My Pop Life #248 : This Is America – Childish Gambino

This Is America   –   Childish Gambino

This is America 
Don’t catch you slippin’ now 
Look how I’m livin’ now
Police be trippin’ now 
Yeah, this is America 
Guns in my area
I got the strap 
I gotta carry ’em
Yeah, yeah, I’ma go into this 
                                              Yeah, yeah, this is guerilla                                                    Yeah, yeah, I’ma go get the bag
Yeah, yeah, or I’ma get the pad
Yeah, yeah, I’m so cold like, yeah 
I’m so dope like, yeah 
We gon’ blow like, yeah 

Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
You go tell somebody
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man 

*

2018 had some other elements which I’ll examine here, perhaps not at quite so much length as the last post. Or maybe at greater length, but with fewer pictures !

In January, having been offered Gemini Man, I called my English agent and let her go. I’d been thinking over something she said to me before Christmas : “you’re aiming too high Ralph…” and decided I just couldn’t get past it. It was a stupid thing to say to anyone, and she doubled down on it rathr than withdraw it. The previous year she had kept trying to get me to sack my manager in Los Angeles because “whatever”, but I am living in the United States, that’s a reality. It was all very unpleasant to be honest. We have since made up, but at the time of writing I have no representation in the UK.

Shortly after that episode it was minus points in New York and I was trying to take my thermal longjohns off one night (boy they were tight) when a snapping noise indicated that I had broken a tendon in my finger. Didn’t really hurt but the final digit became kind of floppy. Some people call this Basketball Finger or Jammed Finger because it’s quite common in that sport. I called it a pain in the ass because I was about to go and shoot a movie called Gemini Man, and it looked all wrong. After a consultation in the local hospital across the park and an X-Ray to check it wasn’t broken (it wasn’t) I was set up with some PT down in Park Slope south. Excercises I had to do, splints I had to wear etc. This little incident dominated the early six to ten weeks of the year. It did heal really well though, eventually. But enough about me and my miniscule problems. How did 2018 actually pan out for the rest of America?

In February there was a school shooting in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland Florida. 17 children were killed and another 17 injured. This made it the worst school shooting in US history, surpassing the notorious Columbine massacre of 1999. The reaction of the political establishment stretched from the “thoughts and prayers” of President Trump to the Democratic Senator Bill Nelson who stated that the murder weapon – an AR-15 – was not for hunting (as claimed by the NRA) but for killing. The survivors of the attack came together and formed Never Again to stop gun violence, confronting the NRA head-on, led by David Hogg  Emma González, and Cameron Kasky.

This resulted in the March For Our Lives in Washington D.C. and other locations in March 2018 (estimated turnout 2 million people) and quickly became the hot issue of the year, especially when another school shooting took place in Santa Fe, Texas in May, resulting in 10 deaths.

In the previous six months there were two more notable mass shootings which means to say that they made the national headlines – I don’t know the actual figures because killings of one or two people just don’t register any more. Las Vegas was the site of the biggest mass shooting in American history on October 17th when a 65-yr old white man shot over 1000 rounds of ammunition from a 32nd floor suite in the Mandalay Hotel over a 15-minute period into a huge crowd of people celebrating a music festival below. 60 people died and 411 were injured amid scenes of panic where further people were injured.

On November 5th 2017 there was a mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas where a man opened fire killing 26 worshippers and wounding 20 others. Camera footage at the back of the church showed the man methodically shooting people in the pews and pausing only to reload.

So as we moved into 2018 the right to bear arms was under massive scrutiny once again. “Open carry” is on the statute books in some states where armed individuals go shopping with their rifles or handguns plainly visible.

Gun violence has become, perhaps has always been, an abnormally normal feature of American life. Particularly for black people. Any interaction between police officers and black people are fraught with tension – parents must have what is known as “The Conversation” with their children when they are old enough to understand it – and The Conversation is all about how to stay alive when the police want to speak with you. How to speak. Where to put your hands, how to move. I wrote about Black Lives Matter back in 2014 in the early days – teenager Trayvon Martin‘s murder was the trigger for the movement in 2013 when a jury exonerated his killer, then Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD in New York in 2014 for selling cigarettes – his final words: “I can’t breathe“, Tamir Rice a 12 yr-old child murdered in a Cleveland playground by police and Michael Brown shot on the street by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri – all were triggers for large BLM protests on the streets (see My Pop Life #163 Early).

Funeral for the victims in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston

In 2015 a white man murdered 9 black church-goers in a Charleston, South Carolina church (a church I visited in 2016 when on a break from filming in Richmond, Virginia), Sandra Bland was arrest for changing lanes in Texas and “died” in prison, apparently hanging herself, Freddie Gray was killed in a police van in Baltimore after his arrest. There were others.

In 2016 Philando Castile was shot in his car in St Paul, Alton Sterling was murdered on the street in Baton Rouge, Terence Critcher was killed in Tulsa among many others. San Fransisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick started his protest kneeling for the anthem before NFL football games, and was vilified by Trump and others for doing so, particularly in 2017 as the kneeling protests gained support from other players and other sports. Trump said that those who didn’t stand for the anthem should be fired. As a reality TV game show host (The Apprentice) he was on confident ground here.

Kaepernick was released from his 49er contract at the end of the 2017 season and has not played professional football since. He featured notably in a Nike commercial in 2018 featuring the slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.“

2017 was relatively quiet, by which I mean that very few police killings were caught on camera-phone. As Will Smith said “Nothing has changed except people now have the means to record police interventions”. However there was a Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina where far-right white supremacists, nazis and Klan marched with tiki-torches chanting anti-semitic slogans while anti-racist protestors faced them down, and the following day Heather Heyer was killed by a fascist driving his car deliberately at a group of counter-protestors. Trump notoriously described these events as having “very fine people” on both sides. Joe Biden has gone on record as saying that this remark prompted him to run for the Presidency.

Charlottesville is the site of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, leader of the southern Confederate states during the civil war and a hero for those who mourn the end of slavery, to put it in the simplest possible terms. Fight me. The proposal was to take the statue down. As I write in November 2020 the statue is still standing.

Just after the Parkland shooting I was in the Southern Georgia wetlands not far from the Florida border, Jacksonville less than an hour away. Americans felt under siege from gun violence. I was in my safe Brooklyn bubble most of the time but now my skin was prickling in the heat. And black people continued to make pop music, make pop videos, dance sing and entertain us.

Lakeith Stanfield, Donald Glover & Bryan Tyree Henry in Atlanta

And this is the context of the video for This Is America, directed by Donald Glover’s regular collaborator Hiro Murai who directed some episodes of Glover’s excellent comedy-drama show Atlanta for FX. The iconic video was never explained by creator Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino.  As a result the internet has proliferated with thousands of sites explaining the coded messages in it, which I’m not about to contribute to.  I will quickly point out a few images though –

the strange facial expression that Glover pulls at the beginning is a reference to the racist iconography of the Coon Chicken Inn which served americans chicken dinners from 1925 until the late 1950s.

The odd pose Glover stands in to execute the musician in the hood is a visual quote from Jim Crow, a racist minstrel character devised by Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s and appropriated from black folk culture which he had observed. The character’s name was then applied to racist laws which enforced racial segregation in the United States after Reconstruction (the period after the Civil War which lasted until the 1960s aka the Jim Crow era).

The Gwara Gwara Dance is a South African dance move created by DJ Bongz and popularised in the US by Rihanna and others. It occurs throughout the video while scenes of chaos, suicide and death are happening in the background. Entertainment takes our attention while violence occurs constantly.

The White Horse with seated figure of Death escorted by a police car.

I’ll leave the rest for you to enjoy or be horrified by and pick out for yourself.

This Is America is a multi-layered and brilliantly constructed piece of work which examines entertainment and race, guns and money in 21st century America.  If you haven’t seen it yet, stand back and stand by.

My Pop Life #238 : Hot Pants – James Brown

Hot Pants   –   James Brown

Hot Pants…

Number 2 Somerfield Road, Finsbury Park.  Top flat – under the eaves, a one-room attic dwelling with two sloping ceilings.  I lived there with Mumtaz, my girlfriend whom I’d left in 1980 to explore South America with my brother Paul for a year’s travel, but returned after four months spent in Mexico with tail between legs and Hepatitus B.  She took me back in, and life went on.  Finsbury Park, as noted in My Pop Life #42 was a delight.  Every now and again we could hear a muffled roar of delight from Highbury as Arsenal scored.   Not that often obviously, ha ha ha.  One-nil to The Arsenal was the 80s cry.   My beloved Brighton & Hove Albion’s cup run in 1983 took us to a semi-final against Sheffield Wednesday at Highbury.   Down the road.  I went to the game, which we won 2-1 thanks to a brilliant Jimmy Case free kick.  We were in the Cup Final!  1983 was clearly a blessing all round.  Laurie Jones was downstairs, communist, comrade, veteran of the Cable St riots against Moseley’s blackshirts and maker of his own wine.   In work mode :  the premiere and run of  Steven Berkoff’s “West” at the Donmar Warehouse in May of that year.   My first fully professional, fully paid proper acting job.  We ran there for five months then filmed it for the new Channel 4 (see Let’s Dance My Pop Life #221).

In saxophone playing mode I was on this tune – Hot Pants.  Deceptively simple, it has to be precise, punchy, tongued exactly, every note must be the right length, it must attack, and the timing is everything.  Like all of James Brown’s magnificent work, the percussive element is primary, and the bulk of the tune is carried over one chord until the bridge, the long awaited release of the bridge.  Take it to the bridge.  Shall I take it to the bridge?  The famous cry from Sex Machine.  One of the genius elements of James Brown is how long you have to wait for the bridge in almost every song.  He knows his dynamics.  So did George Mack.

