Jun 2012

Being white and danc­ing is a les­son,
is a bur­den to bear,
is a lev­eler,
is a kind of unar­guable truth.

I would watch Bubba, my friend, my black friend, dance.
We were 13.
It was so odd to me. How?
With­out mov­ing really at all, some mid­dle part of his body shifted in
the sex of the down­beat and like water between this and that down…

It was so cool to watch, and I would just know way deep in me that Black people’s bod­ies knew some­thing about rhythm that my body did not know.
And I watched and I wanted to know music like that.
When I say I watched I mean I saw every part of every­thing and that is still as suc­cess­ful as try­ing to recon­struct a baby by hav­ing a look at an ultra­sound.
When I hear Ste­vie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’”’s open­ing bass riff (and the Jack­son 5 on back­ing vocals!!),
some­thing, every­thing in me, cuts in line and wants to find a home in my body
for what is hap­pen­ing in the spaces between the whacka rhythm gui­tar, the wocka key­boards and the plat­form heeled bass line. Every­thing. I get chills. Go hear and lis­ten to the first 10 bars and try to turn away. You will stare at your com­puter the way I still stare at Bubba in my mem­ory, with won­der love and envy. I can’t un-know that I expe­ri­ence funk this effort-filled way, but I love that the snake of it moves through me
dan­ger­ously and honestly.