Coumba Gawlo: Pata Pata

Remarks:

That is Senegalese singer Coumba Gawlo singing Miriam Makeba’s first hit song, “Pata Pata”. The song has been done many times (click on the following links to hear them on YouTube):

• 1967: Miriam Makeba, South Africa
• 199?: Daude, Brazil
• 1998: Coumba Gawlo, Senegal/France
• 2000: Thalia, Mexico
• 2004: D’jaa, Germany

I am surprised that no one in America has made a hit song out of it.

I like Gawlo’s version the best. I love that guitar at the beginning. It went to #2 in France in 1998. The words are in Xhosa. Xhosa is a South African language that has clicks in it and you can hear that in Makeba’s version.

Gawlo does some talking in her version. It is not Xhosa nor does it sound like French, so I am guessing it is Wolof.

Lyrics:

Saguguka sathi beka
(Nantsi, pata pata)
Saguguka sathi beka
(Yiyo, pata pata)
Yi yo mama yiyo mama
(Nantsi, pata pata)
Yi yo mama yiyo mama
(Yiyo, pata pata)

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Danzy Senna: Caucasia

“Caucasia” (1998) by Danzy Senna is a story about Birdie Lee, a girl growing up in America who can pass for either black or white. Her father is black and her mother is white but she is neither – or either. She is whatever the circumstances demand. It is a story about that strange, grey nowhere land between the races, between black and white, a story about the nature of race itself.

For a long time I did not read the book because of the title: “Caucasia”: it seemed a little too skinhead to me. It is nothing like that.

Because the story of Birdie Lee seems so much like Senna’s own life you keep having to remind yourself that it is fiction and not autobiography. Just like Birdie Lee, Senna grew up in and near Boston, her father was black, a professor who studied race issues, her mother was white, an old-money, blue-blood Wasp who turned against white American society after having black children.

Unlike the main characters in “The Imitation of Life” or Nella Larsen’s “Passing”, Birdie Lee is not a tragic mulatto. She does not hate being either black or white. She does not come to a bad end trying to be either.

In fact, her very willingness to change race is unsettling. It unsettles even her. We expect our heroes to stand their ground, to be the moral centre of the story. It is sad to see her kiss up to the white girls who laughed at how she looks; it is sad to see her try to be just like them. And sadder still to see her give the cold shoulder to the only other mixed girl in town. Sad, but probably truer to life.

Her mother is wanted by the FBI for hiding guns for revolutionaries. So for much of the book her mother is on the run with her. During that time Birdie Lee becomes Jesse Goldman, a made-up Jewish girl with a made-up Jewish past. But she is Jesse for so long she forgets where Jesse ends and Birdie Lee begins, she almost forgets that she ever was Birdie Lee. Which is her true self? Does she have a true self?

As Jesse she wore a star of David, but then when a boy threw pennies at her (because Jews are supposed to be cheap), she stopped wearing it and tells her friends she is only kind of Jewish because her mother is not Jewish.

I was hoping that she would not quite fit into white society, that her secret about being part black would come out, that she would become an outcast like that mixed girl she would not talk to, that she would say bitter but true things about American society. Well, it is not that kind of book.

However her father does tell her that race is a construct, a fiction, a lie that American society is built on. And that, as it turns out, is the moral of the story.

See also:

• Danzy Senna
• Nella Larsen: Passing
• tragic mulatto
• black father, white mother
• biracial

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Lauryn Hill: Everything is Everything

Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually

Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually

I wrote these words for everyone
Who struggles in their youth
Who wont accept deception
Instead of what is truth
It seems we lose the game,
Before we even start to play
Who made these rules? were so confused
Easily led astray
Let me tell ya that
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
After winter, must come spring
Everything is everything

I philosophy
Possibly speak tongues
Beat drum, abyssinian, street baptist
Rap this in fine linen
From the beginning
My practice extending across the atlas
I begat this
Flippin in the ghetto on a dirty mattress
You cant match this rapper / actress
More powerful than two cleopatras
Bomb graffiti on the tomb of nefertiti
Mcs aint ready to take it to the serengeti
My rhymes is heavy like the mind of sister betty
L. boogie spars with stars and constellations
Then came down for a little conversation
Adjacent to the king, fear no human being
Roll with cherubims to nassau coliseum
Now hear this mixture
Where hip hop meets scripture
Develop a negative into a positive picture

