654660 a zombie movie in which there's only one zombie in the world, and it's you
Thought experiment: suppose you support slave labour. You're th captain of a trireme. Below deck, 170 oarsmen row yr boat to war. Never mind -- Wikipedia says that, contrary to popular belief, triremes' crews were composed of free men. Suppose you're th pharaoh's niece walking in th shade of a palm frond held by a nervous Israelite girl as you watch 100,000 other Jewish slaves swarming ant-like over incomplete pyramids. Wait a cotton-pickin' minute: Wikipedia says, "Outside of the Biblical account, no evidence has ever been found indicating the systematic enslavement of Israelites." How about this: you're Leonardo Dicaprio as a white plantation master in th antebellum American South who owns Jamie Foxx's wife and doesn't seem sorry about it whatsoever. You love slave labour. You have no problem w/ it. How does that feel? When you look @ a mirror, do you see a good person? Do you ask God for forgiveness? Will yr children be stained by slave blood you spilt? Is yr sleep full of dreams of th living dead?
These are all trick questions because in all likelihood you do support slave labour in th here and now. You might not be cracking a literal whip; but have a look @ th U.S. Department of Labour's List of Goods Produced by Child Labour or Forced Labour for 2012 -- specifically pp 25-34 -- and tell me you haven't cracked one of those lethal metaphorical whips. In America we're still trying to repair our slave-enriched past while manufacturing brand-new slave-damaged karma every time we go to th store. It's enough to drive a conscientious atheist to believe in original sin.
"You've already said, 'I was born into capitalist sin. I was born into racist sin.' Whether it was celibacy or no alcohol or work -- living on two dollars a week -- you just couldn't do enough to purge yourself of this unrighteousness we were born into. You were born into money, you were born into the bourgeoisie. I can't speak for black people, but this is what hit me, a middle-class, religious, white kid who was deeply distressed about what was going on in the world." -- Jean Clancey, from Leigh Fondakowski's Stories from Jonestown
Hurricane Isaac crawled through town starting on a Tuesday in late August. Th wife put on a red cocktail dress and poured two glasses of wine while we waited for th storm to climax. Kevin lounged about as if he welcomed nature's assertion of dominance over humanity. Th power went out @ 6:00 p.m. A window in th stairwell leading up to our apartment kept slamming open, and I had to tie it down using Kevin's leash, which I'd tried to use on Kevin just once, and which he'd found unacceptable. Five days later, th power still hadn't returned, but by that time, we -- th wife, Kevin, and I -- had high-tailed it to Jackson, MS, a city named after th famous ethnic cleanser and seventh POTUS, Andrew Jackson. Th drive from NOLA to Jackson had been marked by th roar of air rushing in through th driver's side rear window, which had been smashed out by an unknown vandal on Monday -- th day before Hurricane Isaac hit -- too late to get it fixed before th storm. "Black teenager," I had guessed.
Naturally, Isaac put me in mind of 2005's media darling, Katrina. Mike Myers' look of panic after Kanye West has complained on live TV that George Bush doesn't care about black people appeared to me first; followed by a picture of a grinning, acoustic-guitar-strumming President Bush photoshop'd next to a crying black woman cradling a crying babby; followed by pictures of white "scavengers" and black "looters"; followed by unconfirmed radio reports of raping in th Superdome; followed by a floating, bloated dog carcass; followed by a skinny cat getting scruffed by a rescue worker emerging from an attic window. Nobody has gone broke from peddling disaster porn, nor from pimping th drama of whites and blacks in th throes of thinking th worst of one another. In NOLA, people keep th fantasy of absolute social collapse close to their hearts like a recurrent childhood daydream. Th casual indignities of daily life don't crush dreams; they raise dreams to th same level of reality as everyday life -- what is second lining but an elevation of dreaming to something we can watch walk down th street? By th same curious process, a simple beef gets raised to th level of war. NOLA @ its worst is a town in which a man treats another man's life carelessly. Two blocks from my house on 16 July, somebody murdered a man named Tremell Williams, 37, who'd come here from Los Angeles shortly before Katrina to meet his father for th first time and had decided to stay. According to th Times-Picayune, Williams worked as a janitor, had a history of borderline schizophrenia, and was a father to three. What's unclear is whether he knew he was pursuing his next career as a ghost. After shipping, oil refining, cultural tourism, health care, education, and film production, ghost manufacturing is NOLA's biggest business.
My people are invisible here. Wikipedia says flippies make up 0.1% of New Orleans' population (compared to 1.1% nationally), and I've seen them w/ my own eyes only once, in Walmart (according to th wife) or Target (according to me), where we all were busy expressing our support for slave labour. My people never recovered from being conquered by white men -- th Spanish, then th Americans -- just as black Americans never recovered from being bought and sold by white Americans. Now that that history is remote enough that any return to an original state of dignity looks as absurd as it is impossible -- putting a Lapu-Lapu-style loincloth on and becoming a seafarer is no longer an option for most flippies -- "recovery" has but one definition: successful adaptation to a culture and economic system that weren't ours to begin w/. Th day after th hurricane ended I took a picture of some disaster workers in downtown NOLA loading gear into or unloading gear from a tractor trailer.
They had on green t-shirts w/ th catchphrase "Like it never even happened" on th back, which reminded me of not learning from history and being doomed to repeat it. Th one guy who hammed it up for th camera ended up being th photograph's central figure.
Consider th possibility that disaster recovery is a fiction -- that implicit in th idea of disaster is its transformative power -- that it erases boundaries, rewrites rulebooks, and changes one thing into another thing overnight. NOLA has recovered from Hurricane Katrina in th sense that it is still a beautiful place to live, but a city doesn't hemorrhage 100,000+ refugees and stay th same city. Blackness is down (from 67% to 60%). Tourists take bus tours through th still-shipwrecked Lower Ninth Ward. Post-Katrina economic development incentives have grown industries that pre-flood NOLA wasn't known for, most conspicuously th feature film business. If Katrina was like a forest fire that burns up underbrush and small trees to create forest clearings that help prevent more catastrophic fires, 100,000+ black people were th underbrush and small trees. Th big trees -- higher-income white people -- benefitted, as they tend to do. Consider th possibility that those who do learn from history aren't any less likely to repeat it than those who don't. What present conquerors learn from past conquerors is how to conquer better.