Who?  This fella, a tremendous Anglo-Nigerian singer from Finsbury Park.  Where did we meet?  How did we find out that we were both musicians?  I cannae remember captain.  But this I do know – I was playing Hot Pants in the flat while Taj was at work because the band I was in at this time – George’s band Arc Connexxion – had it in their set.   I was one of three horns in Arc Connexxion, an afro-pop outfit which was a bit Fela Kuti, a bit soul, a bit funk, and a bit of George’s own compositions.  It was fun.  Looking back, it is exactly the kind of band I long to play in right now, here in New York : dance music with a brass/woodwind section, african-influenced.

I’d bought James Brown’s 30 Golden Hits while I was at LSE a few years earlier, exploring the landscape of soul music with my Glaswegian friend Lewis MacLeod. We were beyond aficionados, we were obsessed with hunting down the very best soul tunes of the previous 25 years.  Motown of course, Stax Records indeed, Atlantic’s huge six-album box set, Philadelphia Records and then all the other smaller labels – Sue Records, Curtom, Brunswick, SAR, Hi, et al.  I remember buying Stay With Me Baby by Lorraine Ellison one day like finding treasure on a desert island and we played it over and over, What A Difference A Day Makes by Esther Phillips, Why Can’t We Live Together by Timmy Thomas, Love TKO by Teddy Pendergrass, all golden.

But James Brown was the record which got played a lot.  James Brown was on King Records, an independent label based in Cincinatti, Ohio. The greatest hits album was on Polydor and was a great primer to the man’s genius.  Hard to remember life before the internet, but the moment I saw Please Please Please on television I’ll never forget – the famous cape drama, the anguish, the concerned bandmates, the eruption of emotion when the cape is cast aside Yet Again. It’s magical theatre of soul music so it is, check it out, never gets old :

Lewis and I were hooked frankly.  Each song was better than the last – I Got You, Night Train, Think, I Feel Good, Out Of Sight, Try Me, I’ll Go Crazy,  Poppa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Cold Sweat.  We wished we could see him live.   He never came.  But, eventually, he did.  It was in Brighton one summer in Stanmer Park in the year 2000.  It was called the Essential Festival.  James Brown’s star had waned, he hadn’t charted for years, but his name was still synonymous with legend.  However, he was 67 years old, all the hype was that he only did 20 minutes in all, the bulk of the show was the band and younger singers & rappers.  And by then I’d immersed myself in Live At The Apollo the greatest Live Album of all time, and gorged on the youtube clips of the man in his prime, It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World, Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud) and the ubiquitous, brilliant Sex Machine.  I didn’t want those images to be replaced by a disappointment.  So I actually chose not to go.  Do I regret it now?  Kind of.  Yes.  Of course.  Other people I’ve rocked up to when in their 70s – McCartney, Aretha, Roberta Flack – and one in his 90s the amazing Tony Bennett – were all superb.  We were a little nervous about Aretha because there was some word of mouth that sometimes she “doesn’t turn up”, well she certainly did that night (see My Pop Life #225) god bless her, so that was nonsense.  But I remember distinctly deciding to swerve the great Godfather of Soul James Brown.  A fairly childish decision really.  The great festival- going kid of the 1970s had turned into the tight-assed muso-snob of the millenium.  But since I wasn’t there, I can’t tell you about The Essential Festival that year.  Silly me.

Arc Connexxion rehearsed at George’s house just down Blackstock Road from where I lived.  Once a week in the evening.  I do not remember the rest of the band at all.  Who were they?  A racially mixed bunch who could play Motown, Fela and James Brown.  Out of my league perhaps, but playing a James Brown horn line is considerably easier than attempting John Coltrane or Stan Getz (see Desafinado My Pop Life #68), in fact playing in a horn section (this was my first time) is easier than playing solo.  But you have to be tight.  Tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm tight. The tongue on the reed has to be exact.  Percussive.  I loved it.  Our crowning moment was playing at Notting Hill Carnival after Aswad in August 1983 where we were last on the bill, and didn’t get to play Hot Pants after all (see My Pop Life #42).  We were hustled on and told we could play one song before the curfew and Carnival had to close.  We played Martha Reeves’ Dancing In The Street, and hundreds of people who didn’t want to go home yet did just that.  Fantastic.  It was our biggest crowd ever.

Jenny and Lulu went to the James Brown gig in 2000 and reported back disappointment and a sense of a great artist being wheeled out, a circus act.  Jenny says that apparently James Brown actually was James Brown for one whole song (I should have gone), after which he went off and the young performers, rappers and funkateers played for 15 minutes before he came back, but he just couldn’t do it again and he simply stopped being James Brown and became a kind of JB tribute act and so she was sad.  So was Lulu.  A few years later Jenny and her sister Lucy saw Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis who were both in their late 80s and while Chuck was still Chuck Berry, Jerry was on a zimmer frame and scarcely present.  I’ve felt this way about Brian Wilson, my absolute musical hero, for the last few years.  They’re wheeling out a cash cow.  He’s not Brian anymore.  Leave him be.

But James Brown?  If you think about it he has to be the greatest genius of popular music.  You could argue Louis Armstrong and it might be difficult to resist.  But JB is a giant.  He emerged from the 1950s as a fully formed soul star before the term had even been invented, fusing R & B and gospel into a funk sound a whole decade before it was even thought of.  During the 1960s the sound was honed and streamlined, the melody lines erased and the rhythms amplified and tightened.  The Vocals were punctuated howls, shrieks, shouts and calls.  Astounding. Pure dance music.  Popular, political, immersive, irresistible.  He was the first and most popular artist to be sampled on the turntables of DJs in the South Bronx, the drum breaks of Clyde Stubblefield are all over old skool hip hop.  All hip hop.  When he stole the rhythm and riff of Bowie & Lennon’s Fame from Young Americans for his song Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved) in 1975, no one blinked.  I suspect Bowie thought it was an honour frankly, which indeed it was. JB was infamous for running his band like a military outfit, musicians would get fined for missing a cue or a bum note or a snare hit on the wrong beat or being seconds late for rehearsal.  Not greasing their patent leather shoes or tying their bowtie.  A number of times bandleader PeeWee Ellis walked out only to come back, but in 1970, Ellis, Stubblefield, Fred Wesley and the other Famous Flames never came back and JB then recruited players from Cincinatti band The Pacemakers to replace them, include Bootsy Collins (see Give Up The Funk My Pop Life #138). He called the new band The J.B.s.  His rhythms are in house music, soul music, funk, hip hop, jungle, drum & bass, disco, you name it.  Michael Jackson’s greatest influence.  I can’t do him justice in this bloglet of mine and by the way he was probably bonkers too but what a musical giant.  What a towering extraordinary figure in the musical landscape. What a force.

When The Brighton Beach Boys played people’s parties or weddings we would play a whole load of other material – disco, funk, ska, rock n roll and even Steely Dan and ELO, and when he can, our very own nutty drummer the itinerant rhythmicist Theseus Gerrard (mentioned in My Pop Life #111 and others) gets up to sing Get Up Offa That Thing and the whole room goes up to a different level.  We played it at Caroline Lucas’ 50th birthday in Brighton at the Indica Gallery in town which is based in an old church, and Theseus quite naturally climbed into the still-present pulpit to deliver his message of funk.  He’s a natural the fucker.  The funk of forty thousand years.

So I’ve played at least two James Brown songs in my short musical career.  Hot Pants is my favourite.  Could I get to play anymore before my ultimate death?  I’m 63 now.  Time is ticking…

 

The original number one hit single from 1971, Parts One & Two

Live and direct in 1985…

My Pop Life #219 : Work It – Missy Elliott

Work It – Missy Elliott

Is it worth it? Let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it

September 2002 – Marrakesh, Morocco.  Sitting by the pool with various Max Factors – Andrew French, Eddie Osei, Israel Aduramo, Gabriel Mann, Clara Bellar, Julian Wadham, Ilario Bisi-Pedro, Billy Crawford – listening to the head honcho of Morgan Creek Mr Jim Robinson holding us in thrall with his hilarious stories as his well-endowed Asian girlfriend splashed around distractingly in the water.  Imogen Stubbs is here too, on holiday.  Stellan Skarsgard is off somewhere with director Paul Schrader whom I had auditioned for a few months ago in Shepperton Studios.

Yes. That Paul Schrader. Screenwriter extraordinaire – Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Blue Collar, Obsession, The Last Temptation Of Christ.  Director of tight moral fables such as Blue Collar, Cat People, Mishima, American Gigolo.

We’re about to start shooting Dominion – a prequel to The Exorcist, in the hills to the north of this medieval city.  We can see the Atlas Mountains just to the south. It’s warm. We’re happy.

Paul Schrader with some of Vittorio Storaro’s boys on location

I had many highlights on this job – and very few lowlights, despite the supposedly haunted nature of these films.  The original, the famous William Friedkin masterpiece came out in 1973 when I was 16, and a gang of callow youth from Lewes caught the bus into Brighton and queued outside the Odeon while being sprinkled with holy water as religious types prayed over us and the back two rows of the stalls were reserved for St John’s ambulance.  Despite the gruesome special effects – Linda Blair’s head famously revolving on her shoulders, green vomit and so on, the only time I covered my eyes was when she was taken to hospital and they plunged a needle into her arm.  People carried their fainting girlfriends out. Next to me Jon Foreman, Martin Elkins, Conrad Ryle, Chris Clark laughed loudly at anything truly horrible to keep it at bay and dilute its undoubted power.  We were freaked.

