Three Deaths

THREE DEATHS

There were a number of notable deaths at the end of 2006. One was James Brown, and when his death was announced, I was at my parents' house for Christmas, far away from New York (or so it felt, anyway). I heard he was going to lie in state at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and I was sad I was going to miss it. But when I opened up the paper onboard the Amtrak returning home, I found out I had miscalculated: the date of his "appearance" would be that day, and if I hustled a bit when I got home, I could go see him--or, at least, see the people waiting for him, since it was unlikely I would actually get in. (I missed the cutoff by maybe 50 people. This was the cutoff to wait another two hours to get in, though, so it's probably for the best.)

Why go, if not to actually see him? Well, James Brown was responsible for more than one genre of pop music, embraced and enhanced an incredible number of eras and styles, and was at the time of his death unquestionably the most influential musician alive, historically speaking. More than that, though, it was for the energy, for the spectacle of the thing. Just being outside would make me and my companions part of the event, and personally, because I work in an office all day, I feel like I miss out on a lot of the events New York has to offer, and granted the reprieve of a vacation day, I couldn't think of a better way to use it. Still can't.

I found lots of people, but not many of them were white. The only caucasians I got a good look at turned out to be French, and they don't really count. (French people are the second most likely group of people to be found at James Brown's wake.) But I am a white person, and I was in fact with two other white people. One was even Canadian. (Hi, Hannah!) But how could you not go out to James Brown's wake? Was I committing some sort of racial faux pas by being there? Or was it just attributable to New Yorkers' normal instincts for avoiding crowds?

What was there, symbolically speaking, was black culture. (The lack of white people helped make this as obvious as it was, but this fact was not technically part of the symbolism.) Let's just start with the actual attraction itself: James Brown's body in a royal blue suit, inside a gold coffin, lying on the stage of a theater whose most regular occupant these days is Mo'nique. The man's body was going on tour--next stop was the James Brown Arena in his hometown of Augusta.

But then there was the scene outside. The line to get into the Apollo Theater ran down 125th Street in Harlem and four blocks up Frederick Douglas Boulevard, past the headquarters of the Amersterdam Eagle. There were old ladies in their fancy church hats. There was a barbershop with people dancing outside. A man walked down 125th asking if anyone wanted to buy Newports. Two matching white SUVs drove slowly by with logos of what I can only assume are up-and-coming entertainment companies on the back windows. Men sold books whose titles I probably shouldn't be typing. For the first time since they went up, all the big-box stores that now populate 125th street, Old Navy and H&M and its brethren sprouting out from "Harlem USA," looked actually out of place, overwhelmed by Harlem rather than brazenly encroaching upon it.

And then there was the marquee. You've probably seen pictures of it, reading "REST IN PEACE APOLLO LEGEND / THE GODFATHER OF SOUL / JAMES BROWN / 1933-2006" But what no one seems to mention is that this was not, in fact, the only thing the marquee was saying. It's an electronic marquee, and it was cycling through not only this notice but other ones, advertising upcoming events at the Apollo, television showings of Amateur Night, and even things that had nothing to do with the Apollo whatsoever. A dead body was lying inside, and the body's host was advertising what other things would be appearing in the future where the body was now. And no one seemed at all bothered by this. James Brown was certainly one of the most revered figures in the culture, and there was no concern about this lack of reverence. It wasn't even worth remarking upon.

The cumulative effect was of all the symbols of black America, positive and negative, celebratory and damaging, signing a temporary truce so they could mingle for a day here in the cradle of African-American culture. It was a final testament to James Brown and his status as a unifying figure--possibly one of the last unifying figures black America will ever have.

*****

The above is not (or not just) a recitation of ignorant stereotypes of black people. It is the first part of a contrast. Around about the same time James Brown died, former President Gerald Ford (a man who was unifying in the sense that everyone was united in not caring about him much, unless your name was Nixon) also died, and the news stations seemed to ask themselves the question "how could you not cover his funeral nonstop?"

How indeed! Cable news offered up coffin-to-grave coverage of the ponderous ceremonies, and lordy, it was like watching paint die, er, dry. During primetime, ten channels--god bless a slow week--show us shots of a car stopping in front of some Boy Scouts, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And you can't say anything during all this, partially out of respect for the dead, but mainly because there isn't that much to say. But they showed us these static images anyway, encouraging us to ponder them, and in the process highlighting nothing so much as their utter blankness.

The fact that it was Ford's funeral meant that there was nothing about the man to consider, really, during all of this; you couldn't think about the absurd things people had been saying about the recently dead, as you could with Reagan, nor could you consider his impact on America, because that took about three minutes. There just wasn't that much to think about Gerald Ford, and this had the peculiar effect of forcing you to actually notice what was going on, to regard it not as mere pomp (the announcer's soothing voices droning a play-by-play only heightening the narcotic effect, customarily) but as actual concrete events. The physicality, the realness of it all stood out, for once. Ford was such an uninteresting President that it was like a spanner in the works, a disruption of the normal order of things, highlighting the absurdity of the goings-on.

And maybe you wouldn't have noticed it were it not for the recent festivities surrounding the Godfather of Soul, but the proceedings certainly were, well, white. Not only in the literal sense, with all that buffed marble, but in the "overwhelmingly caucasoid" sense as well. All this ceremony was imported directly from Western Europe, the loins of white Americans' fruit, with the strongest echoes being of British ceremony: the starkness, the regard for easy symbolism (infused with as much heavy tradition as a still-young country can muster) over aesthetics or resonance, the dryness of it all.

