Chris Smith’s blog

In the new issue of SF mag, I review the new book from Leon Litwack, longtime UC Berkeley professor and one of the smartest voices on race in America:

As always, Stephen Colbert put it best. “Racism is over,” TV’s favorite faux right-winger declared after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first African American president. If only it were so. In this fluid retelling of the civil rights struggle from Reconstruction to Katrina, Leon Litwack, a Pulitzer Prize winner and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of history, shreds any notion of a feel-good narrative. Peppering his argument with quotations from freed slaves and fiery protesters, bluesman Char­ley Patton and rapper Chuck D., Litwack charts both the fight for black equality and the white pushback–from South­ern poll taxes to Northern white flight–that accompanied each civil rights victory. While the “mechanics of repression” have changed over the years, he concludes, the ground truths have not. In other words, the lynchings are over, but subtler discrimination remains–for example, in the yawning disparities in our schools and courts (black Californians, he notes, are more likely to end up in state prison than at a state college). None of this stuff is revelatory, exactly–at 140-odd pages, the book could be an expanded version of one of Litwack’s popular lectures–but it offers a powerful corrective to the purveyors of truthiness who insist (sans irony) that we’ve fixed our race problem.

Time for a little hometown chest-beating: “Blame Us,” a massive oral history of the Bay Area’s role in Obama’s rise, out in the new issue of San Francisco:

Without Bay Area technology, ingenuity, righteous indignation, and cash, Barack Obama would not be president today. A flash oral history of a nation-changing collision between A) a long-shot candidate who belived that only people connected could fix a broken democracy and B) a ramped-up region of idealists and web wizards fighting to do just that.

The story hit the web yesterday, and I’m proud to have played a part in its creation, interviewing the likes of Pete Leyden, the progressive politico and futurist big-thinker, and Sean Quinn, the professional poker player cum blogger and one of the minds behind FiveThirtyEight.com, the uncannily accurate online polling sensation. As reporters, though, we had it easy, simply doing our interviews and uploading the tapes. It was the editors who had the tough job, molding those hours (and hours and hours) of interviews into coherence. Bravo, guys. It’s a perfect postscript to the swearing-in of our new president.

Four years ago this morning, I was checking out of a motel in Carson City, Nevada, road-worn and weary, on the way to visit a friend in Mammoth Lakes, trying to escape the gloom that had descended on San Francisco after John Kerry’s loss. There was no getting away from it, though: in the motel office, George W. Bush’s second inauguration was playing on the TV, the sound turned low. Under bleak skies, his motorcade sped through the D.C. streets, besieged by booing protesters. As I signed the credit-card slip, the guy behind the counter burst out, “I can’t believe that bastard won again.”

How things change.

There were the million-plus in D.C. this morning, of course, clogging the Mall and massing out toward the horizon. The crowd was smaller here in San Francisco, but it still filled the Civic Center plaza, where a big screen had been set up in front of City Hall’s beaux-arts facade. We would have had a better view back home on the couch, but that wasn’t the point. At times like this, you just want to be around people. The mood was jubilant; people cheered the Bidens and Obamas, booed Rick Warren and Bush (number of shoes thrown at Bush’s image on the screen: 4) and generally welcomed the dawn of a new era. Gathered today under the bright blue sky were whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, old hippies in sensible shoes and young hipsters in giant sunglasses, all of them craning their necks toward the screen, oscillating between hushed silence and delirious applause. After Obama’s speech, we all sang the Star Spangled Banner, teary-eyed, voices cracking. Afterwards, people lingered in the sun, a little stunned, maybe, over what had actually happened today.

Mali’s Festival in the Desert, the only music festival in the world in which most of the audience arrives by camel, begins tomorrow. A nine-year-old gathering of the tribes that mostly features West African musicians but occasionally draws the likes of former Led Zep frontman Robert Plant, it’s held in Essakane, an ancient Saharan trading post hours from the nearest paved road (which might be in Timbuktu–itself shorthand for “end-of-the-world”). So you get the picture: it’s way the hell out there in the dunes. It’s hosted by the Tuaregs, nomadic tribesmen who ride for days, coming from villages scattered across the sands. Essakane lies at the heart of their ancestral territory, more or less, so the festival is something like a big family reunion. (Of course, the Tuaregs, having never really accepted the idea of the modern nation state, view basically everything around here as their territory. Hence the on-again, off-again insurgencies against the Malian government. But that’s a story for another day.) Writing for San Francisco magazine last year, I gave the festival an SF spin–”Burning Man without the glow sticks” (caveat emptor: PDF).

I’ve never been to the festival, but I have been to Mali, so I find myself wishing I had the cash to get back over there. All the usual suspects are onstage this year: Vieux Farka Toure (son of the late lamented Malian guitar god Ali Farka Toure), who often wears a cowboy hat with his boubou when he plays; Etran Finatawa, from next-door Niger, who are rapidly making a name for themselves in the West; and headliners Tinariwen, aka the Tuareg MC5, former rebels who traded in their AK-47s for guitars. (Imagine them doing “Kick Out the Jams.” Ah, well. I’ll have to settle for “Whole Lotta Love,” with Robert Plant.) What all these guys have in common is searing guitars and clean, crisp rhythms, sounds perfectly adapted to a climate so dry that you can actually feel the hot wind sucking the moisture out of your body (Lessons learned: I got heat exhaustion when I was there last year). Desert blues, indeed.

The only real absence this year, by my lights, is Group Inerane, an obscure seven-piece from Agadez, Niger. When I saw their lp (via demoniazed) buried in the stacks at Amoeba, I had to have it–the cover shows a dude in a turban, staring down the camera, brandishing a battered guitar. And the music: Raw leads and ululating call-and-response, the songs’ unpolished punch enhanced by fluctuating, basement-tapes-style production values. Mythic stuff. Or as the liner notes put it, “the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution.”