Now I was getting my freak on making an Exorcist film.  Quite thrilling – this one takes place in 1947 in Turkanaland, northern Kenya where the priest Merrin (played by another Swedish actor Max Von Sydow in the original) and haunted by a WW2 massacre, is excavating a buried Christian Coptic Church when he finds something beneath the foundations…

Clara Bellar & Stellan Skarsgard

Given that we were supposed to be in Turkanaland, the land of the Turkana, Morgan Creek had flown in 15 men from the Turkana tribe in Kenya to be in our movie. They also provided some music too because they were in a band.  Lovely fellas. I seem to remember buying each of them a watch from the market with my expenses which they accepted with grace and delight and proceeded to sell them the following day for local currency.  But the bulk of the film’s extras were local, originating from Senegal.  One Sunday we arranged a football match out on the recreation area near the hotel – Senegal v The Rest Of The World which ended up as crew & cast people from France, Morocco, Italy and England.  It was 1-1 at half time but we were over-run in the second half and lost 5-1. Just like real life !

Billy in full gear as possessed Cheche

Up in Billy’s room we were bonding over music.  Billy Crawford is playing Cheche a young disabled boy who becomes the devil.  His face is sweet and clean and he is young and good fun, mixed-race Filipino and a pop star in Manila, although he lives in LA and sounds American.  His and my favourite song at this time is Missy Elliott’s Work It, which has just come out, and it tops all her other hits which we are also huge fans of – I Can’t Stand The Rain and She’s A Bitch and Get Ur Freak On.  There isn’t really an internet to speak of yet, but there is MTV.  So generally we get high and listen to a stereo and chat.  Missy’s videos are remarkably good though.

She wears expanding jumpsuits.  She is an awesome pop star. The beats, by her buddy Timbaland, are fantastic.  Her influences are global. Get Ur Freak On in particular opens in Japanese and includes an unlikely break in hindi in the 2nd verse.  Work It we obsess on however because it is brand new and also because :

Is it worth it? Let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it

followed by

Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup

which is the same line played backwards.  A simple trick you might think, but wow we spent quite a few stoned hours trying to actually say it.  Were we possessed by the devil?  Was she?  Remember the playout on the vinyl disc of Sgt Pepper after the final mighty chord of A Day In The Life has finally faded – sounds like something backwards – “we’ll fuck you like supermen” if you spin it back with your finger at the right speed….

Or all those heavy metal tunes with backwards growling supposed to raise Satan or one of his precious minions.  Coincidence?  Anyway. Other moments in this immense tune include the Chinese boys, her ass going aromba bomp bomp  – keep your eyes on my aromba bomp bomp and

Prince couldn’t get me change my name, papa
Kunta Kinte a slave again, no sir
Picture blacks saying, “Oh yess’a, massa”

It was an explosive song on so many levels for 2002 when she did indeed bestride the world like a colossus.

from the album, came the single

[Jenny and I went to see her much later in 2005 at Brixton Academy – we were very excited to see the living Missy Elliott in person – but despite a few cracking moments she didn’t deliver a great gig, spending much time inviting audience members on the stage to dance or chat shit or wiggle their arsecracks, then Missy herself wandering out into the audience – and up onto the balcony – which took at least 20 minutes out of the set.  Pretty poor all in all. A review of said gig in the NME reveals all] :

https://www.nme.com/reviews/live/reviews-nme-5188

Meanwhile back in Marrakesh I am five minutes late for the bus and get severely told off by Stellan Skarsgard who is travelling with us, not in a private sedan which is usually the way with leading actors.  In irritable early-morning Swedish-English he tells me that it is unacceptable to be five minutes late and don’t let it happen again.  He’s right of course.

Julian, Gabriel, Stellan

Weeks later, in the hotel bar where we all gather Every Night he has further lessons to impart :

“Where were you today Ralph?  You did your shot, your close-up, all fireworks and action, then they turn around on me and there’s hardly anything going on“

I blanch and think about it.  Possibly some Hollywood A-lister has previously said to me “Ralph – turn it down, it’s not your shot“, so I have got into the habit of not giving everything in my opposite number’s shot.  I’m wrong.

“Ralph, the scene isn’t about you, or me.  It’s about the energy between us. So we both have to turn up every time they turn over“

A valuable lesson and I love him even more.  We worked together back in 1996 in Newport, Rhode Island on Spielberg’s Amistad.  The rest of the cast are new to me apart from The Wad, Julian Wadham who I’ve met round at Richard E. Grant’s house a few times.  He’s a good man.

Sgt Major Harris reporting to Major Granville (The Wad)

But in the end I spend most of my time with Billy Crawford and Andrew French on days off, walking around the Djma-El-Fnaa which is a medieval North African souk not just for the tourists, but displays traditions that clearly go back centuries – acrobats, snake charmers, fire-eaters and jugglers mix with the carpet & slipper sellers and the endless silk scarves. It is a wonderful place that I returned to briefly in 2005 with Stoned, my old friend Stephen Woolley’s film on the death of Brian Jones.

with Rick Warden, Stellan Skarsgard & Andrew French

But we are filming miles away from Marrakesh. About an hour in the bus every morning and every night. In the desert, with a lunch under a tent.  I am Sgt Major Harris in the British army.  Vittorio Storaro the legendary Italian cinematographer has his huge team of assistants and students lighting the film. He does some extraordinary work and I watch mesmerised as his lights fade and rise, dip and pan with the action. So graceful, so beautiful.

Israel Aduramo playing Jomo

Earlier in the process I had arrived with a strange rash on my chest which had started to manifest on the palms of my hands.  Given the film we were doing, certain people thought it was an Omen, or perhaps a Conjuring.  One of the British actors, Israel Aduramo offered to help me with this affliction. He came into my trailer and prayed for about twenty minutes over me.  It didn’t do anything I’m sorry to report.  when I went home that weekend a lovely woman in Brighton Miriam Greene (RIP) examined me and announced that I had a recent and temporary allergic reaction to citrus fruits.  My mother had been ill the previous month and I was under a great deal of stress.  At the same time I was drinking this new drink Oasis that had appeared  – a lemon-type refresco citrus punch full of aspartame which was addictively delicious.  I stopped it immediately along with oranges, lemons and the bells of st clementines.

Schrader was an interesting dude.  He would meet me in the lift, look me up and down at my shirt & trouser colour combo and say “Ralph.  Red and Blue just don’t go together. Sorry“.  (Tell it to Spiderman Paul).  He would sit in a djellaba smoking a hookah and regale us with tales of Hollywood which I won’t recount here because these people are still alive.  But he had strong opinions.  Brought up as a strict Calvinist he wasn’t allowed to watch a film until he was 18.  I liked him, but he appeared to be under immense pressure.  Directors always are.  When we were in Rome towards the end of the shoot he saw me sitting in a hotel lobby reading something and came over to thank me, for “making something interesting out of what is essentially a yeoman character“.  I was pleased with this acknowledgement, and it remains the only time that anyone has used the word “yeoman” in a conversation with me.

Earlier on, when we had checked into the Hotel Excelsior in Rome, I had a special thrill.  This was the hotel from the original film, so the rumour went, when a character goes to see the Pope in the holiest of the holies, but I can find no reference to this “scene” in any of the previous Exorcist films. We were shooting some interiors of the haunted buried pre-Coptic church in Cinecitta Studios.  I check in and was given a key to Room 666.  I decided to invite the chaps over for a quick spliff before we went out to dinner together and got a message from Gabriel Mann who was playing the priest – “Sorry Ralph but I won’t be able to come into your room.  I’m sure you’ll understand.”

After we’d finished shooting loads of stuff happened which I won’t go into here, another director (Renny Harlin) was hired and indeed another film was made, with some of the original cast, not me.  Sometime thereafter two Exorcist : Dominion movies were released.  Paul Schrader didn’t get the funds to finish his SFX or the score, or colour correction, but his, our version remained the better one of the two, and most of us were reunited in Belgium at a film festival for the film’s premiere. After the Antwerp show I travelled to Paris with Billy because he was doing a gig there.  Those were the days huh.

I saw Billy a couple of times after that but we’ve long since lost touch. I’ve seen Julian too, but none of the others I’m afraid.  I heard that Ilario passed away. That is the way of the long swim. But I cherish these memories and add them to my museum of recollections.  Go well, dear reader.

My Pop Life #197 : My Adidas – Run D.M.C.

My Adidas – Run D.M.C.

My Adidas
walked through concert doors
& roamed all over coliseum floors
I stepped on stage, at Live Aid
All the people gave & the poor got paid
And out of speakers I did speak
I wore my sneakers but I’m not a sneak
My Adidas cuts the sand of a foreign land
with mic in hand I cold took command
my Adidas and me, close as can be
we make a mean team, my Adidas and me
we get around together, rhyme forever
& we won’t be mad when worn in bad weather
My Adidas.
My Adidas.
My Adidas
*

It was September 1986.  My girlfriend Rita Wolf and I had gone on holiday to San Francisco together, and stayed with her friends Lisa & Bryan alongside Alamo Park, picturesque wooden houses around a green square with a view of downtown off to the north.  We were both in our late 20s, working actors, no kids.

Alamo Park, San Fransisco

The plan was to enjoy the city a bit, then hire a car and drive out to Lake Tahoe – I think we’d both been to San Fran before, and explored Alcatraz, Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley and Golden Gate Park, so fancied a trip in a car, one of my favourite things to do in the world.  Hire a car and D R I V E.  I’ve written about a few of these trips before : Lost Highway, America, two songs about travelling through this nation, by Hank Williams and Simon & Garfunkel (My Pop Life #148  and #130 ).

