I've been reading Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now. It's about her work to register voters and the State of Georgia's work to suppress minority votes. In the last chapter she writes:
"I recently saw a YouTube video by a hip-hop artist named YelloPain. The opening sequence broke my heart as he tours his neighborhood and bitterly describes how useless voting seems. He invokes the promise of the Obama presidency, then laments all the ways life failed to improve. His damning indictment of the act of voting seems at once logical and tragic. But with his next verse, he rips into the fiction of voter apathy, and in his rapid-fire poetry, you come to understand that his reaction is more aptly treated as despair and disillusionment. . . (p.252)
"What Yellopain does best is a stroke of artistic and activist genius. He deftly illustrates how understanding and engaging in the political system is an issue of survival. Like a modern version of Schoolhouse Rock!, he explains the three branches of government, connecting their failures to our own. From health care policy and climate action to the social safety net and high finance, our votes determine how the public and the private sectors operate and where they intersect." (p. 253)
I thought I'd look fort the video. Among other things this year, I took training again to be a voter registrar and thought I might learn something. Maybe we could use the video when talking to younger voters who don't see any point of voting.
All I had was his name - Yellopain - and YouTube. He has lots of videos. I went through the titles and dates (Abrams book is copyrighted 2020, so the video is at least seven years old.)
I finally got to a video of someone reviewing Yellowpain's video. It's called "My Vote Don't Count." But before I got to it, there was another video with a rapper right below the one that reviewed "My Vote Don't Count."
The title was "Rapper Listens To Beatles For The First Time." The cover had the rapper and a picture of the cover of the Beatles "Abbey Road."
Ir was late and I was in bed. I had a doctor's appointment today at 8:30am. I wasn't going to post anything last night, so I postponed finding the Yellopain Voting video and decided to see what the Rap meets Beatles video was going to be like.
I couldn't quite imagine someone who had never listened to a Beatles song and knew nothing about them. But I realized that they burst into the world's attention in the 1960s and disbanded in 1970. That's 56 years ago. When I was in my 20s, what did I know of the great musicians of the early 1900s? Not much. And which current musicians would I recognize? Not many. Maybe I should do a video of Geezer Listens To Rap. It's probably already been done.
Is he going to like the Beatles? I'd listen to a few minutes. He said he knew nothing about the Beatles. He knew there was something or someone called Yoko Ono but didn't know what it was. And a couple of times listening, he gets excited by the unknown drummer. I was quietly shouting, "RINGO STARR."
It began with "Come Together". As he went through the album track by track, I was reminded how good the songs and music are. And it was fun watching someone listen to the Beatles for the first time. It's the first video below.
[You can watch "My Vote Don't Count" below the Rapper and the Beatles, along with a more recent one, "My Vote Will Count"]
There are ads so you have to jump in and hit 'skip ad' a few times. It also appears that others have copied this idea of listening to the Beatles for the first time on YouTube.
This seems to be the Yellopain video Stacey Abrams wrote about:
Hey, Steve. I spent some long time with these today. Good to take in on board 'in the feels'. And it reminds me, again, so much: I could cry for what LIVING in another country has given me, not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES now.
ReplyDeleteEach place, each time LIVING in a place different in custom and language, in law and justice, in taxation and how money is spent. In the everyday customs of greetings, of the ways of family life and music, how life itself is taken up in the everyday.
I would wish it on EVERYONE if we didn't also, to often, hold to borders thicker than welcome these days. So afraid of 'others' and they afraid of us. HEARING the Beatles years later, TASTING foods you don't know the names of, SPEAKING in words that don't carry the same message 'back home'.
SEEING people seem like home but not homies. Letting us hear, feel, shout & cry and laugh and drink and shutter down our soul's windows -- then, knowing, we have changed. We start to see others as simply ourselves, not yet known for the customs of the time they have lived, that we haven't.
I am trying to make the noise of words when soundings are the only thing I can trace. It is the voice of a familiar difference, the other life I could have, and did, live. It is beginning to know & understand how we are human.
I am so damn lucky to have gained the life I've had. And soon, I will apply for citizenship in the 4th country I have had the amazingly blessed fortune to have lived in long enough to know: I will never understand it. I will forever be its 'outsider'. I will find moments that warm me like a cabin fire after a day skiing in too far below zero clear-sky bliss.
I am coming into My Country. I am alone and a stranger. I am welcomed to find a new place called, Home. It's like hearing a Beatle's album, years out-of-time, and finding it's new. To me, in my adopted home of now, here.
Good stuff, Steve. Life is good.