Stellarfunk Black History Month special!

ALONE AGAIN OR:

A ten-track spin on the Salvation of rock criticism and the Rock & Roll World at-large

by Kandia Crazy Horse

 “Take the hits, boys, take the hits…make sure you don’t lose your wits…” Marah

As always: for Skydog, Stanley Booth, Margaret Ann & Nana Efua Sutherland

1.“Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin” / Sly & The Family Stone:

THE OTHER Saturday night, in Manhattan, my dear friends Andy Schwartz & Leslie Rondin took me to see blind New Orleans guitarist Snooks Eaglin at the Village Underground. I had been quite ill and reluctant to venture out into the Nueva York nightworld…but I trusted Andy’s exhortation to see any show or acquire any record (he having recently been the beloved heart of Sony & a serious Allman Brothers’ fan, among other things). Upon our arrival, for the first of two sold-out shows, it was clear that I was fortunate to be gifted with admission and that something special was in store. From Snooks’ first query of “How y’all feelin’?,” my flagging spirits improved and throughout his entire set --- including “Lipstick Traces,” Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman” as Sea-Saint remix & a hilarious ole-stylee take on Juvenile’s “Back Dat Thang Up” --- I felt no pain nor malaise. The Myth of (rock) music as healing balm confirmed anew to be no lie.

Ole Snooks sang about “Skinny Minnie,” a gal who is “…one half rock, the other half roll” and he seemed to be describing me, as I feel my essential self to be. This lyric struck a deep chord, as I had lately been floundering in such a slough of despond about music and my role within its’ arenas that my identity was lost. It was as if my portrait were being delineated from sound & space. And I was not alone in thrall to the conjure of Snooks & his tipsy, 3-piece outfit: Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke & Boss Hog leader Cristina Martinez was in Tha House, getting down as keen as anyone. This is the miracle of music; how it webs together all kinds in a freeing, fulfilling --- if fleeting --- joy.

Rock & Roll music, above all, has always been this critic’s highway to that electric Elysium up from the skies where Hendrix & Brian Jones sweetly strum all day, Gaye & Gram Parsons lead a soul-clapping Chorus & Joplin keeps the nectar flowing. Rock & Roll is a total way of life, a lifelong guiding spirit toward the best that emanates from humanity. Yet now that “Rock & Roll Is Dead” and myriad splinter forms of music and noise act as parasites upon its’ rusted carcass, I am devastated to see my life’s principles laid waste and the external, satellite arenas of rock culture, rock criticism & the rockbiz in utter chaos.

This is your pathetic critic’s hapless busk in Harvard Square during a hailstorm of public indifference, rock veterans’ epidemic gangrene & a sinister plot enabling pimple pop world-dominance. My addled cerebellum is awash in “buts” as this is the week of the “Pazz & Jop’s” release (annual critic’s poll helmed by Village Voice poobah Robert Christgau; SEE my ballot here). Disclaimer: The rock list/mixtape format is purposely used for this piece. I will also employ all the verboten and common tenets of rock criticism herein --- first person, use of quotes, punning on song titles/lyrics, gushing, name-dropping fawning idiocy, supplying youthful anecdotes for pathos or street cred purposes, intra-rockcrit sniping, obscurantist wallowing, referencing cultural studies, bandwaggoning, gratuitous citations of Big Star, slipping between archaic forms of language and slang, hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic, sub-sub references to make Dennis Miller blush --- to support my arguments on just how the Rock World hath gone awry.

[I will, however, not use: “tasty licks,” “incendiary,” “Dylanesque,” “baby mamas,” “hos,” “bling-bling,” “serve up,” “Beatlesque,” “namechecked” (<well, perhaps once)]

Because it’s Black History Month, this is fittingly a Slave Narrative (hey, I may not be Henry “Box” Brown but damn close…). Thus the necessity for slave language.

2. “Call Out The Lions” / Royal Trux:

My Hibernian Homey #2, Colin Cooley, co-poobah of the best Hot’lanta rock pr/marketing firm Wicked Group, recently questioned my working methods. He thought it limited me to proceed by devoting consistent attention to a handful of bands rather than simply going out to cover whatever came to town indiscriminately. You can agree with him if you will.

Yet my counterpoint is that my loyalty and laser focus is what animates me and enlivens my work. I had launched my so-called career not to become “A Rock Critic™” but to act as…well, a Black Knight for a group of artists whose honor I felt had been besmirched. Big up Southern Boogie! I would restore the genre’s place in the annals of rock by messing with the minds of those who cared about such things as written rants or raves, full-stop.

At that time, in the mid-Nineties of the last century, the close-knit and fanatical partisans of the genre were very much embattled and outraged at outsiders’ indifference. Most being of an age to have been reared (like the bands themselves) in the 60s & 70s Golden Era of Rock, they were equally versant in seminal texts, recordings, ephemera & apocrypha of the bands who had both influenced the new wave of Southern Boogie and shaped that earlier era…and these fans employed this patchwork “electric Esperanto” as a basis for dialoguing, both in person and via Internet. Y’all know the litany: Dylan, Stones, Beatles, Clapton, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Redding, Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac ad nauseam.

