Ralph Breaks the Internet (And His Own Political Career)

Ralph Northam, the until-recently esteemed Democratic governor of Virginia, was in enough trouble last week when he backed a bill in the Virginia state legislature allowing for abortions all the way up to the third trimester of a pregnancy.  A pediatric neurologist, Northam went on the radio to explain the bill from a medical standpoint as a way of defending it, but he failed to convince abortion opponents and any pro-choice person who's squeamish over late-term procedures of his argument.  Right now, he probably wishes he were still discussing the issue, thanks to his entry in the 1984 yearbook from Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Yes, one of the pictures in his yearbook entry is a picture of two guys in what seems to be a promotional picture for a student production of a stage version of Birth Of a Nation - one guy in blackface, the other in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.  After conceding that he might be one of the guys in that photo, Northam reversed course and said he was absolutely certain that neither one of them was him.

The guy posing in front of the Corvette, on the other hand, is clearly Northam himself.

This yearbook entry raises some obvious questions.  If neither one of those two guys is Northam, why is the picture in his yearbook entry?  Why was a racist burlesque considered normal in mid-eighties Virginia?  And why do medical schools have yearbooks?

But a more important question than that is why Northam thinks anyone would buy his argument that he's not one of those masked men in the racist photo and that the photo was placed there by mistake. I'm surprised he didn't try to say that it's really a picture of a costume party in which the guy on the left is dressed as Marcel Marceau and the guy on the right is dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come . . . and what we're looking at here is actually the negative!

Northam delivered an oddly surreal statement at a press conference on Saturday in which he tried to defuse the scandal and insisted that he is not now the person he was in his youth (what sort of person was he, then?) and that he will continue to work hard against racism and strive to regain the trust of the people of Virginia.  He might as well have read a chapter of "Trout Fishing In America," or maybe the owner's manual from that old Corvette, for all of the good it did him.  And in an effort to show just how candid he is, he admitted to darkening his face when he dressed up like Michael Jackson to enter a dance contest that he ultimately won.  

Because he did such a great moonwalk.

And Northam's suggestion that the photo was someone else's, placed on his yearbook page due to a yearbook editor's mistake?  Right.  Listen, I worked on my yearbook in college (though a piece I wrote about jazz music on campus was dropped), and I know the difference between a mistake and a disaster.  In my senior yearbook from 1988, a feature looking back at the events of the time erroneously identified Democratic presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt as a U.S. Senator from Arizona; he was in fact the state's former governor.  That was a mistake.  However, I know of no picture from one student that got placed in the yearbook entry of another.  Northam's comments sound more like an excuse than an explanation, and an excuse that does not ring true at that.

I give Northam a week at best before he is forced to resign, as Virginians of both parties are calling him to do.  He is constitutionally limited to one term, and there is no higher office for him to seek in 2021 or 2022, but he still has a lot to lose by staying in office.  So do Virginia Democrats and Democrats nationwide, who would rather be talking about health care and infrastructure than this.  Instead of focusing on the Mueller investigation or the abrupt cancellation of the IMF treaty, the press is discussing a Democratic governor's racist past.  It's no surprise that Terry McAuliffe, Northam's predecessor as governor of Virginia and a possible presidential candidate for 2020, has been among the most vocal of those demanding his resignation.  In fact, a week may be too generous; Northam may have already resigned by the time you read this. 

I think there are lessons to be learned here.  First of all, blackface is offensive in any context.  Second, you shouldn't make a bad situation worse by changing your story.  Third, if you're a white male who enters a dance contest and wants to dress like a contemporary celebrity known for dancing, John Travolta is a much better choice than Michael Jackson.

And no moonwalking.

Nice Corvette, though.

Jazz It Up

I'll come out and say it again: Rap sucks.  But I, as a white male, am apparently not allowed to express such an opinion, because as a white male,  I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, so I should just shut the hell up. So why don't we ask a black man who knows more than a thing or two about music - Wynton Marsalis? 

The jazz great talked to Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post last month and declared rap to be "more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee" to black America, explaining that statues of Confederate leaders were designed to keep blacks down and that rap has pretty much done the same thing, with its vile language, its degradation of women, and its perpetuation of stereotypes of young black men as uncultured heathens.  "You can’t have a pipeline of filth be your default position, and it’s free," he told Capehart.  "Now, the nation is entertained by that. It's not free. Just like the toll the minstrel show took on black folks and on white folks. Now all this 'nigga' this, 'bitch' that, 'ho' that, it’s just a fact at this point."

