It has truly been a stunning couple of weeks. One might say colorful. The autumn days have been explosively orange, gold and sky blue. And we the people of every color elected a black man to be our president. And in so doing, by hearing his impressive voice and recognizing his commitment and leadership qualities, we've maybe turned a fraught, frustrating world down a better path.
Even as the economy dives, my friends and colleagues in the creative community here are glowing with pride and promise. Musicians seem especially attuned to Barack Obama because he seems attuned to them. We learned this summer that he had excellent, if uncontroversial, taste in music. I'm sure we've never before had even a serious candidate for the presidency who had a thing for Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm," and I can't understand why freedom-loving conservatives everywhere don't join the President-Elect and me in our love for Dylan's indelible portrait of a slave driver scumbag and his awful family.
Moreover, Obamba enlisted unassailably awesome artists like Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder to sing at his rallies. The always searching and appealing will.i.am made Obama his muse when he produced one of the best pieces of media of the year, the famous Yes We Can video. And now, uploaded sometime last night, the new will.i.am anthem "It's A New Day." I was really, really hoping I'd like this, and I really, really do.
So many times in our history, musicians have shown us the folly of our times, envisioned a more harmonious way to live and written our most difficult conflicts into stories that made them easier to process. And they've been role models for racial harmony when all around them was a sea of hate. African Americans by all rights should have written America's angriest, fiercest music. And sometimes they did. But by and large, they've responded to oppression, segregation and discrimination with music so full of heart, love, redemption and healing that it staggers the imagination. It is one of our nation's most special legacies, right up there with the Constitution. The music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder and so many more is the very sound of beatitude, yet we tend to treat those bodies of work like pop songs for yesterday's people. It has long been my hope that our society would embrace the black music tradition from work songs through the blues, jazz, soul, R&B and hip hop and show it to our children and our teenagers not as entertainment but as a passport to history. Perhaps in these coming years, that will become easier - a natural and accessible way to reflect on and study the road that led to a black family in the White House.
Craig!
I must say, good taste all around with the new first family. I am going to Japan for 3 weeks, leaving next week, and for the first time in 8 years, I am truly PROUD to be an American. Time to stop having to hang our heads in embarrassment to the world.
Posted by: Yoshie | November 08, 2008 at 02:38 PM