|
|
|
Last Updated: Oct 21st, 2007 - 09:55:08 |
The reality of it all finally hit home a few days ago, when my 8-year-old whurl-a-gurl remarked, “daddy, you drive a mommy mobile”. Yes, I am a grown man whose daily responsibilities include driving my two daughters around in a wine-colored Chrysler Town & Country. The soccer mom of political yore is a myth. There is simply a nation of soccer/gymnastics/dance/cheer squad/swim team parents who might dig Nascar, Montessori schools, Bollywood cinema and the writings of June Jordan. We are all faced with the same challenge: what music do you play in a car full of kids that will keep them entertained, not insult your own aesthetic sensibilities or offend anyone in the car.
 |
| !!! |
I made the decision when my oldest daughter was an infant, that I would use our time in the car as an on-going learning lab (indoctrination really) where she and, later, her sister would be introduced to wide a range of popular music, particularly by Black artists and musicians. Some of my favorite times with my daughters (my back-seat interlocutors) are listening to them try to sing the lyrics to James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” or Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “The Candy Man,” or hearing my youngest whurl-a-gurl, now four years old, sing the “call me” fade out to Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me”. This year I made a concerted effort to introduce them to girl-group harmonies, so there was a lot of Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes and The Bluebelles in the car. I wanted to make sure that, as they get older, that they can always recognize those harmonies as being the building blocks for great pop music. Despite these efforts, it would be inevitable that my daughters would begin to assert their own taste and indeed their desire to listen to music that was made in this century. Below is a short list of the recordings that were their favorites from 2006.
1. Corrine Bailey Rae—Corrine Bailey Rae
I literally melted the first time I heard Corrine Bailey Rae’s “Like a Star”. I copped an import copy of the disc months before the U.S. release and I’d like to think that for about two months Rae was a little secret that my daughters and I shared. Then came the single and video for “Put Your Record On” and after 823 official listens of the track in the minivan, I am quite sure it is my youngest daughter’s favorite song ever, especially if we are to judge the number of time she requested that we “play it again,” often to the chagrin of her sister and mother. When daddy got the chance to listen to the disc on his own, tracks like the bluesy “Till It Happens to You” and “Choux Pastry Heart” were the clear standouts. Many critics immediately likened Rae to a new fangled, more soulful version of Norah Jones. I’ll always think of this disc as the sweet taste of summer.
2. Christiana Aguilera—Back to the Basics
Okay, cards on the table. I had never purchased a Christina Aguilera recording before this year and I damn sure could not have imagined listening to her in the minivan with my daughters. But when XTina dropped white chocolate truffles all over Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” for Herbie Hancock’s duet project Possibilities, I was convinced that this critic had been lulled to sleep by all the bad-girl drama. So when baby-girl decided that she was gonna get the Primo (DJ Premiere) treatment for some of the tracks on Back to the Basics, I was first in line. The whurl-a-gurls took notice, as soon as XTina started to blow on “Make Me Wanna Pray” (Peter Gabriel never been freaked so lovely) recalling Rich Harrison’s fine talent for booty-shaking spirituality (Amerie’s “1 Thing” and Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”). More importantly, they bothered to ask questions as Xtina name checked James Brown, Etta James, Billie Holiday and Marvin Gaye on “Back in the Day.” In a world where Britney Spears is a road-kill spectacle and the pop world bows at the feet of the Fergie-licious (JJ Fad redux), Christina Aguilera won’t get the credit for what was a fine recording.
3. India.Arie—Testimony Vol. 1 (Life and Relationships)
Twice a week, my daughters make the sojourn to Ms. April’s Braids and Beads—a braiding salon in Durham, N.C. especially tailored for little Black girls (usually) to step confidently into the hair wars. And of course hair does matter in a world where every little aspect of the female body is scrutinized for lacking the perfection that product X can of course help provide. But the challenge of course is to get the whurl-a-gurls to realize that they are not defined by their hair, so I looked lovingly at Indie.Arie sweet little ditty “I am Not My Hair.” Truth is I’ve always dug the idea of India.Arie more that her music. Tracks like “I am Not My Hair” and “There’s Hope” from Testimony Vol. I were some of the examples of where the praxis of India.Irie was achieved. And give homegirl a major handclap for giving Melissa Etheridge some love and stimulating yet another conversation about pink ribbons and breast cancer in the mommy mobile.
4. Lupe Fiasco—Food and Liquor
“Daddy, kick push”—that’d be the four-year old requesting what could only be called baby’s first hip-hop song. And like any parent who have come of age on the boom-bap, there always that major quandary about hip-hop and our kids. And while my kids a steady diet of Pete Rock and CL Smooth, A Tribe Called Quest and recent Common ain’t the worst thing in the world, it would be nice to equip them with contemporary (and commercial) examples that explained why their daddy was hooked in the first place. So it’s the skate board kid—literally—that provides the soundtrack. Where “Kick Push” is cute and “He Say, She Say” is a nice spin on father absence, Food Liquor is a contemporary rap recording. So a track like “Just Might Be Ok” gets love when daddy is driving alone and driving across the quad with the window down just like he did in that Chevy Nova 20 years ago.
5. Mary J. Blige—The Breakthrough
There’s a moment during Mary J. Blige’s “About You” that you realize that this song is really about generational acknowledgement. Girl drama transcends time and when you are a Black woman artist that demands the simply courtesies that should be extended to you because of your talent and more importantly your humanity, such things can often be read as a “bitch fit.” In many regards, Nina Simone defined the idea of the “sullen” Black women performer, so we can appreciate when Will.I.Am summons Simone to give Blige a digitized hug—“you know how I feel.” The Breakthrough was only that if you’ve been blind and deaf to the body of work that Mary J. Blige has produced over the last 15 years. 1999’s Mary was Blige’s first stab at for real grown folks music, but her core audience wasn’t ready for that move just yet. In 2006, fully equipped with the cultural gravitas that had alluded her for much of the 1990s, audiences were willing to go anywhere Blige took them. As the women who will go down as the “voice” of the hip-hop era (like Ms. Aretha was to the civil rights era) I’m just happy that the whurl-a-gurls know who Mary J. Blige is. Indeed, I suspect that she will be one of their primary resources, when they have to face their own girl drama.
Mark Anthony Neal is associate professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the doting daddy of eight-year-old Misha Gabrielle Neal and four-year-old Camille Monet Neal.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
Top of Page
|
|
|
|
