gives a wonderfully nuanced style homage to Dinah Washington. (She also did a tribute album of her material in '64). Capturing the song's demure but breezy subtleties, around an elegant background of a jazz band augmented with lush R&B horns, "Dream" is the best non-Bacharach Bacharach ever done on record. Aretha filters in luxurious gospel shouts into the song's schmaltz. The music, cocktail jazz arrangements blended in a pop-soul background, captures Burt's weird camp appeal without losing any of Aretha's signature style. "Let The Good Times Roll" was an example Aretha could make you shake your booty as well as move your sprit. It's pure ear candy: a catchy melody, irresistible piano keys, million dollar bass guitar, a Motown style hook and Aretha at her most light-hearted. Kind of like Mary J. Blige's "Family Affair," but not as mind-numbingly dense (I love Mary, I just hate that song). A song about a normal party with any other singer, Aretha's chops make it the spot where you want to be. "Do Right Man" focuses on her gorgeous form; proof she could make a nuanced idiosyncratic reading of a ballad as well as she could rock a full tent R&B revival. "Ain't No Way" is another pop drama musical landmark, but there is a different tone to it than the rest of her depression odes. Her other "my man done me wrong" epics on the album, contained a depressed resignation; as if she couldn't see living past tomorrow. "Way" is more of a gentle yet irritated and almost sardonic plea for her muse to handle his business . Written by Aretha's sister Carolyn, it contains the same massive depth of emotion as "Never Loved A Man" and "Drown" but it's sung as if she knows she's going to survive and in order for the man to be in her life he better straighten up his act; or she just might kick him to the curb. "Dr. Feelgood"is rightly celebrated for it’s approach to female sexuality. It's a gorgeous tune, Aretha paying the eternal compliment to the brotha who knows how to handle his business in more ways than one. Like a blaxploitation sex goddess, she builds and builds the tension, blending religious ecstasy and sexual energy leading to that breathless bridge that couldn't have been any more perfect if it was written by heaven's team of songwriters. Don't send me no doctorrrrr Fillin' me up with all those pills I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood. He takes care of all my pains and my ills Name's Dr. Feelgood and taking care of business is this man's game and after one visit to Dr. Feelgood YOU can see why feel good is his name! oh! ohh!! ohhh!! Good God almighty the man sure makes me feel GOOOOOOD!Backed up with a claustrophobic arrangement on loan from God and perhaps the most ecstatic vocals Aretha's ever done, it is one of the most literate and adult dissertations on the joys of sex and an indispensable addition to your late night record collection "A Change Is Gonna Come" is a fitting coda to this monumental epic of an album. A cover of Sam Cooke's chilling protest anthem, she turns it into a tribute and statement that her darkest days are behind her. Does she even try to top the song? Nope; For not even Aretha could top Cooke's most mountainous moment (and the greatest soul single in recorded time, in my opinion). What she does, however, is personalize the song and create a good composite sketch of its beauty. Where Sam creates an insane sermon, carrying the anger of 52 million ex-slaves all too well; Aretha makes it into a personal moral of perseverance. There is an inner peace in her interpretation, her phrasing bursting with a quiet serenity with her vocal rests sounding like sighs. It's as if she has just got out of a dark place and she won't ever be there again. "A Change Is Gonna Come" is Aretha on the road to happiness; possessing the knowledge that through a positive outlook and strong sprit, good will ultimately come to you. It came back to her in multitudes. After two more tormenting years, she dumped Ted White and continued with a slew of releases, ranging from great to brilliant to breathtaking. Some were influenced by jazz (Soul 69, The Other Side Of The Sky) some were gritty southern funk (Sprit In The Dark). Some were deep soul epics (Lady Soul), some were gorgeous pop (Aretha Arrives, Aretha Now, Young Gifted And Black, Let Me In Your Life, The Girls In Love With You) while yet others were live albums (Live at Fillmore West, Amazing Grace). All of them have one thing in common: you should buy them. Now. Yet in spite of her countless triumphs there is still a cloud of sorrow that hangs over her, adding to the mystique and mystery of her venerable persona. Out of all the living soul geniuses, (her, Stevie, Sly, Prince) she seems to have the least time enjoying her status. The most amazing and frustrating thing about Aretha is for all the dumb stuff that has been written about her, her worst critic is herself. Although coming close in the early '70s, she could never build the self-esteem to maintain an artistic persona. Her greatest performances had become her prison, as she felt obligated to the whims of the audience that had given her so much love. And when her audience revolted against her afro centric pop princess persona, she became an R&B chameleon; doing every flavor of the month style but her own, resulting in an artistic malaise that until only recently she's recovered from. Yet after all the mysticism, myth and reality that constructs the career of Aretha Franklin, I am always drawn back to a picture of her taken from that time period. It's haunting, dark and unpleasant to see, yet it tells a different story every time I look at it. It's a picture of her in a bouffant hairdo with a vat of makeup on her face that almost covers a swollen jaw, busted lip, a huge shiner under her left eye and a one-inch cut scar on her right. If on the face of a boxer, it would have prevented him from fighting for 60 days. It was the publicity shot for inside the album. Music50644@blogcritics.org Sat, 22 Jul 2006 09:14:36 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/06/09/075157.php Robert Lashley"She’s had rapists, child molesters, and lying authors on her show. And if I’m not a rags-to-riches story for her, who is?" -- Ice CubeI begin my essay with this quote for one reason: it is a lie. O’Shea Jackson (Cube’s government name) was born to two UCLA faculty members on the outskirts of its campus. He got into rap, not because of any piercing poverty-driven need or wretched-of-the-earth existence, but because he didn’t want to be an architect.He joined Eric “Eazy E” Wright, another suburban slacker, and Dr Dre, DJ Yella, and MC Ren to form NWA, a group whose racist, sexist, violent, and homophobic lyrics spoke about people they never knew, experiences they never had, and a community for which they had no right to speak.As a solo artist, Cube aimed to take Amiri Baraka’s title of the America’s nastiest black bigot, specializing in soul-scarring genocidal reveries about Jews, women, Koreans, and black people who didn’t think and act like him. After Tupac and Biggie died, he focused more on making B-movies and working on the chitlin circuit of black films. One hoped and assumed he would have grown out of his hate-filled twenties, but since the suburban public’s thirst for black genocide has came back with a vengeance, Cube has decided to return to his hate mongering roots.He's casting paid actors to create his own sadistic race war in the TV show Black/White (go look up Bruno Marcotulli’s film credits in IMDB), and creating another sadistic album, Laugh Now, Cry Later, which takes up the joys of not being a father and bashing interracial relationships. I cannot think of many people in the history of American popular culture who have taken so much from this country while giving so little.Now he wants the head of Oprah, queen of American television and one of America’s greatest modern humanitarians and Horatio Alger stories, yet unpopular with the hip-hop/hipster crowd because she won't take an ax to the white man once a week and give an hour-long exclusive interview to Chamillionare. As a psychological play, it’s easy to see why Ice Cube would look at Oprah and recoil with rage.Oprah was born in extreme poverty in the Deep South, while Cube was born in relative academic privilege. Oprah survived a hard childhood, while Cube had a peaceful two-parent home. Oprah overcame tremendous hardships to rise to tremendous heights, while Cube searched for hardships and reconstructed himself as a ghetto sadist to validate his existence. Oprah is a strong successful female, while Cube wrote several songs about raping strong successful females.Oprah has an audience that spans the world, while Cube’s audience barely goes beyond his B-movie stardom and the frat boys who eat up his records. Oprah is Cube’s nightmare made flesh, a walking remainder that he made his empire on flimsy excuse mongering, and a symbol that there have been people who have done much more with much less than he had, and who have been much more noble while doing so.Cube’s argument with Oprah is a piggy back of Rapper Ludacris’ beef with her, which in turn was piggybacked by rappers 50 cent and Killer Mike. Now, Syracuse professor Boyce Watkins, in numerous interviews and on talk shows, is giving the gripes of these rappers the imprimatur of academia. Central to Watkins’ arguments is that, although these rappers might have vicious and violent lyrics towards women, they have come from bad situations in their lives and have done some good by making money for themselves and being successful in the cinema.These rappers, according to Watkins, symbolize the downtrodden black male, and because Oprah doesn’t give them a voice, she is showing that she hates black men. My argument would be that Oprah's main goal, like millions of black people concerned about the state of Black America, is to do everything in her power to try and make it better. Oprah understands that when Cube, Ludacris, and Fiddy’s checks clear and the frat kids who bang their music on the weekends go back to school on Monday, Black America has to deal with serious problems by itself, problems that are certainly not the fault of rappers, but problems that rappers are certainly not helping.If trying to solve those problems means stepping on the self-esteem of a couple of vulgar gangsta millionaires, so be it.Also, given their hits ("Cave Bitch,” “Move Bitch, Get Out The Way,” “You's A Ho,” “ I Got Hoes In Different Area Codes,” and “Dont Fuck With A Bitch From The Projects”), Ice Cube and Ludacris have a tremendous amount of nerve to suggest that the most successful black woman in the history of this nation bow down and respect them. Both men have made their careers by stepping on the necks of black people, primarily black women, and given that there is such a thing as a first amendment