"It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism." -- President Andrew Johnson, Third Annual Message, 3 December 1867
Historians have typically rated Andrew Johnson in th bottom three of U.S. presidents. However, there's a sentiment in his statement on Negroes that persists through all of our presidents, including th present one -- and that is that black people are a special case, th one race of people who can't succeed w/o outside assistance. Conservative whites resent having to help blacks; liberal whites gladly shoulder their white burden; but neither reject th premise that blacks can't level up w/o white help.
Here's a problem about talking about social equality: there are too many variables to keep in mind simultaneously. Th usual variables under discussion -- race, gender, sex, birth rates, crime rates, income, education, hiring discrimination, family structure, intelligence, personality, religious belief -- are all interconnected and acting on one another. Change one variable, and all th others shift to adjust, like a Rubik's Cube. We can solve one side of th cube fairly easily if we don't care about messing up another side. If we fix a second side, we mess up th first side. A city is a Rubik's Cube only God's hands can encompass, which is why David Simon can't suggest how to fix Baltimore on Th Wire. Everyone in that show -- cops, teachers, administrators, dealers, lawyers -- sees only one side of th cube @ a time. And yet th conventional political wisdom encourages a narrowness of focus: "Let's solve one problem at a time." Why is it that we accept complexity when we're playing Th Sims or Sim City; but when faced w/ real-world politics, our default response it to pick one of two teams, each of which is presented in dumbed-down, monochrome terms? Immigration is good or bad. Individual mandate health insurance is good or bad. Th alternative to that default binary approach is to do our own research on every issue, fact-check against multiple sources, track new evidence as it comes in, and calculate outcomes not only for ourselves but for th community as a whole. @ a certain point, such an effort stops being a civic responsibility and starts being a full-time job.
To suggest that immigration (in and of itself) is neither good nor bad -- that immigration patterns have complex effects on a society, that certain of these effects are either good or bad for certain people in either th short or long term, and that th patterns themselves are sensitive to other dynamic social forces -- or that compulsory health insurance (in and of itself) is neither good nor bad, having complex effects dependent on specifics of implementation, enforcement, consumer culture, etc. -- is less likely to offend than to bore a potential ally. Racism, on th other hand, is exempt from boredom. No matter how sick Americans say they are of racial politics, they always seem to return to th trough. Racism is like yr mother and father, who never seem to lose their power to get under yr skin. Suppose somebody were to suggest @ a cocktail party that racism (in and of itself) is neither good nor bad. How fast somebody gets a drink (or a punch) in th face or a polite scolding will depend on whose party it is, but in any case th outcome probably won't be boring. What is it about race that gets under our skins? What is th THING?
Th thing (not th THING) is that genetics is an exploding field now; in particular, th Human Genome Project's ongoing high-profile research both here and internationally has been unlocking genetic mysteries every day, which is why it's a little surprising that genetics is still a taboo subject in polite conversation -- a little but not totally surprising, since both whites and blacks (and browns, to a lesser extent) hinge their identities on racial opposition. "There is no such thing as a black person" doesn't make sense in casual conversation.
Here's HGP's official word on race, issued in 2003:
"DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other."
We already knew that we were all one species; HGP's statement just confirms that any other subspecies of Homo sapiens are extinct. Only Homo sapiens sapiens remains.
What we talk about when we talk about race is something different, then. (Keep in mind that if I knew what an allele was @ one point, I have completely forgotten and can't define race in those terms w/o further study.) I submit that what we're actually talking about is breeds, a term not defined by science. Domestic dogs, too, are all one subspecies, Canus lupus familiaris; but many different breeds exist w/in Canus lupus familiaris, and each breed has its own peculiarities. By that analogy, all humans are mutts; but just as some canine mutts resemble purebred dogs, some human mutts resemble white people. Some resemble black people. And although they're well capable of interbreeding, they more often mate w/ their own kind and thereby preserve th genetic characteristics of white mutts and black mutts. Now th question becomes, "As human breeds, how different are we from one another?" Th post-1960s American answer has been, "Not that different." In other words, we're all actually of th same mixed breed: black lab mix, yellow lab mix, and chocolate lab mix. Suppose, though, that we're more like rottweiler mixes, cane corso mixes, and German shepherd mixes -- they're all good dogs, but you had better know what you're doing if you put them all in th same yard.
"Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possession is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not. They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
"We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? Or shall we say to them: 'First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!" -- Sitting Bull, "Behold, My Friends, the Spring Is Come", from Robert Blaisdell's Great Speeches by Native Americans
Sitting Bull was never going to make a good capitalist, but what of Sitting Bull's children's children? Lapu-Lapu, who killed Magellan, would not have enjoyed managing a call center or typing in his Internet diary's small, stupid box; but what of Lapu-Lapu's children's children's children? Are certain groups genetically predisposed to fail @ capitalism? If so, to what extent is capitalism itself inherited not only through legal instruments, but also through DNA? Th Human Genome Project probably won't answer these questions any time soon, which means that, in th meantime, those who pose them will have to endure accusations of science fiction lunacy.
"Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was, because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured ... His dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic. He never met the President, never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, or ate at a table and unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter." -- Ian Frazier on Crazy Horse, from Great Plains
Now whenever Neil Young and his band come up on shuffle, I wonder about what in heaven's name made them think it was a good idea to name themselves after a guy who refused to lie down on a bed when he was bleeding to death, because it was th white man's bed. On th one hand, that is precisely what white men do: de-radicalize people of colour by exalting them as cool. On th other hand, that is a cool name to have, and it's probably for th best that Neil Young and his mates got to it before anyone uncool did. On th third hand, fuck Neil Young and th horse he rode in on. A white friend who's a sociology professor @ a southern university told me that some of his students have been astonished to learn that Indians still exist and that they wear clothes as we do, and live in houses. Chris Hedges, who's prone to histrionics but also has a lot of good points, wrote recently that he feared that urban African-Americans might soon achieve American-Indian-like mythical status, too. If it hasn't already happened, a future noise band will name themselves Stanfield, Little, Barksdale, & Bell. If America has neutralized Malcolm X by putting him on a stamp, perhaps there's no person who can't be neutralized. Kill him. Put him on a stamp. Repeat.
