February 25, 2007
First Sunday of Lent
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
The Dixie Chicks and African-American Music: Just How Subversive Is Music Anyway?
On Friday I was walking behind a young man at Barnard who was wearing a tri-colored striped jacket and pants that were vaguely reminiscent of a tallit, with shredded-ended strings brushing the ground. His hat was orange. His sneakers were purple. He was speaking to a young woman who seemed all ears. "I don't know why they built buildings in the seventies. Look at these things. Didn't they know that they didn't have any taste?"
Today, on this First Sunday in Lent, people normally read the story of Jesus' temptation in the desert. He goes there to get away from it all and meets a devil who asks him three questions. In sequence, the devil offers him power, money, and control. To each Jesus says no. He prefers his own company and his own taste.
Music is like that, too. It can be offered by the devil of corporate capitalism at $18.96 a pop, flat, wrapped in plastic, mass-made with a few people at the top making a lot of money from people who think taste is less important than money. (The CD is an uncanny version of what some people want to do to Washington Square Park.) Or something different can happen. We can sing the songs of the people to whom we choose to belong. We can have taste or be tasteless. My friend at Barnard wasn't really talking about architecture or art; he was talking about himself and telling us to whom he belongs. It is very much not the seventies. While I don't think we have to dump on each other's tastes in music or buildings, I do think we have to learn to say no to the devil and choose identification with the groups we love. Saying no to the devil is much simpler than people think. It has to do with what and whom you want to belong to. If you want to belong to money wrapped in plastic, or parks flattened and fenced-in, then there are plenty of opportunities. If you want to belong to yourself and the people who don't like plastic wrap, there are additional choices. You can like street music as well as wrapped music. Jesus made a set of choices against money, control, and power. We can, too. These choices involve another kind of power, another kind of money, another kind of control. One concentrates; the other distributes. Jesus' kind distributes.
In a fascinating article by Tyler Cowen (New York Times, 2/21/07) we have a series of studies about globalized and globalizing music summarized: "Loyalties to cultural goods and services - be it heavy metal music or the opera - are about social networking and choosing an identity and an aspiration. We use culture to connect with other people and to define ourselves: both are, to some extent, economic decisions… [We] use cultural projects to signal our place in hierarchies." When we choose to like the Dixie Chicks, we are telling the world something about who we are. When we choose to dislike them, we are also - in new language that I remain uncomfortable with - signifying. Like wearing a T-shirt or a button, or Calvin Klein or vintage or thrift shop, we say who we are by our cultural choices. Jesus said who he was by lack of interest in ruling the world. He identified with those who don't rule the world. We can do that too by the choices of music, clothing, and architecture that we make.
Cowen goes on to say that "globalization is most likely to damage local culture in regions like Scandinavia that are lightly populated, not very hierarchical…" Such dominance is much harder in India or China. Indian music is 96% domestic in origin. While Europe is very welcoming to American cultural products (70% of cinematic culture), smaller countries have been less welcoming of cultural imports. Actually, the poorer a country, the more likely it will buy and listen to its own domestic music. Cowan concludes: "The complaint of 'cultural imperialism' is looking increasingly implausible." Culture is not a zero sum game. People have choices.
I was thrilled with this analysis because so often I find cultural whining instead of cultural imagination to abound in folk like us. "The world has gone vanilla." Whine whine. "The buildings are terrible." Whine, whine. This one particularly galls me: "There is nothing we can do to keep Washington Square Park from being overtaken by the Parks Department and the mayor and their interest in fencing, straightening, and gentrifying it. It will soon be Robert Moses-ed and shrink-wrapped." These whines are balderdash. They hand power over to people who won't use it well without even a fight. They are the "can't win" strategy of the current American Left. You'd think we'd never gone to a desert or faced a devil down. You'd think we didn't have choices about what kind of music we play or sing. Yes, sing. No one keeps you from singing your own music. Or humming your own tune. If slaves sang songs the master couldn't hear, so can we.
In an effort to applaud the "no" of Jesus in the desert and the no's of millions, if not billions, of people around the world, I want to draw positive attention to a few features of the extraordinary subversive power of music. Subversing means singing another tune, dancing to a different beat, making jazz out of our relationship with the dominant culture. We are not hopelessly lost in elevator Muzak or even Frank Sinatra's crooning, which I happen to enjoy. We are not hopelessly lost in seventies buildings. We have the power of imagination, humor, and song. We have the ability to say no to power, money, and control on behalf of peace, justice, and joy. We have the power to say no to homogenization, stupidity, and straight lines; we need not be shrink-wrapped.