in this country, that’s fine.To quote Candide, one has the right to cultivate their own garden. But why can't people understand that Oprah, as well as the majority of black people who don’t buy and aren’t interested in both men’s music, might want something else to be entertained by? Why should black people who don’t like rap be punished for wanting something else? Why should they be punished by avoiding Cube and Ludacris altogether?Why should they be punished for thinking there is more to Black history than “hoes in different area codes"? Why should Oprah, and millions of other black people, be punished for not swallowing whole Cube's and Ludacris’ vision of black women, and daring to think that Cube and Ludacris just might not be the font of black male expression? (And why do so many people think of Cube and Ludacris as the font of black male expression?)Gangsta rap’s defenders have never stopped to think that maybe Oprah, like millions of black people, knows those "bitches" that Ludacris wants out of the way are raising our children without the help of fathers. Maybe Oprah knows those "cave bitches" that Cube wants to rape are struggling with high numbers of sex crimes, high numbers of sexual abuse, and record numbers of AIDS cases. Maybe Oprah knows that those "hoes in different area codes" are succeeding in spite of periously little love and respect from black men.Maybe, just maybe, Oprah knows there have been millions of families tormented by the crack that Young Jeezy and Chamillionare love to rap about, that millions of young black men have been scarred by the absentee fatherism that Ice Cube has recently bragged about, and millions of black people have been traumatized by the misery, pain, and self destruction that Hip Hop America gobbles up for its entertainment every hour on the hour. Ludacris and Ice Cube aren’t the reason for Black America’s misery, pain, and self-destruction. What they have done, however, is written the soundtrack to it, and profited mightily in the process. The debate they have with Oprah isn’t about their right to do so, as no one is saying that Gangsta rappers should be censored. We live in a democratic society and if the gangsta rapper wants to profit from someone else's pain and the gangsta rap fan wants to dance to it, it is their right.The debate with Oprah is about is Black America’s (or at least the vast majority of Black America that doesn’t buy hip hop records) right to turn away from that Ludacris, Ice Cube, and that gangsta rap fan in disgust. Culture49016@blogcritics.org Fri, 9 Jun 2006 07:51:57 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/05/07/094242.php Robert LashleyApril 1st, 2004 was the anniversary of Marvin Gaye's murder, an act that stilled one of popular music's most gifted talents and ended the story of soul music's greatest tragedy. Before his death he had made a spectacular comeback with Midnight Love, his final album and the centerpiece for his physical and mental decline. Its structure of exquisite singing, deliciously subtle sex ballads, and intricate reggae and new wave funk tracks suggested that Marvin had returned to the front of soul's vanguard. For a time he did, selling over five million copies worldwide, garnering rave reviews and putting himself, along with Prince, up as one of the premiere soul practitioners of the early '80s. Its lyrical themes of spiritual cleansing, mental clarity, and great sex also suggested that, after years of struggling against drug abuse and a self-destructive streak that would give Stavrogin pause, Gaye was healing himself and heading for a positive ending to his life. But, as anyone with a faint knowledge of musical history knows, that wasn't the case. Marvin Gaye's death was one of the most haunting stories in modern pop's history; a frightening decline fueled by drugs, dementia and schizophrenia followed by his father shooting him, an act that, to this day, R&B really hasn't totally escaped from or forgotten. As time passes and Marvin Gaye's legend grows into a space between myth and reality, Midnight Love stands as a mirror of his soul - fiery crosscurrents between genius and madness, manic creativity and manic depression, clarity, dementia, and sexual dysfunction, all held under a facaade of sweetness and positivity. What makes Midnight Love & the Sexual Healing Sessions all the more tragic was that it shows that there was a chance that it needn't have been that way. By 1981 Gaye was a mess. Frail, mentally ill, and emaciated from a year-long crack binge, he was rescued and sent to Belgium by Freddy Couasert, a European promoter, restaurateur, and music fan. He had spent the past seven years snorting massive amounts of cocaine, building an eight million dollar debt, and alienating everyone around him. His records and singles at the time verged between too painful declarations of heartbreak and barely coherent funk numbers. Some of his records were among the best stuff ever done; some of his records were terrible. All of them had one thing in common; they sold miserably. So Marvin went to Belgium to get clean, resume his lifelong struggle to find himself, and figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life. For a year he did get his life together and began to fiddle out ideas for a new album. The best thing about his 1981 clean period was that he got his eclectic musical ear back. In Trouble Man, Steven Turner's biography of Gaye, it says that while experimenting with basic chord structures, he was listening to a lot of Talking Heads, Bob Marley and John Lennon. The music on the tracks, on which Gaye played everything except the guitars and the horns, backs that up. In his eclectic chord changes and the melodic tension in his fender Rhodes you can hear as much Eno, Franz, and Byrne as you can hear Stevie Wonder; and Marvin's seemingly endless gift for off-beat layered rhythm patterns fit reggae's herky-jerky chord structure beautifully. Still, he only could gain label support and backing if he was to make a "commercial" comeback album. So he started the album thinking that if he was going to make pop music, he was going to do it on his terms and with a vengeance. His goal was to recapture his high artistic standards while storming back to America with a massive comeback. His Trojan horse for the invasion came in a suggestion from his biographer David Ritz after being startled at some of his porn magazines. "You need sexual healing," said Ritz. That line of inspiration led to one of the greatest singles in the history of the pop music. "Sexual Healing" is Marvin Gaye 101: clear, abstract, and visceral, created with pinpoint precision yet retaining an endless freshness and listenability. The music is a countrified Jamaican stew, aurally addictive rhythm patterns set along with an intricate-as-a-knitting-pattern reggae rhythm track and Gordon Banks' fatback bass. Slithering, soulful, and sexy, the track itself blew the electro R&B, pop-funk, and crossover soul that was on black radio at the time. Did I forget something? Oh yeah! He sang, too. As great as the music is, it takes second to his vocals, a near-biblical storm that ranges between a seducer's charm, preacher's cadence, and a sonnet from Apollo himself. His voice comes in waves, all starting with a "Baaaaby" sexy and bodacious enough to turn out a Dominican nun. He soars and shouts, turning notes inside out and right side over with a vocal inflection. Here Gaye begs, pleads, growls, caresses, and sometimes does all of the above at the same time. "Sexual Healing" is Gaye's last masterful vocal performance. Cooke might have had a better tone, Redding could out-shout him and Green could out-seduce him, but no one could do all of the above as he could. This track is Exhibit A. Yet for all its danceability and panache, it wouldn't have lasted as long is it did if it wasn't for its message. "Sexual Healing," like all of Gaye's great sex music, stands not because of its graphic nature, but the fact that it treats sex with adult and complex emotions. The thing you have to understands about Gaye's greatest sex ballads is that they weren't dimwitted pleas for libidinous behavior. His focus was for fidelity and all the grand, immense and overwhelming emotions that two people who are deeply in love feel for each other. "Healing" isn't about a quickie or straight deadpan action, but a sexual cleansing, a kind of deep feeling that comes from years of knowledge and interpersonal conflict and resolution. And in an era where misogynist, crotch-grabbing jackasses are on BET and MTV every five minutes, his message has not only grows louder and more urgent. The rest of the album shows that with a little more time, Marvin might have created something really special. "Joy" with its tent revival pace, funky as the dickens low bass and its JB's-esque horns is the closest thing that comes to "Sexual Healing"'s artistic and commercial success. The simplicity in its philosophical outlook ("...everything else hurts so let's find the simplicity in little things like mom and church...") can be grating at first; yet it's augmented by the tracks and made truthful by his chops, to the point when he delivers this line in a storefront preacher's frenzy:I'll overcome the darkest night, just to see your love's alright I got love to give, you know I love to live It's as holy as a sermon. "Rockin After Midnight" is his last sexual interpersonal complex battle, a Gaye trademark. His inner sex-crazed misogynist prick and hypersensitive gentlemen do battle for four minutes, all while both trying to seduce his muse. There's madness to it, as he switches poses by the second, being a slime-balled jerk one minute, sensual saint the next, then back again. He snidely invites her for a night of empty sex, then, with his multi-tracked voice operating as an angelic backing choir, tells her why it will be beautiful. Soaring with the bridge of his gorgeous vocals, it proceeds to resemble a sonnet more than a soul track. But just after the gorgeous bridge, he lets his real intentions out of the bag. When he receives his muse's permission, he lets his inner jerk out one more time to show her that the battle was just a hoax, that his angel and devil were in cahoots all along in the battle to get her to say yes to him. Filled with machismo, Gaye ends the track boasting and bragging that he's "gonna get him some." And this is where Marvin's inner darkness can be seen; because this time, unlike in previous inner sexual battles, ("Baby Please Stay", Come Get to This", "Distant Lover", Soon I'll Be Loving You", All the Way Around") he lets that inner demon win. But, for its duration, the battle on wax is compelling listening. So what happened? Why didn't Midnight Love become one of Marvin's greatest masterworks instead of a nice genre period comeback record? Three Ms: money, market, and