Who Protects Us From You?

5 teenagers are gunned down on the streets of New Orleans Saturday night. Today, 100 National Guard troops in SWAT-style teams called SRTs are being deployed to enforce the city's youth curfew. The Times-Picayune also reports the need for troops stems from FEMA rental support for evacuees drying up this summer. More youth will be trying to come back home in time to start the new school year.

Though all we know about this crime is that the victims are teenagers, the New Orleans city government and media is quick to justify the need for soldiers in the streets to control the youth. In a country where the vast majority of violent crime affecting youth is perpetrated by adults, why are we so quick to blame youth? And why aren't more people outraged when youth are blamed?

With Hurricane Katrina, approximately 2000 people died as a result of a system of neglect designed by adults, and we've all seen graphic footage of the New Orleans police shooting and beating Katrina victims on TV.

But the youth are the problem?

2,500 young Americans (countless Iraqi youth) have been slaughtered in Iraq because of the political posturing of their seniors in government.

But Congress is currently debating the causes of youth violence, and troops are being deployed in the streets of New Orleans to control the youth.

It's something worse than stupidity or insanity at work. It's a war on youth, particularly poor youth. In light of my speechlessness and anger over this after spending most of my adult life trying to stop it, I've decided to repost an interview from the blog Holler If Ya Hear Me as well as important, related links from yesterday's The Daily Show and youth advocate Mike Males.

Myths About Teen Violence--

http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/

"Player Haters" on the Daily Show--

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=70892

Why Congressional Studies Into Videogame Violence Are Worse Than Meaningless--

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hear a Child

By Danny Alexander

In this era of inflamed cultural anxiety and renewed culture wars, it’s hard to imagine a more necessary book than Gerard Jones’s Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make-Believe Violence. One of his key strengths is that Jones listens to what kids have to say, unlike the political pundits who give lip service to protecting them. Aside from skewering the lazy thinking (and bad science) that has shaped most liberal and conservative perspectives on culture, he also offers indispensable insights into the distinct ways boys and girls make use of the culture, often reaching conclusions that fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

After Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s hidden sex scene made national news, Hillary Clinton held a press conference comparing video games to cigarettes and tobacco, spouting the same tired assumptions Jones’s book should have lain to rest.

In response, he agreed to answer a few questions:

In Killing Monsters, you go to great pains to show why studies on the effects of media violence are, to say the least, misleading, and you make a strong case that video games are the least likely cultural culprit when it comes to real violence in society. Last March, likely 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined culture warriors Joe Lieberman, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, asking for $90 million in federal funds for research on the effect of the Internet, iPods, and other electronic media on children. What hopes do you have that this research will yield more objective or thoughtful results than past studies?

Basically none. Whenever there’s a call for new studies, it’s always from the same people: politicians or advocates who want evidence that certain types of entertainment cause certain types of problems. And they always turn to the same researchers, who are even more invested in demonstrating the presence of the same “negative effects.” After all, their livelihoods, sometimes the existence of their schools’ entire social science departments, depend on reliably delivering the same anxiety-provoking data for the same politicians and foundations. It’s a combination political maneuver and boondoggle, just like Bush demanding “more intelligence” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection to al Qaeda. More studies, more quotable people assembled to say exactly what they’ve been asked to say.

I’d love to see some real research done on this subject, but that requires asking questions that no one’s asked in 80 years of social-science “research” on entertainment.

1) What might be the positive effects of this media? (Not just, “Does this increase hostility?” but also, “Does it increase boldness, self-confidence, social connection, the desire to take right action?”)

2) How do the effects of “violent entertainment” compare to sports fandom, academic pressure, social competition, patriotism, religious zeal, and the many other factors in life?(e.g., anecdotally it certainly seems that more large-scale violence is inspired by holy texts and national causes than anything make-believe; but no one ever puts entertainment in a larger context.)

3) How do we explain the fact that instances of crime, violence, and other antisocial and self-destructive behavior keep dropping even as media use increases and media violence becomes more frequent? All the research I see is “bubble research.” The numbers make sense within the bounds of the study, but they’re never reflected in real life. (As contrasted with, say, the cigarette/cancer connection, which clearly showed up in real-life statistics and then was backed up by lab studies.) Can it be that the increase of aggression recorded by so many studies somehow results in a decrease of genuine acts of violence?

