During the summer of 1951 in the mountains of Korea, just days before the truce talks in Kaesong began, RCA-Victor released what was to be the very first tune about the Korean Conflict to come from the battlefront. Earlier that spring, the Korean battlefields were dominated by fierce grenade battles and brutal trench warfare between US forces and the North Korean troops and the Communist Chinese. Lt. Stewart Powell, an American Special Services Officer who spent his time traveling back and forth from the Korean front to Tokyo, scribbled down a few lines about being lonesome and far from home and would eventually make a small contribution to war music history.

The tune was called “Rotation Blues” (rca-victor #48-0494) an A-side Hank Williams-style hillbilly number about the loneliness of war. The flip side contained a western-pop number called “Cowpoke.” “Rotation Blues” may have remained simply a personal piece of writing if it hadn’t been for Louis M. “Grandpa” Jones and yodeler Elton Britt, two prominent country-western recording artists who were introduced to the tune while entertaining the troops with the USO (United Service Organization) near the Korean front. For the exhausted soldiers and Marines thousands of miles from home the tune hit a familiar note and became popular very quickly.

“Rotation Blues” mp3

Britt played the song on the AFN (Armed Forces Radio Network) and received so much mail following the performance that he contacted publisher Nat Tannen and strongly suggested he get the song recorded. Tannen, a man who could easily recognize a unique tune immediately contacted Lt. Powell in Korea via transoceanic phone calls and convinced him to make a deal for the recording rights over the phone. Weeks later Elton Britt and The Skytoppers were in the RCA-Victor Studio in New York putting it down on shellac. Later, Bill Monroe put a bluegrass flavor to the tune and recorded it for Decca, followed by Hoagy Carmichael’s jazz version.

The simplicity of the lyrics and kitschy-hillbilly music mask the deeper emotional state of the American soldier’s isolation in a country at war. The Korean “Conflict” (1950-53) was never officially declared a war and many folks back home were still coming down from the end of World War II. American troops who were on occupation duty in Europe and Japan had been streaming back to the states for the last six years and nobody thought that an American call to arms would come again so soon, but in 1950 it did.

This is one of the first American pop songs to shed some light on the lives of the contemporary foot soldier on the battlefield. It is a glimpse into the monotony of a soldier’s day to day experience–far away from the comforts of home, the one place that everybody in Korea wanted to be. The tune starts off with a simple guitar, steel guitar, piano and bass, then a signature Elton Britt yodel wails; “I got the ro-oo-oh-ta-a-tion blues. I’m a lonely soldier sittin’ in Korea. I’m a lonely soldier sittin’ in Korea. But rotation’s comin’ so I shouldn’t have no fear.” The subject of the fear is only implied by the use of the word. There is no mention of destruction and suffering on the front lines, no dying or killing, just a few sad words from a man waiting patiently for his rotation papers.

While in 1951 it may have been good news to the boys in the trenches and mountains that truce discussions had begun it would still be another two years before anything realistic came out of the talks, besides the troops were experiencing an overwhelming pre-occupation with survival. Any serious hope of a truce seemed trivial when you were living on the frozen dirt. In the meantime soldiers and Marines were still living, killing and dying in the icy rain, mud and snow but that did not stop them from daydreaming about leaving; “I’m gonna pack my bags and sail back over the sea. I’m gonna pack my bags and sail back lover the sea. ‘Cause the A-frames in Korea don’t look good on me” There is no sense of patriotism or gung-ho American stereotypes, just a mention that his duffel bag and a trip home may be more his style than an “A-Frame” the slang for the wooden packs that the villagers used to carry massive loads on their backs. It is no wonder that Lt. Powell’s song became so popular with the grunts, this was music written by a soldier for soldiers, and it spoke their language, he was one of them.