manic depression. By 1982, the ever-so-slow-to-record Gaye was about six months past time to make an album, and the art funk tracks that were left didn't jive with the top 40 at the time. Plus CBS, his new record company, saw that Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, James Brown, and the Temptations all had had great sales in the previous year, not because of their product, but by playing a perceived role to a retro-starved public. Marvin could make more money by playing Marvin Gaye rather than by being himself. And that's just what he did. Stressed, back on coke, sheephish and unsure of his status, he turned what was becoming soul's answer to Lennon's Double Fantasy into a very nice singles album. "Midnight Lady," the very first track, is a prime example of his aesthetic retreat in the midstream of creation. The track, with its kazoo, hard-charging horns, and spicy reggae tracks is the funkiest dance number on the album. It's also the most brainless song he's ever put out on record. The man who made his reputation on deep emotional numbers about sex was now the horny old man at the club, wanting to get his groove on, his freak on, and his coke on. Libidinous junk food pop? Yes. Dumb fun? That too. All of those qualities have nothing to do with Gaye's prior work, however. "Till Tomorrow" might be the most beautifully sung narcoleptic kitsch that I have ever heard. His "gimme some morning sex 'cause I care about you" message just isn't believable, and his sweet croon just puts layers of sugar over the bullsh*t that comes out of his mouth. But within two minutes, you're too entrapped by the beauty of the vocals to care, and by the falsetto bridge you're his, and he can croon that the sky is green and you'll believe him. This song is like having sex with a crazy ex-girlfriend -- half of the time you're amazed at her bullsh*t; half of the time your amazed by her. "Third World Girl" is another botched job, with producer Harvey Fuqua turning what was a nice experimental reggae tribute to Bob Marley into a vegasized hyperspeed funk number, losing all its character in the process. But the most egregious example of stilted musical growth is the devolvement of "I've Got My Music." The vocal track, made famous as a sample in Erick Sermon's "Music," is one of the clearest, most emotionally compelling vocal performances from a man who has created nearly hundreds of them. It starts as a street corner duet, Marvin and all his doo-wop voices: his low bass, gritty baritone, angelic tenor, and feathery falsetto. With a vocal army behind him, Gaye proceeds to throttle his demons one by one, reaching for his family, grasping at his church influences, battling the questions in his soul and providing a five-minute commercial for the healing power of art. Here he communicates the idea that, with a devotion to his craft and a good heart, he can fix any of his problems, whether it be drugs, romantic pain, or scars from abuse. As his vocals provide gorgeously melodic support, he rises above all of his struggles and grows stronger as the song rides along. And as his sermon reaches its crescendo, he builds a frenzy of mental and artistic clarity otherwise known as "being in the spirit." Reveling in a childlike joy at the thought of personal happiness, blending the notions of sex, God, and love beautifully, Gaye takes the listener for a ride and leaves both parties with the notion that they have heard something holy. With a dim funk track and a lot of cocaine "I've Got My Music" turned into "Turn On Some Music" a dim, barely coherent, four minute brag that he could screw for three albums long. Hearing the final draft compared to the first is to hear obfuscation snatched out of the jaws of clarity, a classic turned to filler right before your ears. Yet in spite of its flaws, it isn't the sellout album that most diehard Gaye-heads say it is. There's still something ethereal even in its mirage of positivity. His vocals are breathtaking, and the music, even at its emptiest, is intricate and danceable. And though he was artistically flying at two thirds mast, at that time his two thirds were better than everyone else's 100% in R&B except Prince. Even its flaws only seem to be as gaping as they are in comparison with the standard of Marvin's own body of work, which is as high as any artist in popular music in the past 50 years. But it was nowhere near the exhilarating comeback album that critics said it was, nor even close to the best album that he ever did. After getting rave reviews, and having "Sexual Healing" spend four months near the top of the charts, Gaye went into 1983 living in two parallel worlds. He received major awards, got more adulation, and embarked on a million dollar tour, all the while freebasing himself into an early grave. After he smoked his voiced away and embarrassed himself by dropping his pants on stage, he moved back to his mother's house where he went on an eight-month drug binge/family struggle with his abusive father. On April 1, 1984 Marvin Gaye Jr. fought back against his father for the first time. A few minutes later Marvin Gaye Sr. shot him dead. He was a day away from 45 years of age. It's been over 20 years and male R&B hasn't been the same since. With all the great soul queens out right now, it's easier to forget some of the old soul divas or at least put them on the discussion back burner. Yet because the pickings of new male soul vocalists are so pathetically slim, fans always seem to find their way back to Marvin. There have been better vocalists and artists who have recorded better work (Stevie Wonder is an example), yet Gaye remains the man on soul fans' minds. In his eternal quest to express himself, show his manhood, debate his contradictions, and define his sexuality, Gaye touched on so many nuances on what it means to be black and male in America, and struck a nerve with millions of soul fans black and white. Yet for all the vitality of his work, the greatest factor that contributed to Marvin Gaye's career is heartbreak - heartbreak for sexual and spiritual loss, heartbreak for a custom-made hell he created for himself. Despite his musical testimony to the contrary, the theme in Gaye's final album is no different. The tragedy in Midnight Love is in its contrasting terms of spiritual fulfillment and depravity, and how depravity won in the end. The tragedy of Midnight Love & the Sexual Healing Sessions is that it shows the place where the heaven of that fulfillment and the hell of that depravity collide, the existential nightmare of a happy ending. Music47367@blogcritics.org Sun, 7 May 2006 09:42:42 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/05/07/044757.php Robert LashleyOver 100 years since his birth and 50 years since he was the most visible writer in America, Ernest Hemingway remains a man of many masks. A larger than life figure, Papa (his nickname), meant many different things to different people. There's Albert Murray's Hemingway - a high poet of the populace whose language "had a universal essence that was similar to blues and swing." But then again, there's Ralph Ellison's Hemingway, a callow, racially insensitive nihilist "who's marvelous technical virtuosity was won at the expense of a gross insensitivity to a fraternal values." There's Norman Mailer's Hemingway, the patron saint of all things masculine and macho. But if those characterizations seem off-base, there is Bellow, Malamud and Roth's Hemingway, an effete and deluded cocksman whose country club vision of Jews was downright loony. Certainly there's the Hemingway whose ironclad version of manhood haunted and angered feminist scholars for a half a century. But then what does one make of Joan Didion and Nadine Gordimer's Hemingway - a flawed but an indispensable artist who admired a woman's capacity for strength? Who, out of those writers, is right? All of them are. Hemingway is the ultimate 20th-century American artist/monster, one of the most schizophrenic of our literary masters. His biases shackle a great deal of his work to his time, but they are part of a total package intractable from the man himself. Every novel that he wrote had holes: A Farewell To Arms is brilliant but relies way too much on a surfeit of detail, To Have And Have Not is misogynistic, self-absorbed and too obsessed with celebrity, For Whom The Bell Tolls is way too long, and by the time he got to Across The River And Through The Trees, liquor and the job of living up to his own image had already took too deep a toll on his talent. But the reason that Hemingway's works resonate with the reader is due to their collection of moments, breathtaking moments either in detail, dialogue, action or human empathy. In addition to the novels, this kind of evocation is also reflected in his métier - the short story, where, with his soaring use of plainspoken diction and speech, Hemingway, along with William Faulkner, would kick down the door that Mark Twain opened for the American demotic to come into our literature (although one has to say Faulkner did more of the kicking). The Sun Also Rises has several of the same problems that plague his long fiction. The novel is a structurally flawed mess, a short novella stretched way beyond it's elasticity, with a plot that goes nowhere and a tendency to fall back on dialogue and prejudices -- some petty, some not so - when he runs out of ideas. But Sun has more brilliant moments in it than almost any random selection of a half a dozen mid-level 20th-century classics. I'm not saying that The Sun Also Rises is a classic, nor am I saying that it's great or even very good. All that I am saying is that it's a good novel that shouldn't be totally thrown away. The story is told from the perspective of Jake Barnes, an expatriate journalist from Kansas City, who does news-grams from an American station in Paris. He most closely resembles Hemingway's own voice insomuch that he likes booze, broads, fights, bulls, and all things macho. The book's first part is comprised of Jake's observation of his circle of friends. Jake kind of likes Brett Ashley, the verbose, effervescent, sharp-tongued English "dame" whose rapport with Jake makes for some of the liveliest parts of the novel. Jake can't stand Mike, Brett's melodramatic boyfriend. He pretends to like Robert Cohn, a Jewish novelist, but actually despises him because of his heritage. Closing the circle is Jake's friend Bill, a more verbose, more genial, and at times more vulgar version of the narrator. In addition there are other spicy character dynamics relected in the conflicts and interrelationships between secondary characters. And Jake observes it all, sometimes reacting, sometimes giving out advice, sometimes intervening into their lives and discussions, sometimes doing anything but. And how well Hemingway writes in those observations! The Hemingway