The Joe Rogan Experience - July 24, 2019


Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West

Topics
stand-up comedy comic writers gangster critique of America socialism and its implementation child labor laws fundamental transformation examples are the go-cart of judgment self-giving Gary Clark Jr.. deep music vibrations K-pop and Korean rhythms culture momentum travel black culture
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Dr. Cornel West
Mentioned
Donald Trump Gary Clark Jr. Pull Roseanne Barr Robert Johnson Martin Luther King Jr. Jack Johnson Obama John Brown The Student Chekhov Aretha Franklin Muhammad Ali Miles Horton James Brown Malcolm X Eminem George Clinton Bootsy Stephen Sund Louis Armstrong Bernie Sanders Knight Rider and 130 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1324 - Ian Edwards Joe Rogan Experience #1326 - Maynard James Keenan

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 58 minutes

Words per minute

158.86

Word count

18,764

Sentence count

1,964

Harmful content

Misogyny

27

sentences flagged

Toxicity

90

sentences flagged

Hate speech

68

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Comedian Richard Pryor, who died at the age of 63, was one of the greatest comedians of all time. He was a stand-up comic, singer, songwriter, actor, producer, and singer-songwriter. He is best known for his sketch comedy routines, but he was also known for being the first black man to write and perform a song called "Dogs and the Cats," which was written and performed by his brother, Ron Stallworth. In this episode, Ron talks about his relationship with the late comedian, how he got to know him, and what it was like to work with him. He also talks about the early days of his comedy career, and how he and his brother fell in love with each other, which led to him going back to comedy in the late 60s and early 70s, and why he decided to go back to standup comedy. He also shares his thoughts on the life and career of Lenny Bruce and the impact he had on the art form, and the legacy of the late standup comedian, George Carlin, who was also a close family friend of his late brother, Jimmy Seinfeld, who helped pave the way for him. Richard the Godfather in the early 80s and 90s. the man who paved his way to becoming the greatest standup comic of his day. He is buried in the shadow of a star. Thank you, Richard, for being who you were, and for doing what you did, and not only in comedy, but in life, but also in the art of being who he truly was, and who will be missed out on the legacy you left in the next generation. of great comedians who will live on in the history of greats who will forever be remembered as a great man. in our hearts forever. RIP Richard, you will always be a legend. -Jonestown. Jonestown Jon Taffer John Singleton Jimmy Seibert Jim Carlin Tom Bell . Jon Sellett Bill Paolo Barbu Rick Ross Joe Pesci Robert Downey Jack Och Michael Jordan Ronald Reagan Sam Cooke Bobby Rook Carl Roswell Bob Dylan James Blanchard Dennis Quaid Eddie Murphy Will Smith Mike Comrie

