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 Caught in the Carousel - Music Reviews and More
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Donnie
The Daily News
Soulthought Entertainment
Is there lovelier, more expressive, more dynamic music than American soul? From Motown and Stax, through Atlantic Records, to the current discography of the neo-soul movement, we find the finest singing, the most outstanding musicianship, in American soul. Soul is also the musical form that is most adept at addressing class inequities, social injustice, and personal despair. It is our most evolved genre of music, and it speaks more fully than any other to the broad palette of human emotion and experience.
The neo-soul movement began in the late Nineties, perhaps in response to the heavy gangster rap of that decade, inaugurated by N.W.A. with Straight Outta Compton in 1988, and perhaps also in response to the glossy soul and hip hop albums produced throughout the Nineties by Babyface, Jimmy Jam + Terry Lewis, and Sean Combs. Neo-soul reaches back to classic Sixties and Seventies soul, foregoing the hard beats, rap and thick production of hip hop. Records by artists like Donnie, Alicia Keys and John Legend feature acoustic instruments and the clean, simple production that often sounds like a live band performance. Neo-soul records are often mellower and more romantic than hip hop, drawing some of their color from chill and lounge.
Donnie Johnson, known as Donnie, released his debut album, the colored section in 2003 - it's an astonishing debut and an overlooked neo-soul milestone. In its arrangements, beats, keyboards and vocals, the colored section draws from Stevie Wonder's classic early Seventies period but sounds fresh and modern. "Cloud 9" from the colored section was an urban radio hit, but the album didn't garner the acclaim or sales that greeted debut albums by neo-soul artists such as Jill Scott, John Legend and India.Arie, a friend of Donnie's and fellow Atlanta resident.
India.Arie provides a kind of manifesto for neo-soul in the 50-second introduction to her debut album, Acoustic Soul, from 2001: "This is in remembrance of our ancestors. Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye and Donnie Hathaway. And all that came before. You opened up a door. 'Cause of you. A change gonna come."
This is a short list of neo-soul artists and the albums they've released since 2000:
India.Arie - Acoustic Soul (2001), Voyage to India (2002), Testimony: Vol. I, Life & Relationship (2006)
Erykah Badu - Mama's Gun (2000)
Cody ChestnuTT - The Headphone Masterpiece (2002)
D'Angelo - Voodoo (2000)
Donnie - the colored section (2003), The Daily News (2007)
Alicia Keys - Songs in A Minor (2001), The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003)
John Legend - Get Lifted (2004), Once Again (2006)
Maxwell - Now (2001)
Musiq (Soulchild) - Aijuswanaseing (2000), Juslisen (2002), Soulstar (2003), Luvanmusiq (2007)
Jill Scott - Who Is Jill Scott? (2000)
Donnie was born in Lexington, KY, and moved to Atlanta with his parents, Bishop Robert N. Johnson and Elect Lady Dorothy Johnson, both Hebrew Pentecostal ministers. According to Bishop Larry Owens, interviewed by University of Pennsylvania undergraduate Michelle Harris in 1996, Hebrew Pentecostals believe the Old Testament and the New Testament should be taken literally, and that Jesus was the Messiah of the Jewish People and the Son of God. Hebrew Pentecostals use the appellation "Hebrew" to delineate their connection to Abraham, the first believer, and they keep the Jewish Sabbath, but they do not identify as Christian or Jewish. Women may be pastors in the Hebrew Pentecostal church, but the church follows the Scriptures to the letter and opposes abortion, adultery, assisted suicide, fornication and homosexuality.
Like Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye, both children of ministers, Donnie sang in his church choir when he was a child and throughout his adolescence. "I come from gospel," he says. "I come from Rance Allen, James Moore, John P. Kee, Darryl Coley - all of these men in gospel sing and draw emotions." The vocal performances on both the colored section and on The Daily News are gospel, replete with call-and-response vocals, benedictions, exhortations and warnings. As with much soul music, Donnie's songs often call for the audience to rise up, to love themselves and each other, to be proud, in a tradition that began with gospel and continues in the music of James Brown, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Curtis Mayfield, among others. Donnie's music occupies this same beautiful and blurry area.