sentence, the particular cultural trademark that established him in the world's consciousness for so long, is here and it is as advertised. The beauty of Hemingway's sentences didn't come in any biblical/Shakespearean prose rhythms (Faulkner) or obsession for perfect lyrical beauty( Fitzgerald, although Hemingway was just as obsessed about writing, maybe more so). No, the poetry in Hemingway's prose lies in it's succinctness, it's clarity, it's austerity, it's lack of excess or pretense -- and the way he could describe a character, a scene or a setting also contributes to his greatness. Whether the scenes takes place in Paris cafés, or the beautiful landscapes of Spain, or the bullfight arena at the exact tension-filled moment where the matador and the bull begin combat, one marvels on how he can say so much in such a small space, and do it in such a unique and beautifully American manner. His language in itself makes him indispensable, and its beauty is in abundance here. When one comes to the question of what that beautiful language is saying, however, tough questions must be asked and brutally honest assertions made. It needs to be said that Jake, and subsequently Hemingway's vision of Cohn and Jews is utterly rancid. I am no fan of political correctness, but to overlook the slurs and outbursts is an even more insidious form of it. Granted, we're not talking about controversial poet Amiri Baraka here, as Barnes/Hemingway feigns some feeling from him. But comparing Hemingway's anti-Semitism and Baraka's is like comparing a toxic waste barrel to a toxic waste dump. Yes, the dump is obviously larger, but one can also do without the barrel. That crippling flaw casts a considerable shadow over what's good about Barnes - and there is a considerable amount. At his best, Barnes is a witty and smart and a confidant to Brett, a loyal friend to Bill, and a character who captures a certain clearheaded and sensible American feeling that is healthy in the right dose. I know that many a male writer has lost his soul gazing too longingly and lovingly into the specter of Jake Barnes (Hellooo, Norman Mailer), but dammit, too many writers haven't developed one in looking away. I am tired of whiny, pathetic literary emo boys whose worlds have ended because they got their heart broken in the tenth grade (even though they're 29), and write like they haven't read a single damm book other than The Catcher in The Rye. (And I swear to god, if Salinger knew how many bad books were going to be penned in his name, he would have written like Dreiser.) At his best, Barnes' lust for life, play and friendship, and propensity for courage, self-reflection -- Hemingway's most underrated trait -- and self-deprecation is a tonic. Reading Barnes and how Hemingway can create such a high literary figure out of what seems to be an average guy, one can see how he became a beloved figure, especially at the time. But halfway through, any magic and momentum that Hemingway builds ups starts to run aground with the novel's structural faltering. The boozy scenes, contrarian dialogue, and witty interpersonal conflicts begin to run together, the cafés become more generic and Hemingway's Paris begins to lose its luster. The character dynamics are dishy and fun, but when not tied together, they seem episodic. And when Jake and Bill, on a train to Spain after deciding to go on a fishing trip and later to go to a fiesta, turn on their ugly American, the book becomes unbearable for a while. Both men, when left to their own devices, unleash a torrent of prejudices, and the novel briefly degenerates to the level of the worst works of Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, two of the few dead white male novelists who, to be brutally honest, should really stay that way. But just as you gets to the point where you're ready to throw the novel in the garbage, the action moves to Spain, Papa's inner noble traveler shows up, his gorgeous eye for detail reappears, and the novel starts to come back to life again. The last third of the book is Hemingway in fine form, describing the fiesta in Pamplona, with its bulls, its breathless country, and the romantic entanglements of his circle of friends coming to a hedge. Mike fights with Cohn because Cohn wants his woman. Brett can't stand Cohn because Cohn stalks her, and hates Mike more every day. Bill hates Mike for being a broke bastard, and Cohn just gets tired of everybody hating him. And Hemingway, in the form of Jake, is at his most noble. With the rich, Papa might have been an ugly, self-indulgent American, but in Spain, with it's beautiful, expansive countryside and it's peasants with their rituals of high culture and ceremony, he's good-natured, a good listener and a good, decent and at times humane expatriate. Let me put it in modern terms: he respected and understood the strength of street knowledge.Hemingway's appreciation of Spain and the code of ethics of its people is highlighted when Brett falls for Pedro Romero, the biggest, baddest, and hottest bullfighter in all of Spain (the arc of their relationship leads to the end of the novel). Realizing that Romero is someone braver and more noble than he is, Barnes becomes a different being altogether, less a sardonic, disinterested friend, more a participant observer. He talks the bullfighter up to everyone who will listen, gives him advice, compares notes and stories with his manager and the bullfight experts, and explains to Brett the machinations of the bullfighting game while also giving her a play-by-play of what's happening. He even doesn't get that pissed off when Brett sleeps with Pedro! At the end, when Brett and Jake, back at Gay Paree, ride off into the sunset just as unsure of their relationship as they were in the beginning of the book, my mind focused on two things. The first was Joan Didion's compelling argument for Hemingway as a novelist. In Last Words , her review of his final posthumous novel, the deeply flawed True at First Light, Didion made the case that the sum of those novels can be seen in the accumulation of those breathtaking scenes and how "every word, every sentence mattered." She's right, every word and every sentence did matter to Hemingway. As a unified body of a work, however, they didn't matter as much. A great novel, in my opinion, is like a symphony where every disparate element comes together as a whole. In The Sun Also Rises, there are some of the most beautiful notes in the history of the English language, but without a cohesive structure they languish on the page, in need of a conductor to bring them together. The second thing I thought of was the character of Brett. Here I have a personal revelation to make: my mom, who's a second-generation feminist, loves her, and loves Hemingway. Reading this I can see why. Like my mom, Brett is a witty, whip smart, all around tough "dame," and one can sense that Barnes/Hemingway has a deep affection for her. But one should not look that longingly into the eyes of Brett Ashley either, for it is ludicrous to deny Hemingway had gender issues. His celebration of all things male, masculine and macho came at great expense to the women in his writing and his life. Although he strutted as the supreme cock of the walk while living, the subject of sexuality was something of an underlying terror for him until the day he died. And while men should examine and explore the concepts of masculinity, Hemingway, along with his literary brethren, kin and wannabe kin (helloooo, Harvey Mansfield), have been so obsessed by what it means to be a man, that they lost track of what it means to be a human, the most important task of any writer or any person, regardless of gender, race, creed, or color. But if there is much about Hemingway that needs to be cast off into the dustbin of history, there is much too much about him that needs to be kept. He would write better novels: A Farewell to Arms is too mired in romanticism for me, but it gets to where it needs to go better than Sun did, and The Old Man And The Sea is the best novella long prose piece that I have read next to Tolstoy's Hadji Murad. The Sun Also Rises doesn't rise to those levels, but, like Hemingway, it matters. Or at least it, and he, should matter. I will be the first to say that Faulkner mattered more then, matters more now, and will matter more than Hemingway as long as people read books. But if we want to have a full appreciation of our history, he has to matter for something. Because of his flaws, I will not say that it's a shame that we don't read him now, but American literature has lost something since he hasn't mattered any more. Books47368@blogcritics.org Sun, 7 May 2006 04:47:57 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/18/100533.php Robert LashleyThe posthumous work is a relatively new phenomenon for African American literature, and not without its share of high-profile successes. Leon Forrest's Meteor in the Madhouse was polished with editor John Calwetti's almost symbiotic understanding of the author's mad yet beautiful style (think Dostoevsky and Faulkner gone to church), and the resulting set of novellas serve as a fine closure to the career of what many people consider the patron saint of overlooked African American writers. While Toni Cade Bambara's These Bones Are Not Of My Child suffers from the opaqueness of plot and structure that most unfinished works have, the judicious and careful editing of Toni Morrison, Bambara's longtime mentor, gave it a range of intelligence and lucidity that makes it stand with her best work. Even Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, a 2,500-page, forty-year-long epic work reduced to a 350-page vanity project by Ellison executor John Callahan, has enough majestic passages to remind the reader of Ellison's position as one of the greatest writers in the history of American literature. Which makes Richard Wright's Lawd Today all the more disturbing. Given the massive stature of its author, the circumstances regarding its publication and the miserable failure of the work itself, Lawd Today is one of the most depressing reads I've had in a long time. The plot, a day in the life of Jake Jackson, a disgruntled postal worker who bickers with his wife, runs debts with his job and is oppressed by society, is nearly formless, incoherently rendered and crassly told. The result is nothing short of garbage, and by far the worst work that Wright has ever done. But what bothered me so much was that I didn't know whom to blame for the content, Ellen Wright for publishing it two years after he died, or the author himself. The problem with the posthumous novel is that it takes away an author's ability to guide their own story, the unique creative autonomy that fiction writers have.When I read it the first time I chalked its failure to the Wright estate's literary grave-digging, given