Digital World Extra 3 (October 6): Truly Outrageous!

Remember when television refused to take itself too seriously.   Sitcoms had actual theme songs.  You could sing along to the openings of Family Ties, Different Strokes  and Growning Pains without caring about how ridiculous you looked or sounded.  You didn’t care because all of your friends were doing the same thing.  It was just culture.  

The 1980s was such as shamelessly cheesy decade, wasn’t it?  I loved in its prime and miss it in its absence.   I miss it mostly because that airy optimism, which was so real then, is now virtually non-existent.

The 80s.  Michael Jackson looked human.  Cosby was King.  Anthony Michael Hall epitomized geek chic.  Punky showed me how to wear my jeans.  Molly Ringwald always got her happy ending. 

  Atari and cassette tapes were my XBox 360 and iTunes.  Commodore 64?  My sweetest amore!  Mom or dad drove me to Sam Goody’s for the latest from Whitney or Paula.  The Internet download was not yet part of my reality.  I had to communicate with others to get what I needed.  That need forced my family together for better or worse. 

There was beauty in that simplicity.  There was something so clean about it all.  Darn it, I want it back!  Maybe, I can have it back.  No, it’s gone.  Darn, it!  We laughed and sang along together in dad’s indigo volvo.  Our eyes were wet with give-and-take love and hopeful innocence.

It’s over. 

Time took it! 

Let it go. 

Ah, the 1980s. 

Truly Outrageous! will be the first of many Throwback Sunday Gimmie Back My 1980s entries.  Pine, whine and reminisce with me if you so desire. 

Digital World Extra 2 (Sept. 29) Alice and Us

The square-tiled, brow speckled ceiling stares down at our dark faces–pockmarked and precious; painted and plain.  We’re like Harlem Reniassance artwork made actual.  Our face stay stuck in the best-sellers and classics staring back at them.  Together, our faces form a circle–genderless and unbroken.

The eldest among us is a woman much older than the hardcover copy of The Color Purple she clutches in her pruney grasp, but a tad younger than the novel’s award winning author.  To the rest of the circle, she is Alice Walker.  She exemplifies her in all that mushy grandmother’s homemade apple-pie goodness.  This stranger embodies that negro soul. “My God,” I think.  “She belongs in my family tree.”

She could belong to any one of us.  She resembles Walker in that beautiful, tragic way that can only come from love.  This mother.  Our mother.  Chocolate and stout.  Her onyx-gray ropes of hair atop her oval crown.  That hair is her halo, and she is our angel.  Our history lies in that hair the Lord made.  God, that hair.  Capable of repelling an orange-fire ball as magical as the African sun.

God bless her.  God help her.  She looks lost amongst us young-yuns–seven of us cocky in our designer blue jeans and 20-something bravado.  We sit with these books in our laps, these windows to knowledge so scared and pure because this matriarch marched.  Some of us know how lucky we are; others of us could care less.  Yeah, that hook of general apathy is in pretty deep.

Resident Walker rises from her seat around a half past eight.  Her eye-lids hang low.  She’s leaving.  Not one of us dare blocks her way.  There’s a mass shuffling and moving of toffee-hued chairs.  Those closest to her scatter, making way for our Queen.  “You have a good evening, ma’am,” I whisper as she floats past.  She moves in an almost heavenly way, her periwinkle dress trailing behind her, bridging the gap between Largo and rapture.  “Thank you, baby,” she says.  Her leathery hand pats my shoulder.  Her hand–caked with age and lotion (Maybe Jergens.  Hmm. It smells so much like Jergens.)

Resident Walker is gone now, but the circle remains.  The seven of us–unrelated brothers and sisters, united only by literature and the Middle Passage.  Our hands sift through ivory pages.  The gurgle, gurgle of ice coffee percolating provides the only soundtrack.  We cast our eyes from our text and toward that limitless, square-tiled ceiling that’s as brown as we are.

Digital World Extra 1 (September 22) Why I Hate BET

Today, BET reigns as a pathetic free-for-all station where money and loose women misrepresents a culture.  Battle lines abound on the Hip-Hop playing field.  Conscious dirty backpackers also known as message rap artists (i.e.  Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Talib Kweli) comprise what seems like the least popular team.  Meanwhile, bling & things or gansta rap artists like Lil Jon’ and 50 Cent respectively win the top prizes.  Their music videos earn constant rotation on stations like BET and MTV as the more thoughtful pieces become prey for the wayside.

Conscious or message rap addresses social ills in society and calls everyone–white and black; young and old; rich and poor alike–to take up arms against whatever hinders us from truly being free.  Political rap highlights poverty, crime, racism, sexism and more.  It exposes their ugliness and erases glamorous illusions.  More, message rap muses about female femininity in a way that precludes likening women to canines in heat or wild beasts on the prowl.

It seems that a general fear festers at the core of today’s Hip-Hop culture.  Artists and consumers alike hesitate to tap into anything real.  Kanye West laments this dilemma in his College Dropout track Jesus Walks.  He muses, “It seems like I can rap about anything except for Jesus.  This includes guns, sex, lies and videotape, but if I rap about God my record won’t get played.”  I’m with Kanye.  I wonder what it will take for the pendulum to swing int he opposite direction and who can take us there.

P.S.  Here’s Rock again cause I’m kind of obsessed with him.  Him, Seth Cohen and Sour Patch Kids.  Anyway, feel free to check out his Hip-Hop parody Champagne.