This trip took us east across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and up Highway 80 past El Cerrito.  Terrible memories of Simon Korner and I being trapped with a weird Vietnam vet back in 1976 – a guy with a head so full of shit that he wouldn’t stop sharing with the two teenagers he picked up hitch-hiking.  As the road stretched on and the miles fell away, the memories faded.  Sacramento.  Then Highway 50 to the lake.  Took about 5 hours I reckon.  What a beautiful place Lake Tahoe is.  Fringed by pine and fir trees, it’s at a high elevation and has a number of top ski resorts in the winter months.  We drove around the California side of the lake to the address on the piece of paper (pre-internet or mobile!!) which read

“Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, U.S. 50, Stateline, NV“

which meant that we were just inside Nevada and that our hotel was also a casino.  We checked in and looked out of the window, which was like this :

and since it was early evening by then, descended to the restaurant to eat.  Imagine our surprise dear reader when it became clear at some point after sitting down and perusing the menus that we were sitting by a stage and that in 15 minutes, the great Donna Summer was going to come on and sing us a few songs.  Extraordinary.  But that is the thing with these casinos – the whole Nevada experience – a show, then gamble gamble gamble.  We’d gone there for the trip, for the lake, the desert, but Donna was a completely delightful shock.  She had a mini-orchestra with the band and performed all the great disco-era songs – or almost all anyway : Bad Girls, Hot Stuff, On The Radio, I Feel Love, She Works Hard For The Money, Love To Love You Baby… she was amazing and in a normal blog, she would be the point of the story.  This is her in that era, singing with Joe Esposito in Sahara, Lake Tahoe :

Amazing right?  It would only be right and fair to remember that around this time, Donna had made a born-again Christian mistake regarding gays and AIDS/HIV, a statement which she regretted for the rest of her life.  She apologised for it in 1989 – apologised to her significantly gay fans, such as my brother Paul, who felt betrayed after lifting her up in the disco years only to be brushed aside as the terrible disease struck in the mid-80s.  The whole Vegas part of a career is odd I think – like a bubble which exists off from reality, where people go to hide and make money, protected by the Mob.  I’m thinking Elvis, Frank, Louis.  Names so big they don’t need a second name.  Donna wasn’t in that bracket, but she was making somebody serious money and had been for over 10 years.

We were very happy to see her.  One of my favourite artists, regardless of her religious shallows.  The following day Rita and I drove around the lake and visited Carson City the state capital, then on to Virginia City, an old Wild West style town in the Nevada desert.

Great.  So far, so travelogue, with the open goal of a live gig by Donna Summer spurned by the blog.  Ye cannot top that young man surely.

Maybe not, but the point of this chapter is hip hop.  By 1986 we’d all heard The Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, the former lifting Chic‘s ‘Good Times‘ note-for-note with a bippity-boppity rap over the top, the latter painting a vivid picture of New York’s urban decay with the memorable punchline :

“It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under”

which Rita and I had altered slightly in our childish schtick to –

“it makes me mumble how I keep from going crumble”

I was bumbling along in 1986 at 29 years of age, done my youth cults, been a hippie, a skinhead, a mod, a punk, a glam rocker.  I dabbled in a fashionista sense in the new romantics style without really embracing the music much – Culture Club, yeah, Duran Duran, nah.  I just didn’t like half of the songs of that cult.  I was into Madness & Elvis Costello, Crowded House & Talking Heads, Kate Bush & The Pogues & The Style Council.  A smattering of african pop – Sound D’Afrique LPs and Fela Kuti, some Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N’Dour, some soul music courtesy of Randy Crawford, Prince & Sade, bit of Dr John, bit of Laurie Anderson.  Y’know.

Then I heard it.

Barrelling along Interstate 80 coming back into Oakland we’d picked up a local radio station.  A local BLACK radio station.  Sadly segregation in the USA is still practised widely even now in 2017, and certainly was in 1986.  Even today there are very VERY few radio stations that play black AND white music in the same programme.  The fact that it is possible for me to write “black music” and assume that everyone knows what is meant by that is actually pretty depressing to be honest.  Like : google ‘Darius Rucker’ for example.  I’ll tackle it on another blog – but I live in this big stupid segregated world with my black family. I’m white.  We’re humans.  But that’s a whole other subject.  At this point in my short sweet life I was going out with an English Bengali woman,  “whatever” – right ?

tic ta tic tic – a dumba dumdum

A bass-line which came from below the car, below the street, and a hi-hat which was a metallic scratch from a distant satellite dish.  Stretched between these two extremes of sound, a scrunchy crunch like a door slamming & a car crashing – the whip-scratch of a vinyl record being dragged back under a stylus on a turntable, all overlaid with a man’s voice talking about his trainers – in rhythm. That’s it.  A drum-kit & a voice – and a deep deep bass that you could hardly hear, but was inside your bones.  If you listen to this track on a computer, it sounds tinny & trivial, although the rap itself is till tougher than leather – no,  you have to have the bass, on speakers or headphones.  In a car you get all that top & bottom, and to have this crunching space-age noise with all the clear blue sky in-between each element was perfect, my perfect introduction to hip hop, the new sound of America.

Obviously I was late.

Hip hop had been developing very nicely thank you since The Message, especially in the South South Bronx, Brooklyn and the other boroughs of New York City.  Run-D.M.C. were on their 3rd LP by the time this hit me & the shining light came down from above and converted me to the five elements of hip hop (9 or 4?  5 for me) which I would immerse myself in over the following years.  I was hooked after one song.  This was like the legend of heroin or crack – one puff and you’re hooked For Life Mate!  It was true after all.

Graffiti is one of the five elements of hip hop – 5Pointz, Long Island City

I bought the album Raising Hell within days, with Peter Piper, It’s Tricky, You Be Illin’, the mighty Walk This Way.  It is no exaggeration at all to say that this LP changed my life completely.  If you were mean you might say that I appropriated this black culture and made it mine, stole it, used it, colonised it.  If you were me you might say that this was my culture too, because all the culture I receive and have always received is mine to have and to hold.  It comes from somewhere of course, but where it goes is everywhere.  We’re sharing, aren’t we?

Yes, I was late late late- but what had I missed ?  The first Run-D.M.C. album called simply Run-D.M.C. (above) had been released two years earlier in 1984 and had a tighter, sparser, punchier sound than the hip hop of that era which was still decidedly funky and rolled along with melodic hooks (Kurtis Blow).  They followed that with King Of Rock in 1985.  But even before the 1st album they’d released the seminal single It’s Like That (That’s The Way It Is) with Jason Nevins in 1983 – and this is the groundbreaker sonically.  Those spaces I’d heard on My Adidas were carved out of thin air back in 82-83.

Rev Run, DMC, Jam Master Jay in 1985

Run-D.M.C. come from Hollis in Queens, which is way out past Jamaica, Queens on the Long Island Rail Road (on the way to Long Island where Public Enemy emanate from).   Joseph Simmons (Run) and Darryl McDaniels (DMC) used to rap in the park together, although Simmons had already DJ’d for rapper Kurtis Blow who was managed by his brother Russell Simmons of DefJam Records.  Run and DMC rapped in front of DeeJay Jason Mizell one day in the park – Jazzy Jase he was known at the time – and they all hooked up.  They wouldn’t record anything until they left high school, and Russell Simmons oversaw their first single It’s Like That/Sucker M.C.s at the end of 1983, with Jam Master Jay on the decks as Jason was now known.

The first album broke the mould of hip hop – not only with its sound, but with the style of the band which had come from Jay – Kangol hats, one-colour track suits and sneakers with the laces taken out.  This was “street” and cool, because it came, like later fashion tropes, from prison garb.   But it was the music, the stripped-down, rhythmic interplay between DMC and Reverend Run (who became ordained as an actual minister in 2004), set against the crisp turntabled beats, rockin’ bells & occasional rock guitars produced by Jam Master Jay and producers Russell Simmons & Rick Rubin which became an integral part of the bedrock of old-skool hip hop.  I went on to see them live three times in the 1980s, all in London, they were always immense.

hip hop block party in New York City, late 70s

The great tidal wave of hip hop that crashed into my life was partly me doing catch-up on these early days of Run-D.M.C. along with Afrika Bambaata, Kurtis Blow, Boogie Down Productions, LL Cool J, Eric B & Rakim and Public Enemy, Salt’n’Pepa, Roxanne Shanté, Biz Markie, Schoolly D, Big Daddy Kane, Kool Moe Dee, The Juice Crew, EPMD and Doug E. Fresh.  A great surge of creativity from the streets.  It was extremely exciting.  And then it was all about keeping up with what was coming out right then in the late 80s – 7A3, N.W.A., De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, The Beastie Boys, Tone Loc, Queen Latifah, Young M.C., Spoonie Gee, through to Tupac, Ice-T, De La Soul and Master Ace.  I should also mention the British hip hop scene – Richie Rich, Demon Boyz, London Possee, Cookie Crew, Derek B et al.  Rapping even then in an English accent. I would go off a lot of the hip hop in the early 90s after the gold came back, the social comment of PE and KRS-1 got drowned out by the gangsta rap and macho rubbish that followed.  But until 1991 I bought pretty much every single and album that came out, all on vinyl.  Always been an old skool head.

So obsessed did I become with this new music that it occurred to me that it was going to change the world.  A few of us felt the same way – but it must be recorded that the vast majority of people (that I knew at least) :

a) didn’t like hip hop or rap, or whatever it was

b) thought it wouldn’t last longer than a couple of years, and then

c) real music would come back

In contrast to this I was deep in the flow, going forward.  I felt that this was new, like rock ‘n’  roll was new in the 1950s – a new form – and it wasn’t going anywhere.  It was pregnant with possibilities:  musically, as a dance form, in graffiti, in poetry and, I felt very strongly, in my own arena – drama.  It felt inherently dramatic – it felt as if whole dramas could be constructed out of this new speech.  It was thrilling.  My diary for 1986 records a meeting that I had with Paulette Randall in the latter part of this year.  We talked about creating a play about the hippie convoy (my idea) and urban homelessness (Paulette’s idea) using raps between the scenes or maybe even in the scenes (like a musical).  Soon we would take the project to Joint Stock, where I had worked (with Simon Curtis directing) on Deadlines in 1984/85 (see My Pop Life #185 ). Using the same working method, Paulette & I created Sanctuary, a hip-hop musical which would later transfer to Washington D.C.   See My Pop Life #86, My Pop Life #137 for further adventures.

