What Obama Means

Jabari Asim

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061977220
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

"Provocative and compelling."
— New York Newsday

"Both entertaining and insightful."
— Washington Post Book World

"It should be on the required reading list."
— Chicago Sun-Times

What Obama Means by Jabari Asim, renowned cultural critic and author of The N Word, is a timely and sharp analysis of how the "Obama phenomenon"exhibits progress inAmerican politics and society.Afrequent guest and commentator on "The Colbert Report, " "The Today Show, " NPR's "Diane Rehm Show" and many other media programs, Asim alsoexamineshow cultural and political forcesled to thewatershed 2008 presidential election while indicatingwhat theelectionmeans for every American.

CHAPTER 1

What Cool Can Do

A YOUNG MAN grows up as the only son of a white mother and a brilliant, misunderstood black father who has drowned his early promise in drink. The young man broods a lot and hones his craft amid a multicultural crowd of energetic young people. Despite being clearly talented, he attracts critics who suggest that he’s overly ambitious, just a kid. Perhaps he should set his sights a little lower, bide his time. He struggles, endures unfulfilling relationships, experiments with self-destructive behavior. In the end, though, he prevails. He mounts the stage amid great expectations and leaves it to great applause.

If you’ve seen Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 Oscar-winning film, the plot I’ve described is quite familiar to you.

Any resemblance between Barack Obama’s real-life story and Prince’s fictional one is entirely coincidental. After all, Prince starred in that big-screen musical long before most of us had ever heard of Obama. But its biracial themes and Prince’s aggressive pursuit of a multiracial image bear closer observance. For in many ways, the path to success pursued by Prince, Michael Jackson, and black performers who have followed their trail anticipated—and helped pave—the road that Obama traveled on his way to the White House. What’s more, the world they describe—one free of racial obsessions—closely resembles the American society that Obama calls for and that his followers enthusiastically applaud.

There were successful multiracial bands before Prince and the Revolution hit the scene, and their two-tone racial makeup has been as much a subject of historical discussion as the quality of the music they produced. Still, in a society constricted by Jim Crow laws and customs that governed concert halls, hotels, railroads, radio stations, and more, there’s no question that those early bands desegregated at considerable risk. Benny Goodman took a big chance when he added Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson to his band in the mid-1930s, a time when racial separation was intensely observed in popular music.

Decades later, when Jimi Hendrix emerged as a guitarist of singular gifts, the risks were still there. Having honed his skills on the “chitlin’ circuit” as a sideman with various black R & B outfits, Hendrix gained fame as an international rock star after woodshedding in England. He electrified a genre and redefined expectations in much the same manner as guitarist Charlie Christian did when he joined forces with the Goodman band. But unlike Christian, Hendrix was front and center, the obvious leader of a trio that, initially, was otherwise all white. While white fans mostly embraced him, some grumbling arose in black communities. A thread of criticism arose that Obama would find nauseatingly familiar: Hendrix, some said, wasn’t “black enough.”

By 1969, Hendrix “was said to be under pressure from black militants seeking to interest him in political causes,” according to The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. He found himself in another predicament to which Obama has been no stranger. Stuck between constituencies, “he was clearly caught in yet another situation where he wanted to please everybody, and was willing to stretch himself to do so.”

Sly and the Family Stone, contemporaries of Hendrix whose influence continues into the present, encountered less resistance to their integrated lineup. Outrageous where Hendrix was soft-spoken, the charismatic Stone often overwhelmed his critics. In songs like “Everyday People” and “You Can Make It If You Try,” he charmed black and white audiences alike with his relentless, upbeat funk. “You Can Make It If You Try,” repeated like a mantra against a driving backdrop of brass, drums, bass, and electric keys, is both a highly danceable exhortation and a timely kick in the pants, roughly equal to saying “Yes We Can” while also acknowledging the need for personal effort and responsibility. Like Will.i.am’s creation, it’s an ode to optimism, the seeds of which, after a long gestation, are finally beginning to blossom. As hard as it may be to imagine, admirers described Stone in language reminiscent of that found in various profiles of Obama.