There are hypotheses to explain such a phenomenon, but the usual gang of researchers and politicians never wants to look at it. Heart doctors study the “French Paradox.” Will social scientists ever study the “Media Paradox”? I’d love to see it happening, but it won’t come at Clinton and Brownback’s urging.

Why don’t arguments like the ones you make in Killing Monsters get more media play?

The commercial news business is owned by the same companies who produce the entertainment, and they know that consumer confidence in their news product is tenuous. Producers and journalists are afraid that if they seem to be coming out in favor of the company’s entertainment products, they’ll lay themselves open to accusations of shilling for entertainment at the expense of accuracy.

I’ve talked to enough reporters about this personally, usually right after they’ve interviewed me, to say this with some confidence. It’s the same reason educated, left-leaning journalists are so susceptible to being bullied by conservatives.

The focus on content and taste is also a great distraction from potentially larger arguments about the effects of new media per se or the political implications of the media and their messages. People who make decisions in the mass-media business know that no assaults on violent, sexy, or bad-taste entertainment will actually make any significant differences to their profitability. Everyone in the mass-media business knows that these flurries will happen and all you have to do is toss a couple of products to the wolves, slap on some new warning labels, and maybe pull back on the shock value a little bit.

If you can redirect the argument from “I don’t want my kids disappearing into an iPod” to “I don’t want my kids listening to all that violence and obscenity on an iPod” and then tell them, “Now it’s easier for you to keep them from listening to all that violence and obscenity,” the larger questions about whether they should be listening to iPods in the first place get shelved.

The furor over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is good for video games as a whole, because if you can make it the demon and then show that it’s been dispatched, the rest of the games in the living room look more innocuous.

Clinton’s Senate re-election campaign received more entertainment industry donations than that of any other senator. My guess is, based on what we’ve seen in the past, the industry will continue to support her despite her taking such stances. Why do you think the industry is unwilling to stand up for itself on these issues or help educate itself and the public on the positive side of controversial ideas and violence in particular in cultural play?

People in the entertainment industry are always willing to sell out their own. HUAC found far more friendly than hostile witnesses. When the comic-book business was in danger of being destroyed in the early 1950s, people in newspaper comic strips and “wholesome” comic books rushed to the Senate hearings to say, “We’re not like those sleaze mongers. Attack them but leave us alone.” Supporting a senator who attacks Grand Theft Auto is a perfect way to cast oneself as a “responsible” member of the entertainment industry.The people who support Clinton also know that she’s not going to go after their products.

Attacks on “violence” and “obscenity” shift easily according to what the attackers needs to happen. In 1996 Bob Dole railed against “violent movies.” Then Schwarzenegger threw a few million dollars into the pot and offered to show up at rallies Suddenly Dole was praising Arnold’s movies as “depictions of heroism,” the kind of action movie we should have. Ignoring the fact that Raw Deal and Total Recall were among the nastiest movies ever made—not only in the intensity of their violence but in the sadism of their protagonist and the twistedness of their messages.The same with mainstream sitcom producers or record companies who support Clinton. They know her attention will always be on more marginal, easily isolated entertainers that won’t turn out to be very important as contributors or fundraising hosts.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas argues that cultural anxiety is a tool used to push right wing agendas. You make the point that much of this cultural anxiety comes from a fear of the future and projection of our fears onto our children. Do we have as much to fear from our fantasy culture as we have to fear from the effects of this cultural anxiety Why do you suppose political progressives are so resistant to the kind of critical thinking you try to model in Killing Monsters? (Maybe that’s two questions)

First, yeah: the culture of anxiety is far, far more pernicious to children and adults than anything we’re likely to see in our make-believe. I think entertainment has very little power if we say “someone made that up to shock us” and “it doesn’t matter.”As for progressives...I think it’s mostly just that they feel they have to steal as many issues as they can from the right without compromising the core progressive issues that they need to stick to. They figure they’re not going to lose any votes (or at least any likely votes) by yelling about violent video games and rap songs, but they might by seeming to be “soft on family values.”

