1989—a number, another summer — sound of the funky drummer!
What did I hear, that first time, when Donald Harrison’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice” ended, and “Fight the Power” roared to life, in a cacophony of scratches, samples, and found noise, before that first deep bass hit, that nearly lifted me out of my chair? Something like the screeching of brakes, something like a jet plane taking off: that’s what the Bomb Squad sounded like to a fourteen-year-old in 1989, who was used to the tinny, Casio-looped beats on Eighties rap. Even before the story began, the credits were a body blow — the sheer brightness of the colors, the insistent, defiant, angry sidewalk dancing of Rosie Perez, in a pink miniskirt and tights, in shiny boxer’s trunks, bobbing and weaving. Everything that came after was a little after the fact of that first song. Freedom of speech is freedom of death. Elvis was a hero to most. But he never meant shit to me.
I was listening. I was paying attention.
It wasn’t long after that that the few black kids at Newton South Middle started wearing T-shirts that said It’s a black thing — you wouldn’t understand. By this time I had graduated from the haze of childhood and had begun hanging out, whenever I could, in Harvard Square, and particularly at Newbury Comics, the epicenter of cool. My father was just then negotiating the terms of his new job at Black & Decker in Baltimore — he was, is, an electrical engineer, who invents power-saving devices for small appliances — and I knew my world was shifting, that Newton was already history, over, and I started turning my attention to magazines: SPIN, Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Maximumrocknroll, Vibe, The Source. And it was in SPIN that I read an interview with Chuck D that contained the sentence white liberals aren’t our salvation, they’re the problem.
It had never occurred to me that I was someone else’s problem.
—
With Do the Right Thing came Public Enemy. After Public Enemy came N.W.A., Niggaz With Attitude. And at the same moment, the Native Tongues, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, X–Clan, Del the Funky Homosapien, The Pharcyde, Black Sheep, Arrested Development. Ice-T, Ice Cube, Onyx. In the early Nineties, hip-hop was everywhere but invisible — still controversial, still not quite accepted even as music, still hardly on the radio, and therefore an indispensable part of a teenager’s education. By the time I was sixteen I was buying bootleg tapes of every new album, $5 a pop, and I could repeat whole songs, whole sides of albums. It was the omega to punk’s alpha, the nastiness to our earnestness. Ends justifies the means, that’s the system, so I don’t celebrate no bullshit Thanksgiving. I listened to it hypnotically, miming the gestures in traffic on the way to school, spraying my imaginary MAC-10 through the windshield. We’re the number-one crew in the area, make a move for your gat and I’ll bury ya.
This shit is pathetic, my friend Ayala Kauffmann said, once, a year later, when I was giving her a ride to school. She was biracial, though it was easy to miss; with a mop of brown curls, a nose ring, and an Indian-print blouse she could have been any other Rebekah, Aviva, or Dasi. Hinjews, Mexijews, Sephardi ex-kibbutzniks — at Willow we had them all. Her father had disappeared when she was a baby, leaving nothing to her, not even his name, and her mother had remarried Ira Kauffmann, a balding, kindly Reform rabbi with fishy eyes.
I mean, she said, I get it. I get De La Soul. Everybody loves De La Soul. But this is just like looking at Hustler. It’s gross. And it’s grosser still because it’s you. Nobody meant this for you. Or if they did, it’s just a classic retread minstrel show. Look at the bad black man! You’re getting played. I can’t believe you would pay money for this shit.
I didn’t. Well, not much, anyway.
And you think that makes it okay?
Just because you’re not listening to it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, I said. Wouldn’t you rather know?
What, this is supposed to be my direct line from the ghetto?
Chuck D says hip-hop is the black world’s CNN.
You’re not the black world. You’re not black, don’t you get it? And listening to this shit doesn’t change that. It just makes you a parasite. It would be one thing if you actually knew any black people. And I don’t count.
That’s really fair. You get to be the authority, but yet you don’t count.
You don’t get to decide what’s fair, she said. Don’t you understand? She ejected the tape, before I could stop her, and flipped it into the backseat, among the Subway wrappers and 7-Eleven coffee cups, the broken microphone stand, and the guitar-string envelopes. You get to shut up, she said. That’s your special job. You get to not have rights for a change. Shut up and go away and leave black people alone, for once.
—
I didn’t listen. Or maybe, in some sense, I did.
At Willow, in place of community service, we had what we called volunteer jobs, assigned by the principal’s office, six hours a week minimum. And the black people I knew in any true sense — any real recognition, any actual conversation — were all from my VJ shifts downtown: soup kitchen, sophomore year; food pantry, junior year; community health clinic, senior year. Mostly my supervisors were solemn, tight-mouthed men, ex-cons, Vietnam vets, halfway-house residents, who hardly bothered to learn my name; but there were always others, who asked why I wore my hair that way, who wanted to know how many hours of community service I’d been sentenced to, and what I’d done to deserve it; who offered me menthol cigarettes, which I graciously, nauseously accepted, who told me something about doing a month in the hole at Lorton, or being shot out of a helicopter in Khe Sanh.
And then there was James, a category of his own. James supervised a whole crew of prep school do-gooders — PSDGs, that was his term — at the Belinda Matthews Memorial Food Pantry on Saturday mornings, teaching us how to process a hundred pounds of cast-off lettuce, how to stack boxes of government cheese, how to load a shopping bag so it wouldn’t split. He stood a head taller than most of us, six-five, in an army jacket, with a shining bald dome, a crocheted skullcap, and a silvery soul patch, like an aging hero from a Melvin Van Peebles movie. He told us he’d been in the same City College class with Kurt Schmoke, then the mayor; after that, he’d turned down a scholarship to Howard, traveled the country playing bass in an R&B band, and spent some time with the Peoples Temple in California, years before Jonestown. But I knew, even then, he said, more than once, I knew that Jim Jones was a crazy motherfucker. It was well known that he would screw anything that moved, anybody that came within ten feet. Man or woman. That was how he did it, you know. Everybody felt dirty. Everybody was compromised. Closer you get, the more compromised. So I packed my bags and got out of that scene.
And then what? Alan once asked him. We were on the same shift, in the fall of our junior year; we’d go straight from pitching rotten tomatoes to band practice. What’d you do then, after Jim Jones? How’d you get back to Baltimore?
James palmed a cantaloupe from a wax-board crate, sniffed it, like a chef looking for the peak of ripeness. Son, he said, looking straight at Alan, I did cocaine. Nothing but cocaine for fifteen years. You hear? Bought, sold, sniffed, ate, shot up, smoked, stuck it on my gums, stuck it up my ass once, I was that desperate. Took it into prison with me, took it right up to the moment I left. Fifteen years in the white mountains. Six of them in jail. Then I found God, and here we are.