“Rotation Blues” is an example one of the first times a pop song put an American soldier’s mental stability into question: “Rotation had better hurry up and set me free, I’m buggin’ out. Rotation had better hurry up and set me free, section 8’s gonna get me. The honey pots in Korea done started smellin’ good to me” A Section 8 is a military term for being discharged from service for reasons of mental-illness or problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which back in the 50s was called battle fatigue. In the last part of the lyric we are introduced to another daily problem of the GIs and Marines; “honey pots” these were Korean toilets that were kept inside the house until they were full then they would empty them into roadside ditches, by the time they were full they resembled the sight and smell of honey very little. If an attack occurred the first spot a soldier would instinctively seek was the roadside ditches. This soldier is slowly losing his grip and ‘buggin’ out’ is just the first sign.

Listening to this record 63 years after it was recorded, I can’t help but wonder what it would have sounded like to sit next to Lt. Powell and hear him play it in out in the field. I wonder what his voice and playing would have added to the meaning and impact of the lyrics. I wonder what his buddies may have felt inside as he sang and I wonder where their experiences may have led them. I can only hope it was home.

lc6p1

Previous Lewis and Clark installments

Zach Danesh is a 23-year-old artist from a small town near Boston. Zach lived in Miami for half a decade and now resides in Brooklyn, NY. Zach’s debut graphic novel, Little Black Box, comes out in January, and samples of his previous work can be viewed at www.zachdanesh.com.

It amazes me how much–for someone who professes to so anti-capitalist, anti-consumerism and anti-bourgeois culture– I struggle with the acts of consumption and spending.   I first threw off the shackles of cravings for Wet Seal bangles as a teenager, discovering the joy of thrift stores after a trip to the local Value Village yielded an entire new wardrobe for thirty dollars, one infinitely more interesting than the leggings and floral baby doll dresses I’d been coveting in the window of Contempo Casuals. Almost twenty years later, I remain engaged in a dizzy tango with both the (implanted) desires for material items and the knowledge that a life lived outside of the false strictures of capitalism is a more interesting life, indeed.

Two books have got me thinking about this topic , and have got me reinvisioning the possibilities of my own life outside of prescribed desires and assumptions. The first is one is The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.  Written by Cathy Erway, another entry in the long line of bloggers turned book writers, the book details the author’s two years of living in Brooklyn without ever eating out at a restaurant.

The whole blog to book phenomena has become quite the gimmick but there are some nicely surprising inspirations that I didn’t expect when I started reading. First, I love the detail with which Erway writes about food. She documents her meals and the experiences over the meals with loving attention to not only the food, but the context for the meals. There is a simplicity to her love for the act of preparing and eating good food that is endearing, one that I yearn to replicate. Second, Erway delves into the different ways to step out of the restaurant/eating out cycle by looking at urban foragers like “Wildman” Steve Brill–who gives tours of New York parks where fabulous edible plants grow like special treasures–as well as freegans who scour the streets of New York, finding incredible amounts of perfectly edible day-old bread, donuts and vegetables. Like the dumpster-diving punks that have been doing that shit for years, though I have never been brave enough to do that myself. It got me thinking about my own food consumption habits, and how the way we go about procuring and preparing our food can be a political act, not a new concept, but one I hadn’t given thought too in a while.  Also, choosing to prepare food at home can be step towards simplifying, and escaping the cycle of fast consumption without thought. I’ll never view my styrofoamed burrito takeout meals again after reading Erway’s study of the the incredible amount of waste that goes into these one-off meals, when you look at all of the extra napkins, plastic cups and utensils and paper bags. Inspired by the book, my husband and I are trying not to go out to eat for a month. We’re currently in our first week of cooking all meals at home. I won’t even talk about how many dishes I’ve done this week, but otherwise, it’s been pretty smooth. I’m actually using the slow cooker that was gathering dust under the kitchen counter for the past few years.