Underlying that is the elitism of educated progressives. They still see themselves as having to take care of less well-educated people, which means that their reliance on upper-middle-class standards of taste and the research of people with PhDs will always be seen as more “correct” than the direct experience of kids, teenagers, immigrants, and lower-middle-class or working-class people who comprise most of the audience for the entertainment attacked. This is one reason that attacks on shows like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under never get much media traction, and why the heat always goes toward rap music and pop of the Britney Spears ilk but rarely toward alternative rock. Poor people don’t partake in it, so they’re not as worked up about it; and educated elites “get it,” so they ignore or deflect criticism, imagining that their children won’t be affected by it. The basic progressive model is that “those people” are being led astray by crass (probably right-wing) profiteers, and we liberals need to protect them from themselves.

What’s more dangerous, violent video games or politicians who have problems distinguishing between video game violence and reality? Clinton has consistently supported the Iraq war and is now pushing for an increase in the size of the Army by 80,000 troops. How do you suppose such hawkishness compares with fantasy media in terms of aggravating real world violence?

I think killing real people is a bigger problem than killing badly animated pseudopeople on a computer screen. And I think arguing from the Senate floor that America should be sending its young men and women to their deaths for a disastrous colonial venture is more likely to distort our thinking about violence than watching superheroes fight in a cartoon.My one hope is that the costs of real war will help Americans remember (maybe for longer this time) that real violence isn’t fun and exciting, and you don’t get a happy ending after two hours. Hawks like Clinton may help us that way.

Jones’s 2004 book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book recently came out in a soft cover edition. Dave Marsh called it, “by far the best book about comic book history I’ve ever come across. Best written, best told, most informed, best at seeing the big picture and grasping the little details essential to frame that picture.”

http://hollerif.blogspot.com/2005_09_18_hollerif_archive.html

The Ultimate Reckoning Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” may be the greatest reckoning song of all. Hell, it may be the greatest rock record period.

Producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin, engineer Tom Dowd, the Franklin sisters and that terrific team of Muscle Shoals musicians, particularly bass player Tommy Cogbill, manage to pack those 2:26 seconds with so much energy that it’s hard to imagine it could possibly go on a second longer. On the other hand, I played the record about 20 times today, and I could have gone for 20 more listens without beginning to tire of it. In fact, somewhere around the 7th listen, the record seized me by the throat, and I was overcome with emotion.

I’m not sure what moment it was, but I suspect it was one of those two moments when Franklin’s voice breaks a little. (I would say she almost whimpers, but when a voice sounds as strong as this one—words like sigh or whimper or swoon don’t really come into play.) It’s probably the first time, right after she sings, “I’m about to give you all of my money,” and the wordless cry that follows suggests every bit of risk she is taking in the process. Past ghosts, a sense of helplessness, the possibility of madness and the uncertainty of the future all haunt that line. What she wants, what she needs—just like the lover she’s confronting—demands that she risks losing herself completely in order to find the one thing she needs, respect.

The other place where her voice breaks is after recalling those kisses “sweeter than honey,” making it clear that sexual passion calls for that risk as well. After all, calling for respect, Franklin’s demanding a quality of love, and that comes with all the good stuff, which is why those cries to “whip it to me” and “sock it to me” sound so deliciously erotic.

But, ultimately, the reason I think all of these elements make “Respect” perhaps the most important record of the rock era has everything to do with what’s political in the personal. Respect means, ultimately, to take another look, to more closely consider the wants and needs of another and her point of view. That’s what I think rock and soul, at their greatest, always aim for, a reckoning with other points of view. And when we truly lose ourselves in a song, which “Respect” all but demands that we do, we find ourselves strengthened by the process. Maybe that’s why Aretha Franklin’s voice sounds as strong as any other voice I’ve ever heard here, in the face of all those fears. She’s hit on the kind of love that’s really all we need—the kind that hears the voice that typically goes unheard and joins in.