"Black people never got their Crazy Horse moment," I said to th wife as we waited out th storm in bed in a pet-friendly hotel in Jackson. "When th race war happens ..."
"You don't seriously think there's going to be race war, do you."
"Strange things happen. I mean, isn't it strange that there isn't one? Anyhow, if it happens, blacks will lose in a month, but it'll feel good. They'll call it Blacks History Month."
"You better not be planning on dying with them."
"Nah. They probably won't want me on their team, anyhow."
"Because you married wrong."
"Because owners of Chinese restaurants are always mean to them."
Warfare: advantage, white people. Boxing: advantage, black people. Swimming: advantage, white people. Running: advantage, black people. Staying out of trouble and taking white people's and black people's dollars: advantage, Chinese restaurant owners. Law enforcement doesn't wiretap Chinese restaurant owners, who are as happy in Chinatown as they are in white suburbs. Meanwhile, one out of three black men goes to prison. Crime is th most powerful expression of black resistance to white America, but crime happens one man @ a time. It's as if black men have broken their war up into a million small pieces and spread it out over 150 years. Furthermore, th black man's war, through a perverse magick that resists anybody's grasp, manifests itself first and foremost as a civil war. As bitter, ugly, and sensational as black-on-white crime can be, it pales next to black-on-black crime's scale and casual, everyday brutality. Black criminals are their own parallel police and their own parallel judges and executioners working their way through a bottomless caseload w/ a violent, self-regenerating energy. An inner voice reminds them, "It beats having a desk job."
Naturally, when faced w/ crime's de facto political activism, white people in polite conversation must de-politicize it, or re-politicize it through a white lens. Black men are behaving badly, they say, because black men are impoverished and unemployed. Black men lack hope because nobody has given them a chance because we're racists. It's our fathers' fathers' fathers' fault. These crimes are senseless, they say. Only through fictional characters are white people allowed to indulge their love affair w/ crime, their uncomfortable feeling that criminals' lives are sexier, more courageous, and more truthful than their own. In non-fictional life, white people celebrate MLK, President Obama, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali -- lawful (or civilly disobedient) blacks -- above all other blacks. Their enjoyment of thuggish behaviour by black athletes -- Iron Mike Tyson, Allen Iverson, Ron Artest, Dennis Rodman -- is modified by their admiration for those athletes' transcendent performances inside painted lines. Hip-hop provides an ideal soundtrack to white-on-black romance.
What's lost in that romance is an honest interrogation of group differences. Embedded in anti-racism is an assumption that group differences can be attributed wholly to cultural factors -- that genetics will play no role in group performance. Therefore, if we can guarantee a level cultural playing field, what we ought to see is equal performance between one group and another. Th hypothetical level playing field will result in equality in every measurement -- economic, intellectual, physical, and artistic. If we don't observe equality in every measurement, we conclude that racism is to blame. No other conclusion is possible because race doesn't exist.
"You may have read that there is more genetic variation within major ethnic groups than between ethnic groups. That this precludes the possibility of group differences is Lewontin's Fallacy ...
"Deep sequencing of the human genome, which reveals rare variants (here, defined as those found in fewer than 0.5 percent of the population), shows that there is actually more variation between groups than within groups. (So what you may have been taught in school is not true -- sorry, that's how science works sometimes.) The figure below ... shows that over 50 percent of rare genetic variants are found in African populations (which have greater genetic diversity) but not in European populations. About 41 percent of all rare variants are found only in Europeans and not in Africans, and only 9 percent of the variants are common to both groups.
"These rare variants are likely recent mutations. Unsurprisingly, they differ in populations that have been geographically separated for tens of thousands of years." -- Steve Hsu, "Rare Variants and Human Genetic Diversity"
What I submit is that anti-racist reasoning chases its own tail: lack of equal outcomes between races proves racism; racism proves lack of equal conditions between races; therefore, lack of equal outcomes proves lack of equal conditions between races. If group differences have a significant genetic component, anti-racism falls apart. Consider dog breeds: pit bull mutts will tend to have stronger jaws than greyhound mutts. Should we conduct a contest in which whoever can hold onto a rolled-up towel longest wins, pit bull mutts will tend to win more often than greyhound mutts. We can ensure equally nutritious diets, equally rigorous training, and equally loving homes for greyhound mutts. Against all odds, a greyhound mutt might win here and there; but greyhound mutts as a group will still tend to lose to their pit bull mutt rivals. Now suppose we revise th contest such that whoever sprints around a dirt track fastest wins.
White people have been clutching capitalism's rolled-up towel for so long that they believe no other game is possible. They tell everyone that we are all pit bulls, and that one day black pit bull puppies and white pit bull puppies will go to obedience school together as one. Don't believe th hype. A criminal act is not an expression of powerlessness; it is an exercise of power, a momentary exchange of one game for another.
My most humiliating memory of tutoring in an inner-city charter school is not when a student threatened to punch my face; it's when that same student mimicked my own voice back to me, giving it an inflection instantly recognizable as white person voice: "Now I want you to pay attention." Any illusion I might've had that he saw me as a person of colour disintegrated. Last week on th set of Spike Lee's remake of Oldboy, black extras and white extras self-segregated into distinct racial packs. Asians joined whites, predictably, except for one moody Filipino who decided to eat lunch by himself. When 1960s civil rights proponents toppled legal segregation, they must not have foreseen that 50 dust-settling years later, economic and voluntary segregation would be standing still, as if untouched. Desegregation failed. Now anti-racism is a pose whites put on to boost their scores relative to other whites in an escalating Enlightenment Olympics. You say that you don't fear a black planet. You say that that street you avoid is a little sketchy. You say that you hate th big box store that ruined th formerly-cool neighbourhood. You hide yr Facebook friend who's voting for Mittens. He's a racist. You say that you want to send yr child to a good school. Every twist of th kosmik Rubik's Cube launches Negroes further out of yr sight.
That's a picture of me in Medgar Evers' driveway in Jackson, MS, maybe six feet to th right of where he was shot in th back just after midnight on 12 June 1963 by a sniper hidden a block away in honeysuckle bushes. Evers, who'd come from a meeting w/ NAACP lawyers, got out of his car carrying t-shirts that read, Jim Crow Must Go. Police quickly arrested Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and future Klansman whose fresh prints were found on th murder weapon. In 1964, Mississippi prosecutors failed twice to convict De La Beckwith of Evers' murder. Both trials ended w/ hung juries. Both juries were composed exclusively of white men.
