There is something and practically everything about this video, it's energy and style, which captures and characterizes the zeal of my youth. From the very beginning, Nile and Bernard were aesthetic heroes of mine. And although I had been and continue to be a devotee of the funk in whose ultimate expression, existentially speaking, is found in the personna of Larry Blackmon; I still prefer, overall, the Chic vibe.
As with En Vogue and Sade, I am wont to give these images to my daughters and I will.
An old story I used to tell regards my move to New York and looking for peers in the Big Apple. I asked about to find the equivalent of View Park there - a fairly exclusive enclave of the African American privileged class. Landing in blue collar Brooklyn I asked where are all the bourgie women at? They said, "long Island." OK which part of Long Island, and they said everywhere. In 1992 I was unable to find 'the' spot - word was that all the blackfolks who got above the grind, just integrated and disappeared. There was no equivalent, in New York according to my sources, of Atlanta's Nisky Lake. I wasn't looking for, as one might imagine, some ultra-exclusive sort of clubbiness. Or perhaps I was, so that I could hang snidely at its periphery. You know how the saying goes - don't marry for money, just hang around rich folks and marry for love. I only occasionally bumped into outliers of that crowd. Once on Martha's Vineyard I met descendants of the original black servants of the Vanderbilts. I never quite found my peeps, and my aims as an artist and scientist troubled the entire process. I eventually married and found myself somewhat estranged from my old Talented Tenth coterie.
Occasionally, although I think it would be more frequently had my children not achieved leadership and recognition within this largely white community, I find it regrettable that my kids had not grown up in the tradition of the black bourgeoisie. There have been occasions when my wife and I consider joining Mocha Moms, 100 Black Men, The Links and various other social organizations with auxiliaries nearby. Somehow we never get around to it, we find excuses not to spend the money or make the effort.
Theoretically, I assert that black culture is transparent. There are no black things that other non-blacks cannot understand. Last evening as I went to hang with my best buddy and some friends, one from out of the country, remarked how fascinating it was that we mixed in such a range of Ebonics in our speech. We were kidding around and faking any number of accents (my favorite being a tech support guy from Mumbai named 'Chad' trying to get jiggy upon discovery that his white-sounding customer is actually African American) and granted her an honorary black status, which is a great deal more subtle than I'm making it sound for the sake of brevity. Theory and practice are two very different things, and the camaraderie of deep natives in the soul cannot be approximated by any other social interaction.
I may satisfy myself that my children need only the cream of my old blackness, and certainly that's all they're likely to get in the house, outside of the cautionary tales I may tell from time to time bringing up hoodrat archetypes. I don't need them to be little clones or concerned about the fate of the identity of my generation. They have the rhythms of the Isley Brothers songs and have been baptized. The Chic Mystique is YouTubed. It may not be so hard after all.
Recent Comments