(photo by Dave Ransom, from the June edition of People's Tribune--see links)

My Favorite Gangstas: Natalie Maines and P!nk

Why are Natalie Maines and Pink my favorite gangstas? That’s the question, but not the way it sounds. The interesting thing is why them? Why now?

But I suppose we need to get past the qualifying round before going on. I’ve thought Natalie, Emily and Martie belonged in the company with Ice Cube and Scarface at least since their unrepentant murder fantasy, “Goodbye Earl,” which came out about 6 months before Pink began spittin’ tough guy lyrics like “Hell Wit You” and “There You Go.” And 6 years later, it’s not just Natalie who’s “Not Ready to Make Nice,” Pink starts her new album laying into virtually all of her peers with “Stupid Girls” before turning on “Dear Mr. President.”

Now, considering their penchant for blond Mohawks, you might think I’d wanna call these two singers punks. But punks just don’t cut it. Punks think too small. (I may make an exception for Joe Strummer here who, at his crucial taking-on-the-American-pop-charts moment, also sported a Mohawk.) Punks, with their nihilism at one end of the spectrum and anarchist utopianism at the other, never really grapple with reality on a grand scale.

That’s the job for gangstas. For me, an unrepentant gangsta fan since NWA changed the way I saw everything almost two decades ago, the best gangstas (why bother with the crappy in any genre?) are the ones asking the big questions in pop music. Sure, they may not have the politically correct answers, but they keep their eyes and ears on the material reality. Not ready to make nice, the gangsta asks, how do we take over? The whole genre is a critique of capitalism in some sense, and it’s often a call for class unity and peace by focusing on the everyday violence of the status quo.

That’s what’s in Maine’s voice when she declares, “I could never follow” or I “wouldn’t kiss all the asses that they told me to” or “I’m not ready to back down ‘cause I’m mad as hell.” And that’s what’s on Pink’s mind when she declares “we’re not dumb and we’re not blind.” A big part of both artists’ strength lies where some would see a weakness—in a sort of vulgar directness (Pink takes home the trophy here). That’s precisely what makes gangsta such an appropriate comparison. When those who don’t "get it" get over being polite about human slaughter, then we will have made some progress.

There are a number of intriguing connections between the Dixie Chicks’ and Pink’s new albums. They tackle similar themes with songs like the DC’s “The Long Way Around” and Pink’s “Long Way to Happy” and “Everybody Knows” and “Nobody Knows” (which both focus on the singers’ refusal to let the world see them cry) and, among other things, they both sing lullabies (of a sort) here and end their albums with something like prayers—not worshipful prayers but pleas to the universe.

But what started this whole line of thinking was the way they each confront this political moment with an unusual variation on a staple of women’s music in the rock and soul era. It’s a form I like to think of as the Sunday morning reckoning song. On one level, that image comes from the idea of, say, Aretha Franklin singing “Think” or “Respect” to her man while she’s trying to decide whether to finish frying breakfast eggs in that iron skillet or use the whole damn thing, sputtering eggs and all, to lay him out if he won’t do right. On another level, I imagine it like Aaliyah’s “4 Page Letter,” written to simply sort a relationship out, whether or not the addresse ever gets the chance to read it (a practice about half of my women writing students have testified to ever since I first started teaching).

What's unusual is not the political dimension of these songs. All Sunday morning reckoning songs have a political tenor that rises above the vehicle. The politics of the bedroom generally serve as a metaphor for the larger society, particularly in women's music. But what's unusual about these two songs is the futility of the plea, on one level, and its hopefulness on another.

With Maines the open letter is aimed at an industry (a society really) that propagandizes real world hatred and war without offering a critical thinker enough rationale to justify murder. The result? Well, one is people threatening to assassinate her for saying she’s ashamed of the President. With Pink, the letter is aimed directly at the President, reckoning with grieving mothers, imprisoned fathers and children as collateral damage both here and abroad. In neither case is there any hope that the villains will listen, but the swelling music declares a great hope for unity among a much larger group who could.

It is a piece of Pink’s reckoning song, the bridge, that I see most clearly as a duet with Maines. Together, they could declare--cast iron skillet or gun drawn and ready—

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work—
You don’t know nothing ‘bout hard work!!!!!!!”