In 1994, after De La Beckwith had walked around free for 30 years, Mississippi tried him again w/ new evidence. This time, De La Beckwith, 73, lost. He died in prison in 2001 @ age 80.
Medgar Evers is a hero to most. If th court had handed th septuagenarian Byron De La Beckwith over to a mob of angry brothers for some cruel and unusual punishment -- say, a game of "strength tester" w/ a rubber mallet and De La Beckwith's bozack -- most people wouldn't feel terribly sad. Most people would say he deserved that, and most people would be right. Even so, either Medgar Evers guessed wrong about desegregation's effectiveness, or de facto segregation has grown for 50 years to keep pace w/ legal and cultural desegregation. President Obama presents this country's most stunning proof that a black man can beat white men @ their own game; but Medgar Evers' home state, America's blackest, ranks consistently in last place in per capita income and quality of education. Will anybody be surprised if in 2063, 100 years after Evers' sacrifice, Mississippi has made no progress on racial equality?
Near Jackson's Ross Barnett Reservoir (affectionately known to locals as "The Rez"), th wife and I discovered a cypress swamp whose green scum shimmered. It's one of those places that suspends brain activity by exerting its own thickness on one's senses and instilling a desire to do nothing more than wallow like a pig in its green hot muck. It was here that a tall, pinched-faced white man wearing bro gear accosted us on th bridge to inform us that this cypress swamp paled in comparison to another cypress swamp about an hour's drive north of here. If you like this one, he raved, you'll love that one. Th wife and I became aware @ once that this man was a serial killer; that we'd caught him unawares; and that his friendly, unsolicited chatter was a misdirection: nearby, swamp bacteria began to feast on a fresh body.
Wherever my knee-jerk mistrust for white people comes from -- whether I've earned it through poisonous experience, learned it from books, or inherited it genetically -- and it's probably all three -- what's undeniable now is that I've gotten somewhat attached to it. It has grown on me.
It has grown w/ me. What's funny about chronic mistrust is that it flips itself into a Bizarro form of trust. Th experienced person of colour finds a transcendent calm in trusting in th white man's vanillainous nature. He trusts that th white man will stab him in th back. Bizarro white man him dear friend. My white friend S., whose journalistic inclination leads her through anxiety-inducing binges of questioning all received wisdom, told me that when she's in a city @ night and finds herself on a quiet block walking behind another person, sometimes she senses that person's mental tension, and den she sees it dissolve after they check over their shoulder and find that it is only a white girl. "I'm relieved when they're relieved," she said, "but there's another part of me that's offended, you know? It's like, 'You don't know me. What makes you so sure I'm not dangerous?' And I wish they were scared at least a little." Her statement echoes across two decades to form a call-and-response w/ an old civil rights veteran's:
"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved ... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets -- how humiliating." -- Jesse Jackson, remarks to Operation PUSH, Chicago, 27 November 1993
What everybody wants w/r/t race is to show their backs to other people. That's a faith-based initiative that becomes meaningful only when there's a non-zero probability of getting stabbed. What hurts people least is to hear footsteps and not turn around. My lack of faith in white people is qualitatively different from my lack of faith in black people, and both are distinct from my lack of faith in my own people. Whites won't not murder to get what they want. Blacks won't not suicide. Flippies won't not worship whites. What unifies these distinct strains of disbelief is my desire to be wrong.
Th standard disclaimers regarding treating every individual as an individual do, of course, apply. Look close and closer. That freak is actually a geek. That geek is actually a lothario. That harmless person is actually a dangerous assassin. That pit bull is a pug. That asshole cat shows you belly when no one else is around. That zombie is a v. slow-moving man. That collection of non-human shapes is a family. That white woman is 1/16 Cherokee. That black president is half white. That swamp is a church. Nobody is behind you.
+ + +
THE COUNTDOWN:
33. AISLERS SET "Mary's Song" (7.3 MB)
32. YOU AM I "Heavy Heart" (4.4 MB)
31. RADIOACTIVE SAGO PROJECT "Astro" (5.3 MB)
30. BIG STAR "Thirteen" (3.5 MB)
29. DE KIFT "Nauwe Mijter" (5.0 MB)
28. TH CLEAN "Anything Could Happen" (2.5 MB)
27. JOHN FAHEY "Jaya Shiva Shankarah" (7.0 MB)
26. FEELIES "Forces @ Work" (9.8 MB)
25. LIFE W/O BUILDINGS "Sorrow" (9.5 MB)
24. TEENAGE FANCLUB "Broken" (7.3 MB)
23. PHYLLIS DILLON "Don't Stay Away" (3.7 MB)
22. MATUMBI "Wipe Them Out" (4.0 MB)
21. SISTER NANCY "Bam Bam" (4.5 MB)
20. FENWYCK "Mindrocker" (4.2 MB)
19. ADRIANO CELENTANO "Stai Lontana Da Me" (2.0 MB)
18. SHUGGIE OTIS "Strawberry Letter 23" (5.5 MB)
17. LEE MOSES "Time and Place" (2.8 MB)
16. FUNKADELIC "You and Yr Folks, Me and My Folks" (5.0 MB)
15. LISA "Rocket to Yr Heart" (17.5 MB)
14. MEDICAL MISSIONARIES OF MARY CHORAL GROUP "Angels Watching over Me" (3.0 MB)
13. TIM BUCKLEY "Song to th Siren" (7.6 MB)
12. KARA "We're w/ You" (7.8 MB)
11. ERNIE K-DOE "Here Come the Girls" (4.3 MB)
10. DONNY HATHAWAY "What's Goin' On" (7.9 MB)
09. NANCY SINATRA "You Only Live Twice" (5.4 MB)
08. DENNIS BROWN "Sitting & Watching" (8.0 MB)
07. PATRICE O'NEAL "Race War" (7.6 MB) -- Last year we lost th greatest comedian o.a.t. because he wouldn't lay off of th chocolate cake.
Bonus tracks:
NEIL YOUNG "Song You Know but Might Not Recognize til th 19-Minute Mark" (85.9 MB) -- All is not forgiven, Crazy Horse, but I'd be lying if I told you that 37-minute space jams don't make me forget.
