Hip-Hopping Right on Along
When you are filthy rich, you don’t have one F-ing worry in the world EXCEPT the constant worry that eats like a hungry tapeworm at your orange-rotten mind, the constant, constant worry of one day waking up broke. If you awake and find
[Breaking news: Ellen Willis just died. The first rock critic for the NYTimes; married to Stanley Aronowitz. Cancer got her at 64. Sorry, she represents to me that socially critical era that took my music and shelved it in favor of the pure whitest of what because of Ellen became known as punk rock and the punk rock movement, music freaks—mostly guitar players and scream singers (a la Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, by the way, in case you wanted to know; something Ellen Willis never realized because she grew up loving the Beatles and hating Elvis those who created him.]
you’re still rich, you then go about enjoying yourself, maybe first opening the curtains of your 47th floor multimillion-dollar New York City apartment and looking down south over the whole god-damn world under the Southern Cross, far out over the Statue of Liberty, down the coastline forever south or if you’re facing one of your north-facing bank of windows you’re looking up the hill that climbs up through Central Park all the way up Broadway and the Hudson River far away like an arrow fired into the fingers Saint Lawrence River Basin. Holy shit, you do feel like you rule the world; you do feel invincible [unless one morning you look out your windows and see a wild-eyed fellow-millionaire Yankee baseball pitcher flying his brand new play toy lightweight aircraft right at your 47th-floor-secure ass] and that invincibleness divorces you from that world far below your apartment, way down there where people look like ants, are unidentifiable, and cars and trucks are like toys, mere playthings running about on the tracks of the miniature city below the giantism heaven in which you’re installed.
The only time a rich MF-er has to hit the street is when he has to go to his office or a big business meeting, or the private airport, or the heliport or the Club—yeah, all rich folks that live in those high floors still have their clubs—and their clubs are always giving dinners and banquets and cocktail parties…Holy shit, you, as a rich bastard, never has time to even realize that 24 people on a Baghdad bus were blown to bits while you were overseeing your vast domain over a piece of Melba toast and a mimosa and even if you had of realized it you would not have given a shit—not one damn shit, as long as it didn’t have anything to do with F-ing with your invincible self’s schedule.
Being rich excuses you from caring about others. Like Bill and Melinda Gates. One guess as to who they’re most concerned about. Or old Junk Bond Chisler Warren Buffett. You think that bitter-minded rich moron has any feelings for anyone but you know who? Hell, Warren’s old rich crooked daddy taught him better than to give a flying F about anything but his money.
Being rich excuses you from paying the same amount of income tax as everyone else; it excuses you from voting, serving on juries, waiting in lines, using public transportation, running red lights in your limo, running down some old lady in your limo, backing over seventeen people in front of a nightclub in your SUV, even probably your killing someone, that based on if you’re rich enough, like Phil Spector—has his murder case ever come up? Or you can have sex with underage girls, too, a la Roman Polanksi, Woody Allen, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of filthy rich people who live at street level, especially the old rich; the Kennedys—they all live at street level, except in gated communities or on their own policed estates—that’s the street they live on.
You have to hate the rich if you are me. I grew up around wealth; my own brother became a millionaire—and his second wife was a millionaire and his best friends were millionaires—some, I’m sure billionaires—playwrights, novelists, television commentators, oil men, shoe manufacturers, department store owners, publishers, Hollywood directors and producers—my wife who just kicked the bucket a couple’a years ago was more than likely a millionaire—she was at least worth a half-a-million when she kicked me out of the upper-floors of Sutton Place safety and down onto the mean streets of East 57th and Third Avenue in Manmade Manhattan, where it’s always hats doffed to the rich assholes; hell our mayor is a billionaire from Boston. How insulting to New Yorkers that New York “leaders” love outsiders coming in an becoming famous off New Yorkers and their liberalness—like Bobby Kennedy; like Slick Willie and Sister Hillary the Arkansas Hillbillies who are now at the top of the ladder in New York as well as national politics.
Of course, I’m jealous and wish I were rich, don’t get me wrong, though the path I chose to slide through this world in one peace I knew from the beginning did not lead to wealth, and if there were wealth along it it would be the kind that fell out of the sky and hit my ass right square on top the head and left me dead or bonkers.
My First Rap Session (Continued From When Continued Before and It Remains Continued, as Is Continued)
The room, by the way, was painted red. The couch was leather; the end chairs were oversized armchairs. The room smelled slightly of incense and city grime, an oily sicky smell. There was jazz playing over the sound system—Miles’s Bitches Brew.