Little did I know that almost 30 years later I’d be watching “Hamilton” at the Public Theatre in New York, before its Broadway run, using all these ideas and more –  like an opera where all the dialogue is rapped.  Brilliant game-changing show. This was my inchoate dream in 1986 – but it had taken this long to become a commercial reality.  It was truly inevitable given the power and dynamism of the form, but perhaps it needed an audience born after 1990 to appreciate it, to allow it to flourish and grow.  Some things change slowly.

I changed quickly though.  I’ve always been a faddist, and I embraced this new fad with an irritating born-again fashion victim’s zeal & passion.  Money would be spent on vinyl.  Gigs would be attended.  Plays would be written.  This LP in particular was hugely influential on my style of rap writing, which would win me writing awards in two years time. Meanwhile Rita & I enjoyed the remainder of our trip to California and got back to London to find that she was expected for work in Manchester the night before.  One bowl of grape nuts later & we were driving up the M6 in my spangled blue Vauxhall Wyvern ‘Eddie’ to Chester Zoo and the set of ‘One By One’.   Rita was in front of the cameras within 20 minutes of arrival as I changed a flat tyre.

As for those Adidas, well, talk about a signpost to the future.  I still have my pair of Adidas Sambas.  It’s impossible now to speak in a generalised way about “hip hop” as you could in the 1980s, it is so diverse and has so many branches & flowers & languages.  Not only do we now live in hip-hop wallpaper, we now live in sneaker ubiquity.  The idea of the label.  Logo as clothing as status.  Never mind beats in a rhyme. The song is a damn commercial for Adidas & Lee denim!!

standin on 2 Fifth St.
funky fresh & yes cold on my feet
with no shoe string in em, I did not win em
I bought em off the Ave with the black Lee denim
I like to sport em that’s why I bought em
a sucker tried to steal em so I caught ’em and I fought ’em
& I walk down the street & I bop to the beat
with Lee on my legs & Adidas on my feet
& now I just standin here shooting the gif
me and D & my Adidas standing on 2 Fifth
My Adidas.
My Adidas.

Tick ta tick tick ~ Badumba dumdum.

The space inside this song is ridiculous.

My Pop Life #163 : Early (ft BOOTS) – Run the Jewels

Early (ft BOOTS)   –   Run the Jewels

And he still put my hands in cuffs, put me in the truck
When my woman screamed, said “shut up”
Witness with the camera phone on saw the copper pull a gun and
Put it on my gorgeous queen
As I peered out the window I could see my other kinfolk
And hear my little boy as he screamed
As he ran toward the copper begged him not to hurt his momma
Cause he had her face down on the ground
And I’d be much too weak to ever speak what I seen
But my life changed with that sound

*

When we moved to New York City in February 2014 we felt positive, optimistic and excited.  As a mixed-race couple (I am ‘white’, my wife is ‘black’) we were looking forward to living in a multi-racial city of immigrants where the old blocks of black/ white/ jewish/ korean/ italian/ hispanic /chinese had at least been partly broken down.  Brooklyn was mixed and thriving and beautiful.  The last time we’d been here (apart from the Julius Caesar run in late 2013 see My Pop Life #143) had been the late 80s when we’d stayed in Alphabet City and been shocked by the homelessness, the filth everywhere, and felt at street level the racial tension in the city.  The block mentality appeared to be based on racial origin depressingly.   It was 1989 just after the Central Park incident when five black and hispanic teens were arrested and indicted on robbery and sexual assault charges against a white middle-class female jogger.

White fury 1989 believing in the rape narrative of the Central Park 5

The city prickled with palpable suspicion and anger.   In June 2014  the five men – who were between 14 and 16 when they were arrested – settled for $40 million in compensation after many years of jail, followed by negotiations with the city.  They were all innocent.  The perpetrator, Matias Reyes, had acted alone and confessed in 2002, some 12 years earlier.

On July 17th 2014 Eric Garner was selling cigarettes outside a store on Staten Island.  Bystander footage shot on mobile phones showed five policemen forcing him to the floor, one with a chokehold as Garner said on numerous occasions “I can’t breathe“.  He died on the street, on camera.  The Black Lives Matter Movement had been born in the wake of the murder acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot 17-yr old Trayvon Martin in Florida the previous year.   A protest group coined the phrase and it stuck.  It doesn’t have an “Only” in front of it, but it might have a “Too” after it.  It’s not offensive, or divisive, in the context of the regular dehumanisation of black life in America.

Ferguson, Missouri 2014

Between these two murders was the shooting of 18-yr old Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri which had ignited the nation – a black man shot multiple times by a white policeman and left dead on the street for over five hours – a white officer also later to be acquitted by a white Grand Jury, in a secret hearing.

Since then we have had a rising tide of unacceptable black death at the hands of the police, often captured on camera : Tamir Rice, 12 years old from Cleveland (no indictment of the officer), Eric Harris from Tulsa was shot in the back while lying on the ground (this case resulted in a manslaughter conviction), Walter Scott from North Carolina, shot in the back while running away (a murder charge has resulted from the camera phone footage) Sandra Bland in Texas who apparently committed suicide in her prison cell after being arrested for ‘not signalling when she pulled over’.  And Freddie Gray in Baltimore whose spine was broken while he was handcuffed in the back of a van driven at deliberately high speeds around corners after his arrest.  He died.  All the Freddie Gray cases have resulted in acquittals for the group of officers involved, dripping through the news bulletins one a week in 2016.

Then two weeks ago Baton Rouge had another cop shooting a black man – Alton Sterling – outside a store, and on the same day in Minnesota we had a live Facebook feed from the girlfriend of Philando Castile, shot in his car by an officer as he was handing the cop his legal gun licence.

moments after the shooting of Philando Castile

All this exploded further 14 days ago when – at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas against these last two shootings – a sniper shot and killed five police officers and was himself killed by a police robot bomb.  Then 4 days ago another (black) sniper who was also ex-military shot and killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, which has been extremely tense ever since the killing of Alton Sterling.

I am aware of my white privilege, especially in newly-gentrified Fort Greene, Brooklyn.  I’m not going to discuss the ins and outs of gentrification here because it is quite complex and more to do with money than race – and there are good points, and bad points – but walking down the streets and avenues of Brooklyn, I never feel threatened by the police.  That’s just my reality.   I’m not in the matrix that says – young black men commit most of the crime, so target them, shake them down, stop and frisk.  We know the NYPD profile young black men.  We know they have quotas and monthly targets.  And whatever irrational fear I may have of groups of young black men with hoodies on the street – the reality is that they have a far more rational fear of me as a white man.  Historically and actually.  White people run things.  It’s not a black problem all this.  It’s a white problem.

My white privilege allowed me to attend a Black Lives Matter protest in Los Angeles in 2015 while I was shooting Agent Carter at Disney, a rally then a walk along Hollywood Boulevard with a few hundred protestors past the 101 Freeway entrance blocked by LAPD thence to Hollywood & Vine where we were invited to sit down on the intersection and block the road, to actually lie down as if we were dead on the street.  It felt vulnerable and brave, there were LAPD all around us, but I never felt in danger.  I was a white middle-class English protestor after all.

How ironic, how tragic indeed that all of this is kicking off at the end of the second term of the USA’s first black President.   Barack Obama did speak up about the Trayvon Martin murder saying “he could have been my son” – and NRA membership shot up, as did gun purchases and registrations.  Obama backed off after that, thinking clearly not to stir the hornet’s nest, but it stirred itself anyway.  One of the things I didn’t realise before moving here was how little command & control the President has over the police.  Police Departments are run on a state-by-state basis and controlled by the State Governments.  The Federal Justice Department can however intervene in high-profile cases and seek an indictment, they have done so in the Alton Sterling case.   But Obama often feels side-lined by this issue.  Some, like Cornel West, and I would fall into this category too, feel that Obama has not done enough as a black President to reform a racist police culture.

El-P and Killer Mike : Run The Jewels

Run The Jewels was formed by black rapper Killer Mike and white rapper/producer El-P in 2012 after they had toured together.  Killer Mike debuted on Outkast‘s Stankonia LP in 2000 before releasing 5 full-length independent political trap/hip hop albums out of Atlanta.  El-P is outta Brooklyn, original member of Company Flow and owner of Def Jux records where he produced Cannibal Ox‘ The Cold Vein among other independent hip hop albums.  A well-respected hip-hop producer he has also released 5 LPs, two as Company Flow and three as El-P.

Run The Jewels first LP was a free download in 2013, self-titled with the strange logo that has got me into a few odd situations – severed, bandanged hands holding onto a gold chain – what ?  But it has been hugely effective in establishing them as a force – political uncompromising, old skool, with a political angry content to match a punchy noisy style -they remind me of Public Enemy, committed hip hop from the underground, sent to upset the apple cart.  Run The Jewels 2 was released in October 2014, was again free, and included this track Early, featuring a new face BOOTS aka Jordan Asher who had risen to glory from nowhere in 2013, writing three and producing no less than NINE of the tracks on Beyoncé‘s self-titled 5th LP ‘BEYONCÉ‘ along with a roster of up-to-the-minute talent.  His contribution to this song ‘Early’ is quite stunning.

Killer Mike rapping live in 2015

The first verse, partly quoted above is delivered by Killer Mike, reminiscent in rhythm to Young M.C.’s ‘Know How‘ and in rhyme pattern to Run DMC’s ‘Walk This Way’ : a black male under arrest for weed “could it be that my medicine’s the evidence”   while his partner and child protest and are held by the police

” ‘cos I respect the badge and the gun,

and I pray today ain’t the day when you drag me away, right in front of my beautiful son“

His queen gets shot at the end of that verse “and my life changed with that sound“.