Eventually, I was attracted to other bands in the Black Crowes’ wake who mined a similarly gushing strike of Rock & Soul Motherlode: Gov’t Mule, Wilco, the Jayhawks, Widespread Panic, Bernie Worrell & The Woo Warriors, the Derek Trucks Band, Donnie, Galactic, John Thomas Griffith, Marah, the Delta 72, Soulive etc…and we’ll make special exception for the magnificent Royal Trux. Some turned out to be prophets, others poseurs. Rock milieu veterans were either heartened by these musicians or resentful. Yet each act was or is valiant in the attempt to restore a semblance of roots and divine order to popular music for those of us who want to see the Holy Ghost with a Flying-V, smiting terror in the hearts of the cold agents of the pop marketplace.

I didn’t jump in this monkey hustle to serve record companies, newspaper syndicates or the editorial elite. I write for fans primarily, the bands second. [And perhaps a wee bit to keep my mind slightly free of its’ ever-lurking mania] Does this seem disloyal to you? A bit of biting the hand that feeds…or she doth protest too much? Well, I have already lost a great deal too much to be worried about the threats of the rockbiz. So if you cannot look at my Archives and see writing for rock’s sake, if you cannot see the heroism in weeping for The People, then we are all lost.

3. “Choice Of Colors” / Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions:

On Racism that divides the rock world and the Black Rock Coalition’s need to step up their mandate…

Response to my 2000 Pazz & Jop Ballot from a Philly Soul Brother keepin’ it real:

Glad that you chose Mystikal.

I've tried to hate him for years.

But something about all of that

yelling is appealing. With those

crazy kids(The Neptunes) he's

finally hit pay dirt. James Brown

is back and he's wearing braids.

Outkast: What can I say?

I love them to pieces.

Little Feat: I didn't know that

they were back. I usually like

their brand of funk.

Hanson: Too bad they are directed

at lil girls. They are on some

Beatles thang. And pretty good

with it too.

 Talk at ya

 Homer

4. “I’m Digging You (Like An Old Soul Record)” / Me’Shell NdegeOcello:

If I were D’Angelo or some other dubious rebel & standard-bearing artiste of the Neo-Soul rabble, all I’d be doing is hiding out from BET/Viacom and putting in desperate calls to Bobby Womack & Leon Russell in the hopes that they might produce my black behind the imminent next time I decided to hole myself up in Electric Lady’s hallowed ground for half a decade.

Yes, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimi Hendrix dropped trax with a shitload of jizm…but you got to excite your audience in the first place. And methinks Soulquarian Brotha No. 1 aka “D” failed miserably on that score with Voodoo. Five years in Electric Lady studios and even my tone-deaf ass coulda come up with something to rival Stand! All Brer D proved, after conveniently wiping L-Boogie’s vocals from the mix, is that he could record a note-for-note version of Sly, make it sound like some Fresh outtake. And that ain’t shit, cause Karl Wallinger aka World Party did it too. Besides, everybody done proclaimed Dre 3000 the new Emperor Sly (been telling y’all Hot’lanta’s the hottest scene around but you don’t listen to me).

Speaking of which, whiteboys’ music may not be great shakes of late but when critics say so-and-so is “saving rock and roll,” they got Marah to back it up. Self-appointed saviors of Soul, D, L-Boogie and Gelee Gal Badu --- to put it in Black English Vernacular --- they’re “talkin’ loud and saying nothin’.” As we drown in the miasma of Neo-Soul, let some enterprising young body from the majors go rescue Funk-Jazz star Donnie from the cloister of Hot’lanta and give him artistic control Gaye and Wonder combined could only dream of.

5. “Chocolate City” / Parliament:

I’m more of a Funkadelic head, for those that get the distinction but…

Folks have always been puzzled by me, perplexed (if not incredulous) about where I come from. [DC, where else?!] As you would be, dear readers, should you meet me out at the venues. At least, I guess so…

When them folks find out I am from the Nation’s Capital, they puff up with self-importance like they’ve pegged me and assume, well, I must know Black Uhuru, HR from Bad Brains, Henry Rollins, Dave Grohl and been down with the Pussy Galore gang: Jon Spencer, Cristina Martinez, and the now-defunct act’s genius wing of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer James Herrema. Musta spent beaucoup time at the 9:30 club back in the day.

Well, sorry to disappoint, but I ain’t! Ol Hank and Señorita Cristina might well have served me ice cream in Georgetown, during my preadolescence, as I made my way down Wisconsin Avenue to buy stud bracelets and have my Mau-Mau-Mohawk hair (courtesy of TCB lye) sprayed blue-skunk at Commander Salamander and pick up angelface Fiorucci tchotchkes and gummi worms at Heaven. I was even acquainted with the hip Key Theatre, which screened Rocky Horror at midnights but never ventured to defy my parents and see it, perusing the ground floor poster shop for stills of Mick ‘n Tina at Live Aid instead. Closest I came to a rock star was a) endless Sundays of watching my father having identical brown suits impeccably cut at the Italian tailor further up Wisconsin, near P, and b) oogling the brotha cashier at Kemp Mill Records who dressed and acted like he was Prince, honey (Purple Rain-era).

Naw, back then, in my preadolescence, before the intersection of Wisconsin & M became even more of a mall, the DC luminaries I was most apt to see were Pacifica radio DJ Kojo Nambdi, Gil Scott-Heron and Sweet Honey In The Rock.

Of any of those indie royalty bands featured in the back pages of critics, like my erstwhile Editor Eric Weisbard, as being deep and meaningful shit to them, Black Uhuru were the most likely for me to have seen…and no doubt I did once or twice at some black-side shindig in the park or strutting through mine, the hippest ‘hood, Adams Morgan (aha! I score points at last).