Another book that’s got me thinking about how much is enough is Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin. Originally released in 1981, and revised “for the 21^st” century, the book is basically a manifesto about the reasons to live a life characterized by “ecological awareness, frugal consumption and personal growth.” It’s funny because many of the things that Elgin talks about are concepts that I’ve understood for years, especially since my early instruction in frugality and living outside of the mainstream inspired by the DIY/punk rock movements of the nineties, when it was cool to use and consume as little as possible (except for beer). Yet, I’ve seen those ideals fade among a large segment of the community as people grow older and take on mortgages and have kids. It’s like, what the hell happened? I know that many people have been able to maintain a life of conscious consumption and anti-capitalist ways of existing, and I would like to return to that fold. But I will need to do it in my own way, and in my own time, and by reading books that get me inspired to live in ways more aligned with my dreams and ideals.

Photo by Flickr user maureen_sill

It all started when I met my best friend Duncan in front of San Jose’s Cactus Club the night Dropkick Murphys were playing in the Spring of ’98. I was 14 and he was 17, which made it hopeless to get through the 18+ door requirement, and in lieu of the show, we went back to his parents’ place to shoot whiskey. Duncan didn’t have any shot glasses, but he collected fine Japanese china, so we sat around the dining room table shooting Jameson out of soy sauce dishes.

Duncan’s dad was actually the one who came up with our band name. He overheard the two of us talking about starting up a band, and as he stumbled down the stairwell already fueled with three pints of Arthur, he said that we should call our band The Coming Holes. That’s when Duncan’s mom nagged him from the top of the steps about originality, and said we should go with the word “Cunts” instead.

We started out ambitious, played assemblies at my high school, and a few neighborhood basements and community centers, but our hopes for us making it as a band fell through like the bottom of a plastic champagne cup when we got our first real gig, although I guess it wasn’t that real since it was a pay-to-play gig in the corner of a bar downtown Campbell.

For one thing, we were playing in mid-‘98, and that was when the whole post-feminism and Riot Grrrl or however many ‘r’s’ they used, made a minor local comeback, frequenting clubs with all its brooding angst and sharpened nails. These girls went around from bar to bar picking fights with guys twice their size, hurling beer bottles, and chugging alcohol by the tapped barrels, and subsequently passing out on the floor of the bathroom until someone came to get them or called an ambulance.

So it sucked hard that night when they all showed up to this Campbell bar because after Duncan stepped in front of my drum set and went up to the mic to say,

“Evenin’. We’re the Coming Cunts. We’re here tonight to–”

a black shined to the sheen of a waxed bowling ball hurled through the air toe-to-heel, toe-to-heel and smacked tread-first into Duncan’s mug. This wasn’t just a flimsy army surplus store fake leather boot; this was a hardcore Harley Davidson reinforced with a steel shank for arch support boot that knocked Duncan over in a swift straight and flat against his back way that would make a lumberjack proud.

So we changed our band name to Dissonanz, the German word for dissonance or discord, not because we were pussies afraid of a bunch of, well, pussies, but because we couldn’t afford to piss away our pay-to-play gigs, and Duncan said he couldn’t afford to get 2 concussions and lose all those brain cells every night.

“Once the Riot Grrrls get married and disappear into their kitchens, The Coming Cunts will have a reunion,” he said to me on the gurney in the ER. “And we’ll spell coming with a ‘u’.”

Photo by Flickr user Tom Harpel

Always on the lookout for new marketing angles, and inspired by the custom designs that kids were creating on their roller skate cases, a few like-minded owners created skate stickers with their rink logos on them and distributed them freely to patrons. The promotional move worked like a charm, as people were happy to slap the stickers on their gear and represent their home rink. When other rink owners caught sight of the stickers, they created their own and the trend quickly spread across the country.

The stickers ranged from one-color, roller skate and wing logos, to full-color, die-cut pieces of design mastery. The designers of the stickers, most of whose names have been lost over the years, branched out from simply creating a logo, and started exploring different themes for their stickers. Some of the more popular ones included aeronautics, the old-west and cowboy culture, patriotism, animals, love, humor and the roller rink equivalent of the pin-up girl. The design variations were as numerous as the different rinks and the acquisition of a sticker was as easy as rolling in to get one.