Wright's overall ability to construct the events of a story and the sharp naturalism of his prose. But when I read it again, I saw that it had all of the markings that made his final two works, 1959's The Long Dream. and 1961's Eight Men, such brutal failures: vicious sexism, obsession with violence, atrocious craftsmanship, and subconscious yet deep self-hatred. Adding on the fact that I have found out that Wright had stated numerous times that it was a finished work, this crystallizes its stature as one of the most epic failures in the history of African American literature.The best aspects of the book lie in the scene where Jackson goes to the barbershop and the overall dialogue between him and his co-workers at the post office. One of Wright's greatest strengths is to capture many of the aspects of Black male camaraderie, relating to "good talkin" and various aspects of Black male ritual. You can see it in the down-home, beautifully vulgar, and righteously contrarian banter between Jake; Doc, the barber; and Duke, a communist organizer. That same aesthethic makes for the book's best part, the 28 pages of non-stop dialogue between Jake and his friends at work, where they reminisce about the south and ruminate about being Black in society. Here, if Wright were either as polished as he was when he started writing (he wasn't), or in sound mind when he ended writing (he wasn't), could have been the basis for the down-home novel that he wanted Today to be. But beneath the brotherhood and warmth of their dialogue lies an emptiness that points to his greatest flaw as a writer: his subconscious internal loathing of his own people. Wright can't get past the punch line of Black dialect, he can't see its historical foundation, its interrelationship with myth and folklore, its ever changing sensibility used as an agent of survival. Am I asking Wright to overly mythologize the language? No. One cringes at the thought of another Temple of My Familiar, where every character is bathed in an imitation of an imitation of an imitation of folk wit, so much so that it ceases to be folk wit at all, but New Age crap. But Wright can't see the dialect as anything other than part of their depraved condition as oppressed members of society. The result is that their dialogue, which constitutes about 35 percent of the book, has a dreadful emptiness to it. But compared to the garbage that the bulk of the book consists of, that emptiness seams merely peachy. And the garbage starts early. The book begins with Jackson in a dream sequence going up an endless flight of stairs, and there you can see flashes of all that made Wright great, his clear, no nonsense naturalism and the descriptive imagery he shows in blending the dream states with reality. But alas, he wakes up to a wife who won't tend to his every whim. And because she won't do so, we are supposed to understand why he brutally beats her, chides her for having religious material, and is offended at her for contracting cancer from an abortion that he tricked her into having. For Wright, this is supposed to be and is presented as some political statement about the travails of the black man in society. It makes a statement all right, but one against Wright's grotesque sexual politics. Now that is not to say that Black men have their own unique and viable problems, for one of America's gravest historical sins has been the madness that it has had, and to an extent still continues to have, regarding Black Male sexuality. But in no way, shape or form does Wright address the complex aesthetics regarding the subject when Jake beats his woman to a pulp or says "b*tch" and "c*nt" more times than in an Easy-E LP. In its atrocious symbolism, Wright's use of Jackson as a character also follows the same flawed sensibility that cast a shadow over even his best work, including Native Son. Every time Jake slaps around his wife or vulgarly insults a woman, Wright seems to be saying, "We're depraved creatures because you made us so!" But what Wright, along with the generation of black militants and white liberals that were influenced by him, didn't understand was in saying that, "We're depraved creatures because you made us so!" instead of saying, "We're depraved creature's because we are inferior beasts!" you are still saying that "We're depraved creatures!" The bulk of what makes the book structurally unreadable lies in Wright's worst aesthetic flaw, his tendency to pad a story for length's sake. Wright uses the day in the life motif as an excuse to add numerous scenes in the name of showing an "ordinary" Black man's day. But the problem with the plot lies twofold: his inability to describe his neighborhood in vivid terms and link those descriptions to the plot, reprehensible as the plot may be. Scenes where Jake reads the paper, complains about social issues, glances at advertisements, loiters around a movie house, and picks up the local numbers are not only crudely written (nobody has ever mistaken Wright for Proust, or to be more precise, Ellison or James Baldwin), they exist simply to exist, to make the book long enough to be a novel. Wright tries to communicate their significance to the ritual of Black life, but again that flawed sensibility that rendered him unable to depict African Americans as anything but damaged from the nightmare of racism does him in. But to center the discussion of the book's structural merits (or lack thereof) would overlook the book's abominable treatment of women. While it is noteworthy to mention that Wright's attitudes on women evolved greatly (his very close friendship with Simone De Beauvoir and the progressive attitude towards women reflected in his speeches are examples), his fiction showed opinions that were nothing short of hideous. Lawd Today's"implied premise, that Black women are just as responsible for Black man's problems as White racism is, is beyond reprehensible. Everything that Jackson does, from the problems that he has with money, the oppression he has at his job, and his fight over the prostitute that robs him at a Juke Joint, is linked to that myth of the evil Black Jezebel, the castrating Cassandra that is supposed to lurk in all Black women, but in actuality only lurks in the dark and empty corners of the minds of Black misogynists everywhere. In his abusive behavior towards his wife and the women in the book, Wright turns Jake into not only a subconscious parody of a character, but a parody of his own art also. Jackson's (and subsequently Wright's) treatment of women is bad enough to curdle the blood, and his self-pitying behavior to justify his actions does nothing but provoke a reader with a hint of decency to recoil in anger. Richard Wright's art and historical meaning cannot be underestimated. It should be the first, second and third thing that should be mentioned when you talk about his significance as a writer. At his best, his writing not only contained a breathless emotional impact and the gut toned power of a sermon, but served as an extension of the social realism movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, in which American writers eschewed the oppressive conventions and the perverse anglophillia of the industrial (or what Twain so beautifully coined, "guilded") age. In Wright's work, you can see the lineage of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos, insomuch that he created a moral fiction that shifted the consciousness of the country by forcing it to look at its most glaring flaws. Wright's best work, from the haunting, nightmarish and gripping Jamesian psychological tale of America's racial madness that is Native Son, to the powerful and even at times graceful polemic that is Black Boy, should be required reading for people who have any interest in the history of American literature. By graphically and passionately showing the brutality that American life could be for Black people, Wright served as a witness, not only in the rich tradition of African American literary history, but in the tradition of all American artists and intellectuals that reminded this country of the principles of its creed, whether the country liked it or not. But reading Lawd Today also showed me that Wright, for all his brilliance, extracted a debt that he couldn't pay. The nether edges of his fiction established a template of picaresque male saints whose hyperbolic rants against racism were sandwiched in between the physical and emotional brutalization of Black women and the killing off of White ones as "symbolic" acts. Those edges can be seen in the morbidity, incoherence and downright evil of the bulk of Chester Himes's fiction, the crass sexual and racial realpolitik of John Killens and John A. Williams, and the pseudo- intellectual posturing, interpersonal race and class-based con games and maddeningly brutal misogyny of Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Cecil Brown. The pulp protest writers of the 50's and 60's and early 70's not only did a disservice to African American literature, it did a disservice to all literature, period. And because of them, a dark cloud of animosity lurks over Black male writers to this very day. Lawd Today, with its array of glaring technical flaws and psychopathic foundations, shows that cloud's gestation. It also shows that Wright, for all the deserved acclaim he has received, had faults as a writer that are too huge to ignore. Books43783@blogcritics.org Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:05:33 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/18/085726.php Robert LashleyIf there is any writer in the history of American literature who is a testament to the fallacy of category, it's Henry James. During a 50-year career in which he tackled the art of the novel, short story and essay with religious fervor, he established a persona that meant many things to many people, but nothing that anyone has able to peg upon him convincingly. Too often his detractors partake in sloppy, self-indulgent reading that is synonymous with the decline in the literacy of the times. Yet too often his defenders trot out tired cliches in defense of him, ("Art for art's sake," "Style works as form," etc. ) marginalizing James profound and introspective search for human nature and character in the process. Yet again, I take umbrage with the scores of second-rate novelists who throughout history thought they were crafting their own "Bostonians" and "Ambassadors" by putting a half a dozen commas and semi colons in every one of their sentences (with a sprinkle of bad psychological analysis in between). So am I writing you with any definitive answers about who many believe to be the leading man of American letters? Hell no. But from reading five of his novels, two books of essays, and two short story collections, I have my opinions and reasons why I consider myself a