{"id":3353,"date":"2021-12-20T20:11:09","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T20:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=3353"},"modified":"2023-07-24T07:30:58","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T15:30:58","slug":"ten-favorite-things-of-gene-seymour-in-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=3353","title":{"rendered":"Gene Seymour’s Ten Favorite Things in 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Going to live performances for most of the past year was pretty much out of the question for me (with one notable exception cited down below). And there were so many reasons for this that relatively few of them had to do with the pandemic. (Here, for example, was a big one.<\/a>) As for the brave not-so-new-anymore world of streams and clouds, one wasn\u2019t always sure where one wanted to dump several hours of one\u2019s life into binge-watching. Most evenings found me staring at the available options, all but completely immobilized by the sheer mass of \u201ccontent\u201d to the point where I frequently found myself saying, \u201cThe hell with all this noise!\u201d and go to sports or Turner Classic Movies \u2013 or both. Or neither.

So given the myriad, metric tons of possibilities for my favorite things. of 2021, it\u2019s possible that there may be things I\u2019ve neglected, passed by, haven\u2019t caught up with or entirely forgotten about. It may say something about the sheer glut of \u201ccontent\u201d that my top pick was a 2020 release, but it took me most of this year\u2019s first half to absorb its content, and even longer to assess its impact. It\u2019s still Up On Top, so to speak, because it\u2019s too important to ignore \u2013 even if much of the culture, popular or otherwise, pretty much has:<\/p>\r\n

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Turn Me Loose, White Man<\/em> <\/strong>\u2013 Now that \u201ccritical race theory\u201d has affected state and local elections, driven school boards up a wall and perplexed a mass media that doesn\u2019t quite grasp the concept (or know exactly what it means), it may be time to consider the possibility that we\u2019re all going about this \u201cracial dialogue\u201d thing the wrong way. Mostly we need to stop worrying about making Black and White people \u201cfeel better\u201d about being what they are. \u201cFeelings,\u201d after all, are what got us all into this mess in the first place. Somebody needs to break the news, however gently, that none of us is as \u201cBlack\u201d or as \u201cWhite\u201d as we think we are, thanks in large part to an ongoing cultural transaction that began centuries ago with music created by African slaves, propagated by their descendants, absorbed and, yes, appropriated by Whites only to be reinvigorated and even reinvented into new forms by pink and brown alike.
Fellow Americans and worthy constituents, it\u2019s in all our DNA, whether we like it or not. We\u2019re all different, and always the same.
Few people this side of Ralph Ellison\u2019s ghost care to even consider such concepts, booby-trapped as they are with anachronisms, racial slurs, ribald and sacred outbursts swarming and popping on scratchy old 78-RPM records, archaeologic souvenirs of an earlier, exceedingly weirder America.
But Allen Lowe, saxophonist, composer, historian, educator, and cultural gadfly, has long believed that if you gathered as much aural arcana as can be assembled, you could approach something resembling a unified field theory about what makes up the American soul in all its contradictory restlessness and conflicting exuberance.<\/p>\r\n

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It takes 30 compact discs with almost 900 songs and two volumes of hypertext for Lowe to fashion Turn Me Loose, White Man<\/em>, a survey of the national sound in all its permutations, blues, bluegrass, gospel, jazz, burlesque, C&W, R&B, rock and rockabilly in so many mutant and mongrelized strains that \u201cgenre\u201d loses all meaning. As, Lowe implies, it probably should.
Lowe\u2019s archival efforts have been compared in range to those of such intrepid pioneers as Alan Lomax, Paul Oliver, and Harry Smith. But there are far more idiosyncratic and illuminating patterns Lowe draws from and, in some cases, imposes upon his discoveries. You\u2019ll probably need to follow along, as much as possible, with Lowe\u2019s written text (pure pleasure on its own) to gauge how and why on the first volume he chose to follow, say, the great Black vaudeville comedian Bert Williams\u2019 1906 recording of his deathless \u201cNobody\u201d with the more obscure May Irwin\u2019s whimsical 1907 sliver of minstrelsy, \u201cIf You Aint Got No Money, You Needn\u2019t Come Around.\u201d Note the use of dialect in the title\u2019s first clause and the grammatical precision of the second. Such tensions are played out in big and small ways throughout this cosmic juke box whose selections cover the 20th century\u2019s first sixty years.
From the shuck-&-jive of Irwin\u2019s \u201ccoon song\u201d (defined by Lowe as \u201cthat odd phenomenon of progressive melody and harmony, advanced white singing, significant black co-optation and racist bait\u201d) through the 1920s emergence of Black blues queens Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters and a panoply of artists from the widely celebrated (Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Rodgers, Al Jolson, Leadbelly, Count Basie, Bill Monroe, Bing Crosby, Kitty Wells, Charlie Parker, Roy Rogers, Little Richard) to just-below-the-radar legends (Geeshie Wiley<\/a>, Babs Gonzales, Blue Ridge Quartet, Helen Merrill, Jimmy Yancey, Riley Puckett<\/a>) and many more obscure or little-remembered artists whose contributions glow like searchlights struggling to be seen through twilight mists.<\/p>\r\n