See, my ideals of a great time out on the weekends was lolling at Hains Point (aka West & East Potomac Park) all Saturday afternoon with some Murray steaks on the Barbie and red Rock Creek soda or Kool-Aid in the cooler and then pick up some (Beta!) videos at Erols. Or, getting all us kids from our satellite families in the Gold Coast (bound by Rock Creek Park, upper 16^th Street, Piney Branch and Adams Mill Road) and Anacostia rounded-up for dinner at Hamburger Hamlet or the Dancing Crab on upper Wisconsin, then be taken to flick out at Tenley Town and, of course, gorge on ice cream with jimmies at Swensen’s afterwards.

Other key DC factors in my “training”: drumming in Malcolm X Park, my Aunt’s direction of the Street Theatre, consuming books from Revolution Books and Kramer Books & Afterwords in Dupont Circle.

But hey, all this clean-hedonistic living set the stage for my becoming a rock critic…so don’t knock it.

6, “Are You Experienced?” / Jimi Hendrix Experience

7, “Take It All In And Check It All Out” / Bill Withers

8. “Alone Again Or” / Love:

A rap on rock-crit with the master from my slave…Blighty expatriate Richard Peel is a manager at the Philadelphia Orchestra, possessed of a music degree, a veteran of teenage rock bands formed “to have a laugh with my mates,” and a general fan (of a lot of pop crap!). Richard digs Q magazine and is very fond of digital technology. He also went to school in Leeds with the lads from James and Damon Gough aka Badly Drawn Boy. Imagine all the following in (still posh-tinged!) Northern English accent (Slugger’s from Lancashire)…yep, y’all he be takin’ de piss. Nathen…!

Kandia Crazy Horse: So you’re just a regular person, a layperson with no particular expertise…?

Richard: In what?

Me: You’re not a professional critic?

Richard: No.

Me: So what is your “non-biased” opinion of rock critics?

Richard laughs his head off.

Richard: I know nowt.

Me: You have to elaborate. Saying “nowt” is not sufficient. You have to justify, you have to argue your case.

Richard: What did you ask, my opinion…Um…(adopts serious tone) For the most part they take themselves, their “art” way too seriously. And they like to pepper their reviews with snobbisms and in-jokes, things like that.

Laughs again.

Me: Is that because you went to this Leeds music college, whatever it’s called again ---

Richard: City-Of-Leeds-College-Of- Music.

Me: Yes, so you think you have superior knowledge of music…

Richard: No, I don’t think that…

Me: …that’s why you’re disdainful…

Richard: No, that’s not the reason at all. The reason for what I just said is due to the style of writing that most of them have. And there’s way too much jumpin’ on the bandwagon and the whole Emperor’s New Clothes with the rock critics…

Me: What d’you mean, Willis?

Richard: Well, whoever or whomever says “Oh, Beck has the best album of the year” and so people are like “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s a great album!” Even though it might be a pile of shit, people just say it because so-and-so at Rolling Stone says it’s great, so it must be great.

Me: But you were born in what, like 1969?

Richard: Correct.

Me: So you have actually been raised in the heyday of rock criticism. And you’re a music fan yes?

Richard: Very much so.

Me: You’re of the latter --- the Golden Era of Rock was your Youth, yes?

Richard laughs outright.

Me: So how is it that --- did you grow up in a vacuum? I know it was “The North” [of England] I know y’all were too busy digging (coal) pits but didn’t you read any music criticism?

Richard: Yeah…I would read Melody Maker and NME regularly.

Me: So if you read them regularly, you must have been influenced at some level by what was being said, even if you thought it was all shite, innit?

Richard: Influenced by the Mel? It’s just the same as I do now…if I read something and someone says “Oh Badly Drawn Boy has a great album blah blah blah” or this that and the other then I’ll have a listen to it.

Me: But you do think Badly Drawn Boy is a good album.

Richard: I do, yeah. But also, by the same token, just the same…I forget I really didn’t like [this record], blah blah blah, one of the best albums of the year, yadda yadda yadda, it’s this, it’s that…From the review and the description, I thought, Well awright I’ll take another listen to that. So I did and I thought it was a pile of toss!

Me: Yeah, I just read the Rock & Rap Confidential poll results last night and all your favorite records…Radiohead “Kid A” was number one, OutKast was number two (laughs)...and Cupcake Cutie was in there…

Richard: Deathcab For Cutie.

Me: …Supergrass…and I didn’t see Coldplay…but Badly Drawn Boy, all your other…Travis “The Man Who” --- Who he? I don’t know --- were all in there. So?

Richard: Uh huh. So what?

Me: So THOSE are tosser critics! That’s was an even more elitist sample than normally those things are but they all voted [for] records that YOU like. So that must mean they’re not all shite and they must know something. If they concur with your point of view!

Laughter.

Me: So you don’t like ANY critics? All those usual guys for the NME, peoples names that are tossed around. You can’t be arsed to --- Like you know their style…

Richard: I don’t want to know their names.

And so it went, into the wee hours (or until break was over). Richard Peel did think that Q mag had the best writing for plain folks, that it’s the only one he could be arsed to read. He does read classical music criticism with a keen eye, could name classical critics, however…although he protests it’s not down to respect. Unfortunately, despite all our ongoing discourse, he still loves shite BritPop, Nelly Furtado and the Backstreet Boys. He dismisses me as analog bitch. Currently, Richard’s making me a mini-disc of Buckingham-Nicks (shhhhhhh, Napster’s shut down!).

