"The Snake" (1963)

[Original review of Johnny Rivers recording here. Version of "The Snake" by Oscar Brown Jr. here, version by Al Wilson here. My video of the Johnny Rivers version here. Version by Donald Trump here.]

[swear words] Out on the social media beat: I started my own YouTube channel (I know it's comical that I even have one) because, several years ago when I was much better about doing regular 300-word write-ups of individual songs, I would occasionally run across one that somehow wasn't on YouTube yet. So I'd make a video and upload it, giving me something to point to in my review and enabling people, at least in theory, to hear the song. All the song videos on my channel, such as they are all 17 of them, represent the rock-bottom production value type of video, made from a music file of the song with a decent bitrate and for visuals using a static image, usually the cover of an album that houses the song. This is also from back in the days when I kept music files by the gigabyte on my hard drive. Mostly these videos just sit there, accruing modest levels of views. Five digits is big traffic for them. Most are obscure one way or another, just things I love and have written about: Jonathan Richman's "That Summer Feeling," Percy Mayfield's "The River's Invitation," Boss Hog's "Ski Bunny," etc. Inevitably they attract the kind of comments every YouTube song video attracts. After newspaper sites, YouTube comments are well known for being the most rancid on a per capita basis. They also contain significant portions of vacuousness.

Once in a while someone files a complaint and then a video is banned in certain countries, or everywhere, usually for commercial reasons. It's not always permanent, and I can't always tell when it changes because the videos are always visible to me (thanks YouTube!). But some do appear to go live more widely on and off, judging by view count patterns. Just this month, someone complained about the Angry Samoans video for "They Saved Hitler's Cock." Honestly, I'm so chickenshit I didn't even use the expletive, labeling the video simply "They Saved Hitlers" to avoid problems (for which, just last month, someone else came along and mocked me ... for that matter, I ducked a similar way in my write-up). In this case, though possibly it was the usual copyright protectionism, I suspect the problem was not the word "cock" like I worried about originally but the word "Hitler." The song uses the name lightly, making him the usual symbol of bottomless evil but more playing it for a joke. I happen to think it's a pretty good joke, which is why I was writing it up in the first place. But in the current historical moment I have much less problem with putting it out of sight. If people are going to be idiots about it, I prefer seeing Hitler and his ideas shunned categorically and the more aggressively the better.

In terms of the Johnny Rivers song, that's a different matter, posing a quandary I have been wrestling with for some time. I posted the video on November 8, 2012 (I must say I'm a little chilled by the fact that it was two days after the 2012 US presidential election and exactly four years before the next). I wrote about it because I think Johnny Rivers is generally underrated and I wanted to say some things about that, because I like the song (and, more exactly, I like the album that it is the first song on), and because I felt nostalgic about the album. My judgment when I wrote it up was that the song plays way too loose with misogyny—it's dated—and the whole story of the snake is trite. My misogyny angle was confirmed in a way by the first comment that came in, not so long after posting it (by the way, I'm sure all or most of these comments are from people finding the video on YouTube or the internet and very few if any via my blog posts, at least I hope so): "all cunts are snakes!" (three years later someone replied "PIG!"). Now I'm going to talk about YouTube comments.

Narrative of William W. Brown (1847)

This is another of the shorter slave narratives, just over 50 pages with all the hoopla of prefaces, acknowledgments, and introductions. As always, the stamp of some white person or organization is necessary to see the thing into print and generally stand up for its veracity. As the publication dates of these narratives move deeper into the century the sponsoring white is more and more often formally Abolitionist. What a terrible portrait of 19th-century America these narratives give us. In fact, both William Brown, and Frederick Douglass in his narrative, express nothing but contempt for Christianity, at least in its American version. Brown is more willing to toss away the whole thing as evil, quoting Bible passages that are approving of slavery. The Christian hypocrisy is still one of the greatest shames of slavery, after the corruption into sadism. Brown's narrative often focuses on how families were separated and torn apart, sometimes deliberately to control behavior. He reports on how many owners with limited resources would invest in a young woman to breed them for additional property. It's often, though not always, the master providing the seed, of course. So we also come down to this horrific language of slavery: breeding, training, striping. "Striping" is a term I'd never heard before, for whipping and scarring, and now I also know it's in the Bible. One more reason I'm comfortable with the wholesale rejection of American Christianity by these later narratives. Obviously Brown and Douglass are aware of the Christian roots in the Abolitionist movement itself and temper their tones somewhat to accommodate that. But their feelings are unmistakable. William Brown's story is another one of escape—two attempts, actually, as the first one fails when he is incautious in the North. He suffers terribly for this attempt, as it leads to the final break-up of his family when his mother and sister are sold separately into the Deep South, a certain doom. This narrative is set in Missouri, a more recent slavery state than the rest of the South. Brown shows how the geographical position of Missouri enabled it to be a staging area for kidnapping African-Americans from the North into slavery. Brown had good experiences and bad with whites. He took the name of one who was kind to him in Ohio. Before that he was only William, and even that was taken from him by an owner whose nephew of that name came to live with the family who owned him. Of all his indignities and suffering, this is the one that most seems to rankle Brown. It's strange to us only because most of us have never had to face that treatment in such cut-and-dried fashion—the total obliteration of identity at will.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Manchild in the Promised Land (1965)