The chorus is devastating, eerie, other-worldly from BOOTS –

Get out get out get out feelin this feelin this too early…”

and appears to be in a different song altogether.  A startling moment where everything you know suddenly floats untethered and the sky is falling in.

Then El-P’s verse – the white verse – starts with the same couplet

It be feelin’ like the life that I’m livin’ I don’t control
Like every day I’m in a fight for my soul

– he agrees with Killer Mike that his life ain’t his own, but he talks about the system – there’s a they – and how things are rigged but it ain’t a game if it don’t pause with the sound of Pacman dying in the mix behind him.   He sees the street cameras watch the birdie but it doesn’t record the cop shooting the woman… he finishes with hearing the sound of gunshots maybe two blocks away but he’s going to bed he’s going to sleep, getting up early, unfazed.  White privilege.

This song is both the darkness and the light.  As it should be.

I had tickets to see Run The Jewels in late 2014 and couldn’t go – I had to be in Los Angeles for work on Agent Carter.   I gave to tickets to my Brooklyn friend and gig buddy Tony Gerber, also a white man, also married to a black woman Lynn Nottage, and he went to the gig with Aaron Nottage, his wife’s brother.  I was glad the tickets were used, and glad they were a gift.  I spent that Christmas alone (sob) in Brooklyn with the cats, as Jenny flew back to London to be with her family.  Tony and Lynne invited me round to their house for Christmas Day which was extremely kind of them, and I had a wonderful day.  Presents were exchanged, and Tony had bought me the Run The Jewels T-shirt complete with bandaged severed hand holding the gold chain.

Suzan-Lori Parks wasn’t sure about this T.  I couldn’t explain it

One of my friends here in NYC is a police officer.  We drink.  We argue.  We laugh a lot.   But she tells me things about things.  The gang mentality.  The win mentality.  The shoot-to-kill training.   Social media has heightened the issue a great deal and given us all access to Sandra Bland’s aggressive arresting officer, the shooting of Walter Scott or the shocking view of Philando Castile dying in front of our eyes.  We are not inured to these incidents, rather we are woken by them, they are brought into our homes, our phones, our lives.  What can we do ?  We can join Black Lives Matter, go out onto the streets and show our anger.  We do.  What else ?

Well I think one critically important step we can take is to acknowledge that we all live in a world built on white supremacy, and still operating through it.  White lives matter more, count more, than black lives.  Cops see a black face and see a) guilt and b) danger.  The fear count goes UP.  Each terrorist atrocity in Europe is lamented, people paste the flag of France or Belgium onto their Facebook profile and express sorrow and defiance.  But terrorist atrocities in Mali, Ivory Coast, Turkey or Iraq scarcely get a mention, let alone a flag of sympathy.  Not our tribe.  “A plane came down in Kenya yesterday. Two Britons were on board. ”  Oh.   So what kind of message does that send ??  Our kids are running off to Syria in their hundreds to join ISIL.  Why might that be ?  We live in an increasingly polarised world at the moment. Capitalism is wobbling seriously once again, the 2008 crash did not adjust our system in any meaningful way, and there is less money going round.  We all feel it.  But the banks were bailed out, over and over again.  Was Greece ?

Divide and rule, the old tactic is still taking our eyes off the ball.  These are dangerous times.  Reminiscent of the 1930s.  It feels like we need to pick sides, and people are very ready to do that.  I chose my side many years ago when I married my beautiful black wife.   My family is black.  Although I think I had been on this side for at least fifteen years before that.  And I’ve always felt like an internationalist.

If I had a child and I lived here in Brooklyn they would be mixed-race, or black – and I would feel the fear more keenly, the fear this nation always feels built on.  Across the USA, parents of black children raise them to simply get home alive.  If a police officer stops you, be polite, be respectful, do not move your hands, obey, don’t argue, don’t raise your voice, get home alive.  Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his book Between The World and Me as a letter to his son about coming home alive and it was a best-seller in 2015.  The ABCtv show Blackish felt compelled to address the Black Lives Matter issues in one episode of their sitcom, now in its third series, and the Oscars were dominated by the issue of racism, and brilliantly helmed by Chris Rock on the night.  We are undoubtedly going through another major civil rights movement – but what will change ?   The root is deep, as deep and dark as slavery, and that went on for hundreds of years and made black skin into a commodity, dehumanised, valuable but like the pelt of an animal.  Even after the civil war – fought over the South’s refusal to free their slaves – Reconstruction meant that there was no price to be paid for losing the war.  Robert E. Lee kept his rifle and his Dixie flag and was sent home by Ullysses Grant and no black family got 40 acres and a mule.  The slave-hunters who had profited from bounty turned into the  Sheriffs, Deputies and then Police Officers of the Jim Crow South.  Lynchings, Strange Fruit.

Racism – the great white problem – has never gone away because the root has not been dug out.  The skin grows over it, and it lies there festering until the next breakout.

Charleston, South Carolina  July 2015 – a young white racist shoots 9 black people dead in a church as they pray, and when the police find him hours later they give him a bullet-proof vest and get him a burger.  South Carolina in the weeks that followed finally took the Confederate Flag off the State buildings – to much hostility from white supremacists, for it is their flag.  Quite why it ever became the flag of rock’n’rollers like Lemmy or Mick Jones from the Clash is beyond my comprehension.

And on we go.   In the end compassion is the only way.  Kindness.  We’re in a bit of a finger-pointing era though right now, picking sides, othering.  This song for me shows another way – a white man and a black man working together and seeing the world through each others eyes.  This is the way forward.  I realise too, that this has all been very male, and another great step for me, and for us all, is for MAN to see the world through WOMAN eyes.

Stay safe.

My Pop Life #86 : I Know You Got Soul – Eric B & Rakim

I Know You Got Soul   –   Eric B & Rakim 

…I got soul – that’s why I came, to teach those who can’t say my name

first of all I’m the soloist the soul controller Rakim get stronger as I get older…

A version of this blog will appear in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice.  Watch this space for details !

RB

My Pop Life #74 : We Major – Kanye West ft. Nas, Really Doe & Tony Williams

We Major   –   Kanye West  ft. Nas, Really Doe & Tony Williams

*

you mu-fuckers better do your job and roll up, and watch how we roll up

An’ I can’t control it, I can’t hold it, it’s so nuts –

I take a sip of that gnac I wanna fuck

I take a hit of that chronic I wanna fuck  – But really what’s amazin’

is how I keep blazing, towel under the door, we smoke until the days end

puff puff and pass don’t fuck up rotation, Hypnotiq for Henny ?

now nigga that’s a chaser, turn nuttin to somethin now pimpin that’s a saviour

Best things are green now pimpin’ get your paper

High off the ground from stair to skyscraper

cool out thinkin’ we local – c’mon homie we major

We Major…

Summer 2005 I was in Bude, North Cornwall making series 2 of Julia Davis‘ Nighty Night.  We had the run of this gorgeous clifftop house which became The Trees Therapy Centre.  I was Jacques, the main therapist and counsellor, a kind of abusive self-centred hippy twerp.  I really enjoyed this part very much, and based the character’s speech and mannerisms on a combination of two Brighton people whom I won’t embarrass by naming.   Jenny and I had watched the first series and howled with laughter – we thoroughly enjoyed the dark humour and the character of Jill in particular.   At the audition on Tottenham Court Road Julia Davis had put me through my paces, and when I appeared to be a possible choice, called in Rebecca Front from a nearby room (surely I’m mis-remembering this?) and they proceeded to improvise scenarios with me, both of them in character with Julia as narcissistic sociopath Jill and Rebecca as zero-self-esteem fusspot Cathy, constantly undermined and manipulated by Jill.   It was as much as I could do not to burst out loud laughing (lol) as they created mini-scenes for me to exist in with them.   I stayed manfully in character as not-recovering sex-addict Jacques – a kind of po-faced ultra-serious egotist who nodded sagely at other’s suggestions while not really listening to them at all.   And got the job.  Hooray.

Georgie, Ruth, Ralph, Julia, Miranda, Bude 2005

The performers were all in a little B&B in Bude – the main cast were all either massively successful, or about to be massively successful.  Angus Deayton, always slightly bemused that you’re actually talking to him, Rebecca Front, genuinely lovely and funny lady, Ruth Jones, busy writing her masterpiece in her spare time which turned out to be Gavin & Stacey, Miranda Hart who turned out to be Miranda!, and Mark Gatiss who turned out to be Mark Gatiss.   Nighty Night also starred my old friend Felicity Montagu from very early Edinburgh Festival adventures and there was also Georgie Glen and Llewella Gideon.  We had an absolute blast.

On the first morning there, Julia took me to lunch in Bude where she established that I was married with no cats.   I felt that she was checking me out as future husband material as well as making friends before we worked.  She is a completely unpretentious, funny, sweet and lovely lady and bright as a button.   We almost all worked every day.   I had extensions put into my hair for Jacques and tended to wear floppy hippyish clothes.   The summer was glorious, the views spectacular, I had worked with half the crew before and we had a laugh.  I will mention in particular the sound crew with Saint on the boom.  Not really my world the TV comedy scene -it’s pretty competitive – but I’m terribly happy that I’ve been invited into it on a few occasions – (Him & Her, PramFace) – being funny is hard work and I love the challenge.    I have total respect for Julia – I think she is one of the most original and talented people working in the UK, and I thank her for letting me be a part of Nighty Night.

I was listening to Kanye all that summer.  Kanye West restored my faith in hip hop.  Being an old-skool purist for years, disillusioned with gangsta rap and the 90s scene I turned away and only paid cursory attention – to Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, PE and little bits and smatterings that escaped.   But Kanye West was something else.