9. “Fame” / David Bowie & “Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved)” / James Brown:

FAMILY Apocrypha has it that Harry Belafonte aka Uncle Harry (whose sister is, in fact, my godmother) told my parents, upon our imminent birth (I’m a twin…Yes, there’s TWO of us) that one should be named Congo Brazzaville (my sister Camara) and one Congo Kinshasha (moi). Retrospectively, I’d counter they should’ve named us Pangloss and Polyglot, for all that intellectual arcane and cross-cultural, multi-lingual schooling have ruined our lives and broken our brains (sigh).

Think of this apologia as the Last Will & Testament of a Red-Black-and-Green diaper baby, subject to 1960s cultural nationalist experimentation, gone hopelessly awry. Top that, Touré! (actually, my parents knew his pops, Chico Neblett, too).

Which brings us back to Fame: beyond Uncle Harry --- who is by no means a rock- and-roller but whose “Banana Boat Song” is often cited as childhood guilty pleasure in Q (etc) year-end polls by the hardest core rock animals and who, as filmmaker, apparently used a monograph my mother wrote on “Pap” Singleton and Reconstruction Era black Exodusters as source material for Buck And The Preacher (great score by Benny Carter, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee) --- my parents knew Michael Woodlon, B-mo’ lensman who shot the cover of Donny Hathaway’s eponymous 1971 album (recently reissued on Rhino containing glorious “This Christmas” complete with false ending!!!). And my father attended Lincoln University with Gil Scott-Heron, so his platters (beloved of me and my aforementioned Aunt, Margaret) lived on the KLH and taught me about the tricksterism of this Capital City I was born into. Late South African poet/revolutionary Willy Kgositsile and Joe Neckbone cinema scholar Donald Bogle were actually in my father’s class. Moms knew the Supremes at one time and had Carla Thomas as a college neighbor.

There’s also a whole litany of boldface and obscure names from the overlapping Civil Rights and Black Power Movements they knew that I could list: Rap Brown, Sonia Sanchez, CLR James, Julius Lester, Michael Thelwell, Miriam Makeba when she was wed to Uncle Stokely, I mean Kwame Ture. None of this is to show off; it’s fact. It serves to make a point about the commonality of this thing “fame,” probably in your own life and neighborhood. And to put into question why, with all the best and brightest (black) minds of a generation surrounding me, I should end up chasing false constellations of (overwhelmingly white) men in London, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York?

Still, knowing all that crowd has been to no purpose precisely because dey’s their peeps (dock me for egregious misuse of Ebonics). Mostly, I just sat on those luminaries laps as a nappy-headed babe-at-arms and sometimes ate red Popsicles with their kids out on 14^th Street in springtime, when the black college marching bands, topped by Florida A&M, made their way Uptown ‘neath the beaming auspices of Da Mayor Marion Barry (uh, pre-crack, Mommy raised ducats for his first mayoral run…such were the times).

So, you might think I’d have been on the panel of Tavis Smiley’s recent “State Of The Black Union Forum” held in my hometown (SEE C-SPAN2 for airings…it’s funnier than This Is Spinal Tap), grinning like Reverend Chickenwing somewhere between jazz critic Stanley Crouch the Grouch and Farai Chideya as token to ancient black leadership finally giving the nod to Gen X movers and shakers? It is Black History Month, after all.

Hell no! I have found that we, the 20 & 30-something children of all those great revolutionary 60s types never get along when in company and are atrociously playa-hatin’. Besides, I was in my adopted home of Nueva York, to which the Pussy Galore gang had exo-star-dusted around the time I graduated my Massachusetts Deadhead boarding school (NMH, US equivalent to UK’s Bedales where the Jade Jaggers go and LA’s Crossroads with alums like Kate Hudson and Liv Tyler) and moved to The City to attend NYU and SVA (never saw Mario Sorrenti or Miz Herrema there; also ignored future indie roué Kevin Corrigan and the dude who won an Oscar for The Usual Suspects script but I did share class with Jared Leto and hobnobbed with the chicks from Thunderpussy). That Saturday of the Forum, I was not partying with the Crowes & hoi polloi at the Bank but instead spent delightful afternoon viewing David Gahr and Bert Stern jazz prints in SoHo and cloistered at Finyl Vinyl where Robert “tricked” me into buying a vinyl reissue of Bobby Womack’s Communication (YOU need it in your life now…and Brotha D needs to peep that “Fire & Rain” cover for guidance. Amen). Then caught Snooks that eve, where, as I say, ex-Pussy Galore gangster Cristina was in situ. Alas, no Trux.

So I guess I sorta came full circle: all those years of cultural flotsam and jetsam gathered in Chocolate City led my twin Camara to HATE rock (she’s the good revolutionary daughter, although she loves Bowie (in Thin White Duke guise < that’s post-colonial brainwashing) and thinks David Fricke is in the Encyclopedia under “Rock Critic.” Our erstwhile B-mo’ neighbor J. D. Considine also amuses her no end). It led me to LOVE rock über alles. (Can we take this show to Twinsburg, Ohio and get a witness?).