“Sly was a philosopher, preaching a message of total reconciliation,” notes veteran rock writer Dave Marsh. In his persuasive view, Stone’s approach “could heal all wounds,” providing whites and blacks with “a meeting ground where they could work out their mistrust.”

In so doing, musicians like Stone, for all their flamboyance and flouting of convention, ultimately performed a patriotic service. (Hendrix, a veteran of the 101st Airborne, talked with Dick Cavett about his astonishing, revisionist “Star-Spangled Banner” on Cavett’s late-night talk show. “All I did was play it,” he explained. “I’m an American, so I played it.”) Through their lyrics and integrated lineups, and in casting a spotlight on audience members of various hues dancing and clapping to the same beat, they supplied critical cues to generations growing up under their influence. Undoubtedly their audiences included Americans wrestling with questions of identity and belonging that define both our individual and national quests. Or, as Obama put it when discussing his own life, “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

By creating a common melody from those fragments of culture, Stone, Hendrix, and other like-minded musicians revealed tantalizing glimpses of a more perfect union.

Building on their efforts, Prince took calculated aim at “crossover” success. As Obama has done in politics, he avoided identifying explicitly with race by forgoing an explicitly “black” sound, deemphasizing bass and horns, and eventually favoring a rock-flavored electric guitar over his earlier, synth-based recordings. After he straightened the bushy Afro he wore for his first album cover, Prince successfully crossed over from the R & B charts, scoring a pair of top ten pop hits. A few albums later he started wearing neo-Edwardian costumes, was named Rolling Stone’s Artist of the Year, and copped an Academy Award. On the way to that trip to the podium, Prince successfully advanced the idea of a raceless utopia enriched by confidence, sensuality, and rhythm—or, as he put it in “Uptown,” “Black, White, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin’.” His concerts amassed dancing fans of all ethnic varieties in an orgy of powerful, occasionally conflicting impulses—sex, salvation, and rebellion—that he somehow made work. All the while he toyed with a shape-shifting racial—and sexual—identity. “Am I black or white?” he asked in “Controversy.” “Am I straight or gay?”

At fifty, Prince is just a few years older than Obama. His upbringing in Minnesota doesn’t at first sound comparable to Obama’s in Hawaii, but it seems likely that they sifted among the same pop-cultural products as they suffered the challenges of adolescence. For Obama, TV, movies, and radio supplied “an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.” Along with books, he also consulted these sources for information about the sixties—information that differed from the facts and stories his mother had shared. In The Audacity of Hope, he discusses how such exposure to pop culture helped him cop not only a walk and a talk but an attitude as well.

“If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by the received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd,” he writes. He sounds as if he could have easily fit in with the youthful multitudes bustin’ a move at First Avenue, the Minneapolis club where much of Purple Rain takes place. When young rebels arrive at middle age, they sometimes find themselves in unlikely places. Knocking on the door of the White House, for example, or knocking on doors, as Prince does, as a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

For all his lyrics about sex and God, Prince has also been a steady critic of the military-industrial complex. He worried, for instance, about nuclear proliferation in “1999” (“Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?”) and lambasted the Strategic Defense Initiative in his hit “Sign o’ the Times” (“Baby make a speech, Star Wars fly”). Although Prince’s faith is believed to have prevented him from commenting on the election, he managed to sneak in a timely dig now and then. And they’re consistent with both his and Obama’s antiwar message.

“I’m so tired of debates, I don’t know what to do,” he announced to the crowd at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last April. “We’re going to beat the swords into plowshares tonight.”

It may be comments like those that prompted the formation of an online group called Prince Fans for Obama. When I visited the group’s website last September, it had sixty-six members. It is “dedicated to the belief that if Prince wasn’t apathetic towards voting due to his religion, he would vote for Barack Obama. Furthermore, we believe that Barack Obama upholds the ideals set forth by Prince in every way.” Talk about improbable journeys.

