|
A Post
Industrial Blues
By Amin Sharif
I: What’s Goin’ On?
Many black men my age can count the days of
their existence by the music that they have come to know in their
lives. I, for instance, can remember hearing Jackie Wilson’s Your
Love Keeps Lifting Higher while walking to grade school. And I
can also recall listening on a small, baby blue transistor radio
to the Temptations and the Supremes as my grandmother fried fish
or boiled turnip greens. So went the days of my youth shared with
Black men, known and unknown, sweet as the kosher, white wine we
sipped straight from the bottle in the early days of my
manhood.
Life was as heady then as the reefer we rolled
while listening to Stevie Wonder’s Talking
Book or contemplating the meaning of Jimmie Hendrix’s All Along the Watch Tower. And though we had our trouble, we also
had hope. For, as the Temptations sang in Since
I Lost my Baby, “The bosses are paying . . . not a sad word
should a young heart be sayin’.”
This was the height of the Industrial Age in
America when U.S. Steel and Ford dominated the world. It was a
time when a man, black or white, could see the “USA in your
Chevrolet!” A time when America was trying to close the door on
segregation and when Martin Luther King’s hymn-like sermon swept
across America in a graceful call of the tongue and response of
soul: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty . . .”
Yes, that was before America’s heart hardened and that hymn
became a mournful blues--a dirge for American heroes of all
colors.
But as the Industrial Age in America peaked and
declined, the music in my life changed. With the death of American
heroes such as the Kennedy Brothers, Martin Luther King, and a
newly discovered Malcolm X, even the songs of Soul groups like the
Temptations became transformed. The world, as Temps put it down,
became “A Ball of
Confusion.”
As my taste in music changed from Blues infused
Urban Soul to Blues infused Urban Jazz, I can remember Marvin Gaye
ask the question we all wanted to know the answer to, “What’s Goin’ On!”
What’s goin’ on with the Vietnam War? What’s goin’
on with the riots and the Panthers? What’s going on with Tricky
Dick Nixon? What’s goin’ on? What’s goin on? And, of course,
Marvin already had the answer. We all nodded in approval as Marvin
crooned his reply over every black, urban AM radio station in
America: “Mercy, mercy, me. Things ain’t what they used to
be!”
Some will see all that I have said as
coincidental. Those who see it as such are unaware of the mythic,
purgative, transforming power that music has for the Black
American. From plantation to plant floor, it has been hymns sung
in church, Blues screamed in jukes, and Jazz played in clubs that
have sustained us. And, if Hip-Hop is about anything, it is the
scream of Black youth at war with itself as it watches the death
of one world and the beginning of another.
But the Black youth of America are not alone in
their sense of profound confusion. For the whole world is singing
the death song of the Industrial Age. All that we see in our
children—the confusion, the obsession with drugs and thuggery,
the fascination with death—speaks of the dislocation of their
souls, their hearts, and their minds.
Jimmy Carter began to sense the disintegration
of American Industrial society decades ago when he spoke of
America being captured by a malaise or an uneasiness. But, of
course, America rejected Carter and this notions. If America has
anything in its soul, it is the reluctance to face the truth, or,
more aptly put, to face the music.
It is this uneasiness, sensed by the most
intelligent president to sit in the White House since Jefferson,
this madness that has created the Hip-Hop generation. The Hip-Hop
generation is frequently accused of having no values. But how does
one maintain values in an era where values are being erased by the
high tide of historical change. Under the high tide of historical
change, values are like sand castles—here one minute and gone
the next.
Yet, even as Carter perceived this malaise,
Donny Hathaway was also giving us a clear warning about the
quicksand of changing values in America. Wasn’t it Donny who
warned us of a threat to our values—even to our very sanity?
“Hang on,” Donny tells us, “to the world as it spins
around.” Then he gives us both a warning and a hope, “You
better hold on fast and you will last!”
This is how it is! We face the abyss of change and if we
are not careful it will swallow us whole. But, if we have the
courage to face this change—embrace it—then we can survive.
II. Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay!