By age 22, when I gave my last Black Power speech to a disgruntled mixed audience, Rock & Roll roared up to fill the Void of my broken red-black-and-green heart. Yes, I would spend the next couple of years having quality time with then-dying Uncle Stokely/Kwame, repeatedly bumping into him at Richie Havens gigs at Knitting Factory and the Bottom Line. But what I’d already been doing whilst at film school took over: attending Black Rock Coalition meetings in Harlem, supporting their manifesto by appearing in Living Colour’s “Elvis Is Dead” clip (don’t blink twice), catching Kravitz’ first national tour and P-Funk Allstars at the old Roxy (where Steely Dan and Phoebe Snow mingled with us unwashed in the entrance queue < hey, I had to cite at least one critic’s darling (the Dan)…we’ll get to Big Star). I would spend every last tuppence of Downtown Apple students’ pittance/per diem on vinyl, shows and rock-style accoutrements, in that order.

Food? Pshaw! I wasn't as healthy-looking as you see me today or even as much as when I still got to stave off my scurvy from the Mule’s rider about 2 AM at Irving Plaza (note to Stefani: that was my real incentive for securing a laminate…and breaking Rock Crit Cardinal Rule #1-5 in process). If it’s truth that music be the food of love, Kandia, drone of workaday Downtown Manhattan may have been starving but the rockin’ nightworld incarnation of her could substitute for a Rubens nude, a Rabelaisian rock bitch for…the Allmans, the Crowes at the Beacon (dem belly full) played on and on.

Over this same period (’90-’95), I was so un-hep as to ignore the post-Pussy triumphs in Manhattan (although I lived at 1^st Avenue & 6^th with Deee-Lite DJ Towa Tei as neighbor --- hey, Lady Miss Kier’s from Tacoma Park too! --- never spied Hagerty & Herrema glitter duo striding home through the haze by dawn’s early light…I did see Herrema’s image with my Patroness Anita P everywhere on CK billboards). Instead, I was hangin’ with the disaffected, hip-hop embracing offspring of rich hippies who had grown up with the Beasties, drinking 40s & smoking blunts at Westbeth or in Madison Square Park (where John-John frequented the stupid dog run and Paper columnist/Russell Simmons-Spike Lee groupie Veronica Webb rollerbladed past the Flatiron). And Camara and I stayed in our Chelsea squat often, indelibly sparked by dry, British wit of Clive James’ “Fame In The Twentieth Century” mini-series. That’s where we copped the phrase “…livin’ in the Fame Country.” However endlessly amused by the perils and pratfalls of the Fatty Arbuckles of Hollywoodland, provoked by the personal trauma and extroverted fascism of Lindbergh, riled by a revision of the Beatles’ Swinging London, I failed to see how I so shortly, within a matter of 3 or 4 years, would find myself mired in rock’s version of Vanity Fair.

I, a good little Negro girl from Chocolate City, reared gently on books like Leo & Diane Dillon’s Ashanti To Zulu, Roberta Flack (DC schoolteacher) & Donny Hathaway (Chi-Town native who studied music theory & composition at DC’s Howard U) classic sides on Atlantic, and taught to dance to Al Green Hi records stacked on the console stereo of my babysitter from Lynchburg, VA….how is it that I found myself the titillating token of rednecks?

Perhaps one clue was, other than filling my-then hollow leg fulla pork ribs, tater salad and Rock Creek on those long ago Saturday afternoons, my favorite things to do were attending the annual Folklife Festival on the Mall, digging the exotic bearded men with corncob pipes break it down on banjos, autoharps and moonshine jugs. Then we’d wind-up in Georgetown where, after buying some books from Larry McMurtry at his shop behind the KB Cerebus cinema, we’d have pork chops at Martin’s, buy vintage vinyl from Orpheus Records and watch the young longhair hellions race their beat-up pickups along M Street, blasting the Allmans and tossing Bud bottles on the disapproving asphalt.

I secretly thrilled at this spectacle, beneath layers of baby fat replete with myriad logged hours of Stevie Wonder, Hugh Masekela and the Brothers Johnson. Somehow, I loved these badass rednecks acting out, flying the rebel flag high.

I was trained to walk a tightrope between loving my WASP and Southern Belle godmothers, externally digging the scenes of all colors, privately denouncing the actions of my mother’s good ole boy colleagues within The Beltway, knowing that, as we endured perennial Sundays of “60 Minutes” (tempered solely by fried chicken, cheez-E macaroni and sweet potato pie from Heller’s bakery on Mt. Pleasant), you could never ultimately trust whitefolks who were prone to do wrong and make the black man’s life Hell in this place we call Amerikkka.

Although my father loved Streisand (don’t ever play Guilty in my presence again) and loved country enough that Kenny Rogers’ “Lady” was the featured song at his second wedding, and my Georgia grandmother and her sisters sang Hank Williams songs to accompany their cooking with much fatback, I should have known better. I should not have delightfully grooved along the sporadic times I caught my beloved “Ramblin’ Man” on the radio whilst cruising the back wilds of Rock Creek Park, a High Falls rival in parts, nor done the funky version of the white metal boyz head bang to .38 Special in preadolescence when Camara and I finally defied our parents by scooting the dial up to DC’s rock station Q107 (of course, if we’d been kool, we’d have rocked a lot more DC101).

For the “How Green Was My Valley” minute: I was happiest as a child riding along the Southwest Freeway in the back of the Audi, looking up at the sky above the Potomac, as sun set and WKYS played everything from Steely Dan to Gladys Knight…I never wanted to go home and would silently will my mother to somehow stagnate along the riverside because I knew that once we passed the Kennedy Center, we were doomed.

