Bettye LaVette: The High Priestess of Love and Death
04/18/10 10:40 AM
I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be Afro-American, i.e., born to the culture of American descendants of African slaves. We Americans, black and white, have been taught to reduce it to a set of personal ticks (speech patterns, handshakes, musical taste) and socio-economic caste. Yes, black Americans are taught in the same schools, read the same texts, watch the same media as whites; and we have never held ourselves in sufficient esteem to codify our culture and teach it to our children free of the majority’s blood-splattered filter, as have Jews, some Asian cultures and others.
This used to be easier. When I was younger and the remnants of legal segregation still stood like the architecturally spectral twin tower remnants against the background smoke of devastation, when we had our own music that the majority often ignored and mostly attended our own schools, sheer immersion helped us recognize and reinforce our cultural distinctiveness. No, we never had the luxury of freeing ourselves from the toxins of the majority’s view of us, but we had refuge from it within a society that the most privileged of us could consider equal to, but separate from the majority’s.
Now, we swim in a bigger pond. The levies around our sub-cultural world shattered in the sixties for the better and the worse. Our cultural ether blended with that of the mainstream and the result was inevitable: We were diluted. The majority world overtook the best of ours. We adapted to it. The most obvious examples of our cultural uniqueness now worked for the majority, and not for us. The music grew more generic, the singers less honest, less unique and more emptily histrionic. The writers largely disappeared because venues became less interested in our peculiar worldviews now that we--the “black problem”--had been neutralized. We now mainly speak with the polite vagueries and platitudes of the ‘op-ed columnist,’ or the cloying emptiness of the self-help entrepreneur.
When it comes to music I have clung to jazz as one of the few outposts where—and this may sound odd—what I recognize in my soul as of me appears. Abbey Lincoln helped me through the 90s. With collections like “The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born,“ and “Metamorphosen,“ Branford Marsalis proved himself a master. An extraordinary young player like Jason Moran gives me hope for the future.
Then someone comes along and reminds me of what we can do in other forms. Bettye LaVette has been around since she was a teenager in the early sixties, largely ignored. She never, as she put it, “crossed over.” Opportunities were lost, missed, unrecognized or unfulfilled. Then, in 2005 she released “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise.” The great Joe Henry produced. The songs came from a slew of fine female writers: Aimee Mann, Dolly Parton, Joan Armatrading, Lucinda Williams. Immediately, that voice slapped you. Unashamedly aged, rough, ragged and under absolute control. On the song “Just Say So,” she proved that she could find depths of longing and desperation in a lyric that the songwriters probably didn’t even know existed.
She then released the brilliant “Scene of the Crime” with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The first words she sings are “I’ve been this way too long to change now,” and goddamn! Real instruments slash in the background (Spooner fucking Oldham plays the organ for god’s sake) instead of today’s studio mixing board wash. This is the nastiest, dirtiest blues you are gonna hear. This is what singers like Janis Joplin dreamed they can be. This is music for folks willing to travel down the devil’s own road because they suspect that God went thatta way. She takes Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” and deconstructs, reconstructs and reinvents it into something simply devastating. Not since Lena Horne chewed, spat and then licked up the remains of Charles Aznavour’s “Yesterday When I Was Young” have you witnessed such a work of musical alchemy.
That is, unless you happened to catch The Kennedy Center Honors presentation with Pete Townsend among the honorees. She walked on the empty stage, a slim figure, a simple gown draping it, and then the piano played a simple descending figure, and she moaned and growled “only love can make it rain like when the beach is kissed by the sea. Only love can make it rain like the sweat of two lovers laying the fields” You felt the silence in the hall. Rapt attention would be paid. There was nothing else but this voice and this music, an intensity almost hard to bear because it obviously held such truths for the singer, and for the rest of us. “Love,” she begged, “reign over me...” with a need that would shame a junkie. She turns the bridge into a blues etude and then she begs, pleads and finally demands, exhorting the sky to do her bidding, “Love, reign o’er me.” Pete Townsend sat in awe, as did we all. (Video here.)
