{"id":1436,"date":"2013-07-31T20:58:22","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T00:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1436"},"modified":"2013-07-31T21:00:21","modified_gmt":"2013-08-01T01:00:21","slug":"backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1436","title":{"rendered":"Backup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wordless-wednesday-20-feet-to-stardom-L-Gl1wp_\"<\/a>It turns out that super-spiritual-tantric Sting needs more than a message in a bottle.\u00a0 He needs a sit-down and come-to-Jesus.\u00a0 And, maybe if Mickey J. had actually made love to<\/i> (rather than just \u201chad fun with\u201d) the woman singing with him on \u201cBrown Sugar,\u201d he might have gotten a clue and used his charismatic power to shake-up the white boys\u2019 club that is the industry.\u00a0 Well . . . a girl can dream, right?<\/p>\n

If you live in the Triangle, please go see 20 Feet from Stardom<\/i><\/a> at the Carolina.\u00a0 It just won\u2019t be the same on a small screen.\u00a0 This is a rare opportunity to hear some of the most gifted women in music.\u00a0 Each one tells a unique story about the history of backup singers.<\/p>\n

The Carolina itself has a history<\/a>.\u00a0 50 years ago, after young people across color lines had spent years in creative protest, African-American and Anglo Durhamites walked through the same door, and even sat next to each other, to see films like Bye Bye Birdie<\/i>, Cleopatra<\/i>, and Love with the Proper Stranger<\/i> (all hits from 1963).<\/p>\n

One of the amazing students in our joint Duke\/North Carolina Central University class on \u201cRace and Place in Durham\u201d wrote a research paper on entertainment and race in Durham, by contrasting two Durham venues for the arts.\u00a0 (Ellen Paddock will publish a version of that piece somewhere soon.\u00a0 Won\u2019t you Ellen?)\u00a0 This documentary about backup singers is another route into a related conversation about just whose gorgeous voices are showcased, and why.\u00a0 At the beginning of the film, watching David Byrne dance with supreme awkwardness while the African-American women singing next to him had to appear simultaneously in-sync and also contribute their required, erotic oomph, I thought to myself, \u201cplease, let this prompt viewers to ask which jackass built this beautiful house.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is also plenty to mull over about what I call the \u201cSecret Life of Bees\u201d version of cross-racial \u201cfriendship.\u201d\u00a0 For Men in Space, from the Matrix<\/i> to Star Trek<\/i> to Battlestar Galactica<\/i>, there is often some version of Black <\/a>Woman<\/a> as Spiritual Midwife<\/a>. \u00a0For stories about sexually constipated white women, there is often some version of Black Woman as Sexual Liberator.\u00a0 The pottery scene from that stupid Ghost<\/i> movie is perhaps the most obvious example, but 20 Feet from Stardom<\/i> can prompt a longer conversation about how dominant American culture subtly attributes erotic freedom to African-American women, then uses, controls, sidelines and\/or punishes Black women for that very attribution.\u00a0 (Just for the record, the film does not sugarcoat Ike Turner\u2019s story any more than it does Phil Spector\u2019s.)<\/p>\n

I also watched The Corporation<\/i><\/a> again yesterday with the girls, on our little screen at home.\u00a0 \u00a0 There is a man in the movie named Ray Anderson<\/a>\u00a0who happens to look a lot like my dad.\u00a0 He talks about having an \u201cepiphanal moment\u201d after reading a book about environmental, global collapse as he saw a cascade of things about his position inside the Giant Godzilla of Capitalism.\u00a0 (One of the images in the movie is of the Corporation as Godzilla.\u00a0 It turns out I stole that from them.)\u00a0 Anderson stands in contrast to the head guy from Shell, who sat down and had tea on the lawn with some protesters, but didn\u2019t seem to learn much.\u00a0 (Ditto the Nike guy.)\u00a0 Mr. Anderson seems to have had a conversion of the soul, where he was thrown off-kilter and saw his location through a different perspective.\u00a0 As I watched him again yesterday, I found myself connecting the two documentaries in prayer.\u00a0 I found myself really, really hoping that Bruce Springsteen and the rest of the big guys who, as my older daughter put it, \u201cshow their butts\u201d in 20 Feet from Stardom<\/i> are thrown off kilter by the movie, and see the industry that showcases them as not about individual initiative (really?) or about unequal talent (Grrrrrr!) or about the need for \u201cspiritual\u201d connection (sigh, Sting) but about a white, patriarchal system that defines, packages, and sells what counts as good music.<\/p>\n

The same can be said of the big white guys in the Christian academy, what with our showcased theology and our spotlighted arts and such.<\/p>\n

But that, my dears, is a prayer and a dream for another day . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It turns out that super-spiritual-tantric Sting needs more than a message in a bottle.\u00a0 He needs a sit-down and come-to-Jesus.\u00a0 And, maybe if Mickey J. had actually made love to (rather than just \u201chad fun with\u201d) the woman singing with him on \u201cBrown Sugar,\u201d he might have gotten a clue and used his charismatic power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[169,170,171,168],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-uncategorized","tag-awkward-questions","tag-durham-2","tag-now-showing","tag-theology-and-the-arts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s7EotM-backup","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1442,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions\/1442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}