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                                                         July 18, 2020
I can't say I've ever really liked
Ta-Nehisi Coates' style-- it often
seems overblown to me and for lack
of a better word "pretentious".

But then, there are times when he gets it to work well:

  "Any fair consideration of the depth and width
  of enslavement tempts insanity.  First conjure the
  crime-- the generational destruction of human
  bodies-- and all of its related offenses-- domestic
  terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration.  But
  then try to imagine being an individual born among
  the remnants of that crime, among the wronged,
  among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of
  that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways
  glances of the perpetrators of that crime and
  overhearing it in their whispers and watching
  these people, at best, denying their power to
  address the crime and, at worst, denying that any
  crime had occurred at all, even as their entire
  lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so
  large that it is written in our very names.  This
  is not a thought experiment."

        -- Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Eight Years in Power", p.85
           "Notes from the Fourth Year"

That's a voice like MLK-- or you might say James Baldwin,
later in the book he mentions adopting James Baldwin as his
model-- but it's funny that in the surrounding text where he
talks about trying to find his voice, he references hip-hop:

   "In 1985 I unfolded a steel chair next to my parents'
   stereo, popped in a tape, and then pulled out a pen
   and pad.  For the next hour I played and rewound the
   first verse of LL Cool J's 'I Can't Live without My
   Radio,' recording each word on the pad.  I was
   convinced there was something worth discovering in
   the lyrics, something extraordinary and arcane.  I
   had to have it.  I had to trap it on paper, consume
   it, make it mine:

     'My radio, believe me, I like it loud
     I'm the man with the box that can rock the crowd'

   This was beyond music and poetry.  This was incantation."    Incantation?
                                                                Seriously?
        -- Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Eight Years in Power", p.87
           "Notes from the Fourth Year"                         Nothing in that
                                                                line reminds of
                                                                Ta-Nehisi
He goes on to talk about obsessing about the Nas                Coates. If he's
track "One Love" in 1993:                                       telling us he's
                                                                got roots in
    "I sat back like The Mack, my army suit was black           hip-hop, he's
     We was chillin' on the benches where he pumped his         not showing us
       loose cracks"                                            how.

Here, Coates discusses his developing
sense that "Art was not sentimental.
It had no responsibility to be            The verse goes on giving advice
hopeful or optimistic or make anyone      to a 12-year old drug dealer on
feel better about the world."             murdering rivals successfully.

All of that is fine, it makes sense       Can't imagine why this stuff
as background for the kind of essays      would *bother* anyone, eh?
he writes-- but the idea that his         But then, the fact that the
style has some roots in hip-hop is        situation is so horrible is
very strange.                             what the rap is really about:

    Every now and then, you run into a              NAS_ONE_LOVE
    case like this where what the artist
    *says* about what they're trying to
    do doesn't really match what you see
    in their art.
                                                    I wonder if Coates has
    Maybe none of us are really in                  fallen into a trap of
    control of what we do...                        romanticizing Gritty
                                                    Reality.  Life in The
                                                    Projects would no doubt
                                                    teach you some things,
                                                    but it wouldn't seem to
                                                    be anything to celebrate...




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