The Facts of Life

I cannot exactly pinpoint the moment I transcended my white honky self and the inherent limitations of honkiness to embrace the Universal Groove of the west: the percussion of Africa that the (damnable) slavetraders exported to the shores of the Western Hemisphere which became the basis for gospel, soul, jazz, FUNK, reggae, and the rhythms of South America. It's a heavy groove, and a groove with A LOT of historical and karmic baggage. This groove trounces all and rules all that is truly good because Europeans have no inherent groove; but this groove can be elusive, especially if you are a white American male. You have to admit it's existence on some level consciously or unconsciously, and submit to it in order to feel it in your soul, and a lot of folks just ain't down with THAT. Maybe it was my love of old Prince, old school hip hop, James Brown (and not "I Feel Good", I'm talking "Sex Machine"... "The Big Payback"), THE FUNK, or maybe it started because I had the Burtons for neighbors and Terry Burton as a best friend growing up. I don't know. I do know I can get down on the 1 like THAT, and that I can automatically bop and shake when the Universal Groove is present. But observe white people dancing to good music in large groups (like at weddings) and it's a different story: white women seem more in tune with the universal groove (which explains so much in American history), gay dudes have enough rhythm to bust moves because they like to dance and are also actively oppressed (they were also the first white men to discover disco*), but most white hetero dudes generally suffer because that rhythm totally ELUDES them. We do know it's there because and we keep trying to bogart it, ie rock and roll and country line dancing, but bogarting is not acceptance and submission. This is why white men need to listen to Naked, the final Talking Heads studio album, an album redolent with sweet African rhythms that you cannot help but dance to, an album about looking out beyond yourself at the whole wide world around you.

It just might make the world a better place.



And now I have completed my President's Day Talking Heads surround sound adventure, and boy was that fun. Now I am ready for my 10 hour day tomorrow...


* Did white people really dance well to disco? I really cannot say because I wasn't there. I do know that white hetero people killed disco, first within (ie "Disco Duck" and Ethel Merman Sings Disco!) and then without with big bonfires...

White people who danced well to disco... feel free to DEFEND YOURSELVES here in the comments section, if you dare.