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:04.000 Boom! 0.99
00:00:04.000 And we're live. 0.99
00:00:05.000 How are you, sir?
00:00:06.000 Oh, brother, I'm so blessed to be here, man.
00:00:07.000 I want to salute you, the work that you do, and the fact that you were one hell of an artist, man, I'm telling you.
00:00:14.000 Well, thank you very much.
00:00:15.000 Coming from...
00:00:19.000 Ooh, we the swing from the political, the personal, from the animals on to the visionary.
00:00:25.000 It's just a beautiful thing to behold, my brother.
00:00:28.000 Thank you.
00:00:28.000 From you, that is an honor.
00:00:30.000 I've been a huge fan of you for a long time.
00:00:32.000 So for you to say that to me means the world.
00:00:35.000 Oh, it's a deep thing.
00:00:36.000 And I can see your love for Richard Pryor, man.
00:00:38.000 I walk into your space and I'm just transformed by the geist, the spirit, the esprit of this place, man.
00:00:44.000 Hendrix here, Pryor here.
00:00:47.000 Then when you tell me, you worked with the great Richard Pryor.
00:00:50.000 I did.
00:00:51.000 Oh my God.
00:00:52.000 For five weeks, I followed him when I was a young comedian at the Comedy Store.
00:00:56.000 I went on right after him every night he performed.
00:00:59.000 What was that like, though, brother?
00:01:01.000 It was strange to be in the room with him because when I was a 14-year-old boy, my parents took me to see live at the Sunset Strip, and I could not believe that anybody could be so funny just talking.
00:01:13.000 That was my first experience with stand-up comedy.
00:01:15.000 Other than that, I'd seen people perform on The Tonight Show and things along those lines.
00:01:21.000 But with Bob Hope and some of these others, it's highly talented.
00:01:23.000 It was like, ha ha ha.
00:01:24.000 It was okay.
00:01:25.000 You know what I mean?
00:01:26.000 But when you see Richard in concert in a movie theater, I couldn't believe how funny it was.
00:01:31.000 It didn't make sense.
00:01:32.000 I had seen funny movies before, like, you know, comedy movies that made you laugh, but nothing, nothing like that.
00:01:38.000 I'm like, this guy's just talking.
00:01:40.000 It changed my life.
00:01:42.000 But you can see the power of art, and it's connected to freedom, because I've always viewed Richard Pryor as the freest man in the 20th century, certainly the freest black man, along with Muhammad Ali.
00:01:51.000 He's the freest black man in the 20th century.
00:01:53.000 He is so self-determining.
00:01:57.000 The choices that he makes has to do with his own sense of self.
00:02:01.000 He doesn't care what other people think.
00:02:03.000 He's looking for other people's approval, recognition.
00:02:06.000 He's gonna be who he is, and he pays a major cost for that, of course.
00:02:11.000 Anytime you're that free in a world of such unfreedom, you're gonna pay a major, major cost.
00:02:19.000 Well, he had spectacular honesty, and I feel like what happened was Lenny Bruce opened the art form up, and then Richard Pryor took it to a new place.
00:02:27.000 That's true.
00:02:27.000 In terms of the origins, the real greats.
00:02:30.000 That's exactly.
00:02:31.000 But then George...
00:02:32.000 Oh, yeah.
00:02:33.000 Oh, George Carlin.
00:02:34.000 Well, he was the most prolific.
00:02:36.000 He did an hour special every year until he died.
00:02:40.000 Every year he did a new hour.
00:02:41.000 And they're different.
00:02:41.000 Each one different.
00:02:43.000 But all three.
00:02:44.000 But you are in that tradition.
00:02:46.000 I was saying, man, when I saw you doing the dogs and the cats...
00:02:52.000 I'm getting inside of their souls.
00:02:55.000 You know how profound that is, though, man, as an artist and as a human being to do that.
00:03:01.000 I said, oh, my God.
00:03:04.000 And it reminded me of prior.
00:03:06.000 And so when I walk in and I see your connection, I said, I'll be.
00:03:11.000 I'll be.
00:03:12.000 I shouldn't be surprised.