TAHITI "Tonight" (7.3 MB) -- When K-pop's most-overlooked anthem of 2012 says what sounds like "Report to the dance floor", that is actually Korean for "Never give up." This was Tahiti's debut single, and it must have bombed: they allegedly replaced three members immediately afterwards.
R.A. TH RUGGED MAN "Black and White" (5.2 MB) -- That one white rapper that's good
These are all trick questions because in all likelihood you do support slave labour in th here and now. You might not be cracking a literal whip; but have a look @ th U.S. Department of Labour's List of Goods Produced by Child Labour or Forced Labour for 2012 -- specifically pp 25-34 -- and tell me you haven't cracked one of those lethal metaphorical whips. In America we're still trying to repair our slave-enriched past while manufacturing brand-new slave-damaged karma every time we go to th store. It's enough to drive a conscientious atheist to believe in original sin.
"You've already said, 'I was born into capitalist sin. I was born into racist sin.' Whether it was celibacy or no alcohol or work -- living on two dollars a week -- you just couldn't do enough to purge yourself of this unrighteousness we were born into. You were born into money, you were born into the bourgeoisie. I can't speak for black people, but this is what hit me, a middle-class, religious, white kid who was deeply distressed about what was going on in the world." -- Jean Clancey, from Leigh Fondakowski's Stories from Jonestown
Hurricane Isaac crawled through town starting on a Tuesday in late August. Th wife put on a red cocktail dress and poured two glasses of wine while we waited for th storm to climax. Kevin lounged about as if he welcomed nature's assertion of dominance over humanity. Th power went out @ 6:00 p.m. A window in th stairwell leading up to our apartment kept slamming open, and I had to tie it down using Kevin's leash, which I'd tried to use on Kevin just once, and which he'd found unacceptable. Five days later, th power still hadn't returned, but by that time, we -- th wife, Kevin, and I -- had high-tailed it to Jackson, MS, a city named after th famous ethnic cleanser and seventh POTUS, Andrew Jackson. Th drive from NOLA to Jackson had been marked by th roar of air rushing in through th driver's side rear window, which had been smashed out by an unknown vandal on Monday -- th day before Hurricane Isaac hit -- too late to get it fixed before th storm. "Black teenager," I had guessed.
Naturally, Isaac put me in mind of 2005's media darling, Katrina. Mike Myers' look of panic after Kanye West has complained on live TV that George Bush doesn't care about black people appeared to me first; followed by a picture of a grinning, acoustic-guitar-strumming President Bush photoshop'd next to a crying black woman cradling a crying babby; followed by pictures of white "scavengers" and black "looters"; followed by unconfirmed radio reports of raping in th Superdome; followed by a floating, bloated dog carcass; followed by a skinny cat getting scruffed by a rescue worker emerging from an attic window. Nobody has gone broke from peddling disaster porn, nor from pimping th drama of whites and blacks in th throes of thinking th worst of one another. In NOLA, people keep th fantasy of absolute social collapse close to their hearts like a recurrent childhood daydream. Th casual indignities of daily life don't crush dreams; they raise dreams to th same level of reality as everyday life -- what is second lining but an elevation of dreaming to something we can watch walk down th street? By th same curious process, a simple beef gets raised to th level of war. NOLA @ its worst is a town in which a man treats another man's life carelessly. Two blocks from my house on 16 July, somebody murdered a man named Tremell Williams, 37, who'd come here from Los Angeles shortly before Katrina to meet his father for th first time and had decided to stay. According to th Times-Picayune, Williams worked as a janitor, had a history of borderline schizophrenia, and was a father to three. What's unclear is whether he knew he was pursuing his next career as a ghost. After shipping, oil refining, cultural tourism, health care, education, and film production, ghost manufacturing is NOLA's biggest business.
My people are invisible here. Wikipedia says flippies make up 0.1% of New Orleans' population (compared to 1.1% nationally), and I've seen them w/ my own eyes only once, in Walmart (according to th wife) or Target (according to me), where we all were busy expressing our support for slave labour. My people never recovered from being conquered by white men -- th Spanish, then th Americans -- just as black Americans never recovered from being bought and sold by white Americans. Now that that history is remote enough that any return to an original state of dignity looks as absurd as it is impossible -- putting a Lapu-Lapu-style loincloth on and becoming a seafarer is no longer an option for most flippies -- "recovery" has but one definition: successful adaptation to a culture and economic system that weren't ours to begin w/. Th day after th hurricane ended I took a picture of some disaster workers in downtown NOLA loading gear into or unloading gear from a tractor trailer.
They had on green t-shirts w/ th catchphrase "Like it never even happened" on th back, which reminded me of not learning from history and being doomed to repeat it. Th one guy who hammed it up for th camera ended up being th photograph's central figure.
Consider th possibility that disaster recovery is a fiction -- that implicit in th idea of disaster is its transformative power -- that it erases boundaries, rewrites rulebooks, and changes one thing into another thing overnight. NOLA has recovered from Hurricane Katrina in th sense that it is still a beautiful place to live, but a city doesn't hemorrhage 100,000+ refugees and stay th same city. Blackness is down (from 67% to 60%). Tourists take bus tours through th still-shipwrecked Lower Ninth Ward. Post-Katrina economic development incentives have grown industries that pre-flood NOLA wasn't known for, most conspicuously th feature film business. If Katrina was like a forest fire that burns up underbrush and small trees to create forest clearings that help prevent more catastrophic fires, 100,000+ black people were th underbrush and small trees. Th big trees -- higher-income white people -- benefitted, as they tend to do. Consider th possibility that those who do learn from history aren't any less likely to repeat it than those who don't. What present conquerors learn from past conquerors is how to conquer better.
"It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism." -- President Andrew Johnson, Third Annual Message, 3 December 1867
Historians have typically rated Andrew Johnson in th bottom three of U.S. presidents. However, there's a sentiment in his statement on Negroes that persists through all of our presidents, including th present one -- and that is that black people are a special case, th one race of people who can't succeed w/o outside assistance. Conservative whites resent having to help blacks; liberal whites gladly shoulder their white burden; but neither reject th premise that blacks can't level up w/o white help.