The rap leader was an Angela Davis-looking black woman. Really revolutionary hip; with army fatigues cut to fit her body tight, her Afro high and bold—she was salty, as Ray Charles would have described her, fiercely sure of herself, but alluringly feminine, with the right makeup and trinkets and tight clothes and that wonderful braless evidence catching your lustful male eye. The only other person in the room was a weaselly looking white woman, a student-looking girl really, with a violin case across her legs (a machinegun maybe?). She was sitting on the couch. I sat down by her. “Hi.” “Hi.” She surprised me; she was pretty as hell in the center of her face.
“I’m just divorced,” I said.
“I’ve never been married,” she said, putting her machinegun (violin) on the floor by her feet.
God-damn she was pretty; in that plain natural hippy way—no makeup—the opposite of the black session leader.
“OK, y’all,” the session leader suddenly said. “What’s’ch’all got on your minds?”
“What’d you have in mind?”
“I mean what the hell y’all wanna rap about?”
“Physics,” I said.
“PHYSICS!” the session leader bawled. “God, you white people are so F-ing dumb.”
“Hey, I didn’t pay 3 bucks to get insulted.”
“Then don’t be so dumb, honky.”
“That word never bothered me,” I said. “Where does it come from?”
“Damn if I know, my neighborhood, that’s for sure.”
“What’s your neighborhood?” I asked.
“Lower East Side, Avenue C.”
“Holy Christ, that’s bombed-out Berlin down there.”
“Why Berlin? Why not Hanoi? Why not Johannesburg?”
“What’s the word?” I said. And cocked my head and concentrated on listening to—son of a bitch—it was MONK playing over the house stereo.
“There’s my rap,” I said.
“What say?”
“Monk. He’s my rap. He plays it like I feel it. It’s not confusing in my mind though it may sound confusing to a mind not in tune or time, dig?”
“Hell no. You white folks a damn crazy. Jeez. What the hell you folks wanna rap about or hell you want’a do a doob?”
Me, the Leader, and the White Mouse did a doob.
It smoked like it was marjoram to me. It seemed to work on the White Mouse. She unfroze."I like looking at willow trees when I'm high...like, you know, sitting under one and looking up at it...."
"Yeah," I blurted out, "it's like looking up a woman's dress--you know, I'm the ground and the willow tree's a woman's billowing skirts blowing up...."
"You god-damn men. Sex ain't all there is," the Leader protested.
I had my eye on the White Mouse. She wasn't paying any attention to the Leader.
"What's your name, White Mouse?"
"That could be my name, White Mouse. Yes. Do I look like a mouse to you?"
"You look good to me."
God, I was talking male horny talk; I remember for several long months after my wife kicked me out and I moved in this commercial neighborhood I had been a celibate man, by chance and not choice, too damn long so naturally I began to look at the White Mouse as a potential solution to my randy state of loneliness, the reason I was out cruising this neighborhood in the first place. I saw her as needing attention and love, too; otherwise, what the hell was she doing in this rap parlor not rapping but smoking a doob and having a revo-black-female-boss-bitch insult her and a shaggy divorced musician hit on her, though the Leader really hadn't insulted the White Mouse.
"Thank you," the White Mouse answered my hit.
"Damn, why don't you just ask her to go to bed with you? You've got no aggression, man; you need aggression; you white men have no aggression. Black men, check 'em out, they got aggression, man, like heavy, superior aggression and that's what turns me on, a superman black man and not a puny honky like you. Mouse, you ever had a black man?"
"Yes."
"Really?" The Leader said. "So, what was it like."
"I like sex."
That did it. I wanted the White Mouse suddenly so bad I was willing to chloroform the Leader and hip-hop right on her right there on that leather couch. She wasn't pretty, but, damn, there was something enticing about her--and she did have a beautiful center face; I wanted her.
The Monk was playing; the Leader whipped out another doob.
"Here, guys, let's lip this jay--it's from Hawaii--new stuff."
Soon the joint because of the joint was so mellowed out it was as though I were in a glass ball floating in a watery blue out-of-body universe, all silvery and pillowy, even though I could still see the punch-back red walls and the Che poster with its raise fist. I looked. The Leader was opening the White Mouse's shirtfront. Whaa! I knew I was hallucinating now. The music was by getting Monkly intent; Monk was frying soul eggs on his keyboard. I fell off reality and right under Monk's piano, my eyes nailed shut, my mind whirling around like a merry-go-round full of opera-singing seals--but I clearly heard Monk and I clearly saw that the White Mouse was topless. "Oh what a beautiful morning," I started singing, "Oh what a beautiful day...." I stood up. "I got a beautiful feelin'...everything's going my way."