It wasn’t until I saw Bad Brains at Slim’s last year that I realized I had gotten older. These guys, the black rasta-skaters from DC who almost singlehandedly invented hardcore punk, had gotten back together with their original lineup and gone out on tour. As you might expect for a bunch of now-middle aged punks, they were older and a little fatter. But they still played fast and hard, and songs like “Banned in DC” sounded every bit as heavy, 20 years on, as I wanted them to sound.

I wasn’t prepared for the crowd, though, which probably averaged 35 or so in age. There were pockets of younger people in the audience, each of them doing their mohawked, Discharge-patched best to look like they had beamed in from 1985, but most people looked about like me: jeans, black t-shirt, some gray around the temples. And that’s when it hit me: I’m getting old.

Once upon a time, way back in high school, I sang in a hardcore band. Just like thousands of other teenage basement-bands across the country at the time, we spent our days skateboarding, building launch ramps in our driveways, and working up new ways to express our dissatisfaction with the world. This was the Reagan era, after all, and there was plenty to be angry about–the threat of nuclear war, for instance, seemed ever-present back then. And I lived in the suburbs of Detroit, which had a scarred, end-of-days feel to it due to the auto industry’s fall and the crack industry’s rise. Trips downtown were bleak: acres of feral high rises, rubble-strewn yards, even the occasional just-burned house, smoldering away under the winter sun.

I had spent the previous few years listening to the most aggressive metal bands I could find, wearing out the grooves in my Motorhead and Venom lps on a crappy turntable in my bedroom. When I discovered hardcore bands like Black Flag, C.O.C., and the Necros, it was a revelation. Faster and harder than anything that had come before, this was brutal, primal-scream stuff, a rumble you felt in your guts. It opened my eyes. (As it turns out, it also politicized me–a formative experience that I somehow forgot until, decades later, I tried to explain how I ended up a lefty journalist in SF as opposed to, say, a Detroit doctor or Charlotte bank manager. The difference was punk.)

But while the politics were important, it was the DIY aspect of punk that really inspired us. Intention and spirit were all; real musical skill was, in some ways, beside the point. Noticing that lots of punk bands sucked, we naturally thought, “Hey, we could suck like that, too!” And so the band was born. After a bit of debate, we chose the most hardcore moniker we could conjure: Moral Decay–a name that I’m both inordinately proud and sort of embarrassed to say that I came up with. As it turned out, there was a far more legit band from California out there by the same name, but with the Internet just a gleam in some tech wonk’s eye, we didn’t know it.

All through the fall of 1986, we spent our Saturdays in A.’s basement in Birmingham, a neighborhood of sheltering oaks and stately colonials. We wrote and practiced songs, recording them in one or two takes on a four-track, then surfaced to make sandwiches and drink Cokes in the kitchen, descending again to cut a few more minute-long tracks. I screamed through an underpowered microphone, imagining myself another Henry Rollins but sounding way less tough. J. and E. switched off playing distorted, warp-speed bass lines on a keyboard. J. played some guitar and was often lost in the mix entirely. It was A., who even at 14 was an accomplished drummer, and R., who actually knew something about the guitar, who really held the songs together. This was important because everything we did tended toward entropy. Each song ended in chaos, collapsing in on itself as people in the background cursed and threw things across the room.

And then there were the lyrics. To call them sophomoric is to insult sophomores the world over. “BBQ Cat.” “Let’s Mug Someone.” “Kill Your Neighbors.” Lots of songs about skating. A few random, comically mean swipes at other, allegedly less-cool ninth graders (sample lyric: “You suck!”). And buried beneath all that silliness, a budding social conscience. “Turn on the News,” for example, was a muddled attempt at media criticism, inspired by a seething dislike for Detroit’s Ted Baxterish, gadfly-anchorman Bill Bonds, who could have been the inspiration for The Simpsons‘ blowhard reporter Kent Brockman. “Cats in trees and dancing bears/Chase away your fears and soothe your cares/ At home you won’t feel all the hate/Turn on the news/Don’t be late.” But mostly it was dumber stuff on our minds, propelled by double-bass drumming and driving guitar lines.

Our ambition, if not our skill level, was pretty much boundless. We quickly recorded a few tapes that we sold via MaximumRockNRoll, the San Francisco-based punk bible. I whipped up an ad featuring a Dario Argento-esque zombie and big, Impact-style letters (think Lolcat fonts) screaming our name. It sold surprisingly well, and for a while there I had a bunch of hardcore pen pals, from Colorado and California, Germany and Japan. At least a few people, it seemed, actually liked our music.

We never really made it out of the basement, though. I was the only one in the group who actually liked hardcore, and the rest of the band got bored with always playing as fast as possible. Our last recording sessions featured a shambolic cover of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes,” an oddly catchy take on the ’70s-sleazy theme song to the Barney Miller show, and a discoesque original called “Nuclear Destruction.” There was also, as A. reminded me recently, one final blast of fury entitled “Dicks.” That was our swan song.

So winter came, and the band drifted apart, each of us more interested in hanging out with girls or drinking beer than making marginal music that few people would ever hear. As the years passed, most of us lost our copies of the Moral Decay demo. I left my last copy at an ex’s house in Ann Arbor in the 1990s, collateral damage from my last-chopper-out-of-Saigon exit from the relationship.

Out of the blue a few weeks ago, J., one of the keyboard players, got in touch and mailed me a copy of that 22-year-old tape, transferred to CD. I blushed when I put it on for the first time, even though I was by myself. It wasn’t easy to place all the feelings: sadness and nostalgia, pride and self-consciousness. But mostly wonder: I can’t believe how young I sound.