Fear of this sort of rallying cry is one reason Democrat and Republican politicians who have been hawkish on this war (almost all of them, but for the sake of clarity let’s single out Hillary Clinton, Rick Santorum, Joe Lieberman, for instance) have joined hands against youth culture. The only way you blame music and videos for kids thinking of violence (when your job as Senator is to propagandize violence) as a solution to problems is to ignore such ideas and their implications altogether.

Whether politicians aim at gangsta rap or gangsta video games is really immaterial. The gangstas raise their voices in crude, unrepentant ways because the stakes are too high to fret over manners or political correctness, and perhaps manners are being revealed for what they really are, a systematic tool for ignoring the “outcasts” Pink says she wants to hear.

She literally cries out for these outcasts every day (just about every hour) on Top 40 radio right now because, like all of the great gangstas, she thinks big. That’s what polite society—be it conservative or progressive—hates most of all, those who listen to and engage with the unwashed masses. Fortunately, the best gangstas like the Dixie Chicks and Pink dream of a world, as Maines sings in “I Hope,” where we “can all live more fearlessly.”

GREETINGS FROM NEW ORLEANS, LA.--

(Dave Marsh on Bruce Springsteen in New Orleans, from the May Rock & Rap Confidential)

In a time of warfare against a phantom enemy abroad and a war against the poor creating phantom citizens at home, up pops Bruce Springsteen with an album titled We Shall Overcome. He didn't have New Orleans in mind when he started making it in 1997, but both the music and the ways he's using it speak directly to the situation there today.

Deciding to start his current tour with the Seeger Sessions Band at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on April 30 reflected Springsteen's sensitivity to the issues of poverty and racism and his ability to pick up on a catalytic opportunity. What Vietnam veterans were twenty years ago--a powerful symbol of the people the system tries to erase from view--New Orleans is today.

Discussion of Bruce's new album has focused on its subtitle, The Seeger Sessions, probably because people are puzzled by what it all means. The song selections don't seem nearly as political as their source, Pete Seeger. Yet four of the thirteen--"O Mary Don't You Weep," "Jacob's Ladder," "Eyes on the Prize" and "We Shall Overcome"--have at one time or another been used as "freedom songs." "Pay Me My Money Down" is that rare thing, a song that truly protests the situation it describes. "John Henry," "My Oklahoma Home," and "Mrs. McGrath" are explicitly about oppressed folk. That's almost two thirds of the thirteen song album.

One reason the album seems to avoid politics is "We Shall Overcome" itself. Springsteen's version downplays its spirit-rousing aspect; instead he sings it as one of his desperate love songs, even changing the chorus from "Deep in my heart" to "Darling, here in my heart." The result is a lovely ballad of two people against a hard world, and a violation of the collective spirit that the song stands for. He sings "Eyes on the Prize" in the same emotional mode, but it works a lot better.

The difference between the two is that on "Eyes on the Prize," Springsteen uses his band to build an arrangement that brings in voices and instruments to illustrate a community spirit taking shape out of the dark shadows inhabited by lonely isolated souls.

The music Springsteen makes with his biggest-ever band (thirteen members on the record, seventeen to twenty on stage) abandons much of what has defined his sound. In particular, the stiff rock beat has given way to syncopation. The instrumental focus is on the drums, with the melodic contributions emerging from fiddles and horns, rather than guitars and keyboards. The vocals, both his own and the multipart harmonies, are freer than anything he's recorded. After three albums of tragedy, the mood here swings toward joy. The album's tone is sometimes silly and once in a while fearful but it's never doomed.

Bruce wrote none of these songs yet We Shall Overcome is as personal as any of his records. For once on a studio recording, you can feel the unaffected pleasure he takes from making music, from working with other players and singers.

New Orleans right now is an eerie place, but not just because of the devastation. Abandoned cars and strewn rubble, even the scent of rot, are all over the place in Detroit and, for that matter, Asbury Park. What makes New Orleans different is that despite all the hype about reconstruction, nothing is being done. The housing projects are empty, looking more than ever like prisons. The upper Ninth Ward's population is decimated; the lower Ninth Ward's population is gone. But it's not just people that are missing. So are cranes, building equipment and construction site supplies, even as the courageous volunteers of Common Ground are hard at work in the Ninth, with a blue-roofed house in each part of the ward serving as a center for returning residents, for clean-up, and for visitors.