What's most admirable about The Daily News is its ambition. This is a political album, the kind that's not made much anymore, with the recent exception of Green Day's American Idiot (2004). A concept album with songs "ripped from today's headlines," The Daily News addresses the Atlanta child murders, the devastation of our environment, the Iraq War, pedophilia, the pharmaceutical industry, slavery and suicide. "America is in bad shape," Donnie says. "I witness human tragedy every single day. I just wanted to put music to our everyday culture, because nobody's news is like ours."
In the recent Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary issue, an article by Brian Hiatt titled "Protest Songs Rise Again" discusses the recent spate of "protest songs" recorded by a diverse group of artists that includes Tori Amos, Bright Eyes, Norah Jones, Maroon 5, Nine Inch Nails and Sum 41. In a chart included in the article, "Ten New Anti-Bush Tracks," Hiatt presents a list of swipes at Bush, including Jones's "nothing is as scary as election day/who knows, maybe he's not deranged," and Trent Reznor's "Traded in my God for this one/and he sings his name with a capital G." According to the article, Maroon 5's new single, "Makes Me Wonder," includes the couplet, "give me something to believe in/because I don't believe in you anymore."
Did Adam Levine ever believe in George Bush? Did anyone? Perish the thought! Everyone on the left, or with any sense whatsoever, knew as early as 2002 that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the bombing of the World Trade Center, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq posed no threat either to the US or to any country in the Middle East. To stand at a microphone now, four years after the fact, and take a shot at George W. Bush seems, if not disingenuous, then at least a bit tawdry and facile. Did you just start hating him? Bush is a pusillanimous demagogue, obviously, but what's more discomfiting about his presidency is the bidding he does for the military-industrial complex and his forthright determination, at the behest of corporate interests, to exacerbate the class and race inequities and the war mongering, that plague our nation and our world. Bush is a symptom, and to swing at him like he's some sort of evil piņata is to oversimplify our current state of affairs.
Much of what passes for polemics in Hiatt's list of protest songs is rather toothless. We perhaps are living in the most desperate time in American history - the gap between the wealthy and the poor is widening, with the quiet eradication of our middle class and the dissolution of the manufacturing sector of our economy. There almost 40 million Americans living in poverty, many of them children, few of them with health insurance. Yet even given the increasing severity of our domestic failures, we are conducting an illegal occupation of a Third World nation for reasons that have never been revealed to the American people (oil? permanent bases in the heart of the Middle East?) at a cost of thousands upon thousands of lives, both American and Iraqi, and at a current total expense in excess of $500 billion. Meanwhile, we are sitting by while much of the world lives in slums, starves, dies from epidemics long thought eradicated or suffers under dictatorships that make the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein look like your sister-in-law's book club.
On The Daily News, Donnie attempts to address many of the larger issues affecting our storied nation, to narrate the current state of our national failure, which is something his music business comrades fail to do. While in some regards he succeeds to no greater extent than Tom Morello, recording as The Nightwatchman, who sings on One Man Revolution, "can you explain away the sleight-of-hand/and the criminality/of spending souls for oil," he must be applauded for reaching for the kind of social and political commentary that has made much of the music recorded by giants like the Clash, Marvin Gaye, the Jam, Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder and Neil Young, to name a few, so important and so lasting.