So what happened?  Black commentators took Marsalis to the woodshed for his comments, arguing that rap is a vital voice of black youth culture and accusing him of urging blacks to make themselves more respectable in the eyes of a racist white society that will never accept blacks as equals. They essentially called him an elitist.

Oh, please.  All Marsalis is doing is pointing out that rappers are making black America look bad with their vulgarity and their outrageous behavior, and they only keep black people down with all that while providing America with a toxic, degrading form of entertainment.  Marsalis is one of the most accomplished American musicians of any race, and he got to where he is by practicing complicated melodies on a real instrument (the trumpet, of course) and being able to play it in a myriad of tempos and keys.  And the songs in jazz aren't know for throwing the N-word, the B-word or the H-word around. Marsalis also knows the difference between real music and someone speaking words to computer-generated beats with no melodic structure at all (can anyone even discern a tune in rap "songs?")

None of this, of course, matters to rap's proponents, such as Luke Hinz of HotNewHipHop.com. "As a whole," Hinz wrote, "Marsalis' inflammatory response is the opinion of someone who doesn't listen to the genre a great deal because they have been off put by certain commercial releases. His statements more accurately apply to dumbed down, mainstream music, which unfortunately stands to represent the genre as a whole." Luke, when you get right down to it, you're still talking about a "musical" genre that has heralded as an example of creativity making percussive noises with one's mouth.  How dumbed down is that? 

Marsalis took all the criticism personally, and he took it hard enough to write a long Facebook post in response, in which he explained that he wasn't trying to describe all of rap in describing the vulgarities of the most popular rap recordings. "Those who wish to talk about all of any form, he wrote, "are discussing another subject that I didn't cover, seeing as how I have not heard all of any form of music nor do I expect to."  But he's made it clear that even rap that doesn't offend him isn't what he (or I) considers real music.  And no one should be surprised by Marsalis' comments; he's been dismissing the idea of rap as music since the mid-eighties.  And I think he was being very humble by explaining that his opinion was not based on the idea that all jazz compositions are masterpieces, but instead based on the premise that, well, he thinks rap sucks (my words, not his)! 

And still his anti-rap, anti-hip-hop opinion isn't tolerated.  "In blindly generalizing hip-hop as a valueless, and in fact deleterious, art form," Luke Hinz bitched, "Marsalis comes off as remarkably short-sighted. Hip-hop gives marginalized people a voice, and is a valuable tool when used to uplift and empower. Part of the beauty of hip-hop is that it is without structure or guidelines . . ..  As a whole, hip-hop has always been free of the restrictions reserved for more traditional forms of music. It presents individuals with the opportunity to create whatever they want and express themselves fully. It is multifaceted in its purpose, and can educate, provide a window into a life experience, or vocalize problems in a community."

Someone should play Hinz some blues records from the forties and fifties.  Those old bluesmen gave marginalized people an empowering voice that could educate and also bring life's experiences to the fore, and they did it by using something rappers can't be bothered with - chord changes!  See, structure is a good thing in music, because it ensures that your music actually gets somewhere. Also, bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf (no slouches themselves when it came to assuming provocative stage names like rappers do) could do something rappers can't be bothered to do - sing! 

As for the empowering nature of rap . . . Beyoncé's husband famously said that, despite supporting President Obama's re-election in 2012, he, as an "entrepreneur," thinks there's too much government involvement in the private sector.  Also, remember, Kanye West supports Trump.  In other words, for folks like Mr. Carter and Mr. West, the whole point of rap is to be empowered to be a jerk.  Yo!   

No, I still think rap is garbage, it doesn't do black America any favors, it makes young blacks look like clowns to all of America, and I say all that as a rock and roll fan who hasn't heard all of rock and roll but knows when he hears bombastic crud - not Kanye's latest record but bad rock and roll like anything from Iron Butterfly.  Those guys made all young white men look like clueless stoners.  Iron Butterfly couldn't play or sing either.  And American popular music would be so much better off if it rewarded those who could.  Sorry, I'm with Wynton Marsalis on this one.

To think.  The one rap-hating American musician whose opinion should have some validity . . . nope, not Marsalis either. >:-(