Whiteness, Softness, Rockiness

If Muzak, or elevator music, is the whitest thing known to man, soft rock music, though also white, might be whiteness at its American best.

"Porquois?" you say.

Because it's a white thing that naturally and without resistance includes soul (which means blackness). To paraphrase Ralph Ellison, whatever else America is, it's also black, has been all the time, always. And so, unlike, say, the Constitution or banking regulations or white racial identity, which have their histories of being explicitly anti-black, soft rock music never had a history of being anti-black. (I don't think.)

Likewise, soft rock has never been black-dominated, or predominantly black-interested, like, say, funk. (Funk definitely has its rock roots, but besides the fact that rock is blues-rooted, funk provides its own deliberate nods to blues as well as other black music, such as gospel. My favorite funk riff - and Dr. Dre's, too, I think - is the vocal of Parliament singing, "Swing down sweet chariot, stop, and let me ride!")

And soft rock has no claim on theories of purity, so that's another reason I say its a best expression of American whiteness, if there's any. The white in soft rock is, at best, gray, likely going no lower than that 10 percent screen you can make using MS Word's color toolbar.

Nor has soft rock got any disdain for its international white connections - meaning, the Bee Gees are as legit a white rock contributor as Christopher Cross (whether either likes this or not)! So it's an inclusive whiteness, a phrase that's oxymoronic in most racial and other American English language contexts. (And maybe it's other languages, too. Some say some Asian ethnics want to be white as much as college age Americans nowadays want to be "Japanese by spring," to riff off (rip off) Ishmael Reed's satirical novel's title.)

Dare I say, soft rock is as American as jazz. Neither of those musical forms can claim any greatness without acknowledging the members of other racial and ethnic groups as essential contributors to these musics' essential forms (if such a thing as "essentialism" exists; and when we're talking things-racial, we at least have to debate that question).

Now, why would I even want any kind of "best whiteness" - to exist, I mean? It's funny. My lifetime - 40 years now - has been spent in two regions of the country, mainly. The cradle of the South - Virginia (Newport News is minutes or a few miles from Jamestown, as well as from Nat Turner's Hampton), and the most iconic setting of the urban Northeast, New York City: these two places are America, or certainly keys to its essence, if we can say it has an essence. And whiteness exists in both places. In Virginia, white is so prevalent it needs not mentioning. In NYC, it's articulated via ethnic identification; the white ethnics are identifiable from the non-white ones, but they are not so dominant, so superior-seeming, at least not reflexively or cheerfully or hopefully, as in VA. Even white people would be OK if nobody in NYC was white tomorrow, whereas not so true in Virginia, even at its most progressive, today.

So why? Because when I go to Virginia, I realize there are white people who still want to be white, gonna die white, and most importantly, gonna raise dey chirrens to be whites. (They're doing it now - right now! And while I don't love them for that, I do love them. Friend, for me, means friend.) So I have to think about it. It's also the case that it (whiteness) means something to black people - and I'm one of them. My language is black forever, and so goes my mind and body, everything but my non-white spirit. (In New York City, my spirit got blacker; it's been cool, and amazing to some of my friends and family members. Healthy for me, while not without costs. Though I don't have many people to talk to about the change; some brothas, but not many. More black women. An excellent development for The Sean Formerly Known as Nerd, to black women, and White Boy Sean, to black guys. Anyway...)

The true oxymoron is "best whiteness," and the irony in there for me is that it (a music, here) can't be the best if it's white, and it can't be white (meaning white like pure) if it's the best.

A best whiteness is just me holding out hope for my white-focused Americans' reconciliation with a part of themselves. (These are non-white people, too.) In this case, a best whiteness - soft rock - is a Southern boy's reconciliation to a world where irony is survivor awareness tool number one. I live at the post-integration station on the train line. My ride's still rolling, with me driving on some days. Whiteness, softness, rockiness, rolling along with my American blackness, too.

Rolling to the music of Paul Simon, Christopher Cross, Stevie Nicks, Toto, the Bee Gees, Bruce Hornsby, the Rembrants, Edie Brickell, the Carpenters, Sade (yes), Macy Gray (some of hers), and Amel Larrieux (maybe), dj'd by John Tesh (for my money, with Connie Seleca looking on), and some other sounds yet unplayed or unsung.

