“You’re a taker, Larry.”

The Stand. (Uncut edition.) Stephen King. 1990.

Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America.

The Stand. (Uncut edition.) Stephen King. 1990.

“Take a story and give me, yes? Take a story and give me.”

“I know no monster of your sort.”

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Dark Star Trilogy). Marlon James. 2019.

When I was a kid, eight or nine, the music I listened to consisted primarily of the “classic rock” my white boomer parents had grown up on, which by the early 90s was in regular rotation on radio stations nationwide. Bob Seger and the Beatles, Clapton and the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Three Dog Night. But one Christmas, while visiting family in Dallas, my cousin John introduced me to something a little more contemporary: Salt-N-Pepa’s “None of Your Business,” which, in my memory at least, he played on an incessant loop, trying to memorize all the words.

A month or two later, home in Memphis, I was in the back of a Cash America Pawn, where regular customers weren’t allowed. My father worked as an auditor for the chain, going around to its different locations–there were a lot–to take “inventory.” Sometimes he took me with him so I could look through the CDs that hadn’t been processed for sale out front yet, where the selection would be more picked over. At the triumphant moment my meticulous spine-scanning discovered Salt-N-Pepa’s Very Necessary, my dad’s inventory-taking had taken him out of the immediate vicinity. I popped the disc into a stereo sitting on one of the counters. Despite the song’s “explicit” nature, at that time its overriding sexual themes were entirely lost on me–much like Bob Dylan’s repeated suggestion in my then-favorite song, “Rainy Day Women,” for everyone to “get stoned”–and I suppose I may have turned the volume up a tad high. 

Less than a minute in, an old white guy in a tie burst through the swinging door and, in one swift motion, brought his fist down like a gavel on the player’s spring-loaded opener. “This,” he snarled, brandishing the naked disc at me, “is garbage.” In my memory, he punctuated this declaration by snapping the CD in half, but I might be conflating this with the time my best friend’s father overheard us listening to TLC’s CrazySexyCool.

Either way, at some point in my history, a surly middle-aged white dude broke at least one record of a young Black female hip-hop trio voicing a manifestly sexual independence (of the current “WAP” variety) that was inherently fascinating to me, even if I had no idea what it meant at the time. In hindsight, this violent form of silencing seems a reaction to a perceived violation of white misogynist norms.

In The Stand, King seems to attempt to penetrate beyond the stereotypes of merely using his most significant Black character, Mother Abagail, as a plot device and Magical Black Woman by devoting a chunk of pages to her backstory and writing from her point of view, something he didn’t do with his previous Magical Black Figure, The Shining‘s Dick Hallorann (and which he also attempts to remedy in that novel’s 2013 sequel, Doctor Sleep). A pivotal scene in Abagail’s backstory shows her overcoming racism–in 1902, no less–by the sheer force of her musical talent in a way that expresses the potential of pop culture figures to make some kind of progress on the civil-rights front, but only if they conform to white norms and narratives. The depiction is basically the product of a good-intentioned white author whose belief that he’s not racist ends up leading to a racist representation even more insidious for masquerading as not being racist. This problematic dynamic is underscored by the treatment of music in the rest of the novel, which is tied to race in ways that inadvertently reveal another form of silencing the voice: stealing it.

“Oh Say Can You See”

According to my initial analysis of The Stand, Larry Underwood gets the most significant character development. His transition from hapless capitalist motivated primarily by self-interest–the “taker,” as his mother puts it–to ideally democratic leader motivated by the need to protect others seems to mirror the country’s necessary character development as engendered by the elimination of the majority of its population and infrastructure. Larry’s pre-pandemic occupation as a musician plays a critical role in his development, as well as illuminating the problematic foundation of the book’s treatment of race through the treatment of its aforementioned main Black character, Mother Abagail.

Larry’s career breakthrough comes from the release of his single, “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man”:

They were all pleased with the single, which was getting airplay in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine, already. It looked as if it was going to catch. It had won a late-night Battle of the Sounds contest for four nights running on one Detroit soul station. No one seemed to know that Larry Underwood was white.

The song is even played on “Soul Train.” Larry’s explicitly racist mother invokes the N-word to describe the sound of his voice on the track, and though that particular epithet does not make it into the 1994 prime-time miniseries adaptation, Larry’s teasing response does:

“That brown soun, she sho do get aroun,” Larry said, deepening his voice to Bill Withers level and smiling.