Jamesophile. To me, reading James is taking a glance of the limitless possibilities of the English language. The beauty of his prose doesn't come from a cohesive whole, but sentence to sentence, sometimes terse and concise, sometimes extending to a half a page. Yet his style wouldn't have as much meaning if it didn't augment his sophisticated theories on fiction. James established a detached, high flown literary style that gave him a distance from his characters, which in turn enabled him to give them numerous ambiguities, shades of personality, and depths of thought. The result is a highly powerful and wildly imaginative brand of realism exemplary of the power of great fiction. Although I haven't read all his oeuvre, Washington Square is a great introduction to James, showing the full range of his creative powers. The book centers on the three person dynamic of the Sloper family. There's Austin Sloper, a semi-wealthy doctor whose two parts disdain, two parts sardonicism and one part charm. He has a daughter named Catherine, who he kinda loves between his fits of misogynistic contempt for her. Catherine isn't, in James portrayal, the most attractive person in a world, but she has a warm humanity to her that is easy to like. Lavinia, the aunt, serves as a buffer between the two, comforting Catherine and charming the mercurial Austin. Entre Mssr Morris Townsend, a charming, amorous huckster, who is a toxic mix of seduction and bullsh*t. Before he entered the world of the Slopers, he was a grifter who relied on his wit and good looks to steal and gamble away women's fortunes. He originally doesn't look on Catherine too kindly, but upon hearing that her father has a steep trust fund for her after he dies, Morris suddenly deems her to be his Beatrice. Their courtship is a torrid yet fraudulent one, so transparent to all but Catherine that by the time he asks for her hand in marriage, I found myself yelling at the book for her not to. Upon hearing that a two-bit con man asked for her daughters hand in marriage, Dr Sloper becomes apoplectic and demands that Catherine not see him, sending their father/daughter relationship into a steep and brutal downward spiral. Lavinia is torn between her love for Catherine and the chance of a wedding and a bigger piece of the Dr Sloper trust fund pie. As the story unfolds, the immense depth of the characters give it great intrigue and nuance. James masterfully sidesteps the temptation of typecasting by letting their actions speak for themselves. There are no easy enemies here: although Dr Sloper is at times a loathsome cur, you get the sense that deep down inside he really cares for his daughter, but is a member of his times and subject to the sexual morays of them, which were the presupposed inferiority of women and the demand for their submission. Even Morris, who by his own words and actions can be quite a slime ball, has an youthful, angst-ridden charm to him. Lavinia is no simple saint either, as in the course of this novel she ends up conning her niece nearly out of house and home. But there is one "saint " in this novel and her name is Catherine Sloper. Throughout the arc of the story, she loses almost everything that she holds dear in her life except her sense of self. Her father, scared that his money is going to be wasted when Catherine marries Morris the degenerate gambler, decides to not give her a dime. Upon hearing that the fiduciary petals had been clipped from his newfound rose, Morris decides to ditch Catherine. And all the while Lavinia, her loving aunt, hustles her until there is almost nothing of Catherine left, financially or spiritually. But Catherine survives, her innocence gone, bank account depleted but soul intact. In the end, she's more than a plaster saint, she's a real, brave and vividly written woman who's been through a lot and come out a survivor. Few female characters by male novelists I have read have been more believable. Again, I must admit that I am only a rank amateur in the scope of Jamesophiles. My personal favorite James era is between 1881-1890, in which the psychological thought was married to his prose and the prose became psychological thought in itself. While The Golden Bowl and some of his later stories have many moments of brilliance, they are works that are too insular and don't have the deft craftsmanship of James at his very best. But I could read another one of his late era novels and be proven dead wrong. Henry James is a writer that all people should read, and Washington Square is a good place to start. To those who want to obtain a high amount of coherence in American literature, or literature in general, his is a bridge that you must pass. Books43781@blogcritics.org Sat, 18 Feb 2006 08:57:26 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/03/063659.php Robert LashleyOut of what many American literature enthusiasts call the Big Four (Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike), it is Updike who is the most underrated, as well as the most likable. Granted he has his flaws: few writers as gifted has him have resorted to formula more, and ever since Couples got him on the cover of Time, he has more than often resorted to a D.H Laurence-styled sex scene, which a previous generation found licentiously liberating, but I find unreadable. But unlike Bellow, Roth and Mailer, he almost always has a genuine affinity for the women his protagonists sleep with. Another thing that separates him from the aforementioned three is that Updike understands that his protagonists have real human flaws, a literary trait that the other men have failed to grasp after dozens of books and thousands of pages. Even in race, Updike stands tall, as his progressive moderation has a basic decency and common sense that towers over the Bellow and Mailer's diametrically opposite reactionary politics. Oh yeah, there's one more thing, he's one of the greatest stylists in the history of the English language. America's preeminent Nabokovophile, Updike has crafted his own Antierra out of the American suburb. Like many great writers, his body of work is inconsistent: the aforementioned Couples is cheap Penthouse porn, Month of Sundays tries to fuse Hawthorne's Black Veil with the sexual revolution of the 70s and ends up grasping neither, while Brazil, Memories of the Ford Administration, and Villages (his worst and most recent novel) find him repeating himself. But his best books could take up a small library. 1964's The Centaur turned the story of a father and a son caught up in a rainstorm into a Greek epic. Roger's Version and In the Beauty of the Lilies effortlessly fused religion, pop culture, and the sexual perversity that men can sometimes stoop to. The collection of his early stories, published in late 2003, is excessive, but the best stories show a master at the form of short fiction. But the books that Updike will be remembered for, and rightly so, will be the one's in his rabbit series, a four book tale detailing the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Through four novels, Angstrom moves from being a basketball player, to a single dad, to a wealthy owner of a car dealership. And throughout that transition, Angstrom remains a brutally misogynist, anti-social, ugly American bastard. He is also wildly successful in almost everything he does, no matter how hard he tries to do otherwise. In each book, Updike captures a certain American feeling in Rabbit's ambling and bumbling ascension: Angstrom's blood boiling misanthropy symbolized the darker aesthetics of the Baby Boom era in 1960's Rabbit Run; 1969's Rabbit Redux saw a slice of the racial and sexual schizophrenia of the 60s; and 1979's Rabbit is Rich showed a generation coming to terms with age and money. Rabbit at Rest, the book in which Angstrom's luck begins to go sour, is his masterpiece, a Greek tragedy articulated through the downfall of a flawed nuclear family. To the extent that he is successful in doing so makes it his best novel and one of the very best American novels ever written. The first part of the book finds Rabbit genuflecting on his "wild, American luck". Too old to sleep around, or, let me rephrase that, too old to be good looking enough for women to give him some, Rabbit wonders around from wife to friends to old mistresses. His car dealerships, save his son's, are wildly successful. He has a a loving family and a son with a wife and grandkids. Yet, he is miserable. Almost brutal towards his wife, he throws a temper tantrum when he finds out that Janice is basically running his businesses. He meanders in his son's dealership and family and even cusses out his grandkids. I repeat his grandkids. In what basically is an American Eden, he walks out, complaining that the clouds are too big, the light is too bright, and the wings are too heavy. Ah, but pretty soon darker clouds begin to form in the horizon of our misanthropic hero's seemingly endless summer. Rabbit discovers that his son's dealership is losing money hand over fist, and macho pontification and belittlement, the father's raison d'etre, ensues. But shortly afterwards, he finds out the real reason why the dealership is losing money: Nelson's a crackhead. Nelson, the child Angstrom abandoned in the first book and the sweet curious boy and teenager in the second and third has become a sobbing, hypersensitive, drug-addicted bastard, so consumed with his own pain and self-pity that he doesn't mind beating up his wife to numb it. Nelson's base head pathos comes to fruition when Pru calls both Rabbit and Janice to pick his son up after a domestic violence incident. The conflict spurs Nelson to go in to rehab, Pru to come in closer contact with the family, and Rabbit to lose that majestic luck that came so easy to him for 56 years. Suddenly everything that Rabbit touches doesn't turn to gold. More than that, it's destroyed. His friends, long men of leisure and sexual play, start to die off and realize how bloody fucking miserable their lives were. Janice, the character that Updike is the most sympathetic to, develops her own life to the point that Rabbit seems like an antiquated albatross. And Rabbit brutally undercuts his son and the Son, in response, whines like a child, symbolizing two dysfunctional schools of male thought that have been pervasive through the 20th and 21st century. But his slow, gradual slide becomes a quick and steep one when Rabbit decides to sleep with Pru. When found out, Janice moves away, Nelson's heartbroken when Pru tells her, and even his grandkids(I repeat, his grandkids) come to the realization that everyone who has came in contact with Rabbit Angstrom has found out, that he's a fucking bum. And this, contrary to the his conservative fans' assertions, is the theme of the Rabbit books; not "the plight of the suburban male" but the portrait of a man who has everything and blows