Can anyone address all of this in a song, or even in an entire album? Music requires an elegance of construction that makes addressing these issues a cumbersome operation that often yields dicey results. I wouldn't know how to write a protest song, or even a poem or story that rails against the current state of the world - I could write an essay, but essays rarely make for good singles, as evidenced by Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," which was sort of a word association exercise for Baby Boomers. Dylan, of course, makes it look effortless on songs like "Hurricane," one of his many storytelling and polemical masterpieces. Stevie Wonder sang about the plight of poor black Americans in standout songs like "Big Brother" and "Living for the City," and of course Marvin Gaye recorded one of the most beautiful laments in popular music, "What's Going On," which is a standard in every meaning of the word. What's Going On, the album, also includes one of the darkest, most powerful political songs ever written, Gaye's "Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)." Springsteen has written in this vein as well, successfully on Born in the USA, and without as much success on The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, which feel a bit labored in their phrasing, the result of his attempts to cram unwieldy stories into his songs, a problem that never befell him with masterpieces like "The River" and "Atlantic City."
It's interesting that so many of pop music's greatest artists and bands have often been willing to address class inequities, the failure of post-industrial capitalist societies, and the evils of war. To review an incomplete list, bands like the Beatles, the Clash, the Jam, the Smiths, and artists like Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder have achieved the astonishing feat of issuing superlative albums, often consecutively, that address broad personal, political and social issues. I bring this list to light for the purpose of discussing the triptych of early Seventies Stevie Wonder albums, Talking Book, Innvervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale, three of the most wonderful records ever made and the template for the solid and worthwhile work Donnie began with the colored section, and has continued to fine effect with The Daily News.
Wonder's body of work during the Sixties includes some of the greatest, most beloved songs in popular music, including "I Was Made to Love Her," "If You Really Love Me," "My Cherie Amour," "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," "Uptight" and "We Can Work It Out." Freed from the strict requirements of the Motown single by the success of What's Going On, originally released in May of 1971, Wonder, one of Motown's most reliable hit-makers and one of America's best-loved soul artists, released Music of My Mind in 1972, his first twist away from the Motown format and toward records that were more emotionally expressive, experimental, introspective and socially aware than his previous records. Wonder wrote, arranged, performed and produced Music of My Mind himself, assuming total creative control of his work, and the liner notes to the album announce the arrival of Stevie Wonder, mature artist: "Stevie Wonder comes of age, in now time, into his own. A genius youth grew up with (sic) sings a new song, now he's free. The man is his own instrument. The instrument is an orchestra. Sensitive and earthly, he sings and plays, like a child with a joyful spirit, yet with a master's depth and skill." This was just the beginning.
Perhaps inspired by some of the rock music of the era, the record opens with "Love Having You Around," an extended jam clocking in at longer than seven minutes. Wonder followed this song with the album's finest and most ambitious moment, "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)," an eight-minute piece that blends two songs into one suite of music. While Music of My Mind didn't yield any charting singles, its sonic and thematic ambitions were comparable to the progressive rock of the time, and it heralded the beginning of Wonder's most fecund period, which continued later that year with the release of Talking Book, the first of his three masterpieces. Wonder released Innervisions in 1973, followed by Fulfillingness' First Finale, the most gospel-sounding of these three records, in 1974.
Even after playing them again and again for years, I still find these records bracing and alive every time I hear them, joyous and poignant. Each album covers broad thematic ground with tremendous depth. Talking Book, for example, starts with "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," one of the most delightful, exuberant love songs ever written, an acknowledged wedding standard. Later in the record we find "Blame It On the Sun," maybe one of the saddest break-up songs ever put to vinyl. Talking Book also includes the political critique, "Big Brother," and "Superstition," one of the funkiest and most popular singles in music history. He was making perfect music.