Here's a problem about talking about social equality: there are too many variables to keep in mind simultaneously. Th usual variables under discussion -- race, gender, sex, birth rates, crime rates, income, education, hiring discrimination, family structure, intelligence, personality, religious belief -- are all interconnected and acting on one another. Change one variable, and all th others shift to adjust, like a Rubik's Cube. We can solve one side of th cube fairly easily if we don't care about messing up another side. If we fix a second side, we mess up th first side. A city is a Rubik's Cube only God's hands can encompass, which is why David Simon can't suggest how to fix Baltimore on Th Wire. Everyone in that show -- cops, teachers, administrators, dealers, lawyers -- sees only one side of th cube @ a time. And yet th conventional political wisdom encourages a narrowness of focus: "Let's solve one problem at a time." Why is it that we accept complexity when we're playing Th Sims or Sim City; but when faced w/ real-world politics, our default response it to pick one of two teams, each of which is presented in dumbed-down, monochrome terms? Immigration is good or bad. Individual mandate health insurance is good or bad. Th alternative to that default binary approach is to do our own research on every issue, fact-check against multiple sources, track new evidence as it comes in, and calculate outcomes not only for ourselves but for th community as a whole. @ a certain point, such an effort stops being a civic responsibility and starts being a full-time job.
To suggest that immigration (in and of itself) is neither good nor bad -- that immigration patterns have complex effects on a society, that certain of these effects are either good or bad for certain people in either th short or long term, and that th patterns themselves are sensitive to other dynamic social forces -- or that compulsory health insurance (in and of itself) is neither good nor bad, having complex effects dependent on specifics of implementation, enforcement, consumer culture, etc. -- is less likely to offend than to bore a potential ally. Racism, on th other hand, is exempt from boredom. No matter how sick Americans say they are of racial politics, they always seem to return to th trough. Racism is like yr mother and father, who never seem to lose their power to get under yr skin. Suppose somebody were to suggest @ a cocktail party that racism (in and of itself) is neither good nor bad. How fast somebody gets a drink (or a punch) in th face or a polite scolding will depend on whose party it is, but in any case th outcome probably won't be boring. What is it about race that gets under our skins? What is th THING?
Th thing (not th THING) is that genetics is an exploding field now; in particular, th Human Genome Project's ongoing high-profile research both here and internationally has been unlocking genetic mysteries every day, which is why it's a little surprising that genetics is still a taboo subject in polite conversation -- a little but not totally surprising, since both whites and blacks (and browns, to a lesser extent) hinge their identities on racial opposition. "There is no such thing as a black person" doesn't make sense in casual conversation.
Here's HGP's official word on race, issued in 2003:
"DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other."
We already knew that we were all one species; HGP's statement just confirms that any other subspecies of Homo sapiens are extinct. Only Homo sapiens sapiens remains.
What we talk about when we talk about race is something different, then. (Keep in mind that if I knew what an allele was @ one point, I have completely forgotten and can't define race in those terms w/o further study.) I submit that what we're actually talking about is breeds, a term not defined by science. Domestic dogs, too, are all one subspecies, Canus lupus familiaris; but many different breeds exist w/in Canus lupus familiaris, and each breed has its own peculiarities. By that analogy, all humans are mutts; but just as some canine mutts resemble purebred dogs, some human mutts resemble white people. Some resemble black people. And although they're well capable of interbreeding, they more often mate w/ their own kind and thereby preserve th genetic characteristics of white mutts and black mutts. Now th question becomes, "As human breeds, how different are we from one another?" Th post-1960s American answer has been, "Not that different." In other words, we're all actually of th same mixed breed: black lab mix, yellow lab mix, and chocolate lab mix. Suppose, though, that we're more like rottweiler mixes, cane corso mixes, and German shepherd mixes -- they're all good dogs, but you had better know what you're doing if you put them all in th same yard.
"Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possession is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not. They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
"We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? Or shall we say to them: 'First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!" -- Sitting Bull, "Behold, My Friends, the Spring Is Come", from Robert Blaisdell's Great Speeches by Native Americans
Sitting Bull was never going to make a good capitalist, but what of Sitting Bull's children's children? Lapu-Lapu, who killed Magellan, would not have enjoyed managing a call center or typing in his Internet diary's small, stupid box; but what of Lapu-Lapu's children's children's children? Are certain groups genetically predisposed to fail @ capitalism? If so, to what extent is capitalism itself inherited not only through legal instruments, but also through DNA? Th Human Genome Project probably won't answer these questions any time soon, which means that, in th meantime, those who pose them will have to endure accusations of science fiction lunacy.
"Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was, because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured ... His dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic. He never met the President, never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, or ate at a table and unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter." -- Ian Frazier on Crazy Horse, from Great Plains
Now whenever Neil Young and his band come up on shuffle, I wonder about what in heaven's name made them think it was a good idea to name themselves after a guy who refused to lie down on a bed when he was bleeding to death, because it was th white man's bed. On th one hand, that is precisely what white men do: de-radicalize people of colour by exalting them as cool. On th other hand, that is a cool name to have, and it's probably for th best that Neil Young and his mates got to it before anyone uncool did. On th third hand, fuck Neil Young and th horse he rode in on. A white friend who's a sociology professor @ a southern university told me that some of his students have been astonished to learn that Indians still exist and that they wear clothes as we do, and live in houses. Chris Hedges, who's prone to histrionics but also has a lot of good points, wrote recently that he feared that urban African-Americans might soon achieve American-Indian-like mythical status, too. If it hasn't already happened, a future noise band will name themselves Stanfield, Little, Barksdale, & Bell. If America has neutralized Malcolm X by putting him on a stamp, perhaps there's no person who can't be neutralized. Kill him. Put him on a stamp. Repeat.
"Black people never got their Crazy Horse moment," I said to th wife as we waited out th storm in bed in a pet-friendly hotel in Jackson. "When th race war happens ..."
"You don't seriously think there's going to be race war, do you."
"Strange things happen. I mean, isn't it strange that there isn't one? Anyhow, if it happens, blacks will lose in a month, but it'll feel good. They'll call it Blacks History Month."
"You better not be planning on dying with them."
"Nah. They probably won't want me on their team, anyhow."
"Because you married wrong."
