Another Story of Belonging and Exile?

My dad remembers the days when bands used to come to small town dance halls in southwest Minnesota. Jazz bands these were, and they came to places like Hatfield, which today has a population of 56. Back then, though, in the late forties and early fifties, when there were no hotels around and money was scarce, the patrons would house the bandmembers over night. Someone from the neighborhood of my grandpa’s farm had gone to see the band, then taken them home and put them up for the night since there were. Late in the afternoon of the next day, after sleeping off the night’s festivities, the band went swimming in a pond in the hills adjacent to my grandfather’s farm, where he came upon them. My dad remembers my grandpa laughing to, as they say, beat the band when he returned to the farmhouse. The band members were black and probably the last thing my grandfather expected to see, skinny-dipping in the hills above Champeperdan creek.

I grew up on the same farm in the same hills, hills that were really low rises on a vague plateau. When I was school age, the adults took turns driving the neighborhood kids to the local Christian school in a van we bought together for just such a purpose. It was on this van—first a pink 60’s pill and then a more hearty two-tone 70s almost-conversion van—that I listened to the older kids talk about what was important in the world: sports and music. Friday Night Videos had just been invented and junior high glory was to stay up past the news to catch a glimpse of the real world of music. And what we saw blew our little minds. In many ways the wonder of the "Billy Jean" and "Thriller" videos probably sealed the success of MTV and VH1 at least through the year 2000. It was that powerful, that good. It changed the lives of rural teens forever.

But it didn't end with Thriller. A couple of years later, Prince dominated the radio waves with Purple Rain and generated buzz in the school van by his bizarre costume at the Grammys. When someone on the school van bought his album, it also helped to put our libidos on fastforward: even rural white preteens could figure out what his muse was.

In short black music--no, the absolute genius of black music--continued to make its way into southwest Minnesota and to impact our lives well after my grandfather's revelation above the Champeperdam.

But if Prince moved our nether region, Whitney Houston moved our ideals. Or rather, siren-like, she could move us from our ideals with regard for nothing else but her voice. If beauty is truth, we thought--okay, I thought--this is truth; she could have been singing gobbledy-gook and it wouldn't have mattered. We would follow.

I'm a sucker for Whitney Houston songs; I can't deny it. Also undeniably, at least for a time, Whitney Houston was the voice of America. Just witness her national anthem at the 1991 Superbowl: this was the best America had to offer--the glittering gem that all the seismic upheaval of hundreds of years of American conflict had produced, Zora Neale Hurston's "mule of the world" transformed into its ultimate diva and, in that anthem, spokesperson.

My own personal Whitney Houston siren-song is "The Greatest Love of All," a sappy hymn to self-love that embodies everything the eighties stands for: shameless self-serving self-promotion wrapped up in a package of sham religion. If, as Jamie Smith argues, the political and entertainment worlds are more entwined than we should ever dare think, "The Greatest Love of All" is a perfect example of political ideology packaged for popular consumption. It should have been Ronald Reagan's theme song; that a black woman sang it is pure, calculating, evil genius. Nonetheless, to hear it sung is to disregard all of that. As the key changes climb, our collective spirits and individualist hopes soar with Whitney, the realities of the life around us be damned.

But now two of these 80s icons, and both of them black, are dead. Perhaps, we might argue, "The Greatest Love of All" wasn't enough for Houston, just as starting with the "Man in the Mirror" wasn't enough for Jackson. Meanwhile, other 80s icons blaze or fizzle on: Madonna, albeit somewhat hamstrung, performed at the pinnacle of pop success, the Superbowl; and U2, despite Bono's broken back, completed the most successful world tour in history.

What accounts for the difference? Was it personal flaws that left these black superstars unable to cope with the dizzying heights of stardom? This is what shock-jock radio would have us believe with the taunts of crack-whore being tossed Houston's way--and in essence not just Houston's way, but black America's way.

It's a bit silly for me to return to my grandpa's experience as a sort of parable for America, perhaps, but I can't resist. While the genius of black music in America has left us all with a revelation of sorts--whether real, true awe or a somewhat confused shaking of the head--white America returns home from the revelation, landed and therefore more rooted to the place and, more importantly, to the defining American story.

What happens to the black band swimming in the hills? Who knows? Who cares? Black icons, no matter how successful, are not landed, either literally, like my grandfather, or figuratively landed in the American story, as was the case with both Jackson and Houston.

Sure, there's other things to consider, including the dizzying heights of superstardom that almost no one, white or black, deals with well. But, while I'm the fourth generation to live in southwest Minnesota, while I was changed by the creative genius of two pop icons, they were pushed to the fringes of the American story and are now dead. And I'm afraid to tease out the implications about what this means for the larger story of placed and displaced in America, about the continuing story of belonging and exile on the American continents, about the continuing story of white and black.

But at least let me note that the beauty that we all benefited from for a time has passed out of the world, and that the implications of that passing remind us that in too many ways the continuing story of America remains a tragedy.