First of the Year: 2009

Volume II

Benj DeMott, Benj DeMott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Sammlungen

This is the second volume in the First of the Year Series. Contributors like Armond White, Philip Levine, Donna Gaines, Lawrence Goodwyn, Irving Louis Horowitz, Charles O'Brien, Fredric Smoler, Paul Berman, and Amiri Baraka are back (and blazing). And there are important new voices in the First mix, such as Vincent Harding, Roxane Johnson, and Bob Levin. If there is a leitmotif to this edition, it is the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. First aims to be up to the minute of this moment.As Benj DeMott notes "a glance at this volume confirms the margin is still the center for us." And that margin stretches from Harlem to the world. There are tales of edgy sojourns in Afghanistan, Thailand, and South Africa. The volume also has a Question & Answer with Ousmane Sembi, who taught Africans to resist "elements of received culture-those fixed rules and values which nobody but those on the margins dare to question." A second interview with Adam Hochschild celebrates the Englishman who invented abolition, and an African-American original who coined the phrase "crimes against humanity."The volume includes a protest against the Israeli war machine by Uri Avnery who has long been a creative outsider in his own society. It makes the case that American ideologues (on both extremes) keep getting the Middle East wrong because they cannot grasp the complexities of any country, including their own. First of the Year's minority angles of vision will help readers see with new eyes. It will help their hearing too. The volume has plenty of music writing marked by loving attention to details of pop performances. In short, this collection reflects its editor; direct, unafraid, urban, and entirely contemporary.

Part I
Home Is Where We Start

An elder once suggested we change the name of First of the Month to Harlem First. He was thinking locally (and universally)—proclaiming faith in rootsy humanism, not promoting black supremacy. There were reasons to be wary of our elder’s proposed name-change. The main one being that it might have seemed presumptuous to some Harlemites. But there are Firsters who got a right to sing at midnight on 125th. (See “A Child’s Vision of the Great Depression” p. 17 or “Manilow or Monk” p. 22.)

America loses out wherever tight-thinking culturalists rule, but the bigger danger comes from bland suburban blenders. Everybody wins when rapper Lil’ Wayne resists deracination—”I live in the suburbs but I comes from the hood” (with a little help from a sampled Nina Simone, “Please don’t let me be misunderstood... hood... hood... hood”). A happy few win too when Roxane Beth Johnson races Whitman in this volume—”Slaves out back in the garden among the zinnias are singing—death is a simple thing, he go from door to door.” Those who itch for a “post-racial” America tend to miss what’s made our culture great. And they’re not just dim about art-life. The notion that Obama’s election obviates the need for race men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is false. As long as there’s “Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others” (to use Obama’s phrase) there will be spots for African American “spokespeople” who defend local people of color against white power structures. Still, there’s one set of racial middlemen and women who may soon be displaced. I’m thinking of African American “public intellectuals” who exploit an experiential gap that first became apparent to the gentility in the 60s. I can’t go into the rise of their “cultural studies” here. But a New York Times take on an incident at a mid-60s White House Conference on race matters provides a bit of back story. One of the invitees to that rap on race—an African-American singer—burst out in condemnation of the other respondents, slamming the unreality of their discourse when seen in the light of her own experience. A shaken but proud Lady Bird Johnson responded she couldn’t “understand” the outburst because she hadn’t had the same experience. A New York Times editorial promptly credited the First Lady for her “candor.” That Times-approved notion that the feelings and sense of life of black communities were somehow beyond white people’s comprehension has lived long and fooled many since the 60s. We started First in part to resist it. And we’re still a place to be for crossover artists as many pieces in this volume prove. But back to those public intellectuals who make a career out of translating “the black experience” into bad English.