"The beauty of a woman is more than words," the Leader started rapping. "The beauty of a woman's breasts is like a piece of art that takes your breath away, that melts you, that lurks out at you, that beckons you for a soul-kiss...." Whooaaaa. The Leader was taking off her fatigues top.
"There's a bright golden haze on the meadow," I was singing again, "there's a bright golden haze on the meadow...."
The Leader was now topless and oh my wonderment! she was like that Diana the Huntress statue down in Mexico City I used to mentally masturbate over, right before you enter Chapultepec Park off the Reforma--that's what this huntress looked like. Wow. Here I was singing to two topless women of contrasting beauty--and then I just suddenly thought Gestaltically--I refused to think in terms of contrast; both women were beautiful equally--in their own rights--the White Mouse mousey, thin, her ribs showing under her modest but youthfully perked to points of budding desire, the redness of her baby-bottle nipples alarming--all hail the bull in me.
"You didn't expect this, did you white boy? Two gorgeous women showing you their breasts. And how do you feel about it? How do mine affect you, for a start." She arched her back and stuck them out at me.
"I am dazzled. I am like waking up in a botannical garden with two alarming full blooming flowers staring me down to my knees, two deep-lushly black peonies set blushing against two white budding roses, roses that look like one day they will just suddenly pop open to the burning lips of the man of the sun."
"Oh, man of the sun," the White Mouse chanted.
I started dancing with the Leader. I leaned over and kissed her breasts as we danced to Thelonious Monk....
My first rap session. That's how rap began, my friends; rap parlors all over; and they were big out in L.A., too. And yes rap came out of the street, it did, out of a certain street in Philadelphia, I've always believed, off a grafiti-ed street with a concrete wall along the edge of a city park. It came out of Philly funk that started in jazz back with a guitar player named Bugaloo Joe Jones--the bugaloo funky beat, and funky twangy guitar, congo drums, bongos, and then Gil Scott Heron started telling a story to it and the Last Poets started poeticizing the War that will be on television, and up around Chi-Town, too, with Lester Bowie and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Am I getting too whacky? Yes, rap came out of doo-wop, too--Sonny Till and the Orioles were from Philly; so was Pattie La Belle and the Bluebells; and also in Philadelphia was Bunny "Get on the Love Train" Sigler, Walter Sigler--I just think I hear the beginnings of hip-hop in Bunny's funk. Here's a link to a sight (site) that will introduce you to Bunny Sigler--I am amazed, if you scroll down this site, by how many albums and tunes Bunny has recorded, produced, and written.
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Bunny+Sigler
Comes right on down to the Fresh Prince from the Philly streets. Doug E. Grandmaster Flash.
To Be Continued as is continued
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
The Daily Growler Notes the Passing in August of One of American Music's Unique Souls
Rufus Harley
Rufus Harley Jr., a musician billed as "the world's first jazz bagpiper," died on July 31 from prostate cancer. He was 70.
A North Carolina native of African-American and Cherokee descent, Harley always had a passion for music. He moved to Philadelphia as a young boy and studied the saxophone, oboe, trumpet and flute. To support his family, he dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and earned money working odd jobs and playing in local jazz clubs.
Harley became interested in the bagpipes after seeing the Black Watch Scottish Marching Band perform at President John F. Kennedy's funeral in 1963. Shortly thereafter, Harley purchased his own set of pipes at a pawnshop for $120 and began taking lessons from Dennis Sandole, a local jazz guitarist/teacher who also mentored Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Within a year, Harley recorded his debut album and became the first person to introduce bagpipes to mainstream jazz audiences.
In the mid-1960s, Harley signed a contract with Atlantic Records and recorded four albums ("Bagpipe Blues," "Scotch and Soul," "A Tribute to Courage" and "King and Queens"). He provided backup instrumentals for Sonny Stitt, Herbie Mann and Sonny Rollins, and played alongside jazz icons like Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, usually while wearing an African dashiki or a Scottish kilt. As his fame grew, Harley appeared on numerous TV shows, including Johnny Carson�s "Tonight Show," "The Cosby Show," "What's My Line?" and "To Tell the Truth." He even gave a bagpipe lesson to boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
The self-proclaimed "international ambassador of freedom" showed his patriotic side by giving away tiny replicas of the Liberty Bell and copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Harley also worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and spoke about music in area schools. In recent years, he produced the 2000 CD "The Pied Piper of Jazz," re-issued an updated version of his 1967 album "Recreation of the Gods," accompanied singer Laurie Anderson on her 1982 album �Big Science,� and worked with the hip-hop band the Roots on their 1995 record �Do You Want More?!!!??!�
Thanks to the Blog of Death
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