Between 1963 and 1971, Wonder placed 25 songs on the Billboard charts. Looking back over Wonder's output throughout the Sixties and through Hotter Than July, 1980, I believe this is a series of records rivaled in quality and consistency only by a few of Wonder's contemporaries, including the Beatles, Elvis Costello, Dylan, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen. If we look at this list again in terms of hit singles, the kind of sing-a-long pop that dominated American Post-War radio into the Seventies, Dylan, Elvis, Van Morrison and Springsteen fall off this list, leaving Wonder accompanied only by the Beatles.
the colored section is deep in the vein of classic Stevie Wonder albums. It is a joyful, romantic album, dreamy and completely satisfying, much like the albums that inspired it, and it's full of harmonicas and bright keyboards, a trumpet on "People Person," flute punctuating the bossa nova of "Do You Know?" The record features love songs and a few songs, "Welcome to the Colored Section," "Cloud 9," and "Beautiful Me," that are about being black, a theme that's crucial to The Daily News, but not as prevalent in its lyrics. Musically, The Daily News is a funkier, harder and tighter record than the colored section, more concerned with beats and vocals than with keyboards and horns. On much of the album, Donnie provides his own backing vocals, and the multiple tracks and call-and-response singing push the songs on The Daily News closer to gospel than to Seventies-era Stevie Wonder.
A pair of albums that might be analogous to the colored section and The Daily News is D'Angelo's Brown Sugar (1995) and Voodoo (2000). Whereas Brown Sugar, like the colored section, was lush and dulcet, Voodoo, like The Daily News, is filled with harder beats and raps, and the hooks reveal themselves after multiple plays. Donnie also invites Phonte of Little Brother to rap on "Over-the-Counter Culture," a collaboration that recalls the guest appearances by Method Man & Redman on Voodoo.
The Daily News opens with "Impatient People," and the heavy bass and hard funk of the song, reminiscent of Kool & the Gang's "Jungle Boogie," signal Donnie's break from the colored section. Donnie sings as if he's preaching, with backing vocals that evoke a gospel choir. "Impatient People" addresses the plight of the people of New Orleans, especially those in the impoverished Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina: "I'm an American/And I am human/You treat me like an animal.I'm not a refugee/I'm an evacuee/I'm just a citizen/Can I get some assistance?"
"911" is a phenomenal vocal performance, with Donnie singing near the height of his register over a driving drumbeat. Musically, "911" seems to achieve what Donnie was striving for throughout The Daily News, a harder, funkier, more percussive sound that doesn't sacrifice hooks and melody, but pushes them deeper within the songs. Unfortunately, the lyrics, though sung in absolute earnest, don't make much sense, and Donnie wastes a title here that might have actually been for a song about September 11, 2001: "I'd trade the World Trade to spend some time with you babe/I'd trade my racism, my sexism, my homophobia/Trade all my funny ways/My financial center." It's a confession, but it's unclear.
"Over-the-Counter Culture" lifts the horns from the Average White Band's "Pick up the Pieces," and the conversational snippets floating through the intro are reminiscent of the beginning of "What's Going On?" "Over-the-Counter Culture" is a dance song, with big vocals backed by punchy horns. The song is a diatribe against the pharmaceutical industry and chemicals of various kinds, including MSG, but the lyrics are too scattershot to make the song's message effective - at times they're even a bit silly: "They got a pill for my erection/And another for my depression/And I can taste it in my dinner/With your artificial flavor/You be doin' it undercover/An invisible chemical war." It's a far too broad, and Donnie doesn't bring anything new to the idea that we are a nation that's chemically dependent in our bedrooms, at mealtime and even in warfare. Phonte's rap, like Donnie's lyrics, slams together too many ideas at once and comes up empty-handed.
"Classifieds" sounds as if it were built with parts taken from Stevie Wonder's "Happier Than the Morning Sun" from Music of My Mind and "Maybe Your Baby" from Talking Book - this is the song on The Daily News where Donnie sounds most like Wonder. The vocal arrangement on "Classifieds" is again call-and-response gospel, and the song features one of the album's more salient guitar solos. While the lyrics don't cohere around a particular theme, they seem to be Donnie's call for us to take better care of our world.