00:03:14.000 Well, it was just being in the room with him was strange.
00:03:17.000 I just couldn't believe it was real.
00:03:18.000 You know, I was in my 20s.
00:03:19.000 You were in the 20s.
00:03:20.000 He was in his...
00:03:21.000 He was at the end.
00:03:23.000 And like I said, he couldn't walk anymore.
00:03:25.000 They used to have to carry him to the stage.
00:03:29.000 He performed?
00:03:30.000 Sold out every night.
00:03:31.000 Sitting in the chair?
00:03:32.000 Yeah, sat in the chair.
00:03:33.000 Really?
00:03:34.000 Yeah, but it was sold out every night.
00:03:36.000 Did they ever get tapes of it?
00:03:38.000 I've never seen that before.
00:03:39.000 I don't believe there's tapes of it.
00:03:40.000 I don't believe anybody recorded it.
00:03:42.000 If they did record it, nobody released it.
00:03:44.000 This was in the 90s, and this was, again, this was the end of his life.
00:03:50.000 Who said that?
00:03:50.000 He just decided, you know, he was dying, and he decided he'd go back to his love.
00:03:55.000 This is how he wanted to go out.
00:03:56.000 He wanted to go back doing stand-up.
00:03:57.000 Because you all got that picture.
00:03:59.000 January 1st, 1963. Brother Pryor.
00:04:03.000 My brother just broke down all that information.
00:04:05.000 Yeah, Jamie.
00:04:05.000 So tell us, what did he get?
00:04:07.000 Because I didn't even know what he got arrested for.
00:04:08.000 35 days in jail, man.
00:04:12.000 He had a woman that he knew.
00:04:14.000 He moved to Pittsburgh, apparently, when he was about 22 years old.
00:04:18.000 Let me switch that in there.
00:04:21.000 Prior conviction.
00:04:21.000 There it is.
00:04:22.000 There's the mugshot.
00:04:23.000 Wow.
00:04:24.000 So he had a friend of his, which is a woman that was singing in clubs. 0.95
00:04:29.000 Her father was a cop.
00:04:30.000 And in his autobiography, he wrote that, among other things, that he or she paid him or she gave him money. 1.00
00:04:37.000 He admitted to beating her ass. 1.00
00:04:39.000 So I beat her ass first. 1.00
00:04:41.000 Didn't think about hitting a woman as much as I thought about my own survival. 1.00
00:04:44.000 That led him to being arrested.
00:04:46.000 Sentenced to 90 days.
00:04:47.000 He served 35 of them.
00:04:50.000 And had a $7 fine.
00:04:51.000 He had a crazy life, man. 0.94
00:04:53.000 He grew up in a brothel. 0.98
00:04:54.000 Yeah, right there in Peoria.
00:04:56.000 Peoria, Illinois.
00:04:57.000 No, but the violence against Andy's sister is wrong, but prior, though, my man, he was wild, free, cruel, tender, genius, crazy, wrong as he could be,
00:05:13.000 right as he could be.
00:05:14.000 He's a human being.
00:05:15.000 He's a complicated human being.
00:05:17.000 I never met him before, but his spirit means the world to me.
00:05:23.000 Me as well.
00:05:24.000 Well, I think every comic.
00:05:26.000 I've never met a single comic that doesn't think he's one of the most important figures in the history of the art.
00:05:30.000 Probably the most important.
00:05:32.000 It's like him and Lenny Bruce, in my opinion, and then Kinison later.
00:05:35.000 But Kinison for a much, much shorter time.
00:05:37.000 Who would be the greatest female comic artist? 1.00
00:05:40.000 I think Roseanne Barr.
00:05:42.000 Roseanne?
00:05:42.000 Yeah.
00:05:42.000 Roseanne is profoundly talented.
00:05:44.000 She doesn't know that about it. 0.99
00:05:46.000 She doesn't get the credit she deserves because she's legitimately mentally ill. 0.90
00:05:50.000 And that's one of the things I had on the podcast to highlight with her. 0.99
00:05:54.000 Legitimately mentally ill.
00:05:54.000 She was hit by a car when she was 15. I didn't know that.
00:05:57.000 She spent nine months in a mental hospital.
00:06:00.000 Really?
00:06:01.000 Yeah.
00:06:01.000 She lost her ability to count.
00:06:03.000 She was very good at mathematics before that.
00:06:07.000 The severe head injury changed her personality.
00:06:11.000 Yeah, same with Kinnison.