Guess like Kane’s Rosebud, no one record can explain everything about a body, for it was not just the music Itself that held sway. I always thought I was unique (perhaps because countless male vinyl enthusiast friends of my father, Mom-an-Pop record shopkeepers and even hit men and critics have always been so surprised by me, as a young Negress and worst of all, woman --- or stone incredulous that I should know things in depth about their special, little boys’ fort preserve ie. rock-jazz-soul-race records biniss Arcana) in being a slavish devotee to liner notes and the ephemera of recordings and musical programmes --- only to move to New York and find myself floundering in a sea of snot-nosed boy-men who think Beck is a prophet (while ignoring the far more interesting Chocolate Genius & giving up to OutKast only because they have no choice: even the little girls understand Dre 3000….aside, aside: of course, this hasn’t stopped the Cock Rock Templar, metal-bred meatheads at rock radio from dropping the ball on “B.O.B.” remixed by Zack De La Rocha or no)…you know, the kind you encounter at record releases and roaming the Village Voice’s Editorial Dept. who so thoughtfully take time out from glad-handing Anthony DeCurtis/lobbying the Music Editor that they really can deliver 3,000 words tracing the Stagger Lee Myth from Charles “Buddy” Bolden to OutKast although the first time they ever saw a nigga was when they moved to Manhattan last year to study comp lit at Columbia…yep, that is take time out to oh-so thoughtfully explain to you, a Real Live Negro, in dry-ass, dung-beetle detail all about the hair-splitting differences and merits between the Meters and the Funky Meters and how Dr. John, before Beck, really was a prophet with more than chops and purloined hoodoo from Stagger Lee’s antebellum Wallace Fard Jean Gris-Gris but also got the reassuring nod from Fess. And it’s not even Black History Month.

So I loved Klipsch speakers, console stereos, the murky light which emanated from our SONY radio dials at nighttime, the inner sleeves displaying covers from a label’s roster, the yellow serpentine 45 adapters that the Black Crowes later made such clever use of, and the way a Norman Seeff album portrait could transform the shy Claudia Lennear into the Queen Of Heaven. Still, all those years of afternoons spent with my head attached like a Cheng of Siam to the speaker face’s Eng, allowing my inner PaPa Là-Bas to ferret out the 19^th shadow layer of Stevie Wonder’s “Look Around,” I was also enamored of hit men like Phil Walden Sr, Ahmet Ertegun, Arif Mardin, Willie Mitchell, Gamble & Huff, Lamont-Dozier-Holland, Bill Graham, Quincy Jones, Wally Heider and, above all, Jerry Wexler, who managed to both take care o’ biniss and cut them sides on ReRe. Hell, I ain’t ‘shamed to say it: I loved Papa Dip as much as Wonderlove and Sugarfoot.

Now, I said I went to Vanity Fair, like Meg March, yet unlike Marmee’s eldest I did not go out like Ziggy Stardust. It was odd to find myself at show after show, be it Irving Plaza left balcony, the Wetlands Preserve back exit or the venerable Beacon’s loge, getting happy with the industry wags and band entourages but never any writers. I think in all my New York period, I encountered fellow rock scribes 2 ½ times (the half was at Kravitz’ Live ’99 tour stop at Jones Beach, when Camara met some guy during the Crowes’ set who thought he knew my byline). Pretty much shows you the visibility and relevance of the rock critic, despite these heady days of Almost Famous and Bangs bios (I mean, Cameron Crowe’s only just got the screenplay nomination, ain’t he?). Could this fraternizing with the race record grunts be why I was slightly seduced by the whole twang and twaddle? Conversely, I also hung out a great deal with the security, the roadies, the house techs and the tapers --- what else is there for the perpetual lone Ethiopian Electric Emissary to do at shows, pray tell, those who would accuse me??? --- and suffered little ill effect. These are no longer the widespread days of “No Head, No Backstage Pass,” after all (although the white, female, online version of Jet, Groupie Central might say different): as Chris Rock said of pork chops in “Bring The Pain,” a roadie is your friend. [Big up to Brodie & Buddy & Mark Decker & Matt Busch and of course the now celluloid-immortal (ahem) Red Dawg!] Hey, it’s Black History Month, I can act niggerish and add a long-ass list of shout outs to the end of this screed if I wanna, so hush.

As I took leave of Fair Manhattan to hit 95 South towards Hot’lanta, the Dean of Rock Critics and my would-be mentor, Bob Christgau, took me for a rib sammich at Acme and warned me, as “Lester Bangs” does young “William Miller” in Crowe’s opus, not to commit Rock Crit Rule #1: Don’t fraternize with the musicians! If my dear Mel Brooks came correct in History Of The World Part 1, these tacit rock-crit rules musta been on the last tablet of the “Ten” Commandments. I have always been a goody-two snakeskin boots but even I believe rules are meant to be broken, if only mine by me. Anyhow, as indebted as I was to Bob for inciting me to peep then-nineteen year-old Derek T. Uptown at Manny’s and fighting for my right to stop worrying and love Lynyrd Skynyrd, his alarm was already too late. The Kongo Kid was bound for Dixie, to Macon really, and meant to romp all up in dem kudzu-festooned woods with the Kid Glove Enterprises gang and dip in the High Falls with Les Brers’ freaky-deke fringe luminaries.

Now we come to the thorny part, Intrepid Rock-crit Reader: as my aforementioned Hibernian Homey #2 accused me of, in print and in person, this critic’s been largely associated with a handful of bands. And can certainly be accused of not payin’ no mind to the pimply cuneiform writing writ-large on the pop cavewall: in the immortal words of Imhotep Lenny Kravitz, ROCK AND ROLL IS DEAD.  Regardless, circa 1990, uncool, l’il ole, Dixie Peach-once removed me was seduced not by a band but by that band’s standard-bearing of the Myth Of Rock & Roll. And that band, both in flesh and fancy, was the Black Crowes.