The existence of thousands of different roller skate stickers, all given away for free, and the fact that each sticker represented a different rink, brought on a severe case of collector-itis. Skate enthusiasts began sharing, trading and collecting stickers from as many varying rinks as they could. With rare and hard-to-find stickers being the most desirable, the highest trading value was placed on those stickers that came from out of the way places or whose designs were more intricate, with multiple colors, detailed images and custom shapes.

Roller skating sticker enthusiasts traded with friends and picked up stickers where they could. In those pre-Internet days, they were somewhat limited in how they found fellow traders. However, in 1948, a group of sticker collectors decided to turn their hobby into an organization, and they created the Universal Roller Skating Sticker Exchange (URSSE). With annual conventions at different locations around the U.S., sticker enthusiasts would travel the country, with their binders full of stickers, to attend the meetings. They would make friends, show and tell their collections, trade wares and celebrate roller skating and skating stickers with other collectors.

Over the next 30 years, URSSE membership grew to 4,000 members, and even when the Golden Age of roller skating was replaced by the glitz of the disco era, rink owners, who were well-aware of the trading community, were still printing stickers. The last official meeting of the Sticker Exchangeoccurred in 1989 in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania, where the few remaining members, aware that the golden age had moved on to the inline age, voted to disband.

The way the roller skating sticker phenomenon happened, with its remarkably un-Capitalist spirit, and the DIY wrangling of cultural artifacts from around the country, created a unique movement that existed outside the realm of commercialism. Skate enthusiasts took their love of skating and skate stickers and created a community of friends that transcended geography. We’re left with an amazing and inspiring snapshot of the people and the designs of the Golden Age of Roller Skating.

Special thanks to Lou Brooks for the inspiration, information and access to his roller skating sticker images. If you are interested in learning more about The Golden Age of Roller Skating and the designs it produced, check out his delightful book, Skate Crazy: Amazing Graphics from the Golden Age of Roller Skating.

Of all the formats that comedians use to sell their wares, I personally love the somewhat anachronistic format of the audio CD. The comedy album trumps the Comedy Central special, which, at 30 minutes to an hour, is too structured and filled with bleeps and commercial breaks. It beats the video podcast, which can also be filled with unwanted sponsors. The album also beats the comedy podcast (two or three funny people having a chat like the Ricky Gervais podcast), which suffers from its unrehearsed quality. The CD beats the DVD because if you’re big enough of have a DVD made of your stadium tour (see Dane Cook or Jim Gaffigan), the chances of hearing a joke with any real edge are slim.

Yet, if you go to iTunes and try to find the comedy genre, it’s not easy. It’s buried beneath a dozen links and while music albums are usually reviewed by listeners, it’s hard to find a frequently and well-reviewed comedy album. Of the bestselling comedy albums of all time, Dane Cook is the only comic on the list from this century, proving that fans of the comedy album are a relatively small and aging group of people. But the comedy album, while perhaps not the most popular format, is where you’ll hear the best material, at its most raw, with the highest likelihood of the unexpected. It’s usually recorded at a club rather than a theater or arena, during a long stand-up set, without commercials. Because the comedy club heightens the interaction between crowd and comedian, in many cases, unexpected exchanges make a funny joke even funnier.

So here are a few picks of recent great comedy albums that you should go out and buy right now, for America’s sake:

Midlife Vices, by Greg Giraldo

Why Midlife Vices? Because no matter how outrageous and edgy the joke, the target usually somehow comes out unscathed. Perhaps best known for his roasts on Comedy Central, Giraldo’s just a guy you want to have a beer with. But you’ll probably want to let him go off and have his Tequila shots and Puerto Rican hookers on his own.