"Suicide" starts with the beat from "Backstabbers," by the O'Jays, then it moves into lusher territory with one of the hookiest choruses on The Daily News. The lyrics begin with a story about depression: "Scaring all of my family and my friends/With this thing of wantin' to kill myself." After this promise of storytelling or personal revelation, the song dissolves into banalities: "You've got so much to live for.Suicide Makes the karma bad/For the one who gets your soul next/When you die Then you'll wish you Had lived your life." I wish Donnie had talked about why he had wanted to kill himself - perhaps it was due to existential exhaustion or deep despair brought on by the state of the world The Daily News describes, or even if he had talked about how and why he chose not to kill himself. Instead, we get an impersonal explanation of how karma factors into suicide. The music is outstanding, and the vocals are impeccable and passionate, as they are throughout the entire album, again sounding like a choir at the chorus, but the lyrics demonstrate a failure of both intention and craft.
"If I Were You" sounds like much of the colored section, full of harmonica and handclaps. The song is an exhortation to change your life, to embrace self-esteem and self-love. It's absolutely lovely, a perfect summertime song and dead-on for classic Stevie Wonder.
"Robot" sounds like Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" and Bad-era Michael Jackson slapped together with just a hint of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit." The chorus is sing-a-long brilliant, hook upon hook upon hook. Again, the music is fantastic and quite infectious, but the lyrics are nonsensical: "Filled me with programming as soon As I came out my mother's womb/I'm part of your technology/Tell me who do I really be.I do just what I'm told I'm a Robot."
In terms of its lyrics, "The Atlanta Child Murders" is the album's greatest failure. Between 1979 and 1981, 29 black people were murdered in the Atlanta metropolitan area, most of them pre-adolescent boys. Wayne Williams, a black man, is serving a life sentence for the murder of two of the victims, and he is suspected of committing at least 22 other murders, though he was never formally charged. According to a May 5, 2007 article from www.crimelibrary.com, "Police Reopen Atlanta Child-Killing Cases," by Harry R. Weber, Williams alleges that he was framed, and that Atlanta officials covered up evidence of Ku Klux Klan participation in the killings in order to stave off a race war.
After a lovely piano intro, the song, built on a phenomenal beat, dissolves into a lot of X Files bullshit about scientific experiments, the Center for Disease Control and genetics: "The Atlanta Child Murders conspiracy/Was a modern day lynching like Tuskegee/A political prisoner Wayne Williams is/Scientific experiment on our kids." Although Donnie calls out the names of the murdered boys in memoriam, "The Atlanta Child Murders" is another lost opportunity. I don't see a government conspiracy here, and while I haven't done much research, I think the case presents questions we must ask about the law enforcement and protection afforded to poor Americans - I doubt 22 kids will ever disappear from the Upper East Side of Manhattan and turn up dead in a swamp in New Jersey. There are parallels between the Atlanta Child Murders and the abduction and murder of more than 400 women since 1993 in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico. According to Amnesty International USA (www.amnestyusa.org), "more than 400 women have been murdered.Local investigations into the killings have been sloppy and fraught with problems, including unjustifiable delays in the initial and most important stages of the investigations, a failure to secure the crime scene and the falsification of evidence." Rather than a government conspiracy, perhaps the issue the Atlanta child murders raises is our continued indifference to the poor, who have become disposable. I don't doubt Donnie's sincerity, but I question his research.
The songwriting improves with the next two songs, "For Christ Sake" and "Mason Dixon Line." "For Christ Sake" is a funky, uplifting gospel song with three other vocalists backing Donnie: "This is not/Your typical gospel song/so do not Do not get this wrong/Life is what Only what you make." "Mason Dixon Line" is a funk stomp and maybe the most lyrically cohesive song on The Daily News, a simple, driving song about an escaped slave running for the Mason Dixon Line: "They're behind me/But my destiny is for freedom/They can't do nothing/I'll be straight, I'll be fine/Once I get across the mason Dixon line."
