Mr. Watson...

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morsel:

Pointer Sisters' 'Slow hand' always reminds him of the first strained attempt his father made to explain sexual innuendo to him, only to realize that his son was as naive as a turnip truck passenger.

His family was in the habit of taking a cottage at the beach in North Carolina in August of each year. As a victim of car sickness, one of the few pleasures he could find on road trips like those was the radio; he and his sister would sing along with anything they knew. During the summer in question, 'Slow hand' reached number two on the pop charts, and they must have heard it several times on the drive to North Carolina.

At that time, strong melody and the pure pop production was most likely to earn his admiration, and 'Slow hand' definitely has both in spades. When they arrived at the beach, he continued to sing what little of the song he could remember, which was the chorus. (I want a man with a slow hand / I want a lover with an easy touch / I want somebody who will spend some time / Not come and go in a heated rush...) This did not sit well with his parents, and his father was dispatched to take him on a walk along the beach to sort things out.

Very little was sorted out to his father's satisfaction, because his son honestly had no understanding of the subtext to what he was singing, and dad couldn't decide whether it was better to leave his son's innocence intact, or to open one of the ultimate cans of worms.

He came away from the conversation knowing that his father didn't want him to sing the song, but thinking it a silly, unfounded request, but at the same time suspecting that there was something indecipherably sleazy about 'Slow hand'. He wished he could crack the code. He considers it to be the spontaneous beginning of his sexual education.

Is this an epithet which I see before me

I remember a discussion in one of my college classes about the power of symbols. In an effort to convey the potency a symbol can contain, the professor noted that the swastika had existed for thousands of years before the Nazi movement appropriated it; he asked if it were conceivable that the swastika could ever be recovered? That is, diluted back into our lexicon to the point that it was no longer inextricably linked to the nadir of humanity, as it is now? We doubted it.

Only a few words, symbols that they are, come close to the swastika in embodying such reprehensible inhumanity that we will collectively do almost anything to avoid them. (Mainstream media will use euphemisms - 'n-word' - rather than print them.) Those few words have stopped being words, and have become archetypes that engulf meaning, rather than pointing to it.

Words like these can get people demonized for using the word 'niggardly' - an innocent word that is twice victimized by its obscurity and by its homophonity. The actual slur received a new opportunity to rattle us this past week when Nas announced that it would become the title of his forthcoming album.

Not 'nigga', either, it was stressed. That mutation is equivocally accepted under the aegis of liberation ideology, as a reclamation by a marginalized group of the original term used to oppress them. No, Nas will use the original, the corruption of 'negro' that hypostatizes the archetype of racial destruction as much as the swastika does.

What does it mean that this word would be selected to title a work of commercial art? (Or, at least a work in today's culture; of course there was a time in the past when it was used regularly in commercial titling...) What does it mean that the man using this word might die at the hands of racists wielding it, rather than a man who wouldn't experience that danger?

I don't have answers to those questions, but I have some ideas. I think it's clear that attempting to sweep our uglier moments as a species under the rug only hurts us in the long run; the Holocaust denial movement might be the most obvious example of that. As people, and as peoples, the way to overcome our negative impulses is to acknowledge they are there, and then work to eliminate the ignorance and ignorant fear that is at the heart of our ugliness.

Freedom of speech is important not only because it protects the speaker, but also because it protects us, too, in a way. It gives us the opportunity to know what's in the speaker's mind, and address it, if necessary. That goes for the racist hatemonger - I'd prefer to know what I'm dealing with, rather than have to guess. And it goes for Nas, too - I'd rather know what it means to him to make a statement like this than have to guess.

Segregating speech is no better than segregating people. To try to seperate things we're comfortable hearing from things we're uncomfortable hearing is futile, to start with, but it also pretty much guarantees that we're never going to come to terms with our discomforts. It may even help those discomforts to grow and manifest in our actions.

I think Nas should put Nigger out. (In full disclosure, I'm not going to buy it; I'm not a fan of his music. I wonder how I would feel if I were?) What better litmus test could we construct for the state of racial identity and race relations in our time? I would hope, though, that instead of rushing to the familiar, safe sound bites and empty postures we all know too well, we'll undertake a more rigorous discussion.

