Jack & Jill Politics

Frank Sinatra, you know, is The Voice. Adele and the late Amy Winehouse rank among the great voices of our time. Mick Jagger has the Moves. So goes the Conventional Wisdom.
To which I say: Yeah. Right.
Whitney Houston was a sanger. OK? A sang-er. An uncomplicated piece like “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” becomes magical. It transports. You’re nowhere near the first note when she’s done. And when she’s done, you’re better–somehow. Aretha and the late Luther and Rachelle Ferrell (also, the Temptations doing “Silent Night”) take you down that same rarely traveled—damn near celestial– road. They can’t always repeat the magic is how paranormal it is. (We know about Whitney’s unfortunate turns later in her life.)
Oh–and Mick Jagger is a bad caricature of James Brown and Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Beyonce, entertainment geniuses.
Look, Amy Winehouse was a good singer. Adele is one now. Hell, Barbra Streisand is a great singer. Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn are not bad either. But that’s not the same as transformational.
Frank?
I’ll cite a passage from a manuscript I’d written about a slice of my life in my hometown; the passage deals with what the man character (his name is “Walt”) believes is Sinatra’s undeserved musical status.
“I like very much several songs from Sinatra’s time, or the types he would sing. Hell, I’m crazy about ‘Send in the Clowns’ and for some reason, I’ve never stopped singing ‘The Days of Wine and Roses’ since I heard it as a youngster. Frank’ s not god-awful, and he even has a couple of tunes associated with him that I like–none that immediately come to mind.
“But I mean, whatever criteria they’re using to raise up Frank isn’t shot to smithereens when Luther sings, or when he clears his throat even? You don’t even have to go to Luther. Pick any of these R&B singers, like Whitney and Aretha, or if you want to stay in Frank’s world, Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald. Hell, you can pick Ella’s cousin, the one we’ve never heard about but who sings her baby to sleep.”
“Walt knows he’s exaggerating, but he knows too that this Frank question is not a frivolous question. Blacks and whites answering that question honesty could plant us firmly on the road to racial reconciliation or productive racial avoidance.”

Our struggle in America–it’s always been about access, hasn’t it? Their denial of it to us and our insistence to be included.
I’m in my car, and Whitney’s “I’ll Always Love You” comes on the radio. I’m arisen.
I’m primarily a poet, so I, lifted, see images. I see Jordan, Magic and LaBron on court, Deion on the field, Ali in the ring. I see a small church’s choir. Their lips are moving but the harmonizing—itself more mesmerizing than any solo sound– comes from one of the world’s earliest cities, Jenne-jeno, in a land now called Mali, the people one of the first to use iron as tools, their houses topped with gold.
I see a table. I think of the enemies to that access, those who say we’re undeserving. We’re lazy, they say, and criminal, and we want something for nothing. They’re among the seated.
What do they bring that we should want?

The sixties’ slogan remains right. We are a beautiful people.
When we aren’t, of course, offing each other, emotionally or physically.
Then, we’re more the noun—people. We’re not the first of a majority culture’s despised to turn on each other. And we won’t, unfortunately, be the last. Frankly, this was the accepted analysis—the same, actually, that had been applied to anyone else in Psych 101–a victory in our struggle in this very nation, until we traded truth for hoped for access.

This is how you know you’ve won, by the way, or if you’re winning–when you get back to who you…are. When your Whitney, in all her majesty, if not your normal, is expected.