Being
a latch-key kid meant that life between the hours of 2 and 5 Monday
through Friday resembled either an
episode of The Little Rascals or a chapter straight
out of Lord of the Flies. I now
lived in much closer proximity to others who shared
My world became much more diverse. Along with a superfluity
of kids around from other ethnicities, I enjoyed the company of a new
abundance of girls. They took notice of me and I them.
In school, no one singled me out as the broke kid from
the urban housing complex. My clothes were always clean, hair combed, and I ate
three meals a day.
The clothes might not have been popular brand names, but
with a little charisma, personality and boyish good looks, it wouldn’t matter.
Living in the city among other kids whose living
arrangements mirrored that of mine meant I shared good
company. I always hated being looked at as the “rich city kid” because we were
never rich. Here in the Village Apartments, everyone was equal.
And so, we adapted. To assume we never had disagreements
would be naïve. Fights were as common in urban life as
rural. They just ended sooner. It was over when someone
gave up and no one ever sustained any serious injuries. We learned to resolve
our differences amongst ourselves.
We were the first generation of kids whom the majority had
dual working or single parent working households. Our parents burned the candle
at both ends hoping to get ahead. Autonomy came by default as it shaped and
defined our values or (rather) challenged us to shape and adopt our own
principles of living.
The culture we embraced had much to do with that. Being the
MTV generation, we took no shame in wanting to imitate the lives portrayed in
rock or rap videos. We grew our hair, pierced our ears, and ripped our jeans.
Guys took on jewelry as the girls worked overtime to look older and more mature
and were successful in doing so.
But growing up in the indulgent eighties didn’t leave much to mystery once we
became adolescents. The ideological landscape remained littered with
world-ending, pessimistic doom and gloom. We tried our best to pack the
plethora of sensual pleasures of life into a perceived short period of
existence.
And when the world didn’t end, we continued on through life.
For many, habits became a lifestyle and that lifestyle became a day to day
mundane existence. Our attitudes grew cynical and dark as we channeled our
energy into justifiable art forms. We were not just artists by medium,
but by being, preferring a selective solitude in our
art, content in accepting that not everyone of our generation
was called on this earth to paint, draw, sing, play, and create. Our joy
came in taking the throw away junk and the broken pieces of this world,
re-imagining it all into something beautiful, and leaving it for another
to enjoy (or destroy). I admit: many times our artistry
seemed abstruse, angry and aggressive. But this, our
expression, was what we knew.
Perhaps we should have focused more in school. We should have tried
harder. Our plan-A should have been our plan-B. Our dreams of shattering the
glass ceiling into fame whether on the rock-and-roll big stage or the runway or
a movie set were noble in their own right, but conservators around us would not
resist advancing the tacit advice that we needed a trade or profession to
fall back on. Work towards paying the bills first. If our dreams failed, our
safety net would catch us.
I found such advice to be gutless. I clung to every
intention of investing in my dream of one day being famous. I could not accept
this boring, uninspiring scheme of cradle-to-the-factory-then-you-die template
of existence.
In my public school, this arrangement between education and craft was
clear. It wasn’t math, history, science, or English class where I had my subtle
revelation, but art class. It felt as if an angel leaned in over my
shoulder during a project and whispered: “You are being groomed.” In a sudden
moment, I received a grand epiphany that this was not an art class, but
vocational training.
As easy as it could have been for me to do, I didn’t blame
the teacher. She only operated within the mandated structural confines of her
own craft. It would be hard to imagine that she held some overarching
invested interest in connecting herself to an agenda of making diverse
industrial soldiers of us all.
In contrast, if someone desired to grow up and commit
themselves to a life of labor or office work or the cradle to grave preformed
pattern of general living, then knock yourself out. But true artists have art
stuff to focus on. Time for criticizing life’s plans and maintaining a stable
bank account was in short supply. Such energy can rob one of inspiration.