The idea of the “righteous man” in the song thematically reflects Larry’s journey to become pure enough to be the sacrifice and make the literal titular stand at the end, but ironically Larry doesn’t want anything to do with the song once the world ends: it represents to him his selfishness and irresponsibility. Post-pandemic, he actively conceals his status as the song’s singer when he and Frannie happen to overhear it together. The song describing who he’s supposed to become represents to him who he used to be…

What song represents what America used to be before King’s version of the superflu–and or Covid-19, take your pick–wiped it out? The book itself is pretty unequivocal about this when the Free Zone sings the “Star-Spangled Banner” at their first meeting–the one where they ratify America’s founding documents and retie the Gordian knot in a scene whose schmaltziness is probably only matched by the one where Tom and Stu sing “The First Noel” (thus cementing what starts to feel like a link between American and Christian propaganda…). This is one of three instances in which the Banner is sung in scene in the novel.

Fittingly if his arc represents the country’s, Larry is the first to sing the Banner in scene, in chapter 41:

He cleared his throat, spat, and hummed a little to find his pitch. He drew breath, very much aware of the light morning breeze on his naked chest and buttocks, and burst into song.

“Oh! say, can you see,
by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed,
at the twilight’s last gleaming? …”

He sang it all the way through…

… Singing the old Star-Speckled Banana had turned him right on.

This happens moments before he discovers Rita’s corpse in the tent, her lack of response to his singing cluing him in to what becomes a pivotal moment in his character development (which, as I mentioned, more than one woman gets to die for).

In chapter 45, Mother Abagail sings the Banner in an extended flashback.

And in 1902 Abagail had played her guitar at the Grange Hall, and not in the minstrel show, either; she had played in the white folks’ talent show at the end of the year.

[pages later…]

She finished to another thunderous ovation and fresh cries of “Encore!” She remounted the stage, and when the crowd had quietened, she said: “Thank you all very much. I hope you won’t think I am bein forward if I ask to sing just one more song, which I have learned special but never ever expected to sing here. But it is just about the best song I know, on account of what President Lincoln and this country did for me and mine, even before I was born.”

They were very quiet now, listening closely. Her family sat stock still, all together near the left aisle, like a spot of blackberry jam on a white handkerchief.

“On account of what happened back in the middle of the States War,” she went steadily on, “my family was able to come here and live with the fine neighbors that we have.”

Then she played and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and everyone stood up and listened, and some of the handkerchiefs came out again, and when she had finished, they applauded fit to raise the roof.

That was the proudest day of her life.

Where to even start…

Mother Abagail’s gratitude for Lincoln’s abolition of slavery might seem lovely to a lot of White readers, but it’s actually pretty sick (in a President-with-Covid type of way, not a Lil Wayne motherfucker-I’m-ill type of way). It’s another version of the revision of our country’s slavery narrative perpetrated by representing the Middle Passage as voluntary rather than violently coerced, which, as tracked in the title poem of Robin Coste Lewis’s 2015 collection Voyage of the Sable Venus, is an erasure narrative that exists in various forms Western art and literature. These false narratives specifically seem to displace responsibility, just as King does by rendering Abagail an idealized Black woman in the expression of her gratitude for abolition. The idea that Black people should be grateful to White people for abolishing slavery negates the fact that White people are at fault for initiating the institution of slavery in the first place. It’s like if I hit you with my car and expected you to fall over backwards thanking me for paying your hospital bills. An expectation of gratitude implies I did something for you that I didn’t have to, which would imply further that you now owe me something…erasing/negating my responsibility for the whole thing in the first place. Mother Abagail’s exhibiting this gratitude that erases White people’s responsibility is a White version of idealized Blackness. Abagail’s overtly “magical” qualities are not part of this flashback, but her gratitude here is about as realistic as her appearing in the dreams of hundreds (thousands?) of people she’s never met.

And while the world burns around us and my family lies slain around me, I am meant to thank you for your contribution to the cause.

“A Letter to the Allies” by S.P., Poets & Writers September/October 2020

King and/or King defenders might point out that the racism of the White people in this time and place is vividly and realistically depicted (epithets and all) in this 1902 sequence–which would be in the service of Truth, as King puts it On Writing–but the more racist the Freemantles’ white neighbors are, the more absurd their applause/praise for Abagail here becomes. The implication that music is an equalizer, that white people could have overcome their extreme racism to recognize and acknowledge her talent/quality, is probably more a product of King’s time of writing than likely to have happened at the turn of the century.