(first draft; for revision)

I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Draft 1)

I've come again to the point of wanting to take social dancing lessons. I attended a dinner cruise recently where people took to the floor with line dancing and stepping. I've seen the Country Music Channel where rows of Southerners kicked up their heels likewise. A cousin said she and her mom are taking dance lessons at a community center. My daughter showed me a hip hop dance lesson On Demand on TV. And so I want dancing lessons. I want to be in a room where everybody is listening to a style of music that's meant to be responded to a certain way. And I want to learn those ways. Where to go, where to go?

There are places that men and women go for dancing, whether the music encourages it or not. Many restaurants have separated off a dance area, and clubs exist, of course. But I don't want to dance to today's music; often I don't want to listen to it at all. So that leads me to social dancing. I want to dance with somebody.

Latin dance nights are what many have suggested, and salsa and merengue are fine. I'm finding myself wanting to dance slower, though. I'm finding myself wanting to almost waltz. I'm finding myself wanting to dress up, really dress up, and groove. But not dress up and dance to go-go or Maze or Chicago-style stepping songs. Maybe I want to learn the dances they did in the USO in the 1940s? I probably don't know exactly what I want to learn. They say the first step, though, is saying you have a problem, right?

I don't just want to do it because everybody else is doing it, though. I go through these phases of wanting to dance, and I'm back here again. So if you know of events or venues, holla at your boy! Know who and what you're getting yourself into, though.

I'm the guy who, as a kid, never was addicted to Soul Train the way I was hooked on Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling or Saturday morning cartoons. I never was known as being interested in musical performance or dance the way my siblings all were. Late in my high school years I did get tired of paying to attend parties and not dancing, but my wallflower tendencies kept up even through college. And it's definitely the case that most of my favorite musical genres inspire one to sway more than to downright get down. Or maybe that's not true, but maybe that's just how I hear it. Whatever the music is putting out, I'm proving nonresponsive.

*
Why do I want to dance now?

I've always had an old soul, and maybe my moon's in that phase again. I've been feeling more like Chuck D. By that I mean, I saw an episode of The Mo'Nique show recently featuring the rapper, a choreographer, and some young artists. Twice Mo'Nique got Chuck off the couch to become more involved in the show. The choreographer taught the host and guests some dance steps, and Chuck was good-natured but flat-footed. Then when the young artists performed, everyone stood to groove with them. Chuck clapped but didn't dance. But when I thought back to Public Enemy concerts or the one Fresh Fest I attended, I remembered, Chuck has never danced. He ran and jumped and pumped his fists: oh, he was active. But among the hip hop stars of a certain era, it was LL and Fresh Prince, or the Herbie Luv Bug-produced artists like Kid N Play, who danced. LL and Kane really were the only respectable rappers who also danced, who I remember. Everybody else was decidedly Sir Nose D'Void of Funk-like with theirs. ("I will never dance, Star Child!") Ice Cube said it straight up (Jackin' for Beats): "I don't party and shake my butt. I leave that to the boys with the funny haircuts."

(Aside: It's why hip hop can never save black people or the world - it's ignoring the core of its power to connect people. That core is to say "love" through the music. Instead, hip hop says Listen, first, and Get me paid, second, and Love, Maybe. Said another way, it shouts Avatar-ly, "see me!" but doesn't really mean what the Avatar tribespeople mean.)

*

Maybe that was all bs that I just wrote.

If you really want to know the deal, I want to dance with a woman. I always love being on the floor doing my two-step with Jawando, my homey who made me feel less self-conscious about just doing what I do from high school forward, and who stood by me even when those steps were offbeat or just off. But I want to two-step with a girl. There, I said it.

But what's happening is, I'm psychologically standing on the wall, like the woman in Sam Cooke's Cha Cha Cha.

"Took my baby to the hop last night
and what to my surprise
when we got there, she hit me with the news
right between the eyes:
she said she couldn't do the Cha Cha Cha"

I came up on this music as well as anything else my ears could hear, which was most kinds of popular music in the 1970s and 1980s. I love funk the most, but it's undeniable I'm of the hip hop generation, or that one on the cusp between when pop overtook rock and Soul/R&B, and hip hop came to dominate it all. Content-wise, hip hop does not harken back to Sam Cooke leading his girl who couldn't Cha Cha Cha onto the floor, and teaching her until "she was doing it better than" him. And of course, hip hop follows Michael Jackson saying "life ain't so bad at all livin' off the wall." In my lifetime, dance music was hip hop, House, or electronica-infused variations of them.

Some of hip hop has that element in common with jazz: makes me want to listen, but to sit down and listen. Doesn't get me to dancing with a woman.

What do women want to do?