00:06:13.000 Kinnison was hit by a car when he was young as well and changed his personality radically too.
00:06:17.000 Head injuries make people very impulsive, very wild and impulsive, and oftentimes a slave to their own impulses.
00:06:24.000 And I think Kinnison was a big example of that, as was Roseanne.
00:06:28.000 But Roseanne was the first really loud, brash, almost male, female comedian who could kill like a man. 1.00
00:06:38.000 What about the Joan Rivers and Phyllis Dillard?
00:06:42.000 I love Monique.
00:06:43.000 Monique gets to me. 1.00
00:06:45.000 She touches my soul every time she's on stage.
00:06:48.000 Have you ever seen Miss Pat?
00:06:49.000 No. 0.87
00:06:50.000 Miss Pat's a monster. 1.00
00:06:51.000 Really? 0.94
00:06:51.000 Really? 0.94
00:06:52.000 She's a monster. 1.00
00:06:53.000 She's had a crazy life. 0.99
00:06:54.000 She's been on this podcast a couple times.
00:06:56.000 Her life was insane.
00:06:58.000 I mean, she was selling crack when she was 14. She had a baby when she was 14. Was it 13?
00:07:04.000 She was pregnant at 13 with a married man.
00:07:07.000 Had a couple kids with him.
00:07:09.000 Jesus.
00:07:10.000 And she is so funny.
00:07:14.000 She's so wild and funny.
00:07:18.000 It goes back to Aristophanes.
00:07:20.000 It goes back to those early comics in the history of the West who were willing to tell the truth, especially as it related to the everyday experiences of ordinary people.
00:07:36.000 Plato's text itself, you know, the Republic, was grounded in an imitation of the comic writers who were the first to really delve into everyday people's experiences, not the well-to-do.
00:07:50.000 That was tragedy.
00:07:51.000 Tragedy only had to do with the nobility and the aristocracy.
00:07:55.000 But it was comedy that dwelled into the lives of everyday people.
00:07:58.000 Then Plato takes the whole form and shifts it into the dialogue and makes Socrates, of course, the grand hero.
00:08:05.000 But it was Aristophanes, at least in the West, who initiated this with the clouds.
00:08:10.000 And frogs and so on.
00:08:12.000 And it goes all the way through from Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain to Nathaniel.
00:08:17.000 Wes to brother Ishmael Reed.
00:08:22.000 I mean, these are the great American comic writers.
00:08:25.000 Twain, Wes, Reed.
00:08:28.000 And see, comic writers are different than the tragic ones of Dostoevsky and Kafka's comic in its own deep way, too.
00:08:36.000 The greatest, of course, is Chekhov, though.
00:08:37.000 Anton Chekhov, brother.
00:08:39.000 I know you check out Chekhov, right?
00:08:41.000 No.
00:08:41.000 Oh, brother, you haven't fully lived until you read some Anton Chekhov.
00:08:46.000 Yeah.
00:08:46.000 Oh, you read Three Sisters of Uncle Vanya.
00:08:49.000 You read The Cherry Orchard, any of the short stories.
00:08:53.000 He's had over 6,000 characters in his short stories, man.
00:08:57.000 Whoa.
00:08:57.000 To be thrust into the ravine.
00:09:04.000 Or even Misery, man.
00:09:06.000 The greatest one is called A Student.
00:09:08.000 It's only two and a half pages.
00:09:09.000 It's his favorite short story.
00:09:10.000 Oh, you read that tonight.
00:09:11.000 It'll blow your mind.
00:09:13.000 Wow.
00:09:13.000 You listen to it.
00:09:14.000 You read that tonight.
00:09:15.000 Listen to a little Curtis Mayfield.
00:09:17.000 Okay.
00:09:17.000 Listen to a little Stephen Sondheim.
00:09:19.000 Okay.
00:09:20.000 Stephen Sondheim, No More, Into the Woods.
00:09:24.000 Curtis Mayfield, I Loved and I Lost.
00:09:27.000 And then The Student Chekhov.
00:09:29.000 Oh, man, you be ready for some serious, serious cognac.
00:09:36.000 On your recommendation, I certainly will.
00:09:38.000 Oh, no, no, because I know you're serious intellectual too.
00:09:41.000 You do your homework.
00:09:42.000 But I'm just saying this in terms of just enhancing all of our lives.