The “blackberry jam” imagery is also especially problematic positioned in a Black person’s point of view; while jam doesn’t have a negative connotation on its own, positioned on the “white handkerchief” as it is here, the blackness implicitly becomes a stain, soiling the Whiteness.

None of the Banner’s lyrics are included in this scene of Abagail singing it, maybe because it would feel repetitive when some of the lyrics appeared previously in the scene when Larry sang it…but which is still to say that the White man gets to speak the sacred words on the page (or be represented so doing), while the Black woman doesn’t, because Larry sings it first chapter-wise, even though Abagail sings it chronologically several decades before he is even born–a demonstration of the narrative subconsciously favoring (and the general unearned privilege of) the White man.

The Free Zone meeting group Banner-singing scene is in chapter 53, offering a kind of narrative catharsis: here it’s sung by a group when we’ve seen it sung twice before this by individuals, reinforcing the characters’ immediate post-pandemic isolation. But the group song is filtered through Larry’s point of view, apparently so we can see  it trigger a memory of Rita’s death (which would be a loose interpretation of “necessary”), but in the gap between Fran’s saying the song’s first three words and other voices joining in to finish that initial familiar lyric, Larry feels a dark presence watching them, invoking a song by The Who to capture the feeling that indicates a possible overall tendency on Larry’s part toward white musical preferences, despite his appropriation of that “brown sound” that I’ll circle back to.

The object that is “The Star-Spangled Banner”‘s subject is of course as emblematic as this song itself, or the song wouldn’t be about it. Black artist David Hammons created his “African American Flag” in 1990, updating it with a version called “Oh say can you see” in 2017.

The changing of the original colors–with the only color appearing in both flags being red, presumably representing blood–represents the idea/fact that I mentioned in a previous post via an article by Jelani Cobb about White America and Black America being two overlapping but completely different countries, with the murder of George Floyd this past Memorial Day being a sort of flashpoint through which White America became more aware of Black America’s existence. The updated flag’s tattered nature as well as its title seem to further emphasize that idea, and the reorientation from horizontal to vertical seems to make this version of the flag more reminiscent of a hanging–or lynched–body.

A recent short story called “The Work of Art” centers around multiple layers of artistic reproductions of a pair of lynchings:

The photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, I explained in jerky gchat rhythm, had been an index of an actual event. Those men had been brutalized and hung and burnt (had they been burnt? I googled: yes), and that violence had left its mark on a strip of film—real light had hit real people, then a real chemical composition of silver halide. That photograph had then been reproduced in the form of a postcard. Nearly a century later, Sonia Middleton had rendered that reproduction in an elite, organic medium: oil paint. Did this reversal of reproduction sanctify the event or displace it? The paint on her canvas had not touched those bodies, not even transitively. Worse, this lynching postcard had already been reproduced in art several times over now, by Abel Meeropol in his poem “Bitter Fruit,” which became Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”; by Claudia Rankine in Citizen; by David Powers, whose 2007 mural, American Nocturne, which omitted the lynched bodies, had been protested and taken down, though you could still see it online, in digital photos, another form of mechanical reproduction, whose aura, because of JPEG degradation, is also always already fading . . .

“The Work of Art” by Namwali Serpell, Harper‘s September 2020

Kanye West has sampled Nina Simone’s cover of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” in a song that also appropriates apartheid as a metaphor for divorce. My familiarity with Kanye’s version is probably why this reference in The Stand leaped out at me:

So he leaned back sleepily, listened to the drowning sounds coming from his chest, and watched the wind blow his extra editions lazily up the road toward Rack’s Crossing. Some of them had caught in the overhanging trees, where they hung like strange fruit.

This character is a random white guy who, on the surface at least, is in no way thinking about or doing anything related to what should be (at least) the primary referents for the invocation of “strange fruit”–slavery, lynching. Here it almost feels like King has no idea of the phrase’s racial connotations and historical implications, and thinks he’s developed his own metaphor after he heard the phrase somewhere and it was buried in his subconscious but liberated from its original context. Which strikes me as another form of erasure. It’s been terrifying to see how prevalent White Supremacy still is as a movement/mindset in parts of this country, and how that element is still systematically revising/erasing narratives surrounding lynching.