This performance closes LaVette’s latest and perhaps greatest. Called “Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook,” (releasing May 25th) she takes tunes from The Beatles, The Moody Blues, George Harrison and others and performs her magic. There’s nothing of the archival about these performances. She is appropriately disrespectful of the original and respectful of her audience to make these her own. Sometimes, she does so to such an extent that it takes repeated listenings to wipe the originals from your head. She strips the oft-covered “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” of what every other singer has kept as its melodramatic highpoint. That’s not what she’s after. She’s digging a deeper truth out of it. It’s astonishing to hear what depths can be found in these songs; Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” a country-blues lament; The Stones’ “Salt of the Earth,” without its snarking irony; The Beatles’ “The Word,” a churchy revival with a 70s-era chucka chucka guitar.
The pacing here is astonishing. Each song adds to the one preceding it. If find myself living this record. LaVette inhabits these tunes, wraps her skin around them like some kind of song-eating monster. There’s something so deeply human going on here that it’s incantatory, so distinct that it’s indelible. So true that it dares to be ugly sometimes. So right that it can cause you pain.
There is something distinctly of me going on here: an Afro-American woman doing with a foundation in rhythm and blues what only such a woman could do. And what she does is gut-wrenching. This is the magic that music can make, and magic comes at a cost. If you’re looking for some disposable, distracting background, keep going. It’s not here. This is the tent in the carnival it kind of scares you to enter. It’s the gypsy woman who, from the look in her eye, you fear knows too much and might tell you something you dread to hear. You are entering the presence of Bettye LaVette, the High Priestess of Love and Death, and she demands that you honor all aspects of each. She demands, and delivers, nothing less of herself.
This used to be easier. When I was younger and the remnants of legal segregation still stood like the architecturally spectral twin tower remnants against the background smoke of devastation, when we had our own music that the majority often ignored and mostly attended our own schools, sheer immersion helped us recognize and reinforce our cultural distinctiveness. No, we never had the luxury of freeing ourselves from the toxins of the majority’s view of us, but we had refuge from it within a society that the most privileged of us could consider equal to, but separate from the majority’s.
Now, we swim in a bigger pond. The levies around our sub-cultural world shattered in the sixties for the better and the worse. Our cultural ether blended with that of the mainstream and the result was inevitable: We were diluted. The majority world overtook the best of ours. We adapted to it. The most obvious examples of our cultural uniqueness now worked for the majority, and not for us. The music grew more generic, the singers less honest, less unique and more emptily histrionic. The writers largely disappeared because venues became less interested in our peculiar worldviews now that we--the “black problem”--had been neutralized. We now mainly speak with the polite vagueries and platitudes of the ‘op-ed columnist,’ or the cloying emptiness of the self-help entrepreneur.
When it comes to music I have clung to jazz as one of the few outposts where—and this may sound odd—what I recognize in my soul as of me appears. Abbey Lincoln helped me through the 90s. With collections like “The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born,“ and “Metamorphosen,“ Branford Marsalis proved himself a master. An extraordinary young player like Jason Moran gives me hope for the future.
Then someone comes along and reminds me of what we can do in other forms. Bettye LaVette has been around since she was a teenager in the early sixties, largely ignored. She never, as she put it, “crossed over.” Opportunities were lost, missed, unrecognized or unfulfilled. Then, in 2005 she released “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise.” The great Joe Henry produced. The songs came from a slew of fine female writers: Aimee Mann, Dolly Parton, Joan Armatrading, Lucinda Williams. Immediately, that voice slapped you. Unashamedly aged, rough, ragged and under absolute control. On the song “Just Say So,” she proved that she could find depths of longing and desperation in a lyric that the songwriters probably didn’t even know existed.
She then released the brilliant “Scene of the Crime” with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The first words she sings are “I’ve been this way too long to change now,” and goddamn! Real instruments slash in the background (Spooner fucking Oldham plays the organ for god’s sake) instead of today’s studio mixing board wash. This is the nastiest, dirtiest blues you are gonna hear. This is what singers like Janis Joplin dreamed they can be. This is music for folks willing to travel down the devil’s own road because they suspect that God went thatta way. She takes Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” and deconstructs, reconstructs and reinvents it into something simply devastating. Not since Lena Horne chewed, spat and then licked up the remains of Charles Aznavour’s “Yesterday When I Was Young” have you witnessed such a work of musical alchemy.