00:09:45.000 I mean, the comic writers, the comedians of various sorts, be they on the stage or be they on the page, are, I think, vanguards of the species in a very deep way, you know, because we as a species, We have to objectify our grief and our pain and our sadness and our sorrow.
00:10:05.000 And it begins with moans and groans and you transfigure those moans and groans first into song, but song then moves into language.
00:10:13.000 And the language is not rational language or philosophy and dialectic, but it's a language of stories, especially the stories that are self-critical.
00:10:21.000 We laugh at ourselves, not at others.
00:10:24.000 We laugh with others rather than just at others.
00:10:27.000 So it's not that sudden glory that Hobbes talks about in regard to the comic, where you're looking down and condescending.
00:10:33.000 You see, that's an aristocratic conception of the comic. 0.81
00:10:36.000 You're laughing at the ordinary people who are so dirty and filthy. 0.83
00:10:40.000 It's profoundly anti-democratic, right? 0.96
00:10:42.000 As if...
00:10:44.000 Well-to-do folk, don't fart. 0.97
00:10:48.000 Don't do number one and number two and fall in and out of love and act a fool and live lives of inconsistency, right? 0.54
00:10:55.000 But act when you get these democratic forms of the comic.
00:10:58.000 See, that's you and Pryor and Roseanne and Monique and George Carlin and all of that.
00:11:03.000 That's free spirit, though, brother.
00:11:05.000 In most of our lives, you see, we're dealing with a whole history of a species.
00:11:10.000 Of structures of domination, oppression, that's the history of the species for the most part.
00:11:15.000 And there's moments in which there's breakthroughs, in which there's a freedom of spirit.
00:11:21.000 And then you have some institutionalization of that, which is democracy.
00:11:25.000 That's why democracies are so fragile and usually don't last that long because it cuts so radically against the sense of really wanting to be free.
00:11:34.000 I mean, Dostoevsky's right.
00:11:36.000 Most people really are afraid of freedom.
00:11:39.000 They want to defer to authority.
00:11:41.000 They want to conform.
00:11:43.000 And when they're introduced to freedom and it really catches hold, they say, oh my God, it's a tremendous cost to be paid, but I like that.
00:11:51.000 There's something about that.
00:11:54.000 And they can hear it in the music.
00:11:55.000 They can see it in your comic art, the priors and others.
00:11:58.000 And it allows these effects and consequences in people's lives to really enrich their lives before they die.
00:12:05.000 Why do you think people are afraid of freedom?
00:12:07.000 Well, it's courage.
00:12:09.000 I mean, there is no freedom without unbelievable, unprecedented, unstoppable courage.
00:12:15.000 And courage is not widely distributed in the species, man.
00:12:21.000 That's a very charitable way of looking at people.
00:12:23.000 No, it's true, man.
00:12:24.000 Most people are rather conformed.
00:12:26.000 They're complacent.
00:12:27.000 They're complicitous. 1.00
00:12:28.000 They're cowardly. 1.00
00:12:29.000 They're well-adjusted. 0.99
00:12:31.000 They're injustice and want to smile and walk around as peacocks rather than cut against the grain and have to bear witness and therefore end up on a cross or like Socrates, condemned.
00:12:42.000 Most of the great figures that we know.
00:12:44.000 Yeah.
00:12:45.000 There's more consequences for that now than ever.
00:12:47.000 Oh, yeah.
00:12:48.000 Cancel culture.
00:12:49.000 That's exactly right.
00:12:50.000 Yeah.
00:12:51.000 Oh, it's true.
00:12:52.000 It's very, very true.
00:12:53.000 But, I mean, we live in a culture that's so corporatized, commercialized, marketized.
00:12:59.000 It's all about money, money, money, status, status, status.
00:13:03.000 And you lose any deep sense of honor, of character.
00:13:07.000 It's all about what appears to be the case.
00:13:09.000 It's the culture of superficial spectacle.
00:13:11.000 So it's all about image.
00:13:13.000 Yes.
00:13:14.000 You see?
00:13:14.000 And image is just some surface phenomenon.