This method of systematic erasure should be all that surprising if you look at the history…so look closer.

David Hammons’ title of his updated African American flag highlights these ideas of perception that are embedded in the Banner. Oh say can you see that this is the state of Black America? That Black America exists as a separate and not equal entity? Hammons’ manipulation and recasting of this emblem reveals a sort of Kingian idea, a revelation of what’s concealed beneath the surface of our country’s patriotic rhetoric. The reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee during the NFL pre-game anthems reinforces this: White America cares more about disrespect to a symbol (a symbol that represents/communicates a narrative about the false greatness of White America…) than about the senseless and systematic destruction of Black lives.

A statement made by the Louisville interim police chief in the wake of the recent decision not to charge Breonna Taylor’s murderers reeked of this twisted subversion of human life:

“Our hope is that people will lawfully and peacefully express themselves,” Schroeder said ahead of the decision. “We will not tolerate destruction of property.”

from here.

I talked in that previous post about how an idea expressed in The Stand–that no one is as afraid of theft as a thief–basically sums up this country’s defining and vigorous defense of property: White Europeans stole this land from indigenous people, and stole people from other countries to generate wealth from it. The rhetoric of our greatness as expressed by the flag and its matching anthem conceals that our current economy is an extension of our founding slave-based economy. What The Stand shows even more specifically is how the exploitation of black labor has permeated (contaminated?) the economy via the music industry.

King depicts this industry as almost-literally monstrous via a bit of dialogue, a producer who wants a piece of Larry once “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man” starts making the rounds:

Some crazy rat’s ass of an A & R man called three times in one day, telling him he had to get in to Record One, not now but yesterday, and record a remake of the McCoys’ “Hang On, Sloopy” as the follow-up. Monster! this moron kept shouting. Only follow-up that’s possible, Lar! (He had never met this guy and already he wasn’t even Larry but Lar.) It’ll be a monster! I mean a fucking monster!

Larry at last lost his patience and told the monster-shouter that, given a choice between recording “Hang On, Sloopy” and being tied down and receiving a Coca-Cola enema, he would pick the enema. Then he hung up.

This phrase “monster-shouter” is then used in a very different context after the superflu starts making the rounds:

The monster-shouter was somewhere off to Larry’s left this fine forenoon, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown.

“Monsters coming!” the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. …

“Monsters coming now!” The monster-shouter was a tall man who looked to be in his middle sixties. Larry had first heard him the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did.

The “monster-shouter” appears a couple more times, culminating in his turning up “stabbed repeatedly” “in a huge pool of his own blood,” something of a pivotal plot point for Larry when the sight of it traumatizes Rita to the point of making her a burden.

It’s quite ironic the way that Larry is depicted as being leeched off of in the wake of his single’s success, when his success is the product of his own leeching. The text acknowledges Larry’s leeching in the form of acknowledging that Larry’s single is imparting to his listeners and impression that he is Black, but it doesn’t actually seem to imply that imparting this impression is a form of leeching, or to really portray Larry’s being leeched off of as just desserts for his own leeching. I have the feeling that King is consciously depicting Larry’s mother as racist by having her react to the song the way she does, and that by doing so he’s trying to impart that Larry is in fact not racist: his mother has a problem with the way he sounds because of its racial associations, therefore she has a problem with the race his voice is associated with; Larry doesn’t have a problem with it and thus must not have a problem with that race. This is part of a larger pattern of a type of thinking exhibited by both author and character already demonstrated by the Mother Abagail Banner-singing scene: racist formulations masquerading as the opposite because their formulators can’t process/compute the racists implications (i.e. racists who don’t know their racist).

On the other hand, could Larry’s post-pandemic desire to escape the song parallel a desire to escape what the song represents on the deeper appropriation/exploitation level? Larry’s being presented as exploited by the label and fairweather-friend leeches who just want to smoke his “hospitality bowls” doesn’t seem to heighten his initial characterization as being that of exploiter, so it would seem to be on (King’s) subconscious level that Larry’s necessary-sacrifice death represents the necessity of killing the appropriation/revisionism of Other narratives that it turns out is the bedrock of our (popular) culture.

Inappropriation, Reappropration

In a 2010 appearance on The Colbert Report to promote his new book Reality Hunger, subtitled “A Manifesto,” David Shields says that he wants to “obliterate the laws surrounding appropriation,” part of his general defense of the art form of collage–taking pieces from others to form a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

David Shields: The book is a call to arms though, to urge writers to—

Stephen Colbert: Steal other people’s writing.