A former Jehovah’s Witness himself, Michael Jackson spent much of the eighties establishing a pop-culture kingdom and has spent much of every decade since tearing it down. Between 1980, when he won a Grammy for his recording of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” and 1993, when a lawsuit accused him of sexually molesting a thirteen-year-old boy, Jackson’s landmark Thriller album earned platinum status twenty-one times, making it the best-selling LP in history. Although Jackson’s public conduct became increasingly off the wall, his work throughout reflected an awareness of social inequality and injustice. More so than Prince’s, Jackson’s work suggests an ongoing engagement with real-life concerns and a defiant optimism that problems can and will be overcome. Whereas Obama’s twenty-first-century evocation of hope has encouraged Americans to get out and vote, Jackson’s rhythm-driven tracks urged them to get up and dance. Still, the parallels are readily apparent. In “Can You Feel It,” a valediction forbidding hate, Jackson argues, “The blood inside of me is inside of you.” In The Audacity of Hope, Obama encourages us to honor “a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in each other.” Jackson sings, “We are the world”; Obama declares, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” In “Heal the World,” Jackson urges us to “make it a better place”; Obama’s speech declaring his candidacy talks about “building a better America.” In “Man in the Mirror,” Jackson’s most stirring call to action, the fiery chorus urges listeners to “make that…change!” Accepting his party’s nomination in Denver last August, Obama announced, “It’s time for us to change America.”

Of course, other singers and bands have expressed similar themes, but because none has come close to selling 40 million copies of their recordings, their influence cannot be compared to Jackson’s. Just as few performers (if any) can lay claim to influencing notions of racial conciliation to the degree that Jackson has, no political figure since Martin Luther King Jr. has forged alliances across racial boundaries with the skill and impact that Obama has shown.

In a video version of “Man in the Mirror” based on a Jackson concert tour of Europe and Asia, footage of the singer onstage is interspersed with shots of white women so transfixed by their proximity to the singer that they scream, cry, and faint. As security personnel swoop in and lift the limp women above the heads of the ecstatic multitudes, Jackson commands the audience to look inside themselves and make a change. Meanwhile, flickering images of Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and other historical figures alternate between scenes of Jackson driving his audience to ever-increasing frenzy. The video, shot during a tour that reached more than 4 million fans across 123 dates, perfectly captures the apotheosis of the pop star as a global figure on a par with religious leaders and heads of state.

Although Jackson’s message of healing and change is shown to be salve for the soul, the women listeners’ behavior suggests it is also sustenance for the libido. As in Prince’s message, the distance between salvation and sensual bliss is obliterated. The satirical Obama Girl video and campaign buttons declaring Hot Chicks Dig Obama suggest that Obama’s appearances have aroused similar, albeit unsought connections—an unavoidable possibility, perhaps, when one considers that Obama is, while not the youngest, certainly the sleekest and most stylish presidential candidate in some time, if not ever. Obama has been particularly defensive about attempts to portray him as sexually attractive. During the campaign he and his staff discouraged such chatter by referring to him as a “skinny kid with big ears and a funny name.”

Before his long fall, Jackson was the most beloved pop figure in the world and therefore, like Obama, dramatically expanded the horizons of black possibility. As Jackson stood before vast audiences with arms outstretched, basking in the glow of their adoration, he seemed to have brought DuBois’s hope for black musicians to its fullest realization.

For DuBois, singing wasn’t just about hitting the right notes but about providing a model for the rest of the planet while undoing stereotypes of black inferiority. “It is to be trusted,” he wrote, “that our leaders in music, holding on to the beautiful heritage of the past, will not on that account, either be coerced or frightened from taking all music for their province and showing the world how to sing.”

Seldom have black musicians done otherwise. Slaves brought with them instruments and techniques from Africa that amazed and delighted the plantation owners whom they were forced to entertain. These included Thomas Jefferson, who, in addition to being a Founding Father, was an early and influential advocate of white supremacy. Naturally, Jefferson found little to praise in blacks but was somehow able to acknowledge, “In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time.” However, he cautioned, “Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.”