00:13:21.000 Well, I can't recommend your book, Race Matters, enough.
00:13:25.000 And one of the reasons is because of your analysis of that.
00:13:29.000 Your understanding of the superficial aspect of the pursuit that so many people are locked into from cradle to the grave.
00:13:38.000 And you just encapsulated that so well.
00:13:42.000 And the way you worded it and the way you phrased it, it resonates so well.
00:13:48.000 And I... Mm-hmm.
00:14:04.000 In the 25th anniversary, I wanted to talk to you about it because that's the one I read, and it's so strange when you read something that's so current, even though it's 25 years old, it rings true.
00:14:19.000 Sometimes does that feel futile, where you have the same issues that you spoke on 25 years ago, and there's very little change in those 25 years.
00:14:30.000 No, it's a wonderful deep question though, man.
00:14:33.000 I appreciate the times that you spent reading Race Matters.
00:14:38.000 But no, it's never futile though, man.
00:14:41.000 It's never futile because you have a conception of victory that is not messianic or salvific.
00:14:49.000 You're not trying to save people.
00:14:50.000 You're not trying to be a messiah to bring some kind of grand victory.
00:14:55.000 You're simply trying to touch people's lives.
00:14:58.000 So when you enrich and enable a person's life, the way in which you've talked about that right there, you're already talking about the ways in which you were touched.
00:15:06.000 That means there was no futility at all.
00:15:09.000 Yeah.
00:15:09.000 Oh, it's certainly not futile to me.
00:15:12.000 The fecundity of it.
00:15:14.000 And so all we can do, you know, as human beings, is to try to inspire one another and encourage one another.
00:15:24.000 And enable one another, and noble one another.
00:15:27.000 And that, in and of itself, is what the great John Coltrane called a force for good.
00:15:32.000 How do I become, based on a love supreme, a force for good in a cold and cruel world?
00:15:40.000 Based on love supreme.
00:15:41.000 Absolutely.
00:15:42.000 Absolutely.
00:15:43.000 And love supreme is not love in the abstract, right?
00:15:47.000 It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.
00:15:50.000 It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.
00:15:53.000 It's a love of truth in its concrete forms.
00:15:57.000 Now, I'm a Christian, revolutionary Christian, so I got a love of God mediated through a Palestinian Jew named Jesus, but that's tied to a justice that comes out of prophetic Judaism, right?
00:16:07.000 And we know Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these religions for me have no wholesale monopoly On how we understand the world, because they all emerge at various historical moments.
00:16:20.000 But when it comes to this love that allows us to persist in a world in which cruelty and envy, contempt, manipulation, dishonesty, and that's shot through all of us.
00:16:36.000 We're not finger pointing the name card.
00:16:39.000 Oh, no.
00:16:40.000 You know, I've called up brother Donald Trump a gangster over and over again.
00:16:44.000 And I say that because there's a gangster inside of me.
00:16:47.000 I got to reconquer it every day.
00:16:49.000 So I know gangsters when I see them.
00:16:52.000 And gangster is not a subjective expression.
00:16:54.000 It's an objective condition.
00:16:56.000 If you grabbing a woman's parts, that's gangster. 1.00
00:16:59.000 You stealing somebody's oil in another country, that's gangster. 1.00
00:17:02.000 You lie and say, these people have said that America's garbage. 1.00
00:17:06.000 Quit lying. 1.00
00:17:07.000 That's gangster.
00:17:08.000 They got a critique of America.
00:17:09.000 You did, too, in American Carnage in your inauguration. 0.98
00:17:12.000 Or you're talking about the four sisters in Congress saying, well, evil Jews. 0.96
00:17:18.000 No, they haven't said evil Jews. 0.95
00:17:20.000 They said evil doings of Israel.
00:17:23.000 Every nation state has done some evil things.