David Shields: No. Ignore the laws regarding appropriation, obliterate the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, and to create new forms for the 21st century.

Stephen Colbert: So, could I create new forms for the 21st century if I ignore property rights and obliterate my neighbor’s front door? And just go in there and go, you know what would look good in my house? Your things.

David Shields appears on The Colbert Report to promote Reality Hunger, April 14, 2010

A decade later, Shields’ language as a white man seems more loaded–“call to arms,” “obliterate”–which Colbert’s pseudo-conservative response highlights the implicit violence of. The white man made up property laws to create a narrative of ownership over the land he stole in the first place, and now here’s a white man telling us he wants to obliterate the laws of ownership, invoking the right to bear arms as a means to do so….

On the surface maybe it seems progressive to have a white man stand up for getting rid of the white man’s law. But when I read a quote of Marlon James’ in reference to the narrative of The Lion King, Shields’ “call to arms” struck me differently:

For two years, [James] researched African history and mythology, constructing the foundation for a fantastical vision of the continent that would invert the monolithic “Africa” invented by the West. He drew on oral epics, like the Epic of Sundiata, which some people believe was the basis for “The Lion King,” though the filmmakers have called it an “original story,” while admitting some parallels with Shakespeare. (“I felt like these stories had been stolen from me,” James said at Comic Con. “People say that ‘The Lion King’ is based on ‘Hamlet.’ Please.”)

“Why Marlon James Decided to Write An African ‘Game of Thrones,’” Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, January 21, 2019

The “monolithic ‘Africa’ invented by the West” that Tolentino invokes here seems part and parcel of our country’s false narratives surrounding slavery. White people need to maintain an image/conception/perception of an “other” that justifies our historical enslavement of this “other” race, an emotional logic King presents himself as fully aware of in his story “I Am the Doorway” from Night Shift, a collection originally published almost concurrently with the original The Stand:

“… Find some gold or platinum. Better yet, find some nice, dumb little blue men for us to study and exploit and feel superior to. Anything. …”

“Feel superior to” implying that they wouldn’t actually be, and yet they need to be actually “dumb,” implying the people/races certain white people “feel superior to” actually do possess some degree of inferiority…

James’ above Lion King comment also highlights that obliterating the laws surrounding artistic (and implicitly also cultural) appropriation might sound like flying in the face of corporate co-opting of the creative, but this seeming artistic nobility provides a theoretical foundation for taking from those who have already been taken from. Take Disney:

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalog from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet—a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images (including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others)—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.

Jonathan Lethem. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Originally quoting Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture.

The 2020 musical film/visual album “Black is King” that Beyoncé made after her work voicing Nala in 2019’s live The Lion King purports “to create a full-length film that will tell the real story with the help of actual Africans instead of using lions and animation,” and, according to Wikipedia, was inspired by an act of uncredited cultural appropriation:

[Beyoncé] learnt about the story of Solomon Linda, the South African composer of the song “Mbube” who received no credit or royalties from the song being used as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in the original The Lion King.

From here.

Yet another example of Disney stealing…

Beyoncé’s project seems to restore this appropriated narrative back to its African roots. It is a gorgeous, stunning piece of work, but the film’s use of direct quotes from 2019’s The Lion King, while possibly in service of calling attention to the original appropriator, really seemed more like an advertisement–especially since if it really was trying to call out the original appropriator, Bey would be in cahoots with that original appropriator, having voiced Nala for the project. And if this project is restoring the narrative Disney stole back to its African roots, it’s making god knows how much money for Disney itself in the process. Disney making more money for calling itself out for the unethical ways it’s made all the money it already had…

In the course of this complicated project, Beyoncé updated David Hammons’ “African American Flag”:

And Beyoncé’s subtitle for the Lion-King-inspired album, “The Gift,” invokes themes of property just as the narrative of The Lion King itself does, as though she wants to remove the narrative’s commercial properties from this iteration. As jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie said, “You can’t steal a gift.” And yet she’s also selling it….

These are the types of contradictions we have to live with in a commercial culture. Another of a not dissimilar variety occurred to me watching Saturday Night Live again this fall: the show presents itself as a liberal mouthpiece, but it’s on the same network that’s basically responsible for Trump being President. (Alec Baldwin’s left-wing-on-the-surface Trump impression also might be doing more harm than good.)