Baltimore, the city that I grew up in, was
nourished by two things in the old days: Bethlehem Steel
(Sparrow’s Point)* and its great port. In my youth, it seemed
that every other Black man in Baltimore worked either at the Point
or on the waterfront. When segregation came to an end in the
1950s, I was certain of this fact. I was once told by a Black
Steelworker’s son that his family was given the choice to work
at Beth Steel in Alabama or work at the plant in Baltimore. There
was some argument about which plant to work at, the
Steelworker’s son told me. But finally, the family decided on
the Point in Baltimore. “Why Baltimore?” I asked. “It is
barely out of the South.” “Yes,
it is,” the Steelworker’s son explained, “but barely out of
the South is a lot better than barely in it.”
This was how things were back then. Every
little thing seemed to be a cause for optimism.
Baltimore’s docks were originally in Fells’
Point where the great statesman and abolitionist Fredrick Douglas
worked. Today, you can find one of Douglas’ ancestors giving
tours and presentations related to the life of this Black giant in
the same section of the city.
But now, the once graceful clippers ships of a by-gone
mercantile era have been replaced by the huge, cargo ships of
modern commerce and these ships tie up at the Dundalk Marine
Terminal.
There are considerably fewer Black men working
at the docks now. But I can remember catching the #20 bus with an
Italian schoolmate to see where his father worked. I remember how
impressed I was to see the great Dundalk Marine Terminal teeming
with economic life and activity. I was just as awed when my uncle
drove me, my brother, and cousins to see the sprawling Sparrow’s
Point. I remember seeing what seemed to be thousands upon
thousands of workers—black and white—filling the yards that
stood before the gigantic steel mill. The fires of the Point’s
great furnaces seemed to be pouring hellfire onto the earth rather
than molten steel to be made into the cars and building for a once-grand
America.
Today, Baltimore is a radically different place
than the city I grew up in.
It is, in areas, drug infested and
dangerous—the eight most dangerous city in America according to
a recent report. At one time in the 1980s, Baltimore was the
murder capital of America.
Now, Baltimore is a tourist town. Harborplace
is the rage. Hundred of thousands of tourists come to
Baltimore’s Harborplace to see the National Aquarium’s
dolphins do their tricks. There is a running joke in the city that
these dolphins can get more work than any young Black man in
Baltimore. The racist retort to that joke, but all too true, is
that the dolphins have a better education than most young Black
men in the city. This is, of course, a slap at the Baltimore
School system. But a system that is doing little to get thousands
of Black males graduating will never be defended by me.
Today, there are arguably more Black women
employed in Baltimore than Black men. Beth Steel has closed,
leaving thousands of workers without health care after years of
sacrifice. And Baltimore’s docks are fairing only a little
better. Instead of seeing hundreds of Black men crammed onto
buses, or in cars, or waiting in the early light of dawn, holding
out brown paper bags to indicate they need a ride to the Point, the
buses of Baltimore are now crammed with Black women, the sole
support of many families, going to work at hospitals and hotels. This
seismic shift in employment has made life difficult—extremely
difficult in Baltimore.
Whenever I walked the streets and see Black men
without jobs and hope, I cannot help remembering Otis Redding’s
last song. The one he recorded before he was killed in a plane
accident. My footsteps seem to accompany that magnificent horn
section of his band as I pass these men. I see Otis moving across
the stage filled with so much energy—energy that made him more
popular than Elvis for a year or so. Then I hear him singing in
that signature Otis Redding style, “Sittin’on the dock of the
bay, watchin’ the tide roll away. Sittin’on the dock of the
bay, wastin’ time.” These
words are the lyrics of America’s post-industrial Blues.
III. A Change Gonna Come!
What this book is about is change and the way
the world is choosing to deal with that change. The change that I
speak of is unprecedented. It is as severe as the change that the
great, original people of America, sometimes called Native
Americans, experienced when they saw the first train come across
the American plains. Until then, these First Americans had a ghost
of a chance to save their way of life.
But the train announced more than the coming of
the White Man. The train announced that Industrial civilization
had arrived in western America. The great people of the Plains
might have survived the soldiers and might have learned to live
with broken treaties. But the Iron Horse meant that there would be
no holding back the Whites. Wagon trains brought white settlers in
the hundred over months; the Iron Horse brought them by the
thousands over weeks.
The pastoral, hunter-gatherer civilization of
the Plains people was gone forever. The Native Americans saw it
disappear before their eyes as Whites, without respect for their
way of life, slaughtered hundred of thousands of buffaloes from
the back of a hundred Iron Horses. The Buffalo—which had once
sustained their civilization for thousand of years (a holy
creature in their society)—was destroyed without a second
thought. Today, this civilizational genocide is scarcely mentioned
by American historians. (No doubt white American guilt plays a
significant role in this nation’s eternal forgetfulness.)