Now, everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually

Sometimes it seems
Well touch that dream
But things come slow or not at all
And the ones on top, wont make it stop
So convinced that they might fall
Lets love ourselves then we cant fail
To make a better situation
Tomorrow, our seeds will grow
All we need is dedication

Let me tell ya that,
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
After winter, must come spring
Everything is everything

Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually

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Lauryn Hill: Ex-Factor

It could all be so simple
But you’d rather make it hard
Loving you is like a battle
And we both end up with scars
Tell me, who I have to be
To get some reciprocity
No one loves you more than me
And no one ever will

No matter how I think we grow
You always seem to let me know
It ain’t workin’
It ain’t workin’
And when I try to walk away
You’d hurt yourself to make me stay
This is crazy
This is crazy

I keep letting you back in
How can I explain myself
As painful as this thing has been
I just can’t be with no one else
See I know what we got to do
You let go and I’ll let go too
‘Cause no one’s hurt me more than you
And no one ever will

No matter how I think we grow
You always seem to let me know
It ain’t workin’
It ain’t workin’
And when I try to walk away
You’d hurt yourself to make me stay
This is crazy
This is crazy

Care for me, care for me
I know you care for me

There for me, there for me
Said you’d be there for me

Cry for me, cry for me
You said you’d die for me

Give to me, give to me
Why won’t you live for me

…

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The blackness of Bill Clinton

In October 1998 Toni Morrison famously said that Bill Clinton, a white man, was America’s first black president:

… white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

What!? It sounded like something white liberals in New York would half-seriously say at a party. Not Toni Morrison. Not the author of “The Bluest Eye”. Not in the New Yorker magazine.

I was sure it was some kind of a mistake, but when I got the article and read the whole thing I found out she was serious, even if she did make the larger point that blacks, more so than whites, understood what Clinton was going through with the whole Monica Lewinsky thing: how he stood naked before the law, how his enemies were after him and there was little he could do.

Ten years later in a debate they asked Barack Obama, a man with black skin running for president, if Bill Clinton was the first black president. He said this:

I would have to investigate more of Bill’s dancing ability and some of this other stuff before I accurately judged whether he was, in fact, a brother.

He played it for laughs in what was otherwise a very serious debate.

What must Obama have thought of the question? Obama has spent years trying to come to terms with his blackness and here he is being asked about the blackness of a white man who never for one day or even one minute ever had to face these questions, much less their consequences.

Playing it off for laughs may have been the only graceful way Obama had of answering the question on sound-bite television. The question came out of left field and he had little time to frame an answer.

A few days later Dick Gregory brought some much needed common sense to the whole thing. He said, “Has Chelsea ever been pulled over by the white police because her dad was the black president?” He pointed out that Bill Clinton does not know what it is like to drive while black.

What makes you black is not poverty or a love of McDonald’s or growing up without a father. It is not even a certain nakedness before the law. It is not a way of talking, acting or dressing, like wiggers and assimilated Negroes think. It is having to live in a black skin in a white world.

So Clinton is not black in any important sense. Tiger Woods is black even if he lives in the Cablinasia of his mind, some perfect land where skin colour does not matter. And as for Obama, he is not mixed or biracial as some say, not in America, but just plain old black.

See also:

• Race in America
• The word “black”
• hipster
• Barack Obama
• wigger
• The blackness of:
  • blackness of Eric Clapton
  • blackness of Madonna
  • blackness of Tiger Woods

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Black Men magazine

Black Men magazine (1998- ) is a lifestyle magazine for black American men. Like King and Smooth it has pictures of half-naked women and articles on things like sex, cars, sports, fashion and famous people. It comes out once every two months.

It is put out by John Blassingame, who also puts out Today’s Black Woman and Hype Hair. Hype Hair is his best-selling magazine. His office is across the street from a Staples in Paramus, New Jersey.