That is, unless you happened to catch The Kennedy Center Honors presentation with Pete Townsend among the honorees. She walked on the empty stage, a slim figure, a simple gown draping it, and then the piano played a simple descending figure, and she moaned and growled “only love can make it rain like when the beach is kissed by the sea. Only love can make it rain like the sweat of two lovers laying the fields” You felt the silence in the hall. Rapt attention would be paid. There was nothing else but this voice and this music, an intensity almost hard to bear because it obviously held such truths for the singer, and for the rest of us. “Love,” she begged, “reign over me...” with a need that would shame a junkie. She turns the bridge into a blues etude and then she begs, pleads and finally demands, exhorting the sky to do her bidding, “Love, reign o’er me.” Pete Townsend sat in awe, as did we all. (Video here.)
This performance closes LaVette’s latest and perhaps greatest. Called “Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook,” (releasing May 25th) she takes tunes from The Beatles, The Moody Blues, George Harrison and others and performs her magic. There’s nothing of the archival about these performances. She is appropriately disrespectful of the original and respectful of her audience to make these her own. Sometimes, she does so to such an extent that it takes repeated listenings to wipe the originals from your head. She strips the oft-covered “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” of what every other singer has kept as its melodramatic highpoint. That’s not what she’s after. She’s digging a deeper truth out of it. It’s astonishing to hear what depths can be found in these songs; Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” a country-blues lament; The Stones’ “Salt of the Earth,” without its snarking irony; The Beatles’ “The Word,” a churchy revival with a 70s-era chucka chucka guitar.
The pacing here is astonishing. Each song adds to the one preceding it. If find myself living this record. LaVette inhabits these tunes, wraps her skin around them like some kind of song-eating monster. There’s something so deeply human going on here that it’s incantatory, so distinct that it’s indelible. So true that it dares to be ugly sometimes. So right that it can cause you pain.
There is something distinctly of me going on here: an Afro-American woman doing with a foundation in rhythm and blues what only such a woman could do. And what she does is gut-wrenching. This is the magic that music can make, and magic comes at a cost. If you’re looking for some disposable, distracting background, keep going. It’s not here. This is the tent in the carnival it kind of scares you to enter. It’s the gypsy woman who, from the look in her eye, you fear knows too much and might tell you something you dread to hear. You are entering the presence of Bettye LaVette, the High Priestess of Love and Death, and she demands that you honor all aspects of each. She demands, and delivers, nothing less of herself.
Bob McDonnell Blows the Racist Dog Whistle Really Really Loud
04/06/10 04:05 PM
Think of it a “Black History Month” for proto-Klansmen. It’s like a Freshman Young Republican hanging a white hooded effigy from the second story dorm room window as a conservative career builder.
Let’s consider: We are regularly invited to “celebrate” black history month (absurd as the idea may be in its conception and execution). Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell did not ask his state’s citizens to “celebrate” “Confederate History Month.” He simply “declared” its existence, leaving the celebratory aspect aspirated to the level of the dog whistle (an apt metaphor considering his audience).
If McDonnell had not wanted to be incendiary, if he had not wanted to suggest sympathy with the ideals of the confederacy, if he had not wanted to evoke an opposition to the idea of celebrating black equality, if he had, as stated, simply wanted to ensure that “a defining chapter in Virginia’s history should not be forgotten,“ he could have proclaimed “Civil War History Month,” and achieved that end. Instead, he uses language that, by association, inevitably implies ‘celebrating’ the confederacy, celebrating a world in which white men ruled black ones and fought for the right to enslave them, celebrating treason by the southern states, celebrating the instigation of a bloody war for the right to maintain a way of life both perverted and decadent.
McDonnell has a long history as an arch conservative. (And yes, in today’s America and today’s Republican party, “conservative” implies at least the passive recognition of the acceptability of race hatred; for instance, how many conservatives expressed outrage over this?) During his campaign for governor, McDonnell’s Regent University thesis came to light:
At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples. - The Washington Post
McDonnell has clearly staked his conservative bona fides on abortion, homosexuality and women’s right. He had yet to imply his sympathy for white supremacy. Having done so, I sure he feels politically and personally complete.