On its recent season premiere, SNL tried to show it was hip to the new racial situation–that is, new awareness of the old situation–with a Black host and a Black musical guest, Chris Rock and Megan Thee Stallion. Both sampled quotes to comment directly on ongoing racial injustices, Rock ending his monologue by invoking James Baldwin invoking a philosophy that I’m noting at this point as recurrent in King (if specifically not in a consciously racial context):

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

From here.

The single Megan Thee Stallion performed, “Savage,” featuring her fellow native Houstonian Beyoncé (unfortunately not in attendance) offers an example of a marginalized/oppressed group reclaiming the language that has been used to oppress them–aka reappropriation. In her performance, she sampled Malcolm X (the same quote, it happens, that Beyoncé used in her 2018 Coachella performance).

The designation of a marginalized/Other group as “savage” rather than “civilized” has been used as justification for subjugation and land/property theft via colonization for centuries now, as The Stand indicates by noting:

Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.

This is in reference to Larry’s guitar-playing soothing the “savage” child Joe, who’s lost his language and is signified as an Other thus:

…those unsettling blue-gray eyes with their Chinese shape had been staring at her with mild savagery. He had pulled the knife back with a low growl. He didn’t talk.

The imperialist connotations of the term “savage” are explored most prominently in the ending newly added for the Uncut, in which Randall Flagg, rechristening himself “Russell Faraday,” shores up on a beach in the wake of his nuking. When he asks the spear-carrying men he discovers there if they speak four different European Romance languages (English, Spanish, French, and German), their lack of response leads him to conclude:

They are simple folk. Primitive; simple; unlettered. But I can use them. Yes, I can use them perfectly well.

Then he declares:

“I’ve come to teach you how to be civilized!”

On the surface this seems like King directly acknowledging how the concept of so-called “civilization” is used to perpetuate subjugation more savage than any of the marginalized groups dubbed thus. Yet the implications of another scene seem to undermine this:

At 9:16 P.M., EST, those still well enough to watch television in the Portland, Maine, area, tuned in WCSH-TV and watched with numbed horror as a huge black man, naked except for a pink leather loincloth and a Marine officer’s cap, obviously ill, performed a series of sixty-two public executions.

His colleagues, also black, also nearly naked, all wore loincloths and some badge of rank to show they had once belonged in the military. They were armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. …

The huge black man, who grinned a lot, showing amazingly even and white teeth in his coal-black face, was holding a .45 automatic pistol and standing beside a large glass drum.

This doubly designated “huge black man” then starts drawing names randomly for the executions in what one blogger interpreted as “black nationalists taking revenge on white supremacy one white person at a time live on tv.” But to me this phrasing smacks of the same mindset/logic that King himself seems to have about his racial depictions, another version of what’s reflected in his depiction of Abagail as the Magical Black Woman: the idea that this depiction of murderous black men is anti-white supremacy seems like an erasure/revisionist narrative obscuring (and inadvertently celebrating) its racist nature. While the actions this group of nearly-naked men take might be justifiable by a certain historical logic, this is basically a depiction of a particular race disintegrating into a fantasy of white fear of what black people would do if they gained any sort of leverage or power, a near-instant reversion to our conditioned visions of “savagery,” with the “coal-black” skin of the ringleader reflecting how white fear correlates directly with darkness of skin tone.

Not to mention they’re wearing loincloths, for Christ’s sweet sake.

Screwed Uppropriation

This month the “official” trailer came out for the upcoming adaptation of The Stand, which, in addition to using a Bob Marley song, revealed–lo and behold–that in this version, Larry Underwood is Black. This update mitigates a lot of the original complications with this character, appropriation-wise. Such as: in King’s text, Larry plays a lot of “blues,” but when I looked up the names of the artists of the songs he’s mentioned playing, almost all of them turn out to be white folk singers:

Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought.

…

So he played Geoff Muldaur’s “Goin Downtown” and his own “Sally’s Fresno Blues”; he played “The Springhill Mine Disaster” and Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mamma.” He switched to primitive rock and roll—“Milk Cow Blues,” “Jim Dandy,” “Twenty Flight Rock” (doing the boogie-woogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, “Endless Sleep,” originally done by Jody Reynolds.