Surely some of you heard the feature about the Electric Slide and the right way to dance it. It was on NPR on February 20th:
In the mid 1970's a popular song promised to "take you on a body ride" and teach you the Electric Slide. Over the years, people have been dancing the Electric Slide at parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs - you name it - but the next time you move to the groove be careful: you could be charged with "illegal motion". The inventor of the dance, Ric Silver, is considering legal action to make sure that the Electric Slide is danced correctly. Ric Silver says, "It's a series of grapevines to the right and back to the left, then straight back, and then you step forward and touch and you step back and touch, and you repeat that step, which is what everybody has forgotten. They don't do the repeat step." There are supposed to be 22 steps to the dance because Richard Silver was born on January 22nd; most people only do 18. Richard says, "When I started going to weddings and bar mitzvahs myself and getting on the dance floor to do the dance and people are coming up to me and saying, 'You're doing it wrong', I got very upset." So what do you say, "Excuse me, I invented it?" "Yes!" Silvers says there are thousands of videos online of people doing the wrong version. He owns the copyright of the dance and for ten years he has been writing websites and threatening to sue if the missed steps are not removed. "One group wrote back to me and said, 'Who do you think you are, and, Get a life!' That sort of irritated me." But Richard Silver did not get mad, he got a lawyer. "I think he would have a very difficult case," says Arnold Lutzer, who is a lawyer who specializes in copyright issues. We asked him to review Richard Silvers' case. "The critical legal concept is you can protect choreographic works; social dance steps are not copyrightable. He has on his website words that lay out what the dance step looks like, but it's an extra legal step to go from those words to controlling the way people dance." That's what a lawyer says; Richard Silvers says he is not trying to get money from a lawsuit. He says there's a bigger issue at stake: "At the beginning of the song it says 'It's electric (snap), it's electric (snap),' so I created the dance so people could do it and enjoy it and I don't want this going into history incorrectly." Singer, dancer, choreographer, and by day accountant, Richard Silver.1
There will be people who will no longer dance the Electric Slide at parties for fear of a lawsuit. And there will be people who will still dance it their way. One says yes to the devil of the right way to do things; the other says a deeper yes to the many divine ways to do things, including dancing.
Another example: many of you know about the book The Higher Power of Lucky. It is about a dog that is bit in the scrotum by a snake. Lucky Trimble, the ten-year-old heroine, knows how difficult this is, even though she doesn't have a scrotum. Many librarians are upset that they find themselves, once again, in the position of having to defend indelicate bodily language. They imagine it is bad for their image with uptight, anti-erotic, suburban, church-going folk - note to whom they are playing their band. Instead, they might claim it as a great opportunity to restore the name of librarians. Again, note to whom they could play instead of the crowd that they choose; when Jesus says no to the devil, he chooses to play his music to a different crowd. Instead of taking prudery beyond the prudential, librarians could model themselves (with the proper pronunciation and spelling of the word 'scrotum') on Marian Paroo of The Music Man, a complicated professional who scandalizes River City with her love of bawdy books. "Consider," she said, "Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac." We have choices with whom and to whom we sing. We always have choices.
Today I want to praise bands like the Dixie Chicks who, in a very unpopular time to be doing so, decided not to make music to the President. What a concept. I want to praise another Dixie Chick, who just died. I'll use Paul Krugman's words to do it: "Was Molly Ivins smarter? No, she was just braver. The administration's exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious."
Hooray, Dixie Chicks. Hooray, Molly Ivins.
Ivins wrote a very important article in Mother Jones in 1995. There she said about Rush Limbaugh and the way he tormented and frightened ordinary people with ridicule, that "satire is the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people, it's like kicking a cripple." Ivins never sang a song to the famous, the rich, or the powerful. She sang a song to and with people. She was an artist at subversion and saying no to the devil. Store-bought music can also kick cripples; it takes away our power and substitutes a commodity.
Humor like these Dixie Chicks' happens every day. That Al Sharpton is a descendant of Strom Thurman is something only truly tasteless people enjoy. Watch out for people who don't know their relatives or don't like to use certain kinds of words. They are playing to the ladies who look like they are dancing in The Music Man and their clones - you know, the old biddies. I admit I don't like "Potty Mouth Sarah Silverman," but that's because I don't find her funny, not because she uses language "inappropriate" for polite company. ( I am enjoying the little battle at Cornell University, which began when a fraternity put out a pamphlet, "The Top 75 Reasons Bitches Should Not Have Freedom of Speech." A group of women retaliated without moralistic or high-sounding rhetoric and said, "The Top 75 Reasons Why Men Should Stop Thinking With Their Dicks." A good belly laugh can still short-circuit the ideological dial on the personal laugh-o-meter.)
Is there any such thing as impoliteness? Of course there is. It happens in e-mail all the time. Impoliteness is when you hurt somebody's feelings for no real purpose. It's when you are mean, usually in a self-protecting, self-justifying moralistic way. In the article. "Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to Email Misbehavior", we hear the reason there is so much impoliteness on email, "The brain seems to need the face to face cues that nurture Civility," according to Daniel Coleman, author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Our music probably won't really get better till we all start singing, together, face-to-face, more. Let's hear it for the awesome value of a human choir and spending Saturday night singing instead of buying singing.
The brain needs to sing. The brain needs to make music. The brain needs to see beautiful buildings. And the brain needs to make choices. With whom shall we sing the songs of those who hurt us, the songs of a strange land? We have choices. We have each other. I am so tired of people talking about what they can't do and what can't happen. I'm tired of giving away our power to a male culture that sells it back to us at higher prices. What about singing with the people who are being deported or detained, the people whom Malcolm X describes as, "worked from can't-see-in-the-morning to can't-see-at-night"? What about a night song with those who are exhausted? Malcolm X also said, "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, the rock landed on us." Let us sing with the people on whom the rock landed. Let us sing with Yo Yo Ma on the Silk Road, all the way back to the beginning of tunes. Let us worry less about taste and more about music, which by the way doesn't really have to have any purpose at all, including that of subservience. We can just hum. It doesn't cost any money. We don't have to buy anything from the devil or sell any of ourselves. We have choices. We can sing. We can hum. We can also subverse.
1 "Creator Seeks to Preserve 'Electric Slide.'" Renee Montagne, NPR's Morning Edition, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007
