I recently read a good autobiography called Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America. This isn't a book review, especially seeing as how I already wrote a long book review for it and I don't have the desire to write another one here. But there was something in the book that's worth mentioning here, something that had no place in the academic paper.
A comedic relief moment was when our protagonist, Nathan McCall, steals a car, and finds a box full of 8-track tapes. He describes the tapes as "white person music." He goes into detail about how his mind was blown while listening to Dark Side of the Moon—partially because he was high as shit when he listened to it, partially because who wouldn't have their mind blown while listening to Dark Side of the Moon for the first time, but mostly because he simply hadn't been exposed to any of this shit up until that point. Music was segregated. He was mostly listening to stuff like Marvin Gaye (see the title of the book) and the Super Fly soundtrack.
And I'm sure it was the same way on the other side of the cultural divide. I've never heard my parents talk about listening to any Black-made music in their youth. My dad's love of Stevie Wonder comes off as a course-correction sometimes. I feel like asking them about any of the Black-made music of today gets a response that basically says "Why would I listen to something like that?" and so on. But the boomers have also created this sort of revisionist history in pop culture, and have attempted to erase this truth. When you hear soul music soundtracking a white coming of age story set in the Summer of 196x, there's a 90% chance those kids from that era weren't actually listening to that music.
Which makes me fucking sad, honestly. It doesn't make me angry, per se, because I wasn't alive during a time when music was segregated, and I have never had to steal a car to listen to music made by visionaries who don't look like me. I'm just sad for those who came before me. I live in a world where I can listen to whatever the fuck I want on my own time. In other words, I can't imagine living in a world in which it was not culturally appropriate for me to listen to Otis Redding.
I knew the name, I guess I knew the voice, and I definitely knew that he wrote and recorded the #1 hit "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" and then almost immediately died in a plane crash. That's the extent of my Otis Redding knowledge before this week. I purposefully chose the last album Redding released while alive, i.e. not the "Dock of the Bay" album, so as to not be distracted by narrative. It was... man, it was something alright. This is some good shit.
Confirmed: Otis Redding is one of the best vocalists of all time. Confirmed: soul music, in this form (god, I love this particular style of soul that features a big voice and an even bigger brass section and how they trade licks every other measure), is fantastic. Confirmed: his version of "Day Tripper" might be the best Beatles cover I've ever heard (at least since the Feelies did one for me earlier in the year, anyway). Confirmed: there is a way to be tasteful in a song about the beauty of overweight women (do you hear that, Mika?!). Confirmed: you should start here at Dictionary of Soul if you were like me and you don't know anything about Otis Redding beyond his one hit.
We're just so lucky to be able to kick back and enjoy one of the greats, regardless of color or culture or creed. It wasn't always like this. If I had gone my entire life and not gotten to know Otis Redding, at least a little bit, I'd burn America to the ground. Fuck the boomers. Otis Redding forever.
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