it, not because he's "oppressed" but because he's a couple of humanity genes short. The final part of the book finds Rabbit doing what he did in the beginning of the book and what he did at the beginning of his first book: Running. He goes from place to place, hotel to hotel and, in the ultimate T.S Eliot " in my end is my beginning" moment, from basketball court to court, having a heart attack while shooting hoops with black street toughs, leading to the final, climatic scenes with his family. Along the way there are the usual delightful literary accoutrements from Updike. Once again I have to refer to his prose, as even his worst books have a quality burnished by his style. Like Nabokov, Updike has a lovely ear for surfeit detail, but in his own way, clear with a language invested in the American idiom. In that lyrical sense, Rabbit, with his compositely flawed sense of manhood and his good natured demagoguery is a Hemingway hero in a time where Hemingway heroes are obsolete to the point of being dangerous. (Side note: I like Hemingway, I just know his flaws) Rabbit's misogyny, which critics have harped on, is a tricky issue. There are books to hang him on in that department, (Witches of Eastwick), but this isn't one of them, and Updike has sided with his better angels on that subject the overwhelming majority of the time. And one shouldn't pin Updike, a poor kid from a Pennsylvania sticks who ended up being the most cosmopolitan American literary critic since William Dean Howells, translating Borges and backing writers as diverse as Alice Munro to Gayl Jones, to Rabbit, an all American schmuck who curses out women like a gangster rapper. In June of this year, Updike will release Terrorist, his 22nd novel about a disillusioned 18-year-old boy who discovers radical Islam. It will be by far the most radical and the most controversial book Updike has ever written, but the subject, the tangled web woven from, to quote Greil Marcus, "that old, weird, America", is his bread and butter. His last novel might have flopped, but I'm betting he still has a grand slam in him. But even if he doesn't; Updike has done more than enough. His best work, and there's a lot of it, has given him an indelible place in our American letters. He is one of our literary masters and Rabbit at Rest is where he is at the peak of his powers. Books43108@blogcritics.org Fri, 3 Feb 2006 06:36:59 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/03/054337.php Robert LashleyThere comes a time in every great soul artist's life when they have to compete against their own myth. Myth plays a vital part in soul music because its roots come from the folklore of slavery, pertaining to the cross-currents of beauty and sorrow that come from the spirituals to the secular, populist, and deeply human aesthetic of the work songs. Because the greatest soul singers have been the most concise interpreters of both forms, it isn't surprising that they have assumed larger than life status. Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, serving as mythic preachers, who reshaped popular music in their own image with vocal sermon after vocal sermon. Sam Cooke, the chocolate brown Apollo who took his sweet song to the coliseums of middle-America only to be killed by the bereft armies of the music business when he wanted to sing for himself. Sly Stone, the frightfully gifted prodigal son who, throughout mountains of PCP and cocaine, never came home. Stevie Wonder, the golden child who, through the power of his Moog and his imagination, took the frenetic joy of the revival to Neptune. I Can't Stop, Green's secular comeback album in 2003, succeeds in both showing how powerful and real the myth of Al Green is and in showing how the myth can differ from the artist as well. It articulates why he is considered as, arguably, the greatest soul artist of all time, but also the full range of the gifts that made him mythic in nature, as well as the deeply human element of his art that has compelled people to it for over three decades. Those looking for the master of controlled sensuality and nearly unbearable sexual tension that created hit after breathtaking hit in the '70s will leave slightly disappointed, for, unlike many middle-aged men, he doesn't act like a sexually charged teenager, nor does he try. Those looking for an artist whose grasp of his form is better than damn near any one on the planet, who still has a sense of the nature of his own art, and who still has the wherewithal that one needs to make great art will be satisfied; for I Cant Stop is a portrait of a great artist in nearly full command of his faculties, with the guts to use all of them. Just because he's almost a wistful 60 doesn't mean that the Right Reverend has become a eunuch. The title track starts off where 1977's Belle, his epic last full-length secular album, ended. And this needs explanation. In "Dream," the final track to the album, Green kissed his muse goodbye in what can only be described as the musical equivalent of mind numbing breakup sex. "Dream" is a sensory overload, Green emptying out all of his sexual energy moan by ecstatic moan until the 9-minute track becomes a post-coital blur. It is precisely the way "Dream" ended, that left fans waiting for him to make a comeback, waiting for 26 years, buying his erratic gospel records and seeing him in his breathtaking stage performances in order to be satiated. "I Cant Stop", the title track, returns to that same place, with a loss of his youthful power but not a scintilla less intensity. The voice might have lost its timber but it still has the immaculate technique of its owner. Here, with Willie Mitchell and The Memphis Horns in full swing, he basically admits that he's longing for a woman's touch. Like that, as if 26 years haven't passed, Green steps back into the emotional fire and reminds us the preciously thin line between being in the spirit and being in an orgasm, his musical metier. Like all Al Green bedroom odes, the song doesn't work because he talks under the woman's draws, but by sheer intensity and force of his performance, which screams sex more than 1,235,217 Britney and Christina songs played 1,235,217 times over. He digs, screams, shouts, croons, caresses, and growls as well as any singer in communicating the intensity that one can feel from being in love. But if you listen closely you can hear that the song isn't just a very elegant and nuanced song about fucking. In this adlib, "old Hands leave me alone!!", you can hear the difference between the old secular Green and new secular Green: a man who's now searching for a deeply mature version of sex in relation to the concept of love itself. The deep chasm between God and sex that made him quit popular music the first time lay in how he could brilliantly fuse the two on record yet couldn't in real life, using the same mountains of cocaine that did in Sly. When he decided to sober himself up and really commit himself to the ministry, he cut off all the old places he used to go while he was high, one of them being secular music. Saying "old Hands leave me alone" isn't just a way for Al to tell his demons not to tempt him, it's a way for him to appreciate the joyful stimuli of sex without craving the not so joyful stimuli of blow. You can hear that sophisticated sexuality in "Play to Win" and "I've been Thinkin' Bout You". "Play to Win"'s power comes from the con of its premise. Green plays the role of down home seducer, crooning, caressing, and seducing his muse into believing that his love is so good that it can make her forget that he ain't got a thing to his name. Add Willie Mitchell's string section, a smooth conga backbeat and a sparse blues guitar and you have one hell of a song. "I've Been Thinkin' Bout You" might be a by the numbers "lets make out for Jesus" gospel romp, but when the result is that good and well done, there is little use in being picky. But the bulk of the album doesn't come in Green's deliciously entendred sex ballads or spirited funk workouts. No, the core of what makes I Cant Stop brilliant lies in the exquisite craftsmanship that Green, along with Mitchell, shows in creating and singing an R&B love song. Here is where the brilliance of Mitchell comes in, perhaps more than any other record he has done with Green. Mitchell, the production svengali behind Green's '70's records, had previously mastered a production style built on counterpoint; creating new sounds built between glossy strings and church organs, between church organs and Memphis Horns, between Memphis Horns and subtle funk backbeats, as well as combinations of all of the above. Listening to the record, you get the feeling that Mitchell hadn't rested on his old sound, but broadened and perfected it with a singular determination, as if he had to waited to do this, this and only this for 26 years. Critics who bemoan about his sound being dated can't be anymore wrong, as he expands his musical retinue to add new textures to his soul wall of sound. He uses different Moogs and guitars to add new rhythmic patterns and beautiful melodic tension. The result is a loose, smooth, and beautiful new sound that bends easier to include blues, funk, pop, gospel, and various combinations of the above. You can hear that in the horn, liquid bass, and organ dynamic of "You", as it also shows Green's grasp of diverse blues backgrounds from Little Milton to the late, great Rufus Thomas. Mitchell's production is so good that it even masks Green's lyrical missteps, the only major flaw of the album. As you can probably see, I love Al Green to death, but even he can't fix such clichéd songs as "Million to One" and "Shining Star". But they fail only in comparison to the staggering achievements that Green has on the album, and Mitchell's crack productions makes both songs listenable even in their own faults. But the stunner of the album, and what makes it different from most Green epics is that its greatest songs are its blues ballads. They not only show the man in full command of his gifts, but also force us to look at a Green totally different from our perceptions of him. The world is so used to Green as a sensualist par excellance, and, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison, minister of ecumenical ecstasy that it takes us by surprise when we hear Green the old man with all the emotional scars that come from 60 years of living. "Not Tonight" and "I Choose You" stay somewhat in the vein of sweet, beautiful, and timeless love, but also show the traces of sorrow that old love -- love that has been through the bumps and bruises of life. The satin arrangements of "Not Tonight" show Green at his most slick and cool. They also betray the deep fear of the death of love that he has throughout the song. The smooth and composed demeanor that Green has might be a schtick, but it's a schtick with