DJ Spooky Stole My Gal and Is Wearing My Jacket
So I’m sitting here in my smoking jacket by the fireplace with fur rugs and pets just like the ones on the cover of Ain’t That a Bitch and I decide, completely naked, to look for at least one Blog out there written by a person with strong African features. My developing sense of culture does not inform me that being of “the only Black” anything is something to enjoy or cherish. So I am out looking… and after mistaking AfricaBlog, Katie’s Weblog, Leo Nelson and hundreds of white-controlled news sites about Africa (with RSS feeds) for darkly packed English, I stumble upon this photograph (by Roseann Bersten):
This is DJ Spooky with the cool, Fat Albert cap and the cooler Asiatic jacket (sorry, I don’t know the culturally correct name for this attire). I mean. Blimy! Surely one of the gods of Afro-futurism has a Blog or at least knows an Afro-dude that has one. Right? No? I’m still looking… I guess I’m a little slow…
So I see two areas of danger suggested here: one, DJ Spooky and the clique that hangs out around his international-new-school lunch table are too busy busting social moves instead of technological ones—Erykah Badu is already on record for bashing the use computers but somehow she uses them (indirectly most likely) on every sound recording she has ever made; two, I continue to fail to understand what the hell is going on with African people born one or two generations after me… Most of the people “of color” I meet personally either do not have computers or are too overwhelmed with imperial responsibilities to truly “Think Different”—so they might be affluent enough to compute deeply but are quite entertained by surfing to that Nelly website. There are brothers with rims on their SUVs that cost more than two powerful computers.
My elder, Floyd Webb, covers this discussion of young people (among other thoughts as thangs) by looking at his two sons, ages 12 and 27, in “The World Wide Floyd Webb 2004” here at kintespace.com.
Let me put my clothes back on and close with a quote from my gal Erykah during a 1997 Launch interview. Her logic is fundamentally flawed (but ooh, her sexy ways are not). What she is saying is that since the government uses/regulates guns, she should not have called her album Mama’s Gun:
Man, I don’t want to have nothing to do with computers. I don’t want the government in my business. No matter what I believe, it’s what the powers-that-be believe that will affect me. So y’all can have them computers. I won’t have it.
I guess Erykah won’t be stretching out on my furs next to my fireplace to curl up with a math book and DJ Spooky is gone out catching an analog airplane with a sharp jacket that should be in my closet!