Tonight, I’m taking a knee for America. Not just one knee, but both knees in prayer for our planet, our future, and leaders of our world. | | | | Charles Bradley in Barcelona, Nov. 23, 2011.
(Jordi Vidal/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Tonight, I’m taking a knee for America. Not just one knee, but both knees in prayer for our planet, our future, and leaders of our world.”
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| | rantnrave:// The artlessness of the deal, or how to get people to do exactly what you don't want them to do: Remember when it was only football players kneeling for the national anthem? One presidential rally and a few tweets later, a growing protest movement had leapt across sports leagues, and across the field from the athletes to the national anthem singers themselves. RICO LAVELLE, who dropped to his knees and raised his right fist in DETROIT on Sunday, and former THE VOICE runner-up MEGHAN LINSEY, who ended the anthem with a similar gesture in NASHVILLE, helped turn an implicitly political tradition into an explicit one. By raising their voices both literally and figuratively, they were participating in a political conversation their president had invited. Does he have a right to complain if the conversation didn't go exactly the way he hoped? Or if their emotional response to a two-century-old anthem is not the same as his at this exact moment in time? The national anthem—a military poem set to a soaring, complicated melody—is imbued with political, cultural and deeply personal meanings. Used as an introduction to sports battles local, national and international, it has long invited singers from MARVIN to WHITNEY and beyond to share their own meanings, sometimes melancholic, sometimes triumphant, sometimes hopeful, sometimes angry. Like them, LaVelle and Linsey were tapping into their own feelings but also those of a larger community. They gestured in solidarity. Isn't that what a national anthem is for?... They had lots of company: STEVIE WONDER, DAVE MATTHEWS and PHARRELL WILLIAMS each took a knee (or two) at Matthews' CONCERT FOR CHARLOTTESVILLE. Wonder took two knees at the GLOBAL CITIZEN FESTIVAL in NEW YORK. JUSTIN BIEBER pledged allegiance to BLACK LIVES MATTER. MILEY CYRUS converted "PARTY IN THE USA" to a plea for social justice. And JOHN LEGEND wrote... PAUL RYAN, meanwhile, invoked TAYLOR SWIFT and the BANGLES in a plea for tax reform. It was not a good idea... DAMON KRUKOWSKI's fantastic podcast series about digital sound, WAYS OF HEARING, ends with an episode about the eternal conflict between signal and noise. Spoiler: Sometimes the signal is in the noise... Thirty must-read music books for fall 2017.. The ONION's 20 best music stories... RIP CHARLES BRADLEY, SETH FIRKINS and JOHN JACK. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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