Maybe not as much in my earlier years, but now, I
acknowledge the need for the offices, roles, and positions required to
make up a healthy, well-functioning society. I thank God for honest law
enforcement officers; Praise the Lord for the EMT focused with laser
precision on saving lives night after night; Hallelujah for the lineman who
puts his life on the line after a major storm restoration. And amen for
the graphic artist who designs logos, fonts, t-shirts, menus, posters, signs,
banners, and billboards that give our world a broader means of communication.
We need these people. But not everyone was born for vocation. And so is the
torment of the hyper-imaginative artisan.
Someone had to carry the torch. We were the offspring of an
electric, charged, world-changing counter culture. The history we knew taught
us that our parents trailblazed among the path of social upheaval and
mobilization from The Black Panthers to The Weather Underground to Feminism to
Anti-war protests to gay liberation to environmentalism. This was our
birthright.
Our parents mellowed over time. Either they
weren’t the same revolutionists, or they only identified with the movement by
default and once the hype died down, they took the bargain of abundance from
society and learned to shut up as long as they had their needs met. I would
bank on the latter as the real movers and shakers came from an even
earlier “silent“ generation and were actually few.
It all laid out so perfectly for us to follow
suit. To Boomers, they had won the war. But to us, the cause remained
unfinished. There was much work left to do. And so, we resisted and longed
for purpose or anything that would give our illusory comfortable lives meaning.
We were spoiled. That could be true. Even when my
parents were broke, they provided. And in a worst-case scenario, we never
worried at all for food, shelter, clothing, or education. We wanted for nothing
even in the hardest of times.
Yet our souls... our souls were malnourished prisoners
of our own existence always looking through the bars that confined us knowing
there was chaos, beauty, excitement, and fascination somewhere in the ether.
Our forbearers remained cynical concerning organized
religion and for good cause. But in throwing the baby out with the bathwater,
they abandoned spirituality altogether and left a world for us to figure
out on our own. It was this pathology that became the cornerstone of our
identity.
And so we searched, questioned, and refused to settle for
easy answers to the convoluted mysteries we beheld. And we dug deep. And
we turned to the poets, word smiths, sages and prophets of the generation before,
and those of our own.
Music played a role in our congruity. In the eighties, the
flashy, glitzy, indulgent hair metal got boring, eventually. There was another
wave on the horizon. The time to come into our own happened upon us, and the
change we sought had been organizing itself under the surface.
While eighties hard rock/hair metal standard
remained strong, it still did not feel like ours. We indulged as anyone
else, but just to bide our time.
In the undertow’s current of popular music, innovative
pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash, Eric B. and Rakim, Kurtis Blow, Afrika
Bambaataa, and The Sugar Hill Gang were setting things in motion.
Rap came to be not because of some lazy gene of
the African American community as many Caucasian people would insist. Its story
is quite the opposite. People of Color invented American music. We owe a huge
debt of gratitude to the contributions of maestros such as Robert Johnson,
Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown. When people in
urban communities who relied on our public school system suffered budget cuts
in education and music programs during the Reagan era, turntables became
instruments and young black men became rhythmic poets. Black children with no
money for private training reverted to an old tradition of entertaining
themselves.
In his book Die Nigger Die, H. Rap Brown
describes how he got the name “Rap”. As a young adult, he and his friends would
stand on the street corner and play a game called The Dozens. The competitor
would try to dismantle his opponent by rhyming words to make fun of the
opponent’s mother. The crowd would stand around the two competitors and their
reaction would determine the winner.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, musicians
insisted on sticking to character by not bowing to the hair wave that
swept the world. Bands such as The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, and
Siouxsie and the Banshees maintained a mellower, dreamier, non-distorted sound.
And even though we respected their stardom to a degree, their biggest days
were still yet to come.
Brewing in the shadows of American music were soon-to-be
superstars such as The Replacements, The B-52’s, The Violent
Femmes, and R.E.M. just to name a few.
A more synthesized sound was also being embraced worldwide
with the music of Ministry, Depeche Mode, and The Cure.
But back in L.A. where all aspiring rock stars flocked, the
world remained impervious despite the future being covertly transformed by a
trifecta of sounds by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Suicidal Tendencies, and
Jane’s Addiction.