Then, on reservations, these Native Americans
saw themselves being turned into Whites or as close to White as
possible. This was a process that they knew about. They had seen
African slaves set free only to fight them in place of the White
man. And while some find this to be a noble undertaking for Black
men or a proud moment in African-American history, it is for
others—including me—a thing of shame.
Finally, the original people of America were so
decimated that they nearly ceased to exist. The White World had
conquered the Red World. The First civilization in America gave
way to a Second, new and alien one. American history was
established and the history of the original people of America
erased. This is the kind of change—the replacement of one
civilization by another—that I speak of.
Black people despite notions to the contrary
are like all people in the world. They see their existence as a
thing guaranteed. After all, they survived slavery, Reconstruction
and the Klan, and segregation. All this attests to the strength of
Black people. But there was a time when the original people of
America felt the same way about their own strength. Hundred of
thousands of days passed before they saw the mast of a European
ship. Then, in the space of a century or two, their whole society
was, for all practical purpose, erased from the earth. Notions of
permanency and strength are, sometimes, greatly overrated.
But what Black people do not understand is that
in the Age of Industrialization their labor was essential and
valuable to development of the American Industrial system.
American Industrialization in its early stages (slavery or
northern Mercantilism) certainly required the labor of Black
people. When the early stages of American Industrialism passed
into a more mature stage of factories and mines, it required even
more of their manpower. Finally, when American Industrialism
reached its peak, Black people were totally integrated into the
American Industrial process.
Of course, two World Wars greatly assisted
Blacks entry into the American economic system. Yet it was in the
very midst of the Second World War, according to the futurist
Alvin Toffler, that the seed of the destruction of the American
Industrialism was planted. The digital computer was invented to
decode Germany military messages. And it was the invention of the
digital computer that set the stage for a civilization wide
change—a replacement of one with another.
This emerging civilization is founded on rules
that may make Black people as powerless to control their destiny
as the original people of America were when they first encountered
the Iron Horse. In fact, under these new civilizational
conditions, Black people in America may become just as expendable
as the people of the Plains were when they confronted
Industrialization.
Black men are especially vulnerable to being
rendered obsolete under the new conditions spawned by the
transition from Industrial to post-Industrial civilization.
Industrial America was based on a marriage of man’s body with
machine. Post-industrial society is founded on a marriage of
man’s mind with information. Plantations, steel mills, and the
docks need the body. Software development needs the mind. What
served Black men well in one civilization will not serve them well
in another.
There is a fitting lesson for Black men found
in the Legend of John Henry and the (steam powered) steel-driving
machine. John Henry was an ex-slave some say. Others say that he
was a free-born Black man. But whatever the disagreement about
John’s social standing; there is nothing but agreement about his
mythic strength and his persistence in the face of adversity. As
the legend goes, John Henry was a railroad worker whose job was to
drive steel spikes into rails with a hammer. John Henry was a
natural at this because, “He was born with a hammer in his
hand.”
One day after John learned that the railroad
company he worked for was going to replace him with a
steel-driving machine, he proposed a test to keep his job. He
would race the steel-driving machine through a tunnel. Whoever
emerged from the tunnel first would be the winner. If John won he
would keep his job. But if the steel-driving machine won, John
would have to hit the road. It is recorded in legend that John
Henry beat the machine. They say that even before he emerged from
the tunnel sparks were seen flying from his hammer and the sound
of his strikes were said to rival God’s own thunder. But legend
also records that when John came out of the tunnel that he died
from exhaustion. As the long song “Ballad of John Henry” tells
it, “He died with his hammer in his hand. Lord, Lord! He died
with his hammer in his hand.”
Now, all great legends are said to be based in
fact. The Legend of John Henry also holds true to this pattern.
The real contest between a human John Henry and a steel driving
machine is said to have occurred at Big Tunnel near Telcott, West
Virginia some time in the 1870s. And, just as in the legend, John
Henry defeated the machine and also died of exhaustion. While the
Legend of John Henry is awe inspiring, there is a lesson to learn
that is sometimes missed by those who tell his tale. Yes, he
defeated his mechanical rival. But, he died in the process.
Today, Black men (and women) of the Industrial
Age can also hold onto the romantic notions of their participation
in America’s economic past. And, like John with his hammer, they
too will find that nothing but death and exhaustion will result in
this act.