The Must Download: Divorce / Snacks / Kangaroo F******g

http://www.last.fm/music/Greg+Giraldo/_/Divorce_Snacks_Kangaroo+F%40%40k%40ng

Final Engagement, by Marc Maron

Best known as the host of WTF, the popular comedian-interviewing-comedians podcast, Maron gives intellectual honesty a good name. Final Engagement is a two-disc set and Maron gives you your money’s worth, killing topics that range from China’s superpower status to his career disappointments to the painful and wicked funny bits about divorcing his second wife.

The Must Download: Baby House

http://www.last.fm/music/Marc+Maron/_/Baby+House

From Across The Street, by Doug Stanhope

Stanhope is a stand-up comedy machine. From Across The Street is his 7^th album and he’s lost none of his edge. How good is Stanhope? Bill Maher allegedly plagiarized his FreeLevi.org website idea from Stanhope’s SavingBristol.com, a site devoted to raising money for a Bristol Palin abortion (don’t pull your punches, Doug).

The Must Download: Funny Thing About Child Porn

http://www.last.fm/music/Doug+Stanhope/_/Funny+Thing+About+Child+Porn

Face Full of Flour, by W. Kamau Bell

Bell hates Tyler Perry, Mad Men, and was disappointed when Obama won because he was looking forward to moving to Canada. Bell brings the racial into the interpersonal and is appreciative of the increasing complexity of black/white relations in America in a way that other black comedians aren’t.

The Must Download: Liberal Rapture to Canada

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/face-full-of-flour-live/id355594566

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But you’ve seen the movie right? It’s never that easy.

The night before my 7AM flight, my cousin Santi proposed to his girlfriend. To my family in Ecuador, this is the familial equivalent of New Years and Carnival combined. This is the ghosts of all your ancestors pouring you endless shots of tequila and telling you that if you play your cards right Simón Bolívar himself will show up with a pig slung over his massive shoulders.

So, when I tried to check in the airport at 5:30AM, a cruel immigration official determined that I was either a disturbed castaway from Lost (probably Sayid) or that I was much too drunk to go anywhere. He asked a lot of questions about where I had been drinking the night before and my nationality. As to the former question, I told him everywhere in Quito. I held off on the high-five. I’m 30. It’s just not appropriate anymore. As to the latter, I told him I have dual nationality with the US and Ecuador. I told him I was goin’ to Chicago. I asked him if he knew the song.  I think I then started a bacchanalian monologue about my great-grandfather, about his kick-ass Francophonism and extraordinary equestrian talent, but the immigration officer just held his finger to his lips and asked for my papers. He checked my documents and sternly told me that I couldn’t be in two places at the same time. I had no idea what he meant, though for a moment, I imagined the parallel universe that would grant me the ability to be at two places at the same time. It was wonderful, but it wasn’t Earth. After a lengthy argument with another immigration official about the ability to be in two places at the same time, (I think they determined that this was possible in Latin America, but not the United States. A Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel might have been proof) and a lengthier bag check, they decided that I was okay to fly. I was the last person to board and everyone on the plane seemed to be scowling at me. Five minutes later the plane jerked alive, and I promptly grabbed the puke bag. The Frenchman next to me squirmed and swore. I decided that I would not tell him about my great-grandfather. Hours later, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, or what I thought should be the Gulf of Mexico, I looked out the window and noticed that the sea touched the sky and the sky was blue and alien and kamikaze. I imagined that in the distant future the world would end there and this, somehow, put my nausea at ease. The Frenchman sitting next to me didn’t want to sit next to me anymore and he asked the stewardess if he could change seats.

Trains are a wonderful civic institution. We should all be thankful that we live in a city with trains. The City of Trains, to be exact. But they are also a romantic institution. The saddest films of the 40’s end in train stations. Most immigrants who arrived in Chicago during its first 100 years came by train. On her way to work, my mother reads romance novels on the train. Proof enough. Trains serve as interludes between one experience and the next, and there is nothing more romantic than anticipation.  Riding a train is like reading a poem that ends just where it needs to.