00:17:26.000 If there's a Palestinian state, which I hope there is, they're going to do some evil things. 1.00
00:17:31.000 Every nation state has to be accountable.
00:17:34.000 U.S., Ethiopia, Guatemala, Israel, China, and so forth and so on.
00:17:40.000 And every nation state has been associated with certain forms of barbarism.
00:17:43.000 We know that.
00:17:44.000 But there's some good things.
00:17:46.000 Some wonderful things about Israel.
00:17:48.000 Some wonderful things about Palestinians in formation, creating a state.
00:17:51.000 There's wonderful things about America.
00:17:53.000 I mean, a lot of people say, even Brother Trump, they hate America.
00:17:56.000 No.
00:17:57.000 They love American comics.
00:17:59.000 They love American music.
00:18:02.000 You ask Sister Tlaib, you ask Sister Priestley, y'all love Aretha?
00:18:08.000 Aretha Franklin means the world to me.
00:18:10.000 What about Mary J? Mary J means the world.
00:18:13.000 Mary J and Aretha are as American as Donald Trump.
00:18:17.000 Even more in some ways, because they've been here longer.
00:18:19.000 Their people have been there 10 generations.
00:18:22.000 Donald Trump's grandfather just arrived.
00:18:24.000 His mother, straight from Scotland.
00:18:26.000 Precious Mary Ann.
00:18:27.000 1930 she arrived, right?
00:18:29.000 And so in that sense you say, wait, wait, quit lying.
00:18:32.000 Let's just be honest and candid, just like the comics.
00:18:36.000 Let's just be honest and candid and recognize.
00:18:38.000 Because what is the definition of comedy?
00:18:40.000 It is first drama, which is conflict emotionally felt and critically reflected upon.
00:18:50.000 But it's that conflict that's rooted in incongruity.
00:18:54.000 Things don't fit.
00:18:56.000 So that's the possibility of hypocrisy, right?
00:18:59.000 And we know hypocrisy is the tribute of vice to virtue.
00:19:03.000 So that there's standards and you fall short.
00:19:06.000 So you can laugh at it.
00:19:08.000 Now when it's really deep comedy, it's talking about the human condition.
00:19:13.000 See, that's a deeper thing.
00:19:15.000 Now see, that's where you get Chekhov and Shakespeare and Joyce and the blues.
00:19:21.000 Because deep comedy is the recognition of limits and incongruity at the highest levels of the mind, heart, and soul.
00:19:31.000 That's a different thing.
00:19:32.000 So, I mean, you can start with comedy with, you know, the clown who's walking around slipping on bananas or the sophisticated professor who doesn't realize that he got a banana hanging out the back of his pocket when he's lecturing with the students.
00:19:46.000 Everybody laughing.
00:19:47.000 He don't know what's going on.
00:19:48.000 Well, that's bodily-based comedy.
00:19:50.000 You know, farts and bananas and so forth.
00:19:53.000 And it's important.
00:19:55.000 But high comedy is...
00:19:58.000 The highest levels of human dignity, love, thought, music, mathematics, metaphysics, and then recognize all of those are incongruous.
00:20:12.000 They're broken.
00:20:13.000 They're fractured.
00:20:15.000 There's dramatic conflict of incongruity at the highest levels of who we are as a species.
00:20:23.000 Now that's deep stuff.
00:20:25.000 That is deep stuff.
00:20:27.000 Oh, Lord, Lord.
00:20:28.000 And one of the most fundamental questions of Western civilization is, how come Socrates never cries and Jesus never laughs?
00:20:37.000 Ooh.
00:20:39.000 That's the question Thomas More was wrestling with in the Tower of London before he was executed in his dialogues on tribulation.
00:20:48.000 Socrates never sheds a tear.
00:20:50.000 What does that mean?
00:20:51.000 The founder of philosophy in the modern West has a love of wisdom, but he never loves people.
00:20:57.000 Because it's impossible to love human beings and not shed tears.
00:21:01.000 You go to your mama's funeral and you're not shedding tears and you're committed to the Socratic ideal of self-mastery and self-control.
