Rereading: Vice, New And Selected Poems, by Ai

The early poems here-the ones in Cruelty ( 1973) and Killing Floor (1979)-are intricate and forceful. The best ones are learned, ambitious, drawing on such diverse traditions as Pound, the Oral Tradition, Browning’s Monologues and Post Second Wave Feminism. Obsessed with trauma and agonizingly internal, they can raise powerful questions about race, gender, identity and the human capacity to digest an enormous amount of grief. Even when the message or structure of the poems don’t necessarily jibe, they are consciously crafted enough to always be the readers time.

She loses me In the later poems, where she stops telling human personal stories and starts to ruminate on pop culture events and figures. Ai's  early work interpolated the motif of the early Cantos- that poetry didn’t have the language to encapsulate the grief and horror of modern life-more effectively than Pound ever did, but they worked when she wrote close to the vest of real life, what she knew, what she could see, what she could invent.  When she started writing about OJ, Monica Lewinsky, Koresh, and the Okalahoma city bombing, the animating aesthetics of her work fall flat. Still, the book is worth it: there is much here that needs to be read if you want to understand the history of poetry, chew on some literary theorizing,  or just read some good poems.  If you can get a good copy of Cruelty on Amazon, however, I would go with that first.

My Thoughts On The Year In Music

If, on December 31st, 1951, I wrote these descriptive sentences about

1: A moderate talent hampered by his sociopathic obsession with white women; who consciously crafted his work free from any cultural signifers to black people

2: A middle class kid with a skeevy interest in sex, who is so obsessed with black people not understanding his story, that he often forgets to develop his own one.

You would assume, in an era before Ellison and Baldwin, that I was talking about 1:Chester Himes( before the Cotton series) 2: Richard Gibson and Frank Yerby.
So why, when on December 31st 2011, they describe Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino and Drake, do I have to pretend that the cultural discussions about them that we are having now? In these agonizing, retrograde, backlash fueled discussions defending the thrown crumbs of black male privildge and the brothers who will grovel on the floor to eat them, why are we pretending that any of it is "futuristic"; that a new generation is "telling their story", that we are doing anything except what we are actually doing, which is ignore 60 years of intellectual struggles that actually happened?

I dont consider myself a nostalgist. There have been plenty of  terrible acts and  years that black culture critics wont care to admit were so. That said, so much of what came out in 2011 can just burn in hell.

Just Where Was The Love?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/02/showbiz/music/love-songs/index.html

( trigger warning)

What's wrong with Soul Music? I have a theory, and it doesn't have anything to do with how stupid and evil young black people are.

Fifteen years ago, Bill Clinton signed The 1996 Telecommunications Act; a bill which deregulated the media and allowed for companies to acquire consolidated empires. It is the evidentiary framework that allowed Clear Channel to get over 1200 stations, the reason Comcast bought NBC/Universal, and the reason that Black radio has been brutally cut to it’s knees. Under the Portable People Meter System installed because of the bill, radio ratings were attuned to the exposure an area has to a signal. Because of this, almost every local mom and pop soul radio station-the lifeblood for black music and black audiences for over a half a century-had to close down because of an erroneous ratings system.

Also, because of the abolition of regulatory restrictions in the air waves, Black stations that were profitable under the PPM system were bought out and replaced by companies that replaced their black radio formats with the most popular, failsafe black radio format in the past 25 years: gangster rap/ sex music geared to white teenagers from the suburbs. When black people stopped buying/listening to rap music, smaller, niche markets came up that bred artists that had no crossover support whatsoever. The result was that Rashaan Patterson couldn’t develop an audience the same way that The Ohio Players could, Joi Gilliam couldn’t build a following in a similar form as Betty Wright, and Phenomenally talented artists like Anthony David, Van Hunt, Donnie, Res,  and Janelle Monae get absolutely nowhere in the modern market. It is also the reason that Mary J Blige, Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Anthony Hamilton can go gold and platinum with almost no support outside of Black America.

All of this is far harder than to comprehend and talk about than articles about "The Narcissistic Black Youth". I revile Chris Brown’s work, wrote as such( http://open.salon.com/blog/robert_lashley_1/2011/04/18/review_fame_chris_brown

) and am the last person to offer any excuse for his behavior. His success is a prime example of  how young black men take advantage of the privileges the R&B/Hip hop market affords them, and how it damages the community. It is dishonest, however, to ignore the economic structure built to make a song like “3 am” profitable and ignore a song like this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQDcJBrLcNQ . ( Brown should be criticized to the high heavens, but by god when are cultural critics going to recognize that artists like David exist and face near impossible odds to get their great music heard.)

What is also dishonest is Blake’s romantic subtext: that Black male sexism began with the first Schooly D record, and has stayed only in the territory and ballpark of rap ever since. Reading his glory years timeline-the late 60’s to the early 80’s-I couldn’t help but recall that during them:

-Eldridge cleaver wrote a best selling book that espoused the belief that black women should be raped for practice by black men, who then should rape white women as a political statement.

-Amiri Baraka and Iceberg Slim were writing horror works that were as frightening in content as Odd Future at their worst

-Baraka and Ron Karenga were espousing the idea that black men should beat black women as a form of therapy.

-Writers like Ntosake Shange and Alice Walker were being subjected to cultural witch hunts by black men because they had “unfavorable” male characters in their work

-and, in this glorious era of black music Blake describes, Joe Tex went platinum with a record "Uh Huh-Huh ( You Never Should A Promised Me)" that was an ode to a violent rape.

Of course this shouldn't be used as an excuse for the modern generation of vile love men:  Karenga being a Sociopath in 1971 does not wash away Brown being one in 2011.  There are discussions that need to be had in regards to the decline of the soul love song in America, and hard questions that young men need to ask ourselves about patriarchy in regard to soul music. In this article, Blake asks none of them(and his quoted implication-that black music will get right when Black women take off their high heels- is a more subtle form of the sexism he is railing against). Blake knows this; but like a lot of writers he knows a popular song to sing to an audience. The Black Pathology song he's singing here-one that relies on the same airy, singular cliched tropes of black failure without a whit of subtext or analysis-will get him the gratitude and recognition of many people. Forgive me if I want to turn off the dial