Suzanne Vega!
Suzanne Somers!
“Suzanne Takes You Down”!
What’s my prize?!
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I really miss this band.
One of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Counting Crows opened for them that night a long time ago…
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The following summer, 1956, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal ran an overwrought series on the dangers of rock ’n’ roll, which the author Phyllis Battelle described as “a poor white trash version of a music form called ‘rhythm and blues.’” Throughout the series, Battelle made no effort to hide her racism for rock ’n’ roll’s “primitive jungle beat,” as she called it. She interviewed a Boston disc jockey, who said, “I suppose the natives must have been worked into a frenzy by tom toms. It works the same on kids.” The editors ran a photo of my father and Buddy’s band playing a seedy club where kids were dancing the “dirty bop,” a sort of choreographed dry hump. They blacked out the bandmates’ eyes, so sinful was the scene.
In his 1968 essay collection Soul on Ice, political activist and onetime Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was one of the first to write about the cultural appropriation of rock ’n’ roll:
“So Elvis Presley came, strumming a weird guitar and wagging his tail across the continent, ripping off fame and fortune as he scrunched his way, and, like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, sowing seeds of a new rhythm and style in the white souls of the white youth of America, whose inner hunger and need was no longer satisfied with the antiseptic white shoes and whiter songs of Pat Boone.”
Cleaver attributed this “inner hunger” to the Civil Rights unrest of the 1950s. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the early, violent attempts at school desegregation, the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. — these events opened a “fissure” in American culture through which rock ’n’ roll entered. In some ways, this new, co-opted genre was birthed of good intentions, he wrote: mostly young people, daring “to do in the light of day what America had long been doing in the sneak-thief anonymity of night — consort[ing] on a human level with the blacks.”
That was certainly the case for my father.
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If you’re a fan of Throwing Muses/Kristin Hersh and/or Ian MacKaye, they will be having a conversation for her new book online at Greenlight bookstore… you can replay the conversations she already had for her book “tour”…
https://www.kristinhersh.com/appearances/
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Needs more likes!
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Such a great album. I really like this track:
Speaking of kick ass women in music…
I’m gonna make a video one day yelling “leave SINEAD ALONE!”…
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Oh man. That song has really deep feels for me.
I was 17 and it was the 80s. The music you heard was radio-only, and I had lived in towns with very commercially-sensitive radio (read: boring music). It was the first time I went to a Big City and tuned into university radio. Mind blown, everything changed. This song was included in the playlist among the punk and electronica, and its groove never left me.
That was the year I was living with my grandfather, who I adored. So: good music and a wonderful grandfather are tied in my memory, even if the music wasn’t his choice.
A decade later, I got the phone call that my grandfather had died. After I hung up the phone, this song came on the radio. I’m not a believer, but it felt like a message anyway. Thanks, granddad.
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I stumbled upon these folks about a dozen years ago, and so glad I did.
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Always pleasant to hear white supremacy turned on its head…
RIP Omar.
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[ETA]
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Yvette Young, folks.
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