Many acknowledge September 29, 1991 as the defining moment of an evolving
generation when Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit debuted on MTV’s 120
Minutes. After germinating for a time, the transformation was
well underway. Nirvana may have been game changers. But pioneers they were
not.
Even in my home state of Mississippi, we celebrated one of
our own as Ty Tabor, lead guitarist of King’s X, crafted a darker yet melodic
sound that predated “grunge”.
Faith No More and Alice In Chains found themselves
lumped in with the flashy hair bands of the eighties because as popular as they
were, no one could define what they were.
And so, with this swelling tide of generational cynicism,
boredom, and desperation, our generation embraced a more uniform outlook as
we determined more than ever that the acceptable status quo was no longer
acceptable. Many will say it was disingenuous. In some cases, I can get where
that would be true. But it didn’t seem like we would leave this earth as fast
as we supposed. For the first time in our young unified lives, we found a
purpose by stepping across lines once thought to be beyond the pale.
As with so many things, our values were in the music we
embraced. Not in just lyrical content alone, but in our concerted effort to buy
and listen to that which seemed abnormal.
African Americans who never had a place among the Aqua Net
and spandex Sunset Strip reinvented their own wheel as they picked up guitars
and cranked out the sounds of Bad Brains, Living Colour, and Fishbone.
The Rap/Rock hybrid popularized by Rage Against the Machine
and Urban Dance Squad found its genesis in groups such as 24-7 Spyz and The
Beastie Boys. But it would be unjust to not also give recognition to Run DMC’s
collaborative remake of Walk This Way with Aerosmith.
My generation was not only scaling, but breaking down
cultural walls that regardless of how far we had come as a country, we still
had work to do. Rodney King getting beat to a pulp on national television
became a rallying point for black and white alike.
It didn’t stop the ignorant narrative of fear still
circulating as during the riots of Los Angeles, every major news outlet
broadcasted the brutal beat down of white truck driver Reginald Denny. It made
for very interesting conversations around dinner tables and family reunions as
you could almost guarantee someone would say something that sounded like:
“See?! See?! They are nothing more than uncivilized animals!”
As a young white man not long out of high school, I couldn’t
help feel this fear. Suspended in my ignorance, I had not done enough to
educate myself in facing my own implicit racial biases.
I had friends from other parts of town that
were more homogeneous than what I was used to. They taught me that life was not
always about putting all of your eggs in one basket. It was not just about
picking your preformed identity and sticking to it. We possessed the ability
to create something far more harmonious and daring from the world. And it
mattered little what others thought.
One west-side friend introduced me to NWA, Public Enemy, Too
$hort, and Ice T. Ice T became a champion when he reached across some cultural
barriers himself. And when he did, he didn’t go the safe route. His band Body
Count embodied all things punk, metal, hip hop, thrash, and controversy.
An edited version of There Goes The Neighborhood became a mainstay on MTV. Yet
that is not what caught the most attention. It was their angry and
defiant song Cop Killer. Everyone from President George H. W. Bush to the
founder of the Parent’s Music Resource Center, senatorial wife Tipper Gore
joined in condemning its message and calling for its boycott even likening it
to the anti-Semitic message of Hitler.
And though Ice-T fought back by pointing to the hypocrisy
that Eric Clapton could release a similar message and it become a hit almost
two decades earlier with I Shot The Sheriff, he succumbed to the pressure of
having his album pulled from shelves and later re-released it without the
single (although the decision to do so was likely more that of Warner Brothers
than his).
Despite controversy and pressure, Ice-T would remain
true to form as he found a platform to set the record straight on the Arsenio
Hall Show in 1992 as he stated:
“It’s not that, Arsenio. That’s not
what the problem is. The problem is white kids are listening to this music and
all of a sudden, I have injected the white kids with the anger of the black
kid. And all of a sudden, they yellin’ at their mother. And that’s the big
problem.”
His words were truth to us. Our generation had a spokesman
willing to represent our collective sentiments. It would be presumptuous
to assume that everyone of my peers were as committed to the cause of knocking
down racial barriers as I. But we turned a corner and found empowerment through
pop culture. And the fight would not come easy if you were a white boy from
Mississippi.
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