July 25, 2009
personal essay in two parts
Part One: Gil Scott-Heron's "Johannesburg" is an objectively great song. I knew that when I was 14. For a mid-seventies protest song, the lyrics are unforgiving, but absent either the uplift or the reductive rage of contemporary political anthems. Phrase by phrase, it fills my adult self with admiration. The A part of the verse begins, "They tell me that our brothers are over there, awww, defyin the man. And we don't know for sure because the news we get is unreliable, man." The rhyme could be awkward but it's not, it's conversational and generous, and then he sings the B part of the verse, "I hate it when the blood start flowing, but I'm glad to see resistance growing," and it's so carefully balanced, "hate" vs. "glad," but not evenly balanced, with the weight of necessity on glad, where the resistance is.
The next verse repeats the structure: "They tell me that our brothers are over there, refuse to work in the mines; they many not get the news but they need to know we're on their side." And then the little lift into the B part, "Sometimes distance bring misunderstanding, amen, deep in my heart I'm demanding — " and then running into the chorus, really an extension of the verse, with its double-weight on the word word, because the song is about news, right? — "deep in my heart I'm demanding: somebody tell me what's the word, tell me brother have you heard, from Johannesburg, I know there's something happening tell me what's the word, sister mother have you heard about Johannesburg?"
But of course this is to ignore the song's invincible music, mostly piano and bass, very major and strolling with a hint of West Africa, resolutely upbeat and not a single misstep even in the minory bridge, "I know that their struggling over there, that ain't gonna free me. Yeah but we've all got to be struggling, if we wanna be free," and into the piano breakdown with the funky toms, African soul and in fact it's a dance song, really the whole song is a very particular dream: what if Stevie Wonder was a rad, an internationalist, but still perfect? Finally it ends, "What's the word?" "Johannesburg!" yells the crowd. And back to Gil, "what's happening in Johannesburg, LA like Johannesburg, New York like Johannesburg, Detroit like Johannesburg," and just as you think that's it, last seconds of the fade, "Freedom ain't nothin but a word — so let me see your ID, let me see your ID..." and it's over, four minutes and fifty seconds.
Part Two: Could I ever love something as much as I loved that song when I discovered it in 1977, two years after it was released? But the point was, we all loved it. We all danced to it, we waited the length of every party for it to come on, the same way we waited for "Sir Duke" and "Flashlight" and "Tasty Cakes," and "Reasons" for a slow jam, we smoked joints and drank terrible things, and when it was my year to make the dance tapes I spent hours thinking about where in the three hour sequence to place that song, what before and what after, and it was always late, it was always the right moment because the song itself could do no wrong, and at the end we all shouted "Johannesburg!" furiously with our fists in the damp air of somebody's parents' basement or once in a barn in New Hampshire.
This must have been pretty ridiculous. There we were, a tiny prep school of absurd pretensions and almost equivalent wealth, 125 students for grades 9-12, every year the headmaster would accept a couple black kids on scholarship, I was on a scholarship too but I was a white kid, we were almost all white kids who would start companies and clerk Supreme Court and if the headmaster took a real shine to you, you could get a summer job after graduation learning international arbitrage at one of his offices because he was also the head of Merrill Lynch, Charlie Merrill. And we all shook our fists, Johannesburg.
But I think there was something true about that. I think it worked, I think Gil Scott-Heron worked, I think every single one of us believed that what was happening in Johannesburg, as best we could tell, was an injustice and a travesty, and shouldn't be tolerated. No one reversed this verdict ever, I'd bet. The song convinced us without our thinking about it, convinced us of things we would have articulated passionately and poorly, about what it meant to feel this urgent solidarity with someone's fight but see that it was not your fight, not exactly, see that you might belong to it but it didn't belong to you, and if the song taught us that not every single thing in the world belonged to you, well, that was news to us.
Posted by jane at July 25, 2009 07:04 PM | TrackBack