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The zillions of epiphanies and discoveries along the way are too numerous to adequately summarize. The best I can do for now is to mention the shock of hearing the original bust-out 1911 recording of Sophie Tucker\u2019s \u201cSome of These Days,\u201d composed by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks and thus an early example of appropriation; but one whose impact was galvanic enough to give safe passage to Tucker\u2019s stardom well past the 1960s. Another shock: the spare, haunting 1941 recording of \u201cWhy Don\u2019t You Do Right?\u201d by the ill-fated blues singer Lil Green that Peggy Lee credited with influencing her own hit version the following year. And on and on\u2026<\/p>\r\n

Whether things should have turned out this way (and artists like Lee are the ones least deserving of blame) shouldn\u2019t be a matter of concern to contemporary listeners anxious to throw as many red \u201cracism\u201d flags at the past as can be flung. (You\u2019re better off blaming the Southern segregationist bloc in Congress for ruining what could have been a nice party for all.) The main point, as Lowe continually asserts, is that such push-pull dynamics, this braiding of cultures on record, as it were, didn\u2019t validate or encourage racial separation. It was very much the opposite, even when the lyrics were far from conciliatory or respectful to Black people earlier in the century.<\/p>\r\n


Lowe\u2019s magnificent treatise comes to us as a gift we\u2019ve needed for a long time, though this era being whatever it is, I don\u2019t know whether the skittish, hopelessly judgmental masses who now dominate social media are prepared to deal with its sheer weight or its propensity for nuance, irony, wit, and surprise. For the moment, I choose to be optimistic enough to speculate that when these masses are ready for Turn Me Loose, White Man,<\/em> it\u2019ll still be around somewhere to both explain and evoke a world where the Light Crust Doughboys are as \u201civey-divey\u201d as the Sun Ra Arkestra.<\/p>\r\n

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The rest, as usual, are in no particular order:<\/p>\r\n

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Rita Moreno<\/strong> \u2013 You know how you have those people in your life or in your personal pantheon of whom you always say, \u201cIf you don\u2019t like —-, then I don\u2019t want to know you\u201d? Well, Rita Moreno has for most of my life been at or near the top of that list for me and it was as much for what she did when she was Being Herself on talk shows and interviews as for when she exploded on-screen in the original 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story<\/em> and collected her supporting-actress Oscar the following year. As most of the known universe knows by now, she\u2019s also in the Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner version and not a few people believe she can win the same Oscar sixty years after she got her last one. It may not matter much either way as she\u2019s practically a charter member of the EGOT sisterhood. What does matter is that this year, at a supernaturally energetic 90 years old, Moreno has been given her proper due and then some; not just with the new West Side Story<\/em> (of which she is also a producer), but this past year\u2019s release of Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It<\/em>,<\/a> a PBS documentary about Moreno that gained viewership when it streamed on Netflix. She made being Rita Moreno look easier and much more fun than it likely was, especially when struggling through her dispiriting and (especially) demeaning early years as a studio ingenue. From those experiences, she developed superior emotional intelligence and fervent empathy towards all who struggled as she did. At about the five-minute mark of this interview clip<\/a>, she talks about how when working as a series regular, she would go out of her way to make guest actors feel more welcome in unfamiliar, and in some cases, less hospitable surroundings. It\u2019s not in the documentary, but it\u2019s yet another reason, as if any more were needed, to cherish her forever.

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The Beatles: Get Back<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 As Samuel Johnson didn\u2019t say, but would have, whosoever gets bored from watching four active imaginations pooling their resources to make music in a studio is bored with life. Eight hours of footage didn\u2019t seem an exceptionally long time to get embedded in a handful of hard day\u2019s nights in the studio. Much as they may have wanted to get back, so to speak, to live concerts, their basic instincts turned out right: they were better together in a studio than they would have been on stage in their latter days as a group. (The guess here is that if they\u2019d stayed on the road any longer than they did, one or more of them would have gotten physically, seriously hurt as the decade they helped create began curdling like cream left open too long on the patio.) Even with all the tiffs, tantrums, and tensions sharing the room with them, the guys were in their safe space, as capable of mutually assured generosity (still loving the sequence where George is helping Ringo erect a bridge for the latter\u2019s \u201cOctopus\u2019s Garden.\u201d) as of sticking tiny needles into each other\u2019s self-esteem. All of which happens when you\u2019re just \u201changing out\u201d and this may well be for all time the sine qua non of cinematic \u201changs.\u201d The sainted Cassavetes couldn\u2019t have pulled it off if he\u2019d staged everything in advance: he could never have drawn up those two \u201cwhat\u2019s-all-this-then?\u201d constables trying in vain to get the lads to shut down their rooftop concert. Questions for further study: Can we be sure Phil Spector didn\u2019t put the old lady up to calling the cops? And where, in all this footage, was Phil Spector anyway?<\/p>\r\n

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Passing<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 With episodic television now firmly in the center of popular storytelling, it\u2019s perhaps inevitable that some of the year\u2019s most critically-lauded feature films tended to leave more of their narrative details to the imagination, much as producers, directors and writers tried to do in the mid-20th century as commercial television squeezed movie houses into tight corners. Jane Campion\u2019s award-winning western noir The Power of the Dog<\/em> was a revelation to many for its calculated ambiguity. I preferred Rebecca Hall\u2019s directorial debut<\/a> if only for the daring aesthetic and personal choices she made in adapting a Harlem Renaissance classic and thus proving (a.) that Nella Larson has earned serious reconsideration as a major American novelist and (b.) judging from some of the reactions to the movie, there remain some things about skin color we feel uneasy about.<\/p>\r\n

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