Let’s consider: We are regularly invited to “celebrate” black history month (absurd as the idea may be in its conception and execution). Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell did not ask his state’s citizens to “celebrate” “Confederate History Month.” He simply “declared” its existence, leaving the celebratory aspect aspirated to the level of the dog whistle (an apt metaphor considering his audience).
If McDonnell had not wanted to be incendiary, if he had not wanted to suggest sympathy with the ideals of the confederacy, if he had not wanted to evoke an opposition to the idea of celebrating black equality, if he had, as stated, simply wanted to ensure that “a defining chapter in Virginia’s history should not be forgotten,“ he could have proclaimed “Civil War History Month,” and achieved that end. Instead, he uses language that, by association, inevitably implies ‘celebrating’ the confederacy, celebrating a world in which white men ruled black ones and fought for the right to enslave them, celebrating treason by the southern states, celebrating the instigation of a bloody war for the right to maintain a way of life both perverted and decadent.
McDonnell has a long history as an arch conservative. (And yes, in today’s America and today’s Republican party, “conservative” implies at least the passive recognition of the acceptability of race hatred; for instance, how many conservatives expressed outrage over this?) During his campaign for governor, McDonnell’s Regent University thesis came to light:
At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples. - The Washington Post
McDonnell has clearly staked his conservative bona fides on abortion, homosexuality and women’s right. He had yet to imply his sympathy for white supremacy. Having done so, I sure he feels politically and personally complete.
Putting Aside a Scandal-Ridden Church, and Other Childish Things
04/03/10 05:24 PM
As a child, the Catholic Church overwhelms you. It vice-grips the imagination. High ceilings ringing with stentorian echoes, all blood-red and gilt, intoxicatingly incensed and aromatic, dotted with black and red-robed men who seemingly glide a few millimeters above the earth we mere mortals walk. Secretly, they "transmogrify" matter in rituals creaking and venerable with age and import.
It's like fairy tales with princes and dragons evoking lands long lost and golden -- touched with the luster of the unattainable. I went to Catholic schools back in the day when witch-garbed nuns shamelessly beat students with rulers if they failed the flash card quiz. The schools imposed a militaristic authoritarianism, enabled with outright brutality both physical and psychological. They beat you, promised heaven and threatened hell. Again, a perfect exploitation of a child's simplicity; great reward through heaven, unendurable pain through hell, and an absolute arbiter of your fate in the Church and its minions. Mindless authoritarianism at its most pure.
As I matured, I saw past the costumes and stage paint. The very aspects so entrancing to a child became repellent to a teen: The insistence on men of flesh and blood being greater than other men and snatching the right to dictate to them. Black and raised by southern parents, the notion of the god-made elect lording over the unwashed masses repulsed me. It bore such resemblance to home-grown American race hatred and the despicable behavior so many whites believed that god gave them the right to sling at me.
Further examinations into church history and doctrine only deepened my alienation. An institution that grants itself the power of "infallibility" was hilariously absurd on its face. An organization that insisted that I submit to its functionaries' wills was offensive in the extreme. My decision was easy. This institution did not have the kindness, the intellectual rigor, or the moral right to guide my walk through this life in any way.
The years worth of priest-abuse scandals and the Church's reaction to them only underlines my point. Now, with evidence that the current Pope enabled the rape of children by his priests through inaction, it is appropriate to examine the Church's suitability to dictate morality and spirituality to the rest of the world.
The Catholic Church is a government. Vatican City is an independent city-state with the Pope as its absolute monarch in which cardinals hold legislative authority. It is also a bank; the Vatican Bank is worth billions and faces accusations of money laundering while sitting on a past worthy of a particularly lurid pulp thriller.
Which of the sane among us would appoint politicians and bankers to guide our spiritual development? A creation of St. Paul that invokes the thin veil of Christ as self-justification, the Church is an international financial and governmental institution with a past both corrupt and bloody. Popes have instigated and financed unprovoked wars, committed torture and incest (among the supposedly celibate you might call that a 'twofer'), and sat mute in the face of the deportation of Jews by the Nazis. See here and, for a more sprightly take, here.