Their hustle might be past the sell-by date due to the accessibility of our new First Family. Black people and culture seem less and less alien to many white Americans. The process of familiarization began to accelerate during the primaries. I recall thinking we were in a brave new world as David Gergen explained Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July Speech” in primetime on CNN. When a national voice of conventional wisdom like Gergen talks up the relevance of Douglass’s rhetorical questions—”What to a slave is the fourth of July?”—there’s less call for self-styled clerics with negritude (or hip hop profs with attitude). Obama’s appointment of Lawrence Summers, who once “disrespected” Cornel West causing him to leave Harvard for Princeton, may come to symbolize the Decline of West and the rest. But if not, a new book by Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, hints a nadir is near for those who interpret “signs” of blackness for the clueless. I’m going to take a page or two to examine Rose’s dead end because it clarifies where First of the Year won’t go.

Starting with the over-the-top praise on the front and back cover from (1) Cornel West: “Rose is the distinguished Dean of hip hop studies and her recent book... affirms her grand status...” (2) Michael Eric Dyson: “A bracing and brilliant salvo from the front lines of hip hop’s war...” (3) Henry Louis Gates: “While the depth of Rose’s analytical skills is breathtaking, even more impressive... (4) Jill Nelson: “The Hip Hop Wars is The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual for a new generation...” (5) Robin D.G. Kelley: “A loving, smart and searing critique from the pioneer of Hip Hop studies...”

Once it’s on, the pioneer’s intervention quickly assumes a numbing, been-there-done-that quality.

Is the glorification of predatory behavior—directed against other African-Americans—desirable? Are prison derived behaviors and socializations a good model for non-incarcerated community development? Of course not. Should young black men and women, boys and girls, be emulating street hustling as a way of life? No. Should black fathers leave all parenting responsibilities to black mothers? No...

Rose’s dying falls give up the ghost. She’s not asking burning questions—her only motivation is to fill enough pages to let the log-rolling begin. She manages it (barely) by hammering on the obvious and piling up pieties. Hard to fathom how that blurber could conflate the high contentious spirit of Harold Cruse’s Crisis with pap like this:

In one class a white male student fan of hip hop exasperatedly asked, “Are you saying that white males as a group actually have more power and privilege than others in society?” I replied “Yes,” but said that this fact was not a personal indictment of him or others; it was the result of ideas and policies that support racial and gender inequality we can work together to change...

Rose’s invocation of her classroom serves as a reminder she must regularly judge writing by Brown University students though her own prose is a testimony to inconsecutive thought. Wars slogs through grammatical snafus—”Lyrics that depend on expression of injustice without critique or challenge are reflecting them, not exposing them”—non-sequiturs—”If commercially successful rappers produced as many songs about global warming and George Bush’s war in Iraq as they do about so-called bitches and hoes...those rappers could effectively address questions about global warming and the war”—all the way to Extreme Palin:

A powerful progressive emphasis on the destruction of foundational American values such as equality and justice has the potential not only to successfully respond to conservatives who use rappers as an easy target but also to challenge rappers to live up to the progressive values that highlight and work to change the unequal environment out of which hip hop has emerged.

Rose plays feminist cards like her Alaskan sister-under-the-skin too. But how feminist can she be when she offers this reading of hip hop argot: “[tip drill] is slang for a girl who is considered ugly but who has a nice ass.”

Rose’s flips from rote p.c. to vulgarity aren’t due to her immersion in street culture. She’s not hanging with homeboys. There’s a line in her acknowledgements that points to her distance from her putative subject(s). She thanks a colleague for “sitting me down and playing me several Lupe Fiasco tunes early in the project.” Lupe Fiasco’s rap is worth more than a nod. So Rose was nearly on to something. She includes Fiasco in lists of “progressive” rappers, quotes a passage from an interview with him, and name-checks one of his tracks. Yet she never provides a close hearing of any of his songs. And that’s par for the Wars.