The Legend of John Henry makes a nice folktale.
Taken in the context of a folktale, this legend still has many
lessons for Black children. Perseverance is one of these lessons.
But, like all things, perseverance must be tempered with reality.
Rooted in the Legend of John Henry is the subtle point I wish to
make: fight civilizational change and you will win a battle. Join
civilizational change and you will win a war!
As I pointed out earlier, there was a time when
Black labor, especially Black male labor, was needed to run the
docks, factories, and steel plants of America. And it is no
coincidence that Black labor reached its apex when the Civil
Rights Movement took hold in America. Civil Rights have many
connotations depending on the part of society where it is applied.
For American industry Civil Rights meant that a whole under-used
sector of labor could be brought onto the plant floor.
But what needs to be realized is that the
integration of the plant floor was not an act of charity. It was
only because American Industry came to see the labor of Blacks as
being as valuable as that of Whites when it needed to expand
production, as in the case of World War II, that integration
became possible in the workplace. The proof to make this case is
found in the old, experienced-based saying — “Blacks are the
last hired but the first fired.”
What this saying reflects is that Black labor
is valued when it is needed during periods of economic expansion.
However, when there is economic contraction, recessions and
depressions, Black labor is spurned. The Civil Rights Movement
emerged, in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, when American
Industry was expanding—Black labor was needed. This great social
movement gave American Industry the cover it needed to push aside
white racism in the interest of expanding production. But a decade
latter when recession gripped the American economy, Black
unemployment was at record levels despite tons and tons of Civil
Rights legislation!
Yet it was not simply economic expansion that
made the economic integration of Black Americans on the plant
floor possible. A major contributor to Blacks being brought on the
plant floor was the nature of the work being performed in the
‘50’s and 60’s. Assembly
line work is pre-planned by industrial engineers. It is repetitive
in nature and requires only a limited amount of mental agility.
The uneducated, near educated, Black and White man and woman, were
welcomed on the plant floor by management in the expanding economy
of the early 60’s. But, as labor unions began to push for a
greater share of profits and American industry faced foreign
competition, corporate management began to look for ways to cut
their labor costs. And it was robotics and other high-tech devices
that came to their rescue.
Robotics did not appear on the plant floor of
American industry until well after it had been utilized by the
Japanese in their industries. But suddenly workers all over the
industrialized West saw robots replace them on assembly lines. The
savings from the use of robotics were astounding. Sick leave,
worker’s compensation, and vacations pay never had to be paid to
a machine. These robots never went on strike or got tired. They
could work night and day and seemingly without end.
More importantly, unlike John Henry, there was
no test that any human worker could devise to show his or her
superiority over robots on the assembly line. Even if such a test
could be devised, the result of a human worker challenging a robot
to see who could perform the repetitive tasks of assembly line
work better would be futile. Like John Henry, the worker would
likely end up dead in the effort.
It is at this point that we come back to the
digital computer invented back during the Second World War. It was
the technology derived from the digital computer that led directly
to the invention of robotics—and the large scale reduction of
the assembly worker. Anyone who has seen the precision of a
robotic assembly line cannot but notice an almost symphony-like
performance of its movement. There is an undeniable rhythm in the
way that a robotic assembly lines sounds. If one listens to this
rhythm and watches its movement, they can almost hear history
reciting the lyrics of a Sam Cooke classic: “A change is gonna’
come!”
IV. Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow!
Stevie Wonder is, without a doubt, one of the
greatest artists, Black or White, to have ever sung or written a
song in America. I remember well those early years when Stevie
played the harmonica and was soon recognized as a virtuoso talent.
In the South, the harmonica is associated with the Blues. I have
never heard the instrument used to accompany Spirituals or the
modern Gospels sung today. So, when Stevie recorded Fingertips Part I, every Black person in America with roots in the
Blues was astounded by what Stevie had done by breathing a new,
vibrant life into a familiar instrument. There is a lesson in
Stevie’s recording of those wonderful harmonica solos put down
on Fingertips, innovation
(along with a hell of a lot of talent) will take you far.
Innovation is described as a change in the
established way of doing things. Innovation is the only way that I
know how to describe the phenomenon we know as Stevie Wonder.
First, he revolutionized the way people thought about playing the
harmonica. Later, he showed that a Black man’s music could be
infused not just with Soul but with a socially valid message and
still be popular.