Yet, Church doctrine declares that itself and its Pope can be infallible. And the current Pope, in his tone deaf, tommy-gun barrage of pathetic and/or repellant self-defenses displays the ungodly arrogance of the rich and powerful when faced with facts that threaten their empires.
The institution that turned a blind eye to its priests, its holy men, serially raping children is the same institution that insists that we suffer unimaginable agonies for as long as possible as we die. It is the same institution that tells a woman that she must sacrifice her health, he family's well being, her sanity, her aspirations or even her life to the single-celled blastocyst she carries in side her as a result of being viciously raped in an alley. It is the same institution that insists that men or women loving each another is offensive to god. I have no doubt that such love is an offense to their god -- the one who condones child rape by the extravagantly self-titled and self-indulged.
After a point, an institution so besmirched by sin (by its own definition), cruelty and scandal must lose all right to claim moral and spiritual authority. That point has come.
It's like fairy tales with princes and dragons evoking lands long lost and golden -- touched with the luster of the unattainable. I went to Catholic schools back in the day when witch-garbed nuns shamelessly beat students with rulers if they failed the flash card quiz. The schools imposed a militaristic authoritarianism, enabled with outright brutality both physical and psychological. They beat you, promised heaven and threatened hell. Again, a perfect exploitation of a child's simplicity; great reward through heaven, unendurable pain through hell, and an absolute arbiter of your fate in the Church and its minions. Mindless authoritarianism at its most pure.
As I matured, I saw past the costumes and stage paint. The very aspects so entrancing to a child became repellent to a teen: The insistence on men of flesh and blood being greater than other men and snatching the right to dictate to them. Black and raised by southern parents, the notion of the god-made elect lording over the unwashed masses repulsed me. It bore such resemblance to home-grown American race hatred and the despicable behavior so many whites believed that god gave them the right to sling at me.
Further examinations into church history and doctrine only deepened my alienation. An institution that grants itself the power of "infallibility" was hilariously absurd on its face. An organization that insisted that I submit to its functionaries' wills was offensive in the extreme. My decision was easy. This institution did not have the kindness, the intellectual rigor, or the moral right to guide my walk through this life in any way.
The years worth of priest-abuse scandals and the Church's reaction to them only underlines my point. Now, with evidence that the current Pope enabled the rape of children by his priests through inaction, it is appropriate to examine the Church's suitability to dictate morality and spirituality to the rest of the world.
The Catholic Church is a government. Vatican City is an independent city-state with the Pope as its absolute monarch in which cardinals hold legislative authority. It is also a bank; the Vatican Bank is worth billions and faces accusations of money laundering while sitting on a past worthy of a particularly lurid pulp thriller.
Which of the sane among us would appoint politicians and bankers to guide our spiritual development? A creation of St. Paul that invokes the thin veil of Christ as self-justification, the Church is an international financial and governmental institution with a past both corrupt and bloody. Popes have instigated and financed unprovoked wars, committed torture and incest (among the supposedly celibate you might call that a 'twofer'), and sat mute in the face of the deportation of Jews by the Nazis. See here and, for a more sprightly take, here.
Yet, Church doctrine declares that itself and its Pope can be infallible. And the current Pope, in his tone deaf, tommy-gun barrage of pathetic and/or repellant self-defenses displays the ungodly arrogance of the rich and powerful when faced with facts that threaten their empires.
The institution that turned a blind eye to its priests, its holy men, serially raping children is the same institution that insists that we suffer unimaginable agonies for as long as possible as we die. It is the same institution that tells a woman that she must sacrifice her health, he family's well being, her sanity, her aspirations or even her life to the single-celled blastocyst she carries in side her as a result of being viciously raped in an alley. It is the same institution that insists that men or women loving each another is offensive to god. I have no doubt that such love is an offense to their god -- the one who condones child rape by the extravagantly self-titled and self-indulged.
After a point, an institution so besmirched by sin (by its own definition), cruelty and scandal must lose all right to claim moral and spiritual authority. That point has come.