I thought for sure that I would feel like I was home at last after riding the L for the first time in a year and half. But somehow, it didn’t work. After living in the Andes, everything in Chicago seemed too flat, too immense. The Windy City, I always forget, is immense on a mythological scale. It has the sheer will of a Titan. It felt discouragingly unfamiliar after the density and remoteness of the mountains. I rode around the Loop and watched a whirlwind of passengers get on and off and waited for the end of my unfamiliar poem.

It wasn’t until two weeks later when I was driving around Logan Square on Kedzie Avenue that I felt like I had arrived home. It was a near-tropical, pellucid August night and in the distance Henry Bacon’s eagle monument shone his piercing gaze on the neighborhood. I was stopped at a light and a white construction van pulled up next to me.  I noticed that a man inside was watching me. He looked Eastern-European, a man from the Ural Mountains or a Serb with his own ghosts (ones constantly babbling about the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the best way to cook a pig). He motioned for me to roll down my window. I did. He then yelled something, but I couldn’t understand what. In the distance, a siren sounded. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled back, “WHAT?” He yelled again, “Hey asshole, your lights are out!” He then smirked the way only a Chicagoan can – after helping and insulting you at the same time, which, in my mother’s Chicago Jewish family is as common as breaking bread, so, sure, it feels good. It feels comfortable. I know this. I know how to respond. “Thanks shithead!” I yelled back.  The light turned green and the Balkan sped off, a benevolent force in the twilight.  I turned on my headlights and reminded myself of the following: No matter who the hell you are or where in the damn world you’ve been, you’re still an asshole with his lights turned off.

Oh yeah, I thought and pressed on the accelerator, I’m definitely home.

Photo by Daniel Schwen

comic5p1

Previous Lewis and Clark installments

Zach Danesh is a 23-year-old artist from a small town near Boston. Zach lived in Miami for half a decade and now resides in Brooklyn, NY. Zach’s debut graphic novel, Little Black Box, comes out in January, and samples of his previous work can be viewed at www.zachdanesh.com.

This line pops into my head a lot because I often need to rev myself up with defiant words. I like this particular version of it because the music, the words and the delivery are furious, and lurking underneath it all, I’ve got a competitive fury. Deep, I know.

The problem is that Mindless Self Indulgence (MSI), the band that performs the song “Shut Me Up,” also really, really likes to throw the word “nigga” around in their lyrics. Well, the problem is that I’m not quite sure this is a problem.

Many people would say there is room for some deep, nuanced discussion about the history of the words “nigger,” “nigga” and “negro.” I could throw in some smart references to the Senate Majority Leader, the President, Ralph Ellison, Cornel West and hip-hop. And apparently crack too, since I wrote to IGT editor Paul M. Davis the other day that MSI’s sound is “like crack to me. I crave it.”

And maybe that’s the problem. Their sound, to me, is so infectious that I wasn’t even able to think straight when a couple of months ago, annoyed by my constant listening of MSI, my white boyfriend noted that they used the word “nigga” a lot. He said, “you don’t approve of that, DO YOU?” (The caps are my emphasis.) I knew what he was getting at. He knows me well enough to know that generally my response to a white person appropriating a culturally sensitive term like that is, “Oh helllllllllllll no!” (a la Girlfriends) But I was so hooked on what I thought was a completely brilliant sound that I mentally scrambled to come up with an explanation for why it was okay while simultaneously thinking, “Fuuuuck.”