"China Doll" is about pedophilia. The song starts with a gong and continues with a plinking keyboard line meant to evoke Chinese or Japanese music that ultimately grows rather grating, and the lyrics are as disappointing as the music: "A China Doll/Her uncle-father-family friend/Can't keep his hands To himself/No She's hot to trot.Her private parts have been bombarded/By the one she was supposed to trust." The second line, "uncle-father-family friend" is like using Mad Libs for lyrics - it's nonspecific, sloppy writing, and the ideas and outrage Donnie wishes to express would be better served in a song that tells a story, something like Suzanne Vega's "Luka," or in the kind of first-person narrative endemic to much of Springsteen. It wouldn't have been difficult for Donnie to tell a story about a girl's sexual abuse at the hands of her "uncle-father-family friend" from her point of view, and it would have made for a much stronger, more meaningful song.
"The Daily News" is the penultimate song on The Daily News, a funky list of headlines: "A teacher Messin' round With A student/A little girl Just found Raped Strangled/Soldiers dying in A war on terror/An idiot Tryin' Hard To be A President/You will be singing the blues/When you hear The Daily News." Donnie sings some of the lyrics through a talk box, which reminds me of the live version of Peter Frampton's "Lines on My Face" or Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer," and I think his aspirations for this song might have been better served by another Phonte rap. The Daily News closes with a reprise of "If I Were You," which is sort of Donnie's "Three Little Birds." It lifts you up, all bright horns and sunshine.
What kind of world is Donnie singing to, and about, in late spring 2007, both for black Americans and for all Americans? It seems there's a surfeit of material to work with, if one wishes to write protest songs or social critiques:
HEALTH INSURANCE
I found a 2000 Kaiser Commission report titled "Medicaid and the Uninsured" at the Kaiser Family Foundation Web site, www.kff.org. Although the information dates from the beginning of the decade, it's quite chilling and most likely unchanged or even worse as of this writing:
"African Americans comprise 13% of the US population.the African American infant mortality rate is more than double that of whites and African Americans die from diabetes at more than three times the rate of whites.access to health insurance coverage and appropriate health services could reduce many of these disparities.the uninsured rate for African Americans is more than one and a half times the rate for white Americans, largely because of gaps in employer-based coverage.Among uninsured African American children, 20% of school-age children and 10% of younger children have not seen a physician even once in the past year."
POVERTY
According to the CIA, as of July 2007 the US population will be approximately 301 million, with blacks comprising about 13% of the overall population. According to Census Bureau statistics quoted by Juan Williams in his September 1, 2006 New York Times Op-Ed piece, "Getting Past Katrina," 12.6% of Americans are living in poverty, with 18.6% of all American children part of this demographic. 24.7% of Blacks and 21.9% of Hispanics were living in poverty in 2004, while the percentage of whites in poverty was only 8.6%. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the 1997 federal family poverty level for a family of three was $12,802, with about half of all African American families living on incomes of less than $26,000 in 2000. As of 2004, the federal poverty level for a family of three had increased to $14,680.
On March 31, 1968, in his sermon at the National Cathedral, Rev. King told the congregation, "there is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."
PRISON AND DEATH ROW
I found the following statistics at www.sentencingproject.org:
As of 2003, 161,673 persons were held in federal prisons, an increase of 81% since 1995, with more than two million people behind bars nationwide. More than half of federal prisoners are serving time for a drug offense, and nearly three-fourths of the population are non-violent offenders with no history of violence. African American drug offenders have a 20% greater chance of being sentenced to prison than white drug offenders, and Hispanics have a 40% greater chance; African Americans also receive longer prison terms for drug offenses than whites - in 2002, the average prison term of 105 months for African Americans was 69% longer than the average of 62 months for white prisoners. As of 2002, African Americans were serving almost the same amount of time in prison for drug offenses (57.2 months) as white inmates did for violent offenses (58.8 months).