"Because owners of Chinese restaurants are always mean to them."
Warfare: advantage, white people. Boxing: advantage, black people. Swimming: advantage, white people. Running: advantage, black people. Staying out of trouble and taking white people's and black people's dollars: advantage, Chinese restaurant owners. Law enforcement doesn't wiretap Chinese restaurant owners, who are as happy in Chinatown as they are in white suburbs. Meanwhile, one out of three black men goes to prison. Crime is th most powerful expression of black resistance to white America, but crime happens one man @ a time. It's as if black men have broken their war up into a million small pieces and spread it out over 150 years. Furthermore, th black man's war, through a perverse magick that resists anybody's grasp, manifests itself first and foremost as a civil war. As bitter, ugly, and sensational as black-on-white crime can be, it pales next to black-on-black crime's scale and casual, everyday brutality. Black criminals are their own parallel police and their own parallel judges and executioners working their way through a bottomless caseload w/ a violent, self-regenerating energy. An inner voice reminds them, "It beats having a desk job."
Naturally, when faced w/ crime's de facto political activism, white people in polite conversation must de-politicize it, or re-politicize it through a white lens. Black men are behaving badly, they say, because black men are impoverished and unemployed. Black men lack hope because nobody has given them a chance because we're racists. It's our fathers' fathers' fathers' fault. These crimes are senseless, they say. Only through fictional characters are white people allowed to indulge their love affair w/ crime, their uncomfortable feeling that criminals' lives are sexier, more courageous, and more truthful than their own. In non-fictional life, white people celebrate MLK, President Obama, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali -- lawful (or civilly disobedient) blacks -- above all other blacks. Their enjoyment of thuggish behaviour by black athletes -- Iron Mike Tyson, Allen Iverson, Ron Artest, Dennis Rodman -- is modified by their admiration for those athletes' transcendent performances inside painted lines. Hip-hop provides an ideal soundtrack to white-on-black romance.
What's lost in that romance is an honest interrogation of group differences. Embedded in anti-racism is an assumption that group differences can be attributed wholly to cultural factors -- that genetics will play no role in group performance. Therefore, if we can guarantee a level cultural playing field, what we ought to see is equal performance between one group and another. Th hypothetical level playing field will result in equality in every measurement -- economic, intellectual, physical, and artistic. If we don't observe equality in every measurement, we conclude that racism is to blame. No other conclusion is possible because race doesn't exist.
"You may have read that there is more genetic variation within major ethnic groups than between ethnic groups. That this precludes the possibility of group differences is Lewontin's Fallacy ...
"Deep sequencing of the human genome, which reveals rare variants (here, defined as those found in fewer than 0.5 percent of the population), shows that there is actually more variation between groups than within groups. (So what you may have been taught in school is not true -- sorry, that's how science works sometimes.) The figure below ... shows that over 50 percent of rare genetic variants are found in African populations (which have greater genetic diversity) but not in European populations. About 41 percent of all rare variants are found only in Europeans and not in Africans, and only 9 percent of the variants are common to both groups.
"These rare variants are likely recent mutations. Unsurprisingly, they differ in populations that have been geographically separated for tens of thousands of years." -- Steve Hsu, "Rare Variants and Human Genetic Diversity"
What I submit is that anti-racist reasoning chases its own tail: lack of equal outcomes between races proves racism; racism proves lack of equal conditions between races; therefore, lack of equal outcomes proves lack of equal conditions between races. If group differences have a significant genetic component, anti-racism falls apart. Consider dog breeds: pit bull mutts will tend to have stronger jaws than greyhound mutts. Should we conduct a contest in which whoever can hold onto a rolled-up towel longest wins, pit bull mutts will tend to win more often than greyhound mutts. We can ensure equally nutritious diets, equally rigorous training, and equally loving homes for greyhound mutts. Against all odds, a greyhound mutt might win here and there; but greyhound mutts as a group will still tend to lose to their pit bull mutt rivals. Now suppose we revise th contest such that whoever sprints around a dirt track fastest wins.
White people have been clutching capitalism's rolled-up towel for so long that they believe no other game is possible. They tell everyone that we are all pit bulls, and that one day black pit bull puppies and white pit bull puppies will go to obedience school together as one. Don't believe th hype. A criminal act is not an expression of powerlessness; it is an exercise of power, a momentary exchange of one game for another.
My most humiliating memory of tutoring in an inner-city charter school is not when a student threatened to punch my face; it's when that same student mimicked my own voice back to me, giving it an inflection instantly recognizable as white person voice: "Now I want you to pay attention." Any illusion I might've had that he saw me as a person of colour disintegrated. Last week on th set of Spike Lee's remake of Oldboy, black extras and white extras self-segregated into distinct racial packs. Asians joined whites, predictably, except for one moody Filipino who decided to eat lunch by himself. When 1960s civil rights proponents toppled legal segregation, they must not have foreseen that 50 dust-settling years later, economic and voluntary segregation would be standing still, as if untouched. Desegregation failed. Now anti-racism is a pose whites put on to boost their scores relative to other whites in an escalating Enlightenment Olympics. You say that you don't fear a black planet. You say that that street you avoid is a little sketchy. You say that you hate th big box store that ruined th formerly-cool neighbourhood. You hide yr Facebook friend who's voting for Mittens. He's a racist. You say that you want to send yr child to a good school. Every twist of th kosmik Rubik's Cube launches Negroes further out of yr sight.
That's a picture of me in Medgar Evers' driveway in Jackson, MS, maybe six feet to th right of where he was shot in th back just after midnight on 12 June 1963 by a sniper hidden a block away in honeysuckle bushes. Evers, who'd come from a meeting w/ NAACP lawyers, got out of his car carrying t-shirts that read, Jim Crow Must Go. Police quickly arrested Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and future Klansman whose fresh prints were found on th murder weapon. In 1964, Mississippi prosecutors failed twice to convict De La Beckwith of Evers' murder. Both trials ended w/ hung juries. Both juries were composed exclusively of white men.
In 1994, after De La Beckwith had walked around free for 30 years, Mississippi tried him again w/ new evidence. This time, De La Beckwith, 73, lost. He died in prison in 2001 @ age 80.
