I understand that, for the most part, those of you who visit this page do it because you like my music. I’m grateful for that, and try as best as a human being can to not take that for granted. I also believe part of what you like about my music, at least some of you, is what it communicates, what it articulates, and that it does its best to communicate and articulate those things directly, and, wherever possible, with some degree of empathy, some effort at understanding the irresolute, complicated gray area in and around us, which I believe is scary, and is actually more abundant than life’s scant inarguable certainties, its primary colors supposedly pitched above, below, around. I feel like I rarely see those, or trust them, and envy people who do. I’m not an especially political person - I’m a lot more interested in social justice than politics - or an activist in what I consider to be the strict sense of that word. As far as public figures go, I’m certainly not a celebrity, or anything close. I’m a person/artist/entertainer with a platform at the corner of a niche, and I try to take that exactly as seriously as it’s to be taken. I say all that because, what I’m saying here will send some of you away. Simply retweeting news in the past week without editorial commentary has done that already, which is, of course, fine, and doesn’t even rate on the scale of importance given what we’re discussing here. I’ll be sorry to see you go, but I won’t try to talk you back in. I’ve felt this way since at least Make The Clocks Move: there is no shortage of songwriters who never address/discuss/acknowledge this stuff, and if listening to one who does, even in roughly 10% of his recorded output, is distasteful to you, I absolutely understand, and we can agree to disagree on what my role’s meant to be, etc. So: I come from New York cops. My dad, his dad, two of his brothers, several of my cousins, friends of our family. I love them. I remember being confused when I fell in love with Nirvana and saw a sticker on Kurt Cobain’s guitar that said, “Vandalism: As Beautiful As A Rock In A Cop’s Face.” I was 12, and I couldn’t square that initially my impressions of my family, and the men & women I’d met through my family. It was a real fraught, dissonant moment. Why would anyone want to throw a rock at my dad’s face? I grew up some, and found myself realizing why that sticker existed, and empathizing with the rock throwers sometimes. I felt guilty about that, some vague sense of betrayal, an urge to defend police even in situations where their actions seemed excessive, wrong. It took time to understand more than one thing can be true at the same time. I don’t believe all cops are bad. Some are; some aren’t. They’re People. But I also don’t believe that is what’s at issue here. Because individual people are never all one thing or another, on a moral or any other scale. But systems rot, systems mutate, systems corrupt. And, to me, that’s what this is. What’s at issue is the basic value of a human life in an American society that’s gone bad in its prezteling efforts to protect power and privilege at any cost, and when cops are quasi-militarized and deployed to that end, and people end up killed in highly questionable-to-outrageous circumstances as a result, well….that’s bad. Because people of color are also People, and People are scared, and angry, and exhausted. People are tired of seeing their kids, friends, family members killed, hurt, jailed at mind-boggling rates of disproportionality. People are wounded, fed up with seeing power abused, with seeing the gap grow wider between their reality and whatever shreds of the American Dream are left dangling at a distant, increasingly-hypothetical horizon. They’re sick of seeing injustice manifest itself in dead bodies, empty political rhetoric, no follow through, no protection, no change. I’m a straight white male, and I don’t know what it’s like not to be. I should never be the loudest voice in this conversation. I think we (people like me) all have deep listening to do if we have any hope at making the people who aren’t us feel safe, valued, equal in this society. We have real & increased responsibility to bear as the power brokers, which we are, and have been. Anyone arguing otherwise, suggesting that we’re a “post-racial” society etc., is skirting offensiveness at worst and…sticking to a willful & highly selective understanding of America’s history, at best. It’s not hard for me to empathize with the outrage of a person who watches their loved one murdered. And it’s not hard for me to empathize theoretically with someone making a catastrophic, fear-based, over-reactionary fight-or-flight error in judgement in the heat of a pitched moment that has violent, horrifying results. But things don’t happen theoretically, or in a vacuum; they happen in context, bundled in absorbed information, under behavior-warping cultural weight. And this is why we are where we are. We don’t value all lives the same in this society. And until we do, we’re in trouble, in our streets, in our souls. There’s no bowtie here, no knot to tie neatly. It’s too brutally, endlessly sad and messy for that. My thoughts, my heart, are with Eric Garner’s family, and focused on the belief in our better nature, even when it is, at times, so difficult to see.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 07:28:14 +0000
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