Let me back up and explain. I’m a light-skinned Black woman. This means that I know who I am but sometimes other people get a little confused. For example, when I was 15, I went with some white friends to a New Year’s party in small-ass, middle-of-nowhere Bowie, Maryland, where a couple of the guys started talking about niggers. Of course my immediate response was, “say what?” And yes, I have some cojones, so I challenged them. In a moment of revelation, one said, “I thought she was a Mexican! But she’s a nigger!” And we were thrown out of the party, into the cold, with no cell phones, completely unreasonable skimpy clothing, and no ride home. Thus began 1998, and the end of any illusions I had about racism in my age group.

Twelve years later, that evening stays with me. Like a lot of Black folks, I think “nigger” and variations of it have special meaning. And by special, I mean BAD. Bad bad bad. For months after that New Years incident, I was convinced that every white guy my age was secretly thinking, “Nigger nigger nigger” in the back of his mind. Yes, people, the word has power. I had been branded, for life. The good things stayed with me too: my white friends never abandoned me and never made me feel guilty about what we had just been through.

I eventually got over my irrational fear of white guys my age and went back to listening to KROQ, even as I became better able to appreciate things like Malcolm X and the eventual development of Afro-Punk. I continued to rock out to the good stuff (Nirvana and Tamar-kali) and the bad stuff (I once bought a P.O.D. album) when I wasn’t grooving to Mary J. Blige and or nodding in agreement with 2Pac. Not much has changed in the intervening 12 years except that I’ve integrated more good and bad and in-between into the mix. Enter MSI.

For those of you unfamiliar with their sound, MSI = (hip-hop + guitars) x speed. I have no idea whether this band is any good. I just know that when I feel like I need to scream, they do it for me. This music speaks to me. And it often feels like it speaks for me. It releases things that I’m not allowed to, at least not without the neighbors calling Waterloo Regional Police. So, I’m sitting there, in my car or on my bed rapidly nodding my head, “Two hookers and an eight ball/ Can you believe that I write this shit?” And it’s all totally awesome and then, “Nigga for all the stolen goods/ As I rock that niggas and get freaky-deaky/ with a front row ticket for all my bitches.” And then it’s ‘ummm, no, no that doesn’t speak for me at all!’

As I read the lyrics, it’s clear to me that the lyrical style here is meant to reference hip-hop. The question is whether it’s mimicking or mocking hip-hop? How am I supposed to tell the difference? Can I make that evaluation based on the skin color of the singer? Do I have to check the skin colors of the rest of the band? Thanks society, thanks a fucking lot for making this so complicated! If only you hadn’t dicked around with that whole enslaving my ancestors thing, I wouldn’t have to ask these questions.

But then again, maybe hip-hop never would have come to be without those fucked up experiences. Yes, of course, I’d happily reverse history and kill hip-hop if it meant there had never been and never would be a Middle Passage. But there was and it was born, and now whites like it too. What the hell is a Black girl to do?

Ask Google of course. And I did. Statements on the band’s forum and other websites indicate that the lead singer of the all-white band is a huge fan of hip-hop. He’s very inspired by it. And he’s decided this gives him license to say “nigga” (notably not “nigger”) as much as he damn well pleases. I can’t articulate it, but this doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe because while he might understand when that word is okay (because maybe it is okay in the context of hip-hop), his white listeners might not. White listeners who might throw Black girls out of parties for being niggas or niggers or whatever the hell.

Until everyone understands which way is up, maybe it’s better if the signs aren’t confusing. Annnnnd . . . that’s about as conclusive as I can get about this. I want to say something snarky about how I’m going to keep listening because it’s like crack to me, but I’m not particularly proud of the crack reference, given the history of the drug as a destructive force in the Black community. I want to say something honorable about getting white folks to listen thoughtfully, but I’m too jaded to believe that that’s going to happen any time soon.

What I can say is that my experience with MSI reflects a larger problem of being a person of color or any other divergence from straight-white-maleness in this world: over and over again, we are reminded that as much as we want to connect and think that we can, we are still outsiders in a world that never meant to properly include us. This makes me mad. Defiant. Furious even. Time to listen to some . . . Mindless Self Indulgence?