Musicians in particular are struggling right now, and one reason is that tourism--40 per cent of the pre-hurricane economy--has dwindled so badly. New Orleans does have a great indigenous music community, but the gigs that pay have long been played for outsiders.

The Jazz and Heritage Festival offers a lot of jobs for musicians but the most prominent and best-paying main stages, even the themed tents for jazz and gospel, mainly feature stars from far away. The splendid group of New Orleans icon Allen Toussaint appeared on the main stage right before Springsteen, but with Elvis Costello stepping in to sing several numbers.

Tourists will come to see, hear and eat the music and culture of New Orleans and the Louisiana swamplands. But to get enough of them to fill the huge Fairgrounds racetrack and gain national attention, not to mention lucrative corporate sponsorship, the promoters of Jazzfest need artists like Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews and Springsteen. (The festival is run by a nonprofit corporation, which doesn't mean a lot of money isn't being made.) This aspect of New Orleans may thrive--but it's hard to see how it will do much to change conditions there. It's equally hard to see how presenting a festival with a more local focus would help rebuild the city, either.

Music can do a lot of other things though. Above all, it can provide inspiration and foster connection. Springsteen's always been a man on a mission when it came to those to jobs, and changing bands and singing traditional songs didn't affect that. If anything, this is the strongest outreach he's made in years, stronger than The Rising because he's playing a species of dance music, designed to activate the ass and the mind. And in New Orleans, as backstreets.com noted, "Bruce wasn't preaching to the choir for the first time in a long time."

Springsteen was not only starting a new tour with a new band and new material, but he's Bruce Springsteen, the rock star who is supposed to rise to occasions. He needed a set that lived up to the drama of closing the first big event in New Orleans since the flood.

His big brass section added Crescent City flavor, and drummer Larry Eagle's fat, syncopated beats kept the cadence right. And Springsteen kept things focused. "Oh Mary Don't You Weep," the opening song, ends with: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time." "Eyes on the Prize" with its recurrent "Hold on" also invoked an embattled spirit: "The only thing that we did right was the day we started to fight." But the show found its legs and definition with a sequence that began with the refugee anthem, "My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away," and ran through the Irish antiwar ballad "Mrs. McGrath" before peaking with the Depression-era anthem, "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live."

Springsteen introduced it with a statement about how shocked, furious and ashamed he felt about what he'd seen since hitting town, then dedicated his rewritten version--"Them that's got, got out of town / And them that's not got left to drown"--to "President Bystander." After that, he had the crowd. With his somber "We Shall Overcome," he gripped them tighter. By the end of that one, even violinist Soozie Tyrell turned to wipe back a tear. That wasn't the climax though. For the first encore Springsteen came out and began to sing "My City of Ruins." As he described that "blood red circle," then pleaded for us to "rise up," tens of thousands of fists raised in the air. Thousands of tears formed a new salty flood.

The concluding "When the Saints Go Marching In," also slowed down considerably, should have been anticlimactic. But Springsteen unearthed verses rarely sung, beginning the song with "We are traveling in the footsteps of those who've gone before." In the ruins of America's oldest big city, those words resonated like a midnight echo in an abandoned housing project.

But I left contemplating the last verse, sung by this tour's Bruce sidekick, Marc Anthony Johnson of Chocolate Genius. "Some say this world of trouble is the only one we need / But I'm waiting for that moment when the new world is revealed."

Those lines took my understanding of one of Springsteen's best lines--"Don't waste your time waiting" from "Badlands"--and turned it around. And that made me consider what it would mean to reveal a new world in this life. We need patience to wait for the new world to reveal itself, that's true. But we mustn't waste that time merely waiting, because only struggle and refusal to surrender can bring that new world forth.

Music can't change the world. But sometimes, it delivers some pretty great marching orders.-D.M.

www.rockrap.com