I ain’t gonna get all into the whys and wherefores of that; have run that voodoo down bigger and better before [peep the Stellar Gypsy Ink Archives if prurient interest demands]. Even though there were extreme few ranters and crowd-pleasers who were recipients of La Negresse’s fraternité (whom shall ever after and Amen remain nameless…the kid’s surname ain’t Des Barres, y’all), the Black Crowes got the best of my love by Flash Of The Spirit only. And in the humdrum tedium of everyday that is the rock critic’s true solitary and oft misunderstood work. Almost Famous made me laugh only when “William Miller” called the mediocre “Stillwater’s” music “incendiary” (a word I’d been expressly forbidden to use by my Editor yet find peppering every last article I read); and it made my heart move only when “Lester Bangs” admitted to the high lonesome lot of our profession (certainly was not amused when my precious Little Stevie’s “My Cherie Amour” was used to score the Quaalude Incident…Someone axe Cameron Crowe how a moving picture can be made about rock & roll and ain’t no black folks nor black music up in there? High Time for the Black Rock Coalition to pull a Jesse Jackson boycotting “Brown Sugar” or hold a summit on rock reparations in Memphis, like the race convention Courtland Cox and the SNCC delégués had in Stockholm back in ’66 with Sartre & De Beauvoir and ‘nem. Ain’t it time for the millennial reprise of the American Revolution wherein a lone group of BRC anarchists garbed in hair-metal glamface dump all copies of Almost Famous  into Boston Harbor with cries of “Crispus Attucks” and “Chuck Berry!”? I guess it says a lot for the Occident’s race relations, as did Jann Wenner’s Hitchcockian walk-on, that in the Year 2000, the eve of a new millennium, an audience-nation of boomers can be seduced by a flick that eulogizes the halcyon daze when all that threatening présence Africaine was leached out of rock, only to usher in the late 70s big business era utterly devoid of color which plagues us now and causes even superstars like Kravitz to perennially ponder why it’s still such an anomaly for a black man to play guitar. I mean, his own “niggas,” the Stones don’t let that brotha they got on bass be considered a true Rolling Stone™, but didn’t have no such qualms with Mick Taylor or Ron Wood. And don’t y’all be bringing up ole James Marshall Hendrix to me: all those guitar rags prop him up month after month on those glossy covers, just like how America feeds off the slave bones in her womb).

Anyhow, I never fraternized with the band that was my Muse. My affection was not for them per se but for their songs of the flesh and their typical ability to make them beautifully manifest against the odds (recollect that we’re firmly in the era of big business and LA rock scene poppycock, not the chimerical minute when groupies were benign, rock critics were only white male graduate students, fans were invited in droves to dance onstage and our beloved Skydog flourished to remake axe-story in his own image and drive the ladies wild with that fiery-blond hair). Some observers might claim I went to Vanity Fair because I was not sufficiently deferential to the rock & roll hierarchy. I did, and still do believe, I am as rock ‘n roll, if not more so, than Christopher Robinson. And I don’t need a twirling mic stand, publishing royalties and Cockney physiognomy to prove it (on this last tip, my steatopygia behind will do just as well…sho’nuff rock star Tamar-Kali is feeling me). If you haven’t been asleep during this rant, you might could see how a strong Africana rearing by rebel parents, if not quite black chauvinism, could cause one to possess a perspective somewhat less than admiring of the dominant culture’s incessant vampirism of The Blues and “colorful, real, hep Spade” Black Bottom pathology (aka Thug Life).

Remembered faintly is Chris Robinson claiming to some music journo that he could not tell time as a lad, could not tie his shoes but he knew how to go in the living room and make that stereo work…and oftener than not spun Sly & The Family Stone platters. Well, I don’t know if it’s down to the same babysitter who taught me to dance having dropped me on my head as a baby, but that was ME (insert here footage of Christian Bale’s glam loser in Velvet Goldmine pointing at “Maxwell Demon’s” image on the telly before his deadened parents). I was the same; I never needed an imaginary best friend because the KLH stereo was it, perhaps even more beloved than my twin, bad as it is to say. My father had no sons; he had me, musically at least, as the most apt pupil for whom Sylvester Stewart was revealed as the key to Black Genius likely above all. So I unwittingly trusted Christopher; if white boys like him and Ed Harsch had peeped behind The Veil to ken Les Mystères of Small Talk  (1974 Epic PE 32930) they might cease to be The Enemy…How could they be wrong? Robinson the Elder became from afar my trusted “Dirty South Dog” in relation akin to the American blacks’ love for “the last Negro prez-O-dent” Sweet Dick Willie Clinton. As a sororal twin who always longed for a brother, that is when I loved him best, that’s when he became my doppelgänger, my Cesare to act for me in the psychedelic rock & roll half-life we children of the 60s & 70s had all been reared in and persuaded to uphold dreams of long after Kurt Cobain ate his gun with Neil Young lyrics on his lips.