Of the three musicians named as Larry’s influences here, only Arthur Crudup is Black. (The “Jim Dandy” number also appears in “The Woman in the Room” in Night Shift.) Yet the only specifically titled “Blues” number is specifically designated “his own,” blues being a traditionally Black musical tradition and also one a little freer with its conceptions of “ownership”:

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was titled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said. “I was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out—Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares: “This song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by an “open source” culture, in which preexisting melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked.

Jonathan Lethem. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Originally quoting Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Copyrights and Copywrongs” and Kembrew McLeod, “Freedom of Expression®”

Is Larry just participating in this sort of open-source sharing inherent to the genre, so that he cannot justifiably be accused of the sin of cultural appropriation? His Whiteness matters because of another aspect inherent to this genre: its origins and the race it originated with. As Muddy Waters notes in the above passage, this music goes back to the “cotton field”; the sharing is meant to be among the group who’s had everything else taken from them, whose sharing developed as a means to survive the White man’s exploitation (the ethic of sampling in hip hop seems like an extension of this racial-historical logic). Larry is from the exploiting group, the one that’s always done the taking, has no right to participate in this economy of sharing if he’s part of the economy of taking.

Larry does mentally refer to a black musician at one point:

It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you?

This passage strikes me as a tacit admission that he named the character after this song.

Nadine is a white character whose hair transitions to pure/solid white over the narrative due to her encounters with pure evil. She is almost used up and spit out by Flagg as he rapes her catatonic–after insisting she remain a “virgin” on a very technical basis up to that point–so that she can carry his son. But then she’s able to bait him into killing her and his unborn son. She doesn’t remain a fully exploited and helpless victim, patently does not fulfill the promise of her exploitation by virtue of her own agency. Yet in the context of this particular reading, “Nadine” is something else this narrative has “taken” from a Black musician. That Larry himself must be sacrificed to atone for these sins would seem to be symbolic of what really needs to happen to white appropriators…but Nadine taking her power back is her taking white power back, even if she is named for a Black musician’s song.

As a white child, my primary referent for Chuck Berry was Marty McFly playing his song “Johnny B. Goode” in Back to the Future (1985). Seeing the movie again recently, I was struck by one of those time-travel paradoxes that always nag at such narratives. This one has problematic implications on a deeper level:

I love Marty’s condescension when he tells the Black band “watch me for the changes, and try to keep up.” About a minute and a half in, we see the band member Marty replaced due to his injured hand make a phone call back stage: “Hey, Chuck, it’s Marvin….your cousin, Marvin Berry… you know that new sound you been looking for? Well listen to this!” And he holds the phone up so Chuck can hear Marty playing “Johnny B. Goode.”

As Larry implicitly points out in his reflection on Diana Ross (if anachronistically in the 1990 Uncut), pop music has been a significant means of “raising consciousness” and gaining respect for Black people, since, seemingly, in what King’s scene with Abagail at the non-minstrel talent show shows in grotesque parody, it’s a kind of showcase of raw implicit talent (which can then create monetary value). Chuck Berry’s pioneering of a genre is an example of such talent (even genius), but this narrative of him originally hearing the sound from Marty–a white man-boy–struck me as a form of erasure and/or revision of this narrative of Berry as an avatar of Black achievement (and thus inherent (monetary) value). This narrative presents Berry as a thief, (again) erasing the narrative that traditionally Black people are the ones who have been stolen/taken from. Of course, even for this narrative to work, Marty still necessarily had to have heard the song from Chuck in the first place to be able to play it for Chuck to hear here, and for that to be the case, Chuck could not originally have heard the song from Marty…but like the other time-travel paradoxes, the narrative is asking (if not demanding) the viewer overlook that detail. Which is a form of negating that detail, that detail in this case being the Black artist’s claim to the innovation of an entire genre still prevalent today.

DJ Screw pioneered a genre that had already been pioneered by and for Black people, blending voices from his own community rather than stealing them, “chopping and screwing” them and slowing them down, as though to listen more carefully to what they were saying. A recent article points out how app algorithms continue to obscure/erase the work and narratives of Black artists like DJ Screw, enabling a “whitewashing of black music” that’s a product of white supremacy while continuing to perpetuate it, and which is easy for white people to convince themselves is not a product of racism (if I like this Black musical style enough to use it myself–if I like it so much I’d even like to take credit for it myself–then I can’t be racist). So, the 2020 version of Larry Underwood’s musical “taking.”

I guess the white man sacrificing himself for (white) sins was only lip service…

-SCR