He has now made (May 2015) six LPs on the bounce starting in 2003 which have individually been astoundingly good, and collectively represent the most important artist of the 21st century.  Kanye comes with original ideas, smooth flows, comedy, orchestration, samples, pop, raps, and pretty much paved the way for a number of 21st century musical innovations and trends.  His last LP Yeezus (2013) was monumental in its sound design and another game-changer – but this track I’ve chosen right here is a personal favourite from the second album Late Registration.  Not an obvious pick, not a single, but somehow this is the one that got under our skin chez Brown/Jules.   Already you can hear the music straining on the first few bars – the sound of a sound trying to escape from its boundaries, pushing against the barriers, smooth, powerful, strong and melodic.  Good chords.   The hook chorus is written above, rapped by old Chicago buddy Really Doe.    I always thought the last line was “too low thinkin’ we local“…  Rap Genius website has it as “cool out, thinkin’ we local…“.   I prefer my version because of the word-play on low and local.   Oh well.    Kanye employed Jon Brion – multi-instrumentalist and orchestrator – to help him on this LP.   Brion had produced Brad Mehldau, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright and written the music for the films Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before co-producing Late Registration in 2005.   He did a splendid job.

I could have chosen any number of his songs to feature in my patchwork quilt of a musical auto-biography:  Gold Digger, Diamonds From Sierra Leone, Flashing Lights, No Church In The Wild, Black Skinhead, Blood On The Leaves, Jesus Walks, Through The Wire….   He’s attracted a lot of hate recently and over the years mainly because of his antics, but sometimes simply because he is a successful black man.   Obama called him a jackass “off-mic” and Kanye enjoys stunts which can backfire.   He has been banging his head on the glass ceiling for a few years now, documented on Yeezus, indeed all his music is like a kind of running commentary on his achievements, desires and obstacles.   I always swing in and defend him on social media, not because he needs me, but because the mob mentality really bothers me, I like to poke a stick into its spokes.   {This hasn’t aged well!!}  All I know is that when the history of 21st Century music is written Kanye West will be Chapter One.   And when the history of 21st century TV comedy is written, Julia Davis will feature.  They’ve both been hugely influential.   My Pop Life introduces them to each other.   Big up!

The final verse on We Major is penned by Nas – who changed the world of hip-hop with his debut album Illmatic in 1994.   These are the final few lines on the Kanye track :

I’m Jesse Jackson on the balcony when King got shot

I survived the livest niggas around, last longer than more than half of you clowns

Look, I used to cook before I had the game took,

Either way my change came like Sam Cooke

  

My Pop Life #61 : Fight The Power – Public Enemy

Fight The Power   –   Public Enemy

…Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant shit to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother fuck him and John Wayne
‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud
I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps…

After another election night betrayal, another public display of democracy that makes you want to vomit, all we have left is “each other” people.  We have to fight the powers that be.  England will kick off this summer, once again, the familiar ritual of burning and brick throwing.  Once again Labour has failed to appeal to its core constituency and some of them have voted Green, others UKIP, still others Conservative. Many others didn’t vote at all.

…What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless, you say what is this ?   My beloved lets get down to business, Mental self defence and fitness…

The greatest band to come out of the 1980s was Public Enemy.  PE burn with righteous fire against injustice, racism, the media, corruption, laziness, selfishness, privilege, ignorance.   They were one of the reasons that I became a writer in 1987.

 When I heard their  first LP “Yo Bum Rush The Show” I was excited by power and truth combining with beats and rhyme, it was exciting and inspiring – but could not prepare me for the monster work of their 2nd LP “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” in 1988.  It was a tidal wave of sound and righteous fury and I couldn’t get enough of it.  I saw them twice live in London that year – or maybe two years running.  Brixton Academy ’87 – ’88.

I went with Miss P who was directing my first as-yet-unwritten play and the cast of same as-yet-untitled play:  Rita Wolf (my girlfriend), David Keyes, Kwabena Manso, Gaylie Runciman, Pamela Nomvete and Carl Procter.  We were all researching a play about homelessness, to be expressed at least partly through hip hop.  That’s how it was pitched to the Joint Stock Steering Committee “led by” Caryl Churchill and Max Stafford-Clark.   The resultant play was called “Sanctuary“, directed by Paulette Randall and designed by Jenny Tiramani, and it won me the Samuel Beckett Award 1987 for best first play.

Leader, writer and inspiration behind Public Enemy Chuck D is now an elder in the rap world.  In 1987 he was a revelation.  His lyrics, his delivery, his fury, his tone are all second to none.  I don’t think technically he is the best rapper – that honour goes to Rakim for me – but Rakim pretty much sticks to one subject ie: what a great rapper Rakim is.  Chuck D and PE cover the waterfront.   DJ Terminator X was also scratching records in ways unheard of at that point, not just samples, but noise pure and simple, and the production team of Hank & Keith Shocklee and Eric Sadler “The Bomb Squad” invented a whole new vocabulary of sound : screeching, chopped up quotes from many sources, layered, punchy, visceral and powerful.  The genius addition of Flavor Flav, the joker in the pack, wearing a huge clock “so you know what time it is” and chirruping support from the sidelines (“yeeeah boyeee“) made the package complete – a black gang to take on the white establishment and kick it in its holy nuts.

Hence the Elvis/John Wayne quote above.   Deliberately provocative, it comes from a lifetime of being a second-class citizen in a first-world nation.   The pure anger in their work becomes a creative force in itself, and the potency of Fight The Power, (taken from album number three Fear Of A Black Planet which should have been released in 1989 but eventually appeared in 1990) has not been matched by any protest song or rallying cry ever recorded.  It is a seriously pumped-up rhythm, sampling James Brown, The Isley Brothers, Syl Johnson and 16 other tracks in a huge sound which was ubiquitous that summer of 1989 when it soundtracked Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing, and the hot summer in Brooklyn kicking off.

*

In 1989 I was still in full B-Boy mode.  I’d adopted the hip-hop look in 1987 when the sounds and culture of rap bowled me over.   I had written an American version of Sanctuary that summer called Sanctuary D.C., researched and set in Washington DC.   And I had the genesis of a new piece forming, all in verse, commissioned by the BBC.   George Faber it was who asked me in early 1990 to write something in rap from that culture, I was the white emissary from the front line.   I came up with a rhyme play called The House That Crack Built, set in Washington DC and based on the street life I had experienced there in the summer of 1989, the summer of Do The Right Thing.  I nearly got stabbed in D.C. outside a downtown men’s shelter when my bicycle was surrounded by homeless guys who wanted to know what I was doing.  “you’re a european” one of them accused.  “How did you know?” I answered with naive foolishness “I’m English“.  He meant I was white.  There were 20 of them around me, one guy circling the outside giving me glimpses of a large knife inside his coat.  He looked insane.  I spoke sincerely about my desire for a colour-blind future and they probably pitied my twattishness and let me cycle off.  My general foolhardy youthful naivitée probably saved me a few times that summer, researching the American version of my English hit play.  Chatting to crack dealers on the wrong corner.  At night.  But somehow I got away with it.

Back in London 1990, George Faber didn’t get the play I’d delivered at all.  He asked me to produce a week’s workshop and show him a handful of scenes.  I’d anticipated this, and hired a handful of actors who had to prove they could rap in a brief audition.  My lead was the amazing Roger Griffith, one of my favourite actors.  His buddy was played by Michael Buffong, now a first-rate prize-winning director at The National theater, Royal Exchange and Talawa.  Mum was ‘Dame’ Dona Croll of course, whose five-year old daughter had just arrived from Jamaica – so cute – with best friend Jo Martin, the bad guy was Calvin Simpson, who tragically died shortly after the workshop, a lorry knocking him off his bicycle on Waterloo roundabout.  That was a terribly sad funeral.   We filed past the open casket in church, and he was so dead.    I remember him as a great actor and a man who insisted on wearing odd socks.  Years ahead of his time.   Chris Tummings and one true love Jenny Jules completed the cast, but Jenny got a bad asthma attack and was hospitalised and had to be recast at the last minute and Pamela Nomvete filled the breach as far as I can recall ?  We worked hard all week, bringing a few scenes to life, learning how to rap in dialogue.   It worked really well, rap is naturally really dramatic and perfect for stage or dramatic work – it’s not unlike Shakespeare or Greek drama.  But Faber and his small BBC gang who came to watch on the Friday afternoon (including his secretary – his barometer) didn’t get it.  He had a meeting with me the week after and said “why is it set in America?“,  I said “Because there’s no crack scene in the UK“.   He said “well change the drug then“.  The casual lazy sweeping generalisation.  Crack was different to every drug I’d ever come across.   Totally.  His well-meaning liberal racism was shocking in the end.  “We brush past these people in the street every day – what do they feel?“.    So depressing.   The piece wasn’t taken forward, and has never been produced anywhere.   If it was mounted now it would be proper old skool rap history, all about Bush and Amerikkka.

*

Years later in 2003 I was on the set of another aborted project which I’d written – a film called Red Light Runners.  Bits of it are online somewhere.  Long bitter story – for another post (actually a trilogy that starts at My Pop Life #144).  That was the experience that stopped me writing.  Bookend contribution.  I was talking to Tricky, who was in our cast, about Fight The Power since he had covered the Public Enemy track Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos on his first album rather brilliantly with Martina Topley-Bird sing-songing the rap lyrics.   We were sitting on the top deck of a bus waiting for something or other to happen.  Probably filming at Centrepoint ?  Anyway, I asked him about the exact quote at the top of the page about Elvis Presley, and we went on to talk about how brilliant Elvis was, especially in the early days.  Elvis was a hero to me, but so were Public Enemy.  I didn’t have a problem with that but I couldn’t quite articulate why.   But I trust Chuck D.  We agreed he was a provocateur and stirring the shitpot.  There’s always been debate about the good ole boy Elvis and how he treated black people, but you’ll need to listen to the ’68 comeback tapes to get the rest of that story.  Racist – in the sense that any kid from Memphis was racist in 1954 – probably.  But Racist with a capital R – no, don’t believe it.  He melded black and white music together.  He listened to gospel music on the radio and loved it, mixed it with hillbilly music.  Elvis = no racist.  But the racial divisions of America are so deep and so scarred that you can see them from the moon, and Chuck D and PE needed to hold up white icons in order to shoot them down.   It’s a polemic.   It’s a position.