Black Men is more well-rounded and serious than King or Smooth. You could take out the women and still have something of a magazine left. But in 2005 it was in last place: its women were not as good as those in Smooth and King.

Then one day Blassingame’s son Marcus was in Harlem getting his hair cut. As the women walked past the front of the shop it struck him that the men did not like the thin supermodel sort of women that appeared in the magazine. They liked women with much more of a figure – “fat asses and pretty faces,” as the barber put it.

So over the next two years Black Men tried different sorts of women to see what worked. By using models with more of a figure they were able to outsell Smooth. They say they now have a pretty good idea of which kind of women will work in all parts of the country and even in Jamaica and Haiti.

The magazine has women of all colours: white, yellow, black and brown. It prefers Latin and light-skinned black women. In 2006 Black Men named Vida Guerra, a near-white Latin woman, as the sexiest woman of the year. Each issue has only one or two dark-skinned models.

The women are heavily airbrushed and many have a soulless look in their eyes. They are still not as good as the women in King, which, in spite of its blacker idea of female beauty (or maybe because of it), still sells better.

Video vixens, those half-naked women you see in music videos, tend to speak well of Black Men: many got their start in its pages. One was Angel Lola Luv. She was discovered at one of their modelling contests – not on stage, but sitting in the audience!

Black Men seems to be based more on Today’s Black Woman than on Maxim. When Black Men first came out in 1998 there was no King and even Maxim was still new in America.

Unlike King and Maxim, Black Men does not have any mainstream advertisers, like Heineken or Absolut.

Sometimes Black Men puts out a swimsuit extra magazine called Black Men SSX. Some have only one woman, like Buffie the Body.

Blassingame learned the magazine distribution business by working first for Hearst in the New York region and then Metropolitan News. When he was passed over for a higher position at Metropolitan he started his own magazines. Thus Black Men.

See also:

• blackmenpub.com – their website
• King magazine
• Smooth magazine
• Maxim magazine
• video vixens
  • Buffie the Body
  • Vida Guerra
• race and beauty
• magazine
• Harlem

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Google

From the Google home page, December 2nd 1998.

Google (1998- ) is both an Internet search engine and the American company that created and maintains it. It is now the top search engine in the world.

Like any search engine, Google is a page on the Web that you can go to to find all the web pages that mention the given word or words that you write in.

But the Web has countless pages, even for uncommon words. It seemed that the Web was going to die under its own weight, that it would become too large to find anything useful in it, even with search engines.

A good search engine will list pages from most important to least important. But how do you tell which pages are more important for a given word?

Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford came up with a beautiful idea:

What matters is not whether a page has the word you are looking for, but how many times it is linked to by those that do!

For example, if you put in “New York Times” into Google, it will list the New York Times website first. Not because anyone told Google where the newspaper has its website, but because of all the pages that mentioned “New York Times”, it was linked to the most.

This process is called PageRank.

Brin and Page wrote a computer program that did this and ran it on some computers at Stanford. It worked!

They knew they had the best search engine in the world. But to start a company, they needed some serious money and a way to make money from searches.

First they went to Yahoo!, the top search engine at the time. It had also started at Stanford. Yahoo! said no, search engines were already as good as they were going to get. The real money was what you could add to a search engine. “Portals” was where it was at, they said.

Then they went to Andy Bechtolsheim, a founder of Sun Microsystems, a computer maker. They told him about Google on his front steps. He got it. He understood how great Google was. He got them the money they needed and the rest is history.

Google’s searches are free, so how do they make money? By selling search words. When someone searches on that word, your link appears on that page.

Nothing new in that. But Google did two things that most search engines did not:

1. They kept your link separate from the search result itself. A Google search should be utterly trustworthy.
2. You only paid when someone followed your link. This is called pay per click.

Prodigy, an early online service, had the second idea as far back as 1988, but Google was the first to get it to work.

Google has since got into other things, like searching for pictures, news and directions, putting up pictures of the entire Earth on the Web as well as all the old books in libraries.

The Google logo through the years:

1998

2000

2005

2010

2015

– Abagond, 2007.

See also:

• Google – the website
• Internet
• Yahoo!
• The Web
• New York Times
• computer
  

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