one hell of a melancholy core. Throughout the song's duration, the satin exterior of his messages erodes into a desperate man begging for forgiveness with a deep and almost biblical intensity, fueled by the fear of dying alone. "I'd Still Choose You" is Al talking to the same woman after she decides to stay with his ass. Set to a bass and horn driven track, it's the sound of a man who's worked through all of his midlife crises, and is deeply searching for an innocent childlike love that he once had with his woman. Like "Why Did I Choose You", Marvin Gaye's melancholy masterpiece, Green tells his woman that, through all the events and elements that can damage a relationship, he would do it all again with her. Unlike Gaye, who acknowledges his fuck ups before retreating into a cocaine induced hell, Green offers himself as a changed man, with the chops and the passion to make you believe him. The result is a spiritual regeneration of a man, the picture of a fresh, clean and new beginning. And when he says, "I'll learn with you/I'll grow with you", you not only hear a beautiful ending but an example of the intrinsic moral fiber that made Green great in the first place. Others don't offer such a beautiful template, but are compelling songs nonetheless. "Raining In My Heart"'s clichéd lyrics might make you run from the room, but his performance will keep you glued to the CD player. It starts slow, gentle, almost too demure, and the first time you hear the hook you are tempted to skip the track. But when he lets out his first growl, you're hooked, and the rest of the song is encyclopedic reference of his influences: Ray Charles's preachers growl, Sam Cooke's vocal leaps, the crisp clear vocal runs of Claude Jeter, and Julius Cheeks's upper register. All of them have one thing in common: they're brilliant but depressing. Green successfully communicates the existential terror of an unrequited love and by the end of the song, you really do believe that it is raining in Green's heart. I thought "My Problem is You" was bloated the first time I heard it, and showed no emotion. I still think it's two minutes too long (6:20?), but what I took for emotional emptiness when I listened to the first time grew into deep emotional complexity. Green doesn't tackle the song from obvious catharsis, as I initially wanted him to, but from a deeply inward emotional place that shows that sometimes love can be too painful to articulate, and the brilliance comes in how he can say so much in vocalizing so little. "My Problem is You" isn't as much a snarl as it is a resigned gulp, a containment of feelings that, behind the surface, seem ready to explode. And leave it to crafty ol' Willie to try and sneak it out of him with the lyrics. In the end you, have a breathtaking emotional push and pull, with Al winning but barely, as those growls, yells, and shouts grow closer to tears as the song progresses. But the absolute clincher that I Can't Stop is a magnificent comeback for Green lies in the grand slam of "Too Many", the final track. A straight up and down ragtime-influenced blues number; it is the most avant garde song Green has ever done. It starts off by biting a lick from Billy Preston and goes into a bright and breezy piano-driven number, similar to the ones that the aforementioned Thomas used to do so well. But as the listener gets comfortable, in come the lyrics: "I got too many tears to shed I got too many ghosts in my bed I got too many, and that's wrong for you"The song goes through the stunning push and pull of the vocal/lyrical dynamic, with one minute Green being a skinning and grinning trickster, the next a bitter, manic-depressive clown, cursing himself to the brightness of the arrangement, cursing the audience to the bright jazz riffs of the piano. "Too Many" is Green doing Pagaliacci as Memphis confidence man, fusing the contrarian essence of the work song with the eternal pathos of that old tormented Italian clown and the rebellious duality of the African trickster. It is also an example of why Green is one of the greatest musical artists to ever draw breath. I expected to say something here about Green going back into the fire of secular music, but what I got from Green is something entirely better. I Can't Stop's brilliance doesn't lie in his rehashing of any '70's love man poses, but in Green's sterling and steadfast dedication to his craft. Its triumphs not only remind you why Green was so brilliant for so long, but show you why Green still is. In this era of mallrat pop production, fake suburban punk pathos, and perverse bigotry of mainstream hip-hop, Green's return to form wasn't only wonderful to the ears, but for my money, one of the greatest musical stories of the decade. Music43107@blogcritics.org Fri, 3 Feb 2006 05:43:37 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/23/092513.php Robert LashleyIn The Male Prison, his review of Andre Gide's notebooks that appears in his brilliant collection of essays titled Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin said that "To deny another person's humanity is to deny one's own." Specifically, he was talking about the French Nobel laureate suppressed love for a woman named Madeline, of which Gide hid beneath a veil of extreme contempt. Baldwin's broader point, however, was about sexism: that when men do not give love to women, and I'm talking about a a broader, more plural, more encompassing love than the pleasures of the flesh, they do a brutal amount of damage to the women they are with, as well as themselves. I am reminded of this quote every time I turn on the radio and hear crunk, bounce, or any other kind of thug music over the past couple of years. For the imagery in their lyrics has been brutally inhumane, even for rap. Where do you want to start? Lil Jon's obsession with sexual dehumanization ( all you b*tches crawl, skeet, skeet, skeet) 50 cent's vicious lyrics combined with an antebellum image of a black woman in chains? Triville and the Ying Yang Twins' fetish for reducing women to their body parts and abusing those body parts afterwords? And to top it off, Lil Weezy's sick obsession with crack and rape?For the sake of not attempting to score easy points by only saying how those messages are wrong, let me clarify myself. The misogynist rapper and rap fan has enclosed himself in a prison that is similar to the prison of the nihilist, in so much that both of their foundations are built by a dark paean to and concern for the self. But the walls of the thug rapper/fan's prison are made by an obsession with "real manhood." This brand of "manhood" is always "under attack" by women, black men who aren't "real" like them, white people, and pretty much anybody who doesn't think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. This ever present sense of "danger" always makes their lives tenuous: since they believe they are always under assault by the slightest offense, their only forms of expression are a phony rage at the women who slighted them, and a glorification of material things in order to cauterize their wounded egos.But pretty soon these thugs find out that their macho healing elixir is poisonous. In my old neighborhood in Tacoma, there is a place called Peoples Park, built for children but usually populated by thirty something ex gangsters, men who were lucky, or in some cases, unlucky enough to survive the early 90's blood/crip/piru/sucka wars that terrorized black Tacoma and Lakewood. If you listen to them, you hear a great deal of anger and sorrow over children they had left behind and baby momma's they had a hard time loving. A block away, there is the Indian Bar and Grill, where those thug's spiritual, and sometimes actual fathers drain the insulin out of their kidney's with liquor, fill their noses and lungs up with toxic white powder, and grouse on how bad of players and pimps they were back in the day. Each of these men in the park and in the bar have turned away from the women in their lives and the moral responsibility of sexual equality and reciprocation. Their anger and hatred for women, combined with their immersion in a demonic gospel of self pity, has robbed them of the ability to love anything, not even themselves, and reduced them to empty vessels of rage and deep, deep regret. And if any of the rap fans who read this ends up adopting the psycho sexual politics of crunk and gangsta rap music to heart, someday those men will be you. That said, you can't blame all of the violent imagery of rap music on black men. There wouldn't be a glut of hyper violent gangsta rap if there wasn't an audience for it, 70 percent of them being suburban white teenagers. But to understand Rap's popularity in the suburbs, you have to understand the half century long pact that so many radical leftist male intellectuals have had with black men for over a half century, in which all too much of the American leftist racial debate ended up being centered around black men being oppressed paragons of hipsterism, free from any responsibility because of discrimination, with any debate about black women's issues cast aside. That pact was the reason that Richard Wright's Native Son was fetishized for the wrong reasons for far too long, the reason that Chester Himes' novels about abusing white women were wildly critically acclaimed, the reason that Amiri Baraka's poems about putting Black and Jewish Women in the gas chamber and Eldridge's Cleaver's assertion that white women should be raped as a political statement became radical chic, the reason that Ishmael Reed's reveries about assaulting feminists were overlooked by his post modernist constituency and it is the reason that music with some of the sickest and most violent imagery of women is radically popular with white suburban hipsters/teenagers and young black men.All I am saying is that I'm tired of that pact. So many black men have made that pact and realized that the deal they agreed to made Mr. Faust's deal with the devil seem like an out and out steal. And call me crazy (as many of you already have), but I want no part of it. And I will pay whatever price from my peer group not to be a part of it. I know that the rising level of young black women being assaulted, infected with the AIDS virus, and having astronomically low opinions of themselves (Village Voice) doesn't cause the pitchforkmedia hipster or black militant any sleepless nights, and the prep school senior who bangs 50 cent doesn't know or care that only 41 percent of young black men are graduating from school. But I do, and I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. I believe that young black men need to deal in a metaphysical philosophy of love, empathy and respect for humanity. Because if we don't, we will perish, and do a disservice to our ancestors in doing so. Culture42634@blogcritics.org Mon, 23 Jan 2006 09:25:13 EST