Claude Brown grew up in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. He survived it and his story is in this book. His survival is due chiefly, but not only, to his instinctive aversion for heroin, which he calls a plague for that part of New York City in those years. He published this memoir when he was 28, in 1965. By then he had worked as a cosmetics salesman, a jazz pianist, and other assorted jobs. He left Harlem and lived in Greenwich Village for a few years after he was 17. He also survived because he had the wisdom to stop doing crime after he turned 16. Before that he dealt reefer, pulled con jobs, fought a lot in gangs, and was generally a part of street culture. He died in 2002, at the age of 74. He only wrote one more book but also went on to get a college degree and work all his life as a community organizer and public speaker. Brown's voice is his own but his narrative skills are mostly limited to anecdotes, which don't always connect up well. He has many stories about his mother and father, his two sisters, and especially his youngest brother, nicknamed Pimp from an early age. But there's no consistent through-line or development, beyond escape and/or survival. Maybe that's enough—it certainly was for me when I first read this in the '80s. The stories are even more cloudy regarding his pals through the years, because there are so many names and generally not enough information to sort them. I knew I was in trouble when one character was named Danny and another Dunny, and sure enough, I never quite got them straight. Still, Brown obviously has a lot of heart to make it through everything he does. Many others didn't. He has lots of interesting points about street slang and street life of the times, and lots of intriguing encounters with people and with racism too, of course. I was glad to find out he lived a long and productive life beyond this memoir. He has interesting views of the times too, such as the rise of Black Muslims in the '50s. There is also a Christian sect called Coptics, with roots in African and black culture. "Black" itself was a relatively new term at the time of this book and Brown regards it with some skepticism. He doesn't like "Negro" either but seems most comfortable with "colored." So there's also a lot of innate interest here related to the times it chronicles. My old paperback of it sold it as "A Modern Classic of the Black Experience," but at this point it's actually much older.

In case it's not at the library.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)

Dee Brown's classic and painstaking account of the catastrophes visited upon Native Americans of the U.S. West in the second half of the 19th century can be painful to read. It's engaging and thoroughly researched, and though it never breaks the fourth wall, filled with copious sources and citations, it's not very hard to read it as dark and angry. It sketches in its context from the beginning, with Christopher Columbus stumbling into the Bahamas and, believing he had reached India, naming the indigenous people he encountered (and kidnapped) "Indians" and putting them to work to win them their salvation. But the real genocide in the West—"real" meaning a systematic implementation of public policies—did not begin until the Civil War or shortly after. The 20-year period between 1871 and 1891 is when most of it happened and that's the story this book tells, simply laying out the facts. It's practically impossible to come away without some anger of one's own. That's as intended, and those not inclined to give the facts their due are likely to feel Brown's work is "manipulative" or even "self-serving." It's possible that the stories here might require some balance, whatever that means, and I think Brown's work here is scholarly and disinterested enough that one could as well turn to his bibliography for places to get what were once considered the more conventional views of the history of the times and places and peoples. If you want to start there, fine, but for what it's worth I recommend getting back here sooner or later. It's a quick, easy read full of fascinating stories—about the Navahos, Cheyennes, Lakota, Nez Perces, Apaches, and many more (including a good deal about perhaps the Native Americans' single greatest figure, Crazy Horse). You won't necessarily come away from any of it much impressed with the behavior of European Americans, but that's a worthwhile perspective too, and depending on one's own orientation, won't necessarily stay with you long—though it well might. Lots of massacres occur here, on both sides. Then it finishes with one of the saddest and most haunting episodes in American history, the pan-tribal embrace of the Ghost Dance. This book is not easy to forget.

In case it's not at the library.

Night of the Jabberwock (1950)

Fredric Brown grew a checkered 20th-century career as a newspaper proofreader in Milwaukee turned into science fiction and mystery novelist after establishing himself as a story writer in the '40s and '50s pulps. He was prolific, author of dozens of stories and many novels, whose quality varies. He's always good, carefully written, but may feel rushed, working the hell out of one or two surprise tricks or snap twists, and supplementing that with broadside parody when nothing else would do—a Midwestern O. Henry by way of H.L. Mencken wishing he could be Sinclair Lewis and damn proud to speak it so proudly, yet always with a gentle, affable humor. The aliens turn out to be advertising men on the other planet, or the gladiatorial combat actually was about a corporate merger, things like that—'50s man in the gray flannel suit stuff basically straight up, with proto-Rod Serling twists when he could manage them and occasional splendid results (fans included Philip K. Dick, Ayn Rand, and Mickey Spillane, it says here). Nowhere else that I've seen did Brown get it together quite so economically and so brilliantly as in this little gem, whose surprises come regularly as the story becomes stranger. It doesn't really cheat with anything, which is just the start of what makes it so good. By its setting, it's already one of Brown's most personal novels—a quiet Midwestern town where our narrator, a newspaper publisher in his 50s who longs to break just one big story once for his weekly paper, has just put the paper to bed for the week and headed off into the night with a bottle. Right on cue, weird stuff starts happening. First there is someone pretending to be a character out of a Lewis Carroll novel waiting for him at his home with a strange request. Before our narrator can hear him out he gets a call. Something about a serious auto accident involving prominent citizens on the outskirts of town. On the way into the office, he discovers the town bank being robbed. Then gangsters, guns, eventually more Lewis Carroll, a haunted house, and murder. Things happen fast and the action is rat-a-tat precise in this short novel. Everything happens practically real-time across the space of a single night, and the whole extravagant Alice conceit is delivered on nicely, the reading experience of it like the funhouse scene in a cartoon, with trapdoors, sledgehammers, teacup cars, cigar-smoking bad guys, bizarre images in the mirror, all of it coming at you like a freight train right down the tracks on you. Really. A big ride. Suspenseful too. And the drinking is amazing. Just delightful from beginning to end.

In case it's not at the library (you better hope it is, looks like).