We could pull down so many houses of cards. Why do we believe there is such a thing as black America or white America? Why do we believe that race is in any way an accurate description of a person? Why do we ask others not to stereotype us based on our race (or a handful of other descripters) but then go ahead and stereotype ourselves? Why, when we are ignorant about someone, do we have the impulse to maintain that ignorance? Why do we take the things we dislike most about ourselves and project them onto others?

A pop album (or its title alone?) is unlikely to contribute significantly to the discussion of any of these topics. But it just gave me the opportunity to think and write about them. I hate that word, and everything it stands for, all of the ways it demonstrates my faults and failings as much as my society's. But I have to love it, too, because I have to claim it, as difficult as that is. I will need a lot of help to heal it in myself, and to heal it in the world.

Henrik Ibsen

Truths are by no means as long-lived as Methuselah - as some folks imagine. A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years; seldom longer. But truths as aged as that are always worn frightfully thin, and nevertheless it is only then that the majority recognises them and recommends them to the community as wholesome moral nourishment. There is no great nutritive value in that sort of fare, I can assure you; and, as a doctor, I ought to know.

An Enemy Of The People

WONDER STUFF - A WISH AWAY

Wonder Stuff falls into the gap between high school and college for me; I should have heard them in high school, but didn't hear them until I got to college. Well, I suppose that all that matters is that I heard them. They are an interesting case study in how one's greatest strength can also be one's greatest weakness; the thing that makes them so remarkable is what may have kept them from greater success.

Despite the fact that it was only a minor hit for them, 'A wish away' from debut album The Eight Legged Groove Machine is Wonder Stuff's definitive track. And I couldn't have realized it then, but that single track is for all intents and purposes a capsule history of rock music from the original British invasion through punk, post-punk, Britpop and beyond. It's a little hard to figure out how they did it; the only problem is, they seem to have done it at the wrong time.

Start with the spirit of an old time pop soul stomper. Without a brass section and without someone like Dusty Springfield fronting the track, it's not immediately obvious, but it's there in the rhythm section. Pick up the nothing-up-my sleeve arrangement style of Beatles and Kinks, and bring the electric guitar sound forward with more effects. Take a cue from punk and feel free to build a song more or less around a single phrase; the concession to glam and new wave is that a strong melody line is preserved. Beat most of the brit poppers to the punch by getting the song out in 1988, a few years before Stone Roses, Suede, and Blur would capitalize on virtually the same sound. Wonder Stuff enjoyed their share of success in the UK, more so with their second and third albums, but seemed to lose steam as the rest of the brit pop movement was gaining momentum, which is a shame, because they had the right formula.

It's remarkable what a chameleon 'A wish away is'; pair it with Bowie's 'The jean genie' and the glam sensibility jumps out. Play it after Buzzcocks' 'Noise annoys' and it holds its own in dance punk. Following Siouxsie & The Banshees 'Party's fall' it shows its allegiance to post punk. Elastica's 'Hold me now' might be 'A wish away' at half speed. And of course these days the bands referencing all these sources all over again are legion; My Favorite's 'The happiest days of my life' builds a more delicate castle on top of the framework that is essentially 'A wish away'.

Maybe that worked against Wonder Stuff, in the end. Rather then being all things to everyone, in 1988 they may have been not quite enough of any one thing for anyone. They even had the remarkably arrogant front man in Miles Hunt, though; the entire blueprint for Oasis is there...

The amusing thing about the flimsy lyrics to 'A wish away' is that they do nothing to arouse sympathy for Mr. Hunt. 'I remember a time when I was feeling down / and I never ever wished you were here... / But now I need a hug, and now I need a love... / I wish you were here / now that you've gone.' What kind of a plea is that? But lyrics aren't really the point here; this is a song that hopes you'll jump around to it the first time you hear it, plain and simple. On those terms, it succeeds quite well.
Wonder Stuff official website