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)