81.4% of crack cocaine defendants in 2002 were African American, while about two-thirds of crack cocaine users in the general population are white or Hispanic; the average sentence for a crack cocaine offense in 2002 (119 months) was more than three years greater than for powder cocaine (78 months).
According to "Incarcerated America," an April 2003 Human Rights Watch backgrounder, 44% of all prisoners in the US are black and, as supported by Justice Department statistics for 2002, "black men of all ages are incarcerated at more than seven times the rate of white men."
As Phonte raps on "Over-the-Counter Culture," "war on drugs, please, it's war on the poor/Victims of the hypocrisy of race war."
With regard to capital punishment, the ACLU issued a report, "Race and the Death Penalty," on February 26, 2003:
"People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43% of total executions since 1976 and 55% of those currently awaiting execution.While white victims account for one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all capital cases involve white victims. Furthermore, as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.For many years reports from around the country have found that a pervasive racial prejudice in the application of the death penalty exists."
UNEMPLOYMENT
In the first quarter of 2005, "the overall African American unemployment rate was 10.6%, while the overall rate - 5.3% - was half that level," according to the Economic Policy Institute's "African Americans in the current recovery" economic snapshot, prepared by economist Jared Bernstein and available at www.epinet.org. "Almost four years after the recession began in March 2001, employment rates remain down by 2 percentage points overall and almost twice that much (3.7 points) for African Americans." Bernstein concludes his report by remarking, "the labor market still discriminates against minorities, particularly African American males."
THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ
Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress updated her report, "The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11" on March 14th of this year:
"For FY2008, DOD requested $481.4 billion for its regular or baseline budget and $141.7 billion for war costs. If Congress approves both FY2007 and FY2008 war requests, total funding for Iraq and the Global War on Terror would reach about $752 billion."
As of May 30, 2007, there have been 3,474 American deaths in Iraq and 25,549 total wounded. As of the same date, www.iraqbodycount.com estimated the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the war to be between 64,664 and 70,815.
In a 2002 interview, Donnie told Netherlands R&B and classic soul Web site Save Our Soul (www.saveoursoul.nl), ".we would rather have war than talk and fair and reasonable. We relate on an animalistic level, and I feel that we, including myself, should rise higher. I cannot identify with animalistic behaviors such as killing, raping and bombing."
We're in bad shape, perhaps on the cusp of the End-Time, wading into the failure of capitalism and militarism. Beginning with Reagan, the Republicans, with some help from Bill Clinton, have rolled back the New Deal and whatever gains the War on Poverty made. The Great Society we sought to build in the Sixties, flush with our Post-War prosperity, is a tired and beaten idea, one I doubt I will see taken up again in my lifetime. To create an Eden on Earth is no longer possible, but must we transform this world into a hell? For many people worldwide, it's already happened. Given all this material, I wish Donnie had attempted more specific, trenchant lyrics.
Perhaps one of the only positive results of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 is that more Americans than ever have entered the fray of political discussion. The situation is dire, and we must politicize our experience as Americans. As Dylan wrote in "All Along the Watchtower," "the hour is getting late." So while many of the lyrics on The Daily News stumble, we must applaud Donnie for his ambition, his passion and his concern. He deserves a standing ovation, a thunderous applause that fills the house. No one else is attempting this sort of album. He hasn't yet made his What's Going On or his Innervisions, but he's working toward it and making incredible music along the way. the colored section and The Daily News should be required purchases for anyone who loves classic soul. Donnie's musicianship is superb and, as a student of soul and gospel music, his scholarship is robust. He is crafting painterly, uplifting, thoughtful soul records - he is an artist whose work is absolutely worth our attention and support.
I'd like to conclude this sermon with a Langston Hughes poem:
Oppression
Now dreams
Are not available
To the dreamers,
Nor songs
To the
singers.
In some lands
Dark night
And cold steel
Prevail -
But the dream
Will come back,
And the song
Break
Its jail.
--David Porter
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