But it also struck you how much it was a product of the amalgamated white American culture. This culture does not seem strange, of course, because it is so familiar, but what we think of as white culture is oddly sourceless. The images Ford's funeral evoked were not those of, say, an Irish-American wake, with its comfortable materiality. They weren't those of a white Southern funeral, with its quiet beauty. They weren't even of a WASP funeral, which would have far more self-aware gentility and far less ostentatious humility. If anything, they would seem to have sprung from California, the leading candidate for the cradle of white American culture, but it seemed to lack the vague ridiculousness and crassness of a California funeral.

No, the sourceless white American culture that produces Presidential funerals is also the same culture that produces the accent of news anchors, one common across the country, whether you're a white guy in Georgia or an Asian lady in New York. It's also the same culture that determines the aesthetics of cable news: packed with information but lacking any context or deeper meaning, grasping at easy symbolism not as a means to express something deeper but merely as a way to invoke something faster, to pretend at depth. And this was why the news channels were so eager to give Ford's funeral nonstop coverage. It was white American culture--Boy Scouts and World War II[1] and landscaped trees and suits and silence and cable fucking news--coming together in the vast virtual space it always occupies to do yet another awkward dance.

And it made you wonder why this culture was still dominant. In a country where unpopular things have been falling like crazy lately, this culture, one that has been almost completely rejected by consumers, has survived as a social and political norm. Regardless of whether it's right or not, is it even Good For America? The Constitution--a legitimate source of glory white America's been milking for a long time now--is careful to protect the rights of minority populations. But what about the rights of minority cultures?

Now, when someone says something like this, it usually indicates that they are worried about the traditional practices of a tiny population that they see being eliminated by multinational pop culture. Of course, this ignores the fact that microcultures die all the time, they're just subsumed as artistic memory within the larger culture, and that generally these cultures die out because multinational pop culture is fun as fuck, one of the great achievements of our species, and forcing people to preserve their unwanted local customs so that one day they, too, can present them to bored four-year-olds and their conscientious parents at a children's museum seems like a form of sadism--well, that's not the kind of thing I'm trying to say, is the point.

What I'm saying is that just as minority groups deserve a "place at the table," in our civic life, so do minority cultures. And yet, as Ford's funeral amply demonstrates, black culture--which, let's be honest, almost everyone likes some aspect of--is almost wholly absent from those aspects of culture that constitute our civil religion. There were no ladies with fancy church hats, no brass bands, no solid-gold coffins. And yet these things would have inarguably been more American than marble columns and rotundas and a body guarded by soldiers. Black culture has been remarkably unable to infiltrate America's secular nationalist traditions. Oh sure, there's the cultural stuff--jazz, old blues musicians, Morgan Freedman--but this is all carefully walled off with the other cultural stuff that you’d never see at a governmental function. [2]

And this confusing dominance of the sourceless, amalgamated white American culture over our political and civic life has had disastrous effects. It makes mandatory the middle-class populism, false humility, and schoolmarmish morality that white America sees itself embodying, and as a result, the only people eligible for public office resemble nothing so much as news anchors. They are embodiments of company men, unable to show any character, creativity, or adventurousness (three things we could use right now, rather than carefully plotted timidity or pigheadedness masquerading as common sense), the equivalent of the droning voices of announcers that solumnulate us into not noticing the absurdities being presented to us as the status quo. It's created this strange freak class of elected officials (though not, notably, their staffs) wholly separate from the rest of us, who, it's been amply documented, have sex and do drugs and use swear words in public all the time. White culture isn't even white culture anymore.

But maybe it could be--and maybe American culture could be American culture--if we started being a little more honest about what exactly that culture is. No one wants to be part of the mainstream anymore, to the point that we've all decided that the mainstream doesn't actually exist. But it does: millions of people across all interest groups watch the same TV shows and see the same movies.[3] And it looks almost nothing like the abstracted image of mainstream culture that we've allowed to persist because we keep insisting that it's dead, that this thing before our eyes does not exist merely because it appears on a screen. Talk about a disconnect from reality! We've defined the mainstream as something it's not so we can pretend that it's dead. This image of the mainstream is fixed right before people stopped wanting to be a part of it: the 1950s, the era whose absolutely ahistorical conditions continue to be used as our political benchmarks. If we were able to embrace our pop culture as actually popular culture, one that's not uniform but certainly shared, maybe the voices that have become an inextricable part of that pop culture--black voices, female voices, Southern voices, Latino voices, the whole goddamn Burger King Kids' Club spectrum--could also become a part of our civic life. Maybe we wouldn't have to live separate lives anymore but the cultural reality of a market-driven amalgam of voices could become a social reality too. And maybe our political life could stop being a bad joke from a hack comic booed off the stage at the Apollo Amateur Night.

[1] In the abstract; c.f. Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation
[2] Except, of course, for when something appears specifically to represent the entirety of the separate black culture at political events, e.g. "And now, a gospel choir!"
[3] I'm too close to music to be able to honestly say that anything like a mass market exists for music anymore, but that's a whole other issue.

Labels: ford, james brown, music, new york, politics, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM