Black History Month (Living Colour)

I’m not a fan of Black History Month.  You know why?  Because a ton of the stuff crammed into it should be woven into ALLdiscussions of American history.  The black Navy Cross winner at Pearl Harbor–you discuss him in December or at start of a WW2 unit and throw in the Tuskegee Airmen/Red Tailed Devils.  G.W. Carver, W.E.B. DuBois?  They go with the industrial revolution.  Brown v. Topeka–works even better if you put it in context of the 1950s–not to mention Marshall as first black Supreme Court justice.

The other problem is, by trying to make it ‘bigger’ than it is–an exaggeration of influence or importance.  That doesn’t help education either.  The best example of this though isn’t black history–it’s the continued insistence of politically-motivated writers that the Founding Fathers plagiarized/stole the Constitution from the Iroquois Indians.  Poppycock, unadulterated.  That story (repeated regularly by some) tries to give credit where it does not belong.

It is absolutely silly to pigeon-hole this stuff into one month.  It means we miss out on a lot of things we should consider in our society.  How are things better than they were fifty years ago, how are they unchanged? (And really, I could spend at least a couple weeks on JUST those items linked above)

Does this mean I want BHM eliminated?  No, because with the state of things right now, we’d quickly see minority contributions ignored again (think about who the decision-makers are regarding history textbooks and that the biggest buyer happens to be a southern state…if you think having a former Confederate state as ultimate arbiter of what goes into textbooks isn’t part of the problem…hmmm….)  I just want a real, integrated history of American–the good stuff, the bad stuff.

So… I was thinking about this and a couple songs came across my mp3 player, both from the band “Living Colour.”  The songs were their big hit ‘Cult of Personality’ and one that didn’t chart (too political), ‘Funny Vibe’.

Cult of Personality:

Funny Vibe (contains stuff that WILL make many people uncomfortable):

The songs are from 1989.  It’s possible you may not have heard of the band since it is 2020 now, 30+ years later.  Here’s the sad thing…are you aware this album is the last time a black rock band made it to #1 on the rock charts?  Did you know that for Living Colour to even get a record produced, the Rolling Stones told their company to give Living Colour a deal or the Stones would break their own deal?  Think about what that says, both in terms of society, but also the people who were and ARE in charge of signing bands to contracts and publicizing them.  Now think about who gets pushed in advertising.

• Attractive women of any race

• Bands around 40+ years, appealing to Boomers

• Boy Bands, usually white with rare exceptions (such as the current trend towards k-pop)

You can find ads and hype every time a new Taylor Swift album’s coming out, hype when The Who launch their final, last, really-done-this-time, ending-and-we-really-really-mean-it tour (their first ‘final tour’ happened back in 1987 or so…and here we are 30+ years after it…).   Living Colour fits none of the categories above.  Want something in a modern context–when’s the last time you saw a prime-time campaign of any sort for a hip-hop album dropping?

To be clear–I don’t listen to hip-hop, don’t like much of it (it’s still better than 99.94% of country music though).  That doesn’t mean I can’t see the value of something or why it’s important.  Heck, I’ve argued that record executives ignoring minority rock bands like Living Colour is what helped create rap music–which is actually what rock music is supposed to be about in the first place.  The boom of rap created new labels run by minorities–the most famous is probably Death Row Records which created the careers of Dre, Tupac Shakur, and Snoop Dogg.

If we want to learn from history, we have to incorporate it in everything, rather than segregate it into a Black month, a Hispanic month, or a Women’s month.  That separates–and history has the power to unify.  Why do we permit anyone to do that to our society?  It leads us to see differences as bad, rather than good.  (…think ‘hybrid vigor’)

Seriously, listen to this and tell me it doesn’t rock, tell me this isn’t directly addressing a real social issue, tell me this isn’t a big “F-you” to authority…everything rock is supposed to be:

Open Letter to a Landlord

Anyways, think about all this–get out of your safe place, learn more about your country, the people around you.  Build bridges, not walls.