And part of what makes her book the antithesis of First of the Year: 2009. There’s writing in this volume of First about contemporary R&B, Afro-pop, 60s rock and soul, hip hop and Bruce Springsteen’s Magic; all of it marked by—this time it’s for real—loving attention to details of pop musical performances. Armond White’s attentiveness is exemplary on this score. See how he notices (in his review of Magic) “waitress Sheniqua pouring coffee for ‘my poor Bill’... the first black female character in [Springsteen’s] songbook cosmology.” Or how he zeroes in on these lines of Biggie Smalls’ (to show up critics who claimed Eminem was hip hop’s genius):

Tell them hos,

Take they clothes off slowly

Hit em with a force like Obi

Big black like Toby

Watch me roam like Romey

Lucky they don’t owe me

When they say show me

Homie

The awesome, pop modernist range of Biggie’s references cohere with the brevity and plausibility of the rhyme sources—Star Wars, Roots, Frank Sinatra, the street—without ever explicitly defining what comprises his fantasy world. It’s sexual, criminal, historical, musical and, in the end, what Eminem never is: affirmative.

Hip hop positivity is supposed to be Rose’s specialty, but she has nothing vital to say about what’s good, bad or ugly in specific rap tracks. That might be a sign she’s lost her vocation. Yet her mangling of the title of the classic 1990 rap by A Tribe Called Quest suggests she’s never really been all that into hip hop. Only a Dean of Hip Hop studies (with a research assistant!) could turn Tribe’s round-the-way girl “Bonita Applebum” into a nice Jewish one, “Bonita Applebaum” (italics added).

On the real side, Rose’s mistake might be a revelation of personal (or social) history. I don’t know about Rose’s racial/ethnic ties, but I’m reminded of my first conversations about turning our newspaper First of the Month into an annual First of the Year. As our future publisher mulled over writers we’d printed and quotes from folks who’d allowed our rag wasn’t worthless, what struck him was the density of the links—fractious and fraternal—between African Americans and Jews in First’s corner.

Some things don’t never change. The title of Judy Oppenheimer’s tribute in this volume to her old school BFF, “Tight Connection,” underscores bonds between African Americans and Jews so evident throughout the book.

I planned for that reason to dedicate this First of the Year to the late James Bevel—organizer of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham (and the Million Man March)—who once seemed to incarnate the Movement’s Black/Jewish thing. Bevel wore a yarmulke in tribute to Old Testament prophets. But right before Bevel died last December, he was convicted of committing incest back in the 90s. (Bevel had 16 children by 7 women.) The case against him seems to have been incontrovertible so his glory days will always be shadowed by his low end. John Lewis thinks Bevel went mad after King was shot. But he seems to have always marched to a different music inside his head. (He had a doo-wop group in the 50s, around the time he began reading late Tolstoy.)

First will always make room for radical imaginations (though we can’t bow to someone like Bevel who moved on from the Movement’s Beloved Community to prey on his own family). A glance at this volume confirms the margin is still the center for us. And that margin extends from Harlem to the world. There are tales here of edgy sojourns in Afghanistan by an ex-hippie and an ex-drug-store cowboy. A Q&A with Ousmane Sembene who taught Africans to resist “elements of received culture—those fixed rules and values which nobody but those on the margins dare to question.” A Q&A with Adam Hochschild who celebrates the Brit who invented Abolition (and an African American original who coined the phrase “crimes against humanity”). A protest against the Israeli war machine by Uri Avnery who has long been a creative outsider in his society.

I’d caution longtime First readers not to understand Avnery’s presence—or the other critique here of Israel’s incursion in Gaza—too quickly. There hasn’t been an about-face at First on the Middle East. (No one in this neck of the woods ever thought the road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad.) Please don’t be misled by the recent review of last year’s First—”In Praise of First of the Year”—in the influential international journal Democratiya. While I’m glad author Thomas Hale gave First points for style, intellectual seriousness and a “sense of place,” he misrepresented positions on the Iraq War taken by me (and other First contributors). In First of the Year: 2008 I’d owned up to alleging before the invasion of Iraq the choice for the American left came down to “war or torture”—a claim blown away by the Abu Ghraib scandal. But Hale misread my admission of error, falsely asserting I’d conceded I was wrong to support the overthrow of Baathism in Iraq.