To finally answer Bob, two years later, I might not keep my distance from the Fame Country because tacit RCR #1 demands it. I’d be more prone to do it because I have always felt my mandate was to write for the fans, to level with them about just what they should spend their $18.00 on down at Tower Records (and don’t snipe at me about getting records for free…you’d be surprised how much I still have to pay for). You know, duh, fans, those obscure folk who bump up circulation and sell out sheds and chase you down the street and trade tapes to spread the Good Word and score you blow and bring home-made bagels to your tour bus and kiss your album art because it means so much to them. And it’s the fans that reward me, no one else (that money “Lester Bangs” offered “William Miller” to make Sammy run sounded like big ducats to me! Lest you be fooled, read the real Bangs’ (like the Real Roxanne?) hilarious “How To Be A Rock Critic” at Rockcritics.com --- THIS GIG AIN’T ONE YOU WANT TO PURSUE UNLESS YOU’RE WILLING TO DIE TRYING…and if you don’t believe that then you should be put in a bunker out West with that fine-ass Richard Meltzer until he makes you see reason). It’s the fans who deserve a good deal more real respect from the artists and the label heads. If you want to hide your essential cold-blood behind shades and keep everyone at arms length, go to Hollywoodland, Son-Of-A-Gun --- for all that every jackanapes there born after 1959 with “good” bone structure, possessed of a glam mullet and veteran of a few screenings of The Song Remains The Same thinks they can be a rock star now --- Jared Leto’s the latest with a Virgin set forthcoming; ain’t he heard William Shatner’s and Richard Burton’s classics yet or even my schoolmate Jamie Walters’ disc, for that matter? Rock & Roll is for and by the People. There’s this insipid rockshow on VH1 these days in which gushing fans and aloof “artistes” interact along the axis of that hierarchy. The commercial shows KISS’ Gene Simmons in full regalia saying --- beat, pause, deep tones --- “without the fans, we’re nothing.” Skeptical as I am of his sincerity, more bands, especially on the rock tip, would do well to at least admit this when no one’s looking or no critic’s big ears are in the vicinity. I do think it’s the fans, the everyday fuck-ups and junkies and tattoo artists and head shop owners and benevolent bikers; and my e-sister, The Silver Girl channeling Anita Pallenberg in her perfumed lair replete with Stones boots, feathers and floppy hats, signing manifestos to me “Gone To Persia xxx” to cheer me up in my nocturnal perambulations of rockcrit skullfuck; and Divine Patronesses like Mama Louise down in Macon at the H&H that spur the Rock World go-‘round, that make the Myth of Rock & Roll worth living and maintaining. Worth fighting for when all and sundry are so goddam hasty to put nails in the music’s posthumously Gorey-rendered coffin. Ever seen the hovel of a rock critic? Look like some medieval, scholarly monk’s cell in a vanitas don’t it? Yet I, we still got to struggle on or believe nothing and invite The Abyss because for sure me, Cameron Crowe and other name-checked enemies herein all believe that Rock & Roll is worth saving….we were all transfigured (if not actually saved) by it at a precocious time when --- to quote my Queen rock-crit forebear Patricia Kenneally-Morrison’s husband --- 3-minute praise-songs on vinyl did like “ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.”

Like De Lizard King, I can come correct in many faces and tongues, Keltic, indio, blue-gum at will. That’s the true wonder of the New World. And the marvel of the sense of freedom, that Liberty is truth-soundtracked by the best of Rock & Soul music. In the deep heart of our country, called Amorica by Chris Robinson, Rock & Roll (which like vodun enlivens Its’ host) is the very air breathe. I am a young, African-Native American rock bitch with a drop o’ Scots and I dwell in the City Of Brotherly Love, buoyed by the roots rock of the brothers in Marah…sadly resident in the very Cradle Of Liberty whose ills, like the murk and madness which also plagues Rock & Roll, perennially make a horrid lie of our brave new world. Fame and its’ contents are only the most prominent part of the ugly American Picture Of Dorian Gray. And, in the smaller sphere of rock, We the People are many of us guilty of spreading such bad air that this once-green dystopia of ours resembles the hedonistic ruin of the Old World. America should not be Babel nor Babylon.

Remember if you can that our native tongue Rock & Roll should speak Truth to Power.

10: “Rock & Roll Doctor” / Little Feat:

Don’t rightly know if this wandering, inchoate rant has succeeded at its’ imposture of a revolutionary manifesto of sorts. Forgive the attempt: it’s Black History Month. This is more like: Ten Faces Of A Rock Critic (nod to Brer Skip Gates). But this is the best your, po’ brokedown stellarfunk not so-supernova can do at present. The aim is to invite debate and increase discourse, not to lay down any laws. Will you let me be an outlaw for your love? (aha! Big Star reference).

This critic is going down on the stultifera navis (that’s “Ship Of Fools” for you fans of the Garcia-Hunter songbook) of those prone to narcissistic, rosy dreams of Youth. Still, perhaps you’ll find this message in a bottle, as you part the murky waters of the millennial zeitgeist, and seek to fight the good fight for Rock & Roll “purity” (not in the Leni Riefenstahl aesthetic sense and a pox on Wilhelm Reich and ‘nem).

 I don’t necessarily hold any of the truths herein to be self-evident but it is an attempt to tell the dying breed of rock-a-rollers, in hip-hop parlance: Keep Ya Head up!

Ain’t it funny how blackfolks’ slang for the sex act turned out to provide such flesh-spirit-soul pleasure for the entire world?

Snooks Eaglin again showed me the way forward, his music evidence of Truth the Light.

Last Saturday, swinging through Manhattan’s traditional musicians’ haven Greenwich Village, I sho’nuff went easy into that good night.