A very personal observation to begin with. The power of the day only really got to me last thing on Tuesday night, when I was sitting on a suburban train leaving Glasgow, listening to Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key of Life on my iPhone (my all-time favourite album, and Obama's too - they got married to its soundtrack). There's a song on there called 'Black Man' - a real seventies' era black power anthem - and the lyrics to the chorus stunningly anticipate Obama's social achievement as an African-American:
We pledge allegiance/All our lives
To the magic colours red, blue and white
But we all must be given/The liberty that we defend
For with justice not for all men/History will repeat again
It's time we learned/This world was made for all men
I remember first hearing Stevie Wonder on the radio in the seventies as a wee boy, and thinking instantly, "I want some of the energy, joy and power of that music", without really understanding till much later where that power came from. Watching the coverage over the last few days makes it clear to me that, culturally at least, this is a soul/r'n'b presidency - and that's not just because voices like Wonder, Usher, Mary J. Blige, and Will.I.Am, Aretha at the inauguration and Beyonce at the first dance, were so prominent.
The rhetoric of common purpose is something Obama has explicitly invoked throughout his campaign - but it takes its clout from Martin Luther King and the collective determination of the civil rights movement. As the historians put it, soul music wasn't just the soundtrack to that movement, but an exemplification of it. The sanctuary and intensity of the Gospel church was taken out of the halls to sanctify the wider society, preaching a secular gospel of the uniting power of love, sex and romance.
As a far-off and entranced white boy in Scotland, I always sensed there was a societal future implied by the very grooves, harmonies and performances in this music (never mind the political specifics of a lyric like 'Black Man'). So it's peculiarly moving to me to see one element of that future come about in the election of Barack Hussein Obama. And in terms of the title of this blog, the legacy of this music could never be a better example of what a 'play ethic' might mean in practice: literally, an inclusive, attractive humanism generated and reinforced by the kind of play, players and playing that comprises soul and r'n'b.
The inauguration couldn't have come to a more appropriately funky close than the words of the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights veteran: "Lord, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right." Obama's laughter at Lowery's sixties street-fightin'-slang came from the same capacious and ironic place that enabled him to make public sense of his ex-Pastor Jeremiah Wright's incendiary comments on America.
Dignity, style, cool and grace under pressure was the aesthetic glory of soul culture in the harsh times. When I watch Obama's habitual hands-in-pockets, Marvin-Gaye-esque stroll, it's as eloquent to me as any of his speeches. Before you get to the policy platform (which I'll try to do tomorrow), you have to admit how much he literally incarnates a better, more complex future for America. And for that, as Rev. Lowery said, Amen and Amen and Amen.
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