Medgar Evers is a hero to most. If th court had handed th septuagenarian Byron De La Beckwith over to a mob of angry brothers for some cruel and unusual punishment -- say, a game of "strength tester" w/ a rubber mallet and De La Beckwith's bozack -- most people wouldn't feel terribly sad. Most people would say he deserved that, and most people would be right. Even so, either Medgar Evers guessed wrong about desegregation's effectiveness, or de facto segregation has grown for 50 years to keep pace w/ legal and cultural desegregation. President Obama presents this country's most stunning proof that a black man can beat white men @ their own game; but Medgar Evers' home state, America's blackest, ranks consistently in last place in per capita income and quality of education. Will anybody be surprised if in 2063, 100 years after Evers' sacrifice, Mississippi has made no progress on racial equality?
Near Jackson's Ross Barnett Reservoir (affectionately known to locals as "The Rez"), th wife and I discovered a cypress swamp whose green scum shimmered. It's one of those places that suspends brain activity by exerting its own thickness on one's senses and instilling a desire to do nothing more than wallow like a pig in its green hot muck. It was here that a tall, pinched-faced white man wearing bro gear accosted us on th bridge to inform us that this cypress swamp paled in comparison to another cypress swamp about an hour's drive north of here. If you like this one, he raved, you'll love that one. Th wife and I became aware @ once that this man was a serial killer; that we'd caught him unawares; and that his friendly, unsolicited chatter was a misdirection: nearby, swamp bacteria began to feast on a fresh body.
Wherever my knee-jerk mistrust for white people comes from -- whether I've earned it through poisonous experience, learned it from books, or inherited it genetically -- and it's probably all three -- what's undeniable now is that I've gotten somewhat attached to it. It has grown on me.
It has grown w/ me. What's funny about chronic mistrust is that it flips itself into a Bizarro form of trust. Th experienced person of colour finds a transcendent calm in trusting in th white man's vanillainous nature. He trusts that th white man will stab him in th back. Bizarro white man him dear friend. My white friend S., whose journalistic inclination leads her through anxiety-inducing binges of questioning all received wisdom, told me that when she's in a city @ night and finds herself on a quiet block walking behind another person, sometimes she senses that person's mental tension, and den she sees it dissolve after they check over their shoulder and find that it is only a white girl. "I'm relieved when they're relieved," she said, "but there's another part of me that's offended, you know? It's like, 'You don't know me. What makes you so sure I'm not dangerous?' And I wish they were scared at least a little." Her statement echoes across two decades to form a call-and-response w/ an old civil rights veteran's:
"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved ... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets -- how humiliating." -- Jesse Jackson, remarks to Operation PUSH, Chicago, 27 November 1993
What everybody wants w/r/t race is to show their backs to other people. That's a faith-based initiative that becomes meaningful only when there's a non-zero probability of getting stabbed. What hurts people least is to hear footsteps and not turn around. My lack of faith in white people is qualitatively different from my lack of faith in black people, and both are distinct from my lack of faith in my own people. Whites won't not murder to get what they want. Blacks won't not suicide. Flippies won't not worship whites. What unifies these distinct strains of disbelief is my desire to be wrong.
Th standard disclaimers regarding treating every individual as an individual do, of course, apply. Look close and closer. That freak is actually a geek. That geek is actually a lothario. That harmless person is actually a dangerous assassin. That pit bull is a pug. That asshole cat shows you belly when no one else is around. That zombie is a v. slow-moving man. That collection of non-human shapes is a family. That white woman is 1/16 Cherokee. That black president is half white. That swamp is a church. Nobody is behind you.
+ + +
THE COUNTDOWN:
33. AISLERS SET "Mary's Song" (7.3 MB)
32. YOU AM I "Heavy Heart" (4.4 MB)
31. RADIOACTIVE SAGO PROJECT "Astro" (5.3 MB)
30. BIG STAR "Thirteen" (3.5 MB)
29. DE KIFT "Nauwe Mijter" (5.0 MB)
28. TH CLEAN "Anything Could Happen" (2.5 MB)
27. JOHN FAHEY "Jaya Shiva Shankarah" (7.0 MB)
26. FEELIES "Forces @ Work" (9.8 MB)
25. LIFE W/O BUILDINGS "Sorrow" (9.5 MB)
24. TEENAGE FANCLUB "Broken" (7.3 MB)
23. PHYLLIS DILLON "Don't Stay Away" (3.7 MB)
22. MATUMBI "Wipe Them Out" (4.0 MB)
21. SISTER NANCY "Bam Bam" (4.5 MB)
20. FENWYCK "Mindrocker" (4.2 MB)
19. ADRIANO CELENTANO "Stai Lontana Da Me" (2.0 MB)
18. SHUGGIE OTIS "Strawberry Letter 23" (5.5 MB)
17. LEE MOSES "Time and Place" (2.8 MB)
16. FUNKADELIC "You and Yr Folks, Me and My Folks" (5.0 MB)
15. LISA "Rocket to Yr Heart" (17.5 MB)
14. MEDICAL MISSIONARIES OF MARY CHORAL GROUP "Angels Watching over Me" (3.0 MB)
13. TIM BUCKLEY "Song to th Siren" (7.6 MB)
12. KARA "We're w/ You" (7.8 MB)
11. ERNIE K-DOE "Here Come the Girls" (4.3 MB)
10. DONNY HATHAWAY "What's Goin' On" (7.9 MB)
09. NANCY SINATRA "You Only Live Twice" (5.4 MB)
08. DENNIS BROWN "Sitting & Watching" (8.0 MB)
07. PATRICE O'NEAL "Race War" (7.6 MB) -- Last year we lost th greatest comedian o.a.t. because he wouldn't lay off of th chocolate cake.
Bonus tracks:
NEIL YOUNG "Song You Know but Might Not Recognize til th 19-Minute Mark" (85.9 MB) -- All is not forgiven, Crazy Horse, but I'd be lying if I told you that 37-minute space jams don't make me forget.
TAHITI "Tonight" (7.3 MB) -- When K-pop's most-overlooked anthem of 2012 says what sounds like "Report to the dance floor", that is actually Korean for "Never give up." This was Tahiti's debut single, and it must have bombed: they allegedly replaced three members immediately afterwards.
Click to viewR.A. TH RUGGED MAN "Black and White" (5.2 MB) -- That one white rapper that's good