The ability to prove such skills during slavery was difficult, to say the least. After Emancipation, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed in 1871 to help save a foundering school for Negroes in Nashville, Tennessee, put doubts such as Jefferson’s to rest. Over the course of nearly seven years, they performed in northern cities and in Europe, including a private concert for President Ulysses S. Grant. They raised more than $150,000 (more than $2.5 million in today’s dollars), helping build Fisk University into a world-class institution that would later open its doors to a young student named W. E. B. DuBois when Harvard would not. In addition, they were civil rights activists before such activism had a name. Defying attempts to confine them to segregated audiences and accommodations, they demanded and received treatment as first-class citizens. Just as important, with their demanding repertoire (joyfully free of minstrelsy) and exacting performances, they served as highly effective globe-trotting cultural ambassadors on behalf of black equality. “Their music made all other vocal music cheap,” enthused a fan named Mark Twain. “In the Jubilees and their songs, America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages.”

Just as Obama has made spectacular use of new Internet technology, musicians in the twentieth century took their works to the world in ways that the Fisk Jubilee Singers couldn’t have dreamed of. As a result, African American music, and the ways to distribute it, helped the image of black artists not only become popular but also attain a degree of influence that far exceeded their number.

White allies played a critical role. A typical effort, a 1938 Carnegie Hall concert called “From Spirituals to Swing,” presented, in the words of its promoter, “talented Negro artists from all over the country who had been denied entry to the white world of white music.” Such venues, along with the sprouting of recording studios, radio stations, and record shops, as well as developments in portrait photography and design, helped musicians such as Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday become iconic figures. The bebop pioneers that followed, especially Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzie Gillespie, helped usher in a new age in which “hipness” became an American attribute to be desired. Similarly, the lingo favored by jazzmen and others in black communities became a desirable sign of pop-culture awareness.

“Cool” jazz followed, coming on the heels of bebop in the late 1940s. Many of the composers and arrangers of the music were white musicians from the West Coast. Cool was a hybrid of styles including the smoothness of Lester Young and fast tempos from the beboppers who came after him. It was essentially a two-toned music, but black performers such as Miles Davis became the public face of it. Besides adding another aspect of cool to the ferociously hip persona perfected by the hard-blowing beboppers, jazz musicians influenced developments in literature, fashion, advertising, and other cultural categories.

For many of them, landing a recording deal with Blue Note Records was definite, delightful proof that one had arrived. The Blue Note album covers of the fifties and sixties are still treasured today as examples of elegant design. Featuring dapper artists such as Hank Mobley, Dexter Gordon, and Lee Morgan, they conveyed an image of black men as stylish, cerebral, and undeniably masculine. On Gordon’s Our Man In Paris, showing him with a thinly knotted tie, a collar bar, a hint of houndstooth lapel, and a cigarette (this was 1963), the saxophonist exudes a man-of-the-world confidence similar to Obama’s on the Ebony magazine cover discussed below.

These men had a look, an aura, that white men didn’t hesitate to copy. Like the smoke rising from a jazzer’s ever-present cigarette, the possibility that blackness wasn’t so bad floated out of the dives and nightclubs and into the open air.

Few spread more fumes than the photogenic and subversively charismatic Miles Davis. Davis released Birth of the Cool in 1957, but it was recorded in 1949–1950, while Jack Kerouac was wandering the streets of Denver. In On the Road, Kerouac recalls walking through a black section of that city in 1949, “wishing I were a Negro, feeling the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”

The vapors Kerouac inhaled had been in the air awhile, even if they hadn’t spread very far from the epicenter of jazz. In the 1930s, Jeffrey Melnick writes in A Right to Sing the Blues, Jewish musicians had tried to “capture some of the masculine cachet stereotypically ascribed to the black male.” In the 1920s, M...