Chuck has since blurred the quote : on the LP it’s scarcely audible.   You can hear it on the original single, and the film soundtrack clear as a bell however.  Its impact was huge.   They always flirted with controversy, particularly in the shape of Minister of Information Professor Griff, who left PE after an unfortunate quote about Jewish people, but at their heart they are fundamentally about telling the truth to power.

We all have to carry on, despite defeats, setback and disappointments.  What choice do we have?  In the late 80s, Public Enemy were the soundtrack to change.  They still are.  Live – I’ve seen them five times – they are astonishing, nowadays using a live band and covering songs like Edwin Starr’s “War“.   They retain all their power and urgency.  For what, if anything, has changed ?

opening of Do The Right Thing :

My Pop Life #40 : I Ain’t Mad At Cha – Tupac Shakur

I Ain’t Mad At Cha   –   Tupac Shakur

Heard you might be comin’ home, just got bail
Wanna go to the mosque, don’t wanna chase tail
I seems I lost my little homie he’s a changed man
Hit the pen and now no sinnin’ is the game plan

Tupac raps about how times have changed since he was a child, how friends have left him, how people have turned on him since his success, how things can’t ever be the same.   In the first verse an old school friend who became a muslim doesn’t want to join him in his new life making rhymes & money:  but they go back a long way together, and 2pac is not angry.  Second verse is about an old girlfriend, third verse concerns his success.   It’s a lovely lazy funky reminiscence, thoughtful and lyrical, wise and compassionate, one of the best tracks from his best LP All Eyez On Me.  The sly slinky bass line and piano figure is a direct lift  from 1983’s A Dream by Michigan Motown act DeBarge, not sampled but re-played faster and funkier.  But it makes the track one of 2pac’s finest moments, dance-floor filler, late-nite groove, take your partner and slowdance.  Not many rap tunes you can do that with.

It was recorded the day that Tupac was released from prison – Oct 12 1995, along with another track Ambitionz az A Ridah – both produced by Daz Dillinger.   The soul singer Danny Boy sings the chorus hook.  The track was released 2 days after Tupac was shot dead on Sept 13th 1996 in Las Vegas, probably by the Crips gang whom he had attacked hours earlier.   I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what happened and much print and film has been spent on the attempt, with no clear conclusions.   I personally find the East Coast/West Coast beef unlikely to be the cause of death.

Tupac was an educated man whose parents were both Black Panthers.  He was raised in East Harlem and among his close friends from school were Jada Pinkett.  But it was on the West Coast that he made his mark as a rapper, first with San Fransisco’s Digital Underground, then as himself.   He was a charismatic actor too, clearly in demand and successful but appeared to enjoy flirting with the thug life which eventually killed him as a young man at the age of 25.

We were getting used to living in Brighton when this LP came out.  All Eyez On Me was a blast of G-funk hip hop from the Dre stabled Death Row Records.  It has 14 producers, including Suge Knight, boss of the label, Dr Dre, and Tupac himself.  Apart from this one track it is an unapologetic glamourisation of gang-banging and thug life, not at all like his previous 2 LPs both of which feature more conscious raps.  We moved to Brighton because it reminded us vaguely of Venice Beach in Los Angeles, one of the few ‘neighbor”-hoods where we’d considered buying a house, had a good look at one, but eventually didn’t.  You could hear gunshots there on some evenings as Anita Lewton could testify.  You could buy weed from shady types on Pacific Ave.  The whole LP reminded me of Los Angeles, Snoop Dog, California Love, all that bollocks, there I was on Brighton Beach reading the Argus with headphones on listening to gun this nigga and hoe that.  The grooves are sensationally good, but the content is frankly embarrassing – apart from this one tune.  And this one tune is a tune.   Things were changing….

                                    Then he got shot.   The video was filmed with a new re-recorded version of the track played live, it features Tupac in heaven alongside other dead musicians Jimi Hendrix, Nat King Cole, Bob Marley, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Sammy Davis Jr.  Danny Boy is also present as an angel.

Change, shit
I guess change is good for any of us…

My Pop Life #33 : We Got Our Own Thang – Heavy D & The Boyz

We Got Our Own Thang   –   Heavy D & The Boyz

…you’re a chicken mcnugget and I’m a Big Mac…

This is the end of a long story, and the beginning of an even longer one.   From way back “when I was a writer“… I’d been invited over to Washington D.C. by the No-Neck Monsters Theatre Company who’d happened to see my play Sanctuary performed by Joint Stock at the Drill Hall in 1987, and then wanted me to write an american version of it.  At first I said no, then they said they would re-write it, then I said NO even more, then I decided to go over and plunge in.

That’s for another story:  the workshop on the streets of Washington (the play is about homeless teens) and so is the writing period, up in Mount Pleasant having an affair with the woman next door who worked at The Pentagon, and yet another tale is the show opening in the Unitarian Church in Adams Morgan in late ’88 and the epic empty road trip that followed.

But now, here, I’m flying back to America with my brand new girlfriend one Jenny Jules because my play has been nominated for best musical in the Helen Hayes Awards, and actress Deidre Johnson has a best supporting actress nod too.   We fly to New York first and stay in Jim’s mini walk-through apartment in the Lower East Side at 7th St and Avenue A – Alphabet City.   Jim was brother Paul’s first boyfriend – they’d met in San Cristobel in Southern Mexico after I’d been forced to fly home with hepatitus B in 1980.  Then Paul had come back with Jim to New York and this very apartment.  They’d split after a year but were still close.  Jim was upstate this week.

This part of Manhattan is scuzzy, broken down, graffiti’d and druggy and has a very definite edge.  You gotta remember this is 1989 and there are homeless people with mounds of belongings in tow, dealers hustling in Tompkins Square Park, squeegee merchants at every corner squirting grey water onto your windscreen if you’re unlucky enough to be driving in the Lower East Side and get caught on a red light.  There’s a racial whiff in the air too and it’s unpleasant.  Jenny is my first black girlfriend, and here we are getting chups and spat at on the sidewalk by angry black men, the Nation Of Islam in Times Square berating Jenny for selling out to the devil and miscegenating with the white man (all this from the lips of a mixed race brother).  And then the Central Park rape case exploded.

From this atmosphere we took the Amtrak train 4 hours south to the nation’s capital and a nice hotel in leafy Georgetown.    I had to show Jenny around since I’d spent four months in D.C. the previous year – so we went to the Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, up to Dupont Circle which figured in the play, the Adams Morgan district, walked along the Potomac River, explored the Smithsonian Institute and we met Herbert again, a social worker who’d been a great resource while I was re-writing the piece.  Herbert invited us a to a barbecue in his yard where everyone sang the Temptations “My Girl” and told us about The Mack Man.  Herbert later escorted us down to Anacostia Park in South East D.C. to an almost 100% black event at which Jesse Jackson spoke thrillingly, and we heard the famous I Am (“I Am”) *pause* Somebody (“Somebody”) speech.

It hadn’t escaped my attention that as well as appropriating a black woman, I had also appropriated black culture and written a hip-hop musical, called Sanctuary D.C.  I’d been wrestling with this particular dilemma since the first incarnation of the show in London and found most of the barriers to be inside my own head.   But here in Washington D.C. which is 80% black, where people work side by side all day but then socialise in distinct racial groups in the evenings, where there are white areas, and black areas, somehow we were in a mixed gang forging a middle path and to be honest, I was on a pretty steep learning curve regarding black culture, particularly black american culture.   But it’s a curve I am still happy to be on.

It was good to see director Gwen Wynne again, and the cast who’d worked so hard but with whom I’d largely fallen out (another story).   We all got dolled up to the nines in black tie and ear-rings and attended the Helen Hayes Awards in the Kennedy Centre.  What a lovely glamourous evening.  We didn’t win, and Gwen invited us all back to her apartment in Georgetown afterwards and we drank and laughed.

Sanctuary D.C. was a rap musical and was largely inspired by a handful of old-skool rappers, notably Run DMC, Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim, Kool Moe Dee, Roxanne Shanté, Salt ‘n’ Pepa and KRS One (Boogie Down Productions).    All started (for me) by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.  By 1989 we’d heard from NWA, Ice T and the stirrings of Gangsta rap which would put me off following hip hop in the same way that I had in the 80s.   In the late 80s I bought everything that was released from 2 vinyl shops in Soho on 12″ – EPMD, Stezo, 7A3, Big Daddy Kane, De La Soul, Schoolly D, Biz Markie, and I still have all those singles, and albums, stacked in crates in storage.   I couldn’t sustain that level of purchasing, the huge volume of bands that suddenly appeared, the genres going in all directions at once and it became impossible – and expensive – to follow.  Although I wrote a second rap musical, based on my Washington D.C. experiences, it has never been produced.   Hip Hop was splintering into factions, East Coast and West Coast, conscious rap and gangsta rap, and yet ! here was Heavy D with his own Thang.

Heavy D

Mixed by Teddy Riley this was New Jack Swing with a rap and it was a great funky bouncy pop soul mix.   It reminded me of the joy of rap, the delivery of the words being their own reward, the syncopation of those tumbling syllables on the beat giving such major satisfaction.   There is some creative disrespecting inside this song.   This is the jam.

“You’re a chicken McNugget and I’m a Big Mac”

“It started with a POW and I’m a end it with a BANG”

And 20 years later Jenny Jules returned to Washington D.C. and the Helen Hayes Awards with a production of Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined”, and won “best production”.  Happy endings.

…Be your own guy, follow your own movement…