In accomplishing this, Stevie prefigures
Hip-Hop artists by decades. With Stevie, it wasn’t all about
hype. Unlike today’s artists, Stevie made history not by dying
for a cause but by living for one. His campaign to make Martin
Luther King’s birthday a national holiday and his forthright
stand against South African apartheid had international
ramifications and struck a blow against white racism around the
world. This is something that, with all their impact, Tupac or
Biggie could not accomplish.
Wonder’s inventiveness emerged again when he
introduced in 1972 the Moog synthesizer to his music fans on his Talking
Book album. It was the synthesizer that allowed Stevie to
stretch out and move from R&B artist to an international icon.
While the history of the Moog synthesizer is too complicated to
reveal here, it is accurate to say that the heart of the
synthesizer is the transistor.
It was the invention of the transistor that
made the microchip and all other computer technology possible.
Stevie’s decision to play the Moog synthesizer is a tribute to
his visionary and innovative attitude toward music. Whether Stevie
knew it or not his choice of using state of the art equipment was
in line with what the Chicago Blues men did with the electric
guitar.
One of the greatest blues artists who ever
lived was the legendary T-Bone Walker. Born in northeast Texas in
1910, Aaron Thibeaux Walker was already something of a blues
legend throughout the South even before he played an electric
guitar. In 1940 or soon after, T-Bone mastered the electric guitar
inventing a style that would earn him the title “father of the
electric blues.” It was the electric guitar that other Blues men
such as B. B. King and eventually Muddy Waters would use to
thoroughly urbanize the blues. Today, not only is the Blues
celebrated as an art form emanating from the Mississippi Delta,
its electric version is celebrated as an art form emanating from
northern cities like Chicago.
What is important about Stevie Wonder and T-Bone
Walker is that their talent was raised to a whole new level after
they embraced new technology. T-Bones’ electrified Blues is
identified with the Great (Black) Migration of the Second World
War. This migration brought hundreds of thousands of Black workers
from the Deep South to the steel mills of Baltimore and Allentown,
the meat processing plants of Chicago and Kansas City, and to the
assembly lines of Detroit. The electric blues was just as much a
product of the Industrial Age as Stevie Wonder’s Moog
synthesizer is the product of a post-industrial invention—the
transistor.
Just as it was the ability to embrace cutting
edge technology that advanced the musical genius of T-Bone Walker
and Stevie Wonder, it will also be the ability of all peoples and
nations to embrace the new technological based post-industrial
society that will ensure their survival. But, if the people and
the nations of the world want to do more then merely survive the
transition from industrial civilization to post-industrial
civilization, they must move beyond a passive embracing of the new
post-industrial technology. They must apply the principle of
innovation to their new situation. For only an innovative approach
will allow people to keep the best of the old civilization and
blend it with the best of the new one.
For example, the personal computer and the
internet have allowed for an unprecedented exchange of trans-cultural
information throughout the world. Websites have been established
by cultural workers, lay and professional, to preserve the history
of the most remote peoples of the world. This preservation of
world culture through a medium of the post-industrial age presents
a unique way to challenge global racism in the intellectual
arena.
If one can click a mouse and see an extensive
history of the Hopi Indians of America, the Basques of France, or
the Kurds of Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention all the varied
cultural expressions of Africa, then intellectual movements that
are based in cultural chauvinism will be given less credence in
the future. In fact, Information Technology (IT) allows such a
massive accumulation of economic, social, political, and cultural
data that the very consciousness of man of man will undoubtedly
lead to the erasing of all kinds of prejudice throughout the world
in the future.
It is the erasure of prejudice and other uses
of Information Technology that will free man’s mind to consider
all kinds of possibilities. The real question in the transition
from industrial to post-industrial technology is what people will
be intellectually liberated by this transition and what people
will be enslaved and intellectually impoverished by this
civilizational shift.
The purpose of this book is to demand that
Black and Third World people consider engaging in the movement to
liberate the human intellect that will characterize participation
in a new post-industrial civilization. Succinctly, I asking Black
and Third World people to follow the wisdom of the Funkadelics and
“free their minds” so “their ass will follow!”
* At its height Bethlehem Steel employed 45,000
steel and shipyard workers! Source: Maryland Department of the
Enoch Pratt Free Library. Credit: Painting of John
Henry Swinging His Hammer by Ezra Jack Keats
* * * * *
posted 9 November 2007 |