Clarity counts here chiefly because Hale aligned Kanan Makiya’s position with mine. No illusions the world must know my take on my shaming back pages, but Makiya matters. While he certainly has regrets about what’s happened in Iraq (as would anybody who’s tried to walk with that nation’s democrats), he’s explicitly rejected what he describes as “Maoist” calls for recantation. Hale notes I repeatedly cited a piece of Makiya’s in my introduction to a section of First articles on the Iraq war in our last volume. I did that in the course of criticizing (what seemed to me to be) a duplicitous “good-bye to all that” by New Yorker writer George Packer who had once been a lukewarm ally of Makiya’s. Packer (and others) traduced Makiya’s pre-war movement of mind, avowing that he cultivated beamishness about prospects for democracy in Iraq. But Makiya warned his compatriots they couldn’t “ride into Iraq on American tanks... without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath party has made of your country.” He detailed daunting dealings with “damaged” Iraqis in his own camp:

People who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply suspicious towards their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy, and ravaged land.

This passage and others I quoted in First of the Year: 2008 date from before the invasion of Iraq. Makiya was not engaging, as Hale seems to assume, in a retrospective mea culpa.

Hale slips from misinterpreting positions (and timelines) to mockery of my “self-aggrandizing” claim First deserved credit for the range of our polemics on the Iraq war. His sarcasm—”We may have been wrong, DeMott admits, but at least we were open to debate”— is a little out of order as Charles O’Brien says (see p. 235) in “To Criticize the Critic”:

Hale lectures, “The purpose of open debate [!] is not to embrace all views at all times [as if anyone has ever said that], but rather to allow the more intelligent position to win out.” Hales’ phraseology is important here...”Purpose” suggest that there was always only one admissible right answer, and that is Hale’s mind-set. And his phrase, “the most intelligent position,” is revealing. Most people would have said the best or the truest. Not the soon-to-be Dr. Hale: what counts for him is the most acceptable position. And there, time and again, we have been seriously wanting.

First isn’t about to start toeing correct lines now. Given the recent election in Iraq, which hints the idea of establishing a federal, democratic state there might not be a pipedream, it still seems wise to tune out certain trumpets on the left—”SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement] means total defeat for the U.S. in Iraq!”—as well as blowhards on the right—”2008 was the year we won in Iraq!”

American ideologues (on both extremes) keep getting Iraq and everything else wrong because they won’t grasp the complexities of any country, including their own. Minority angles on America have helped teach Firsters to see Iraq through Kurdish eyes and envision—with a push from Avnery (the “grandfather” of the Israeli peace movement)—the busy-being-born potency of Mizrahim in Israel.

Avnery is one ballsy Israeli. It takes much less audacity to be an anti-militarist in American universities as Fredric Smoler notes in his review here of soldier’s heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. Smoler uses the phrase “two nations” to evoke the gulf between academics and America’s officer class that the author of soldier’s heart managed to bridge when she taught cadets at West Point. Smoler reads this book as an account of a rare “mutually respectful meeting of opposites” in the Academy. Mike Rose’s piece in this volume—a sympathetic explanation of how everyday people are tested (and tricked) by higher education—engenders more faith in the possibility of such respectful meetings. Rose notes, in his other contribution here, that candidate Obama was faulted for his professorial manner (though it doesn’t seem to have hurt him). Perhaps Americans aren’t as anti-intellectual as some pundits assume. Especially when the intellectual in question is a good listener who seems to believe (as per Wesley Hogan in this First) “everyone—from Pat Buchanan to Sista Souljah, from Milton Friedman to Jim Hightower—has something to contribute to the civic conversation.”

Lawrence Goodwyn noted Obama’s knack for stimulating candid democratic exchanges in a First piece written before the future president gave the 2004 convention speech that made him a national figure. Goodwyn paired Obama then with another “relentless democrat”—the late Polish intellectual and Solidarnosc ally Jacek Kuron, whose “enduring legacy” was his “commitment to candor as an instrument of politics and his belief that one worked with anybody who was willing to help one deal with a persisting social malfunction inherited from the past....