00:21:09.000 You need to get off the crack pipe.
00:21:11.000 Get off! 0.99
00:21:13.000 Show her the depths of your love for her through being outside of your self-mastery.
00:21:19.000 The tears will flow.
00:21:20.000 And it's the other way.
00:21:22.000 It's like your daughter.
00:21:23.000 This precious thing that you got when we walk in for your daughter.
00:21:26.000 When she graduates, you and your wife are going to have tears of joy.
00:21:30.000 That ain't the moment for self-mastery.
00:21:32.000 That's not the moment to be Socratic.
00:21:34.000 And so when Socrates is dying, his wife walks in, Xanthippe, and she's crying.
00:21:38.000 He said, get her away. 0.98
00:21:39.000 I can't stand tears.
00:21:40.000 So that's a problem.
00:21:42.000 That's a problem.
00:21:42.000 See, I come from Blackfield.
00:21:43.000 We start with tears.
00:21:45.000 All the mess we had to come to terms with.
00:21:47.000 You know what I mean?
00:21:48.000 Cries and so forth.
00:21:49.000 The Hebrew Scripture begins with the cries of oppressed people too, right?
00:21:52.000 But then Jesus never laughs.
00:21:54.000 Ooh, now see, that's a deep one.
00:21:55.000 That is a deep one.
00:21:56.000 That's GK Chesterton.
00:21:59.000 Chesterton said, Jesus turns over the tables of the money changers.
00:22:05.000 He does not conceal his rage.
00:22:09.000 Crucial.
00:22:10.000 Jesus does weep.
00:22:12.000 That's one of the most profound verses in the Christian Bible, right?
00:22:16.000 Jesus wept, unlike Socrates. 0.90
00:22:19.000 Why did Jesus weep?
00:22:21.000 He wept for Jerusalem.
00:22:22.000 He wept for Lazarus.
00:22:23.000 He wept for his friends.
00:22:25.000 But Jesus hides and conceals his mirth.
00:22:28.000 That's what Chesterton says.
00:22:30.000 Is there any laughter in the Bible?
00:22:32.000 Well, Isaac means laughter when you think of the joke of an older Sarah giving birth to a young person in an older age and so forth. 0.77
00:22:41.000 But it's hard to catch Jesus laughing.
00:22:44.000 None of the synoptic gospels have Jesus laughing.
00:22:48.000 Some people thought they discerned a grin.
00:22:51.000 Somewhere.
00:22:51.000 Because he turned wine into water, he probably had a little grin on there.
00:22:55.000 A subtle grin.
00:22:56.000 A little subtle grin, exactly.
00:22:59.000 But you can never get the full scale and variety of the human condition in any one tradition.
00:23:08.000 I think one of the beauties of what you're saying here one of the beautiful things about what you're saying here is the complexity of human beings and When you're dealing with the situation between these girls that call themselves a squad and Donald Trump and you deal with these very simplistic Things like these chants of send her back or lock her up or they hate America or you know this this is simplifying things and Is so attractive to some people and so attractive during political discourse,
00:23:38.000 right?
00:23:39.000 During these times when you're trying to rally up a campaign and get the audience behind you.
00:23:44.000 This is when these simplistic things resonate.
00:23:47.000 But as a human being, we know that things like...
00:23:50.000 I don't...
00:23:52.000 I don't subscribe to this idea that human beings are good or bad.
00:23:59.000 Go either way.
00:24:00.000 I'm sure.
00:24:01.000 The way Donald Trump loves his family, I'm sure there's love in that guy.
00:24:05.000 I'm sure there is.
00:24:06.000 I mean, he's had some, you know, relations to his mother and his brothers and sisters that were not ones of sheer manipulation and domination.
00:24:15.000 There's no doubt.
00:24:15.000 As a human being, it's important to keep track of his humanity.
00:24:20.000 But at the same time, what happens is it's a dominant path.
00:24:23.000 Patterns of behavior.
00:24:24.000 This is what worries me about Brother Trump, especially the fact that he's head of the American Empire and head of the government.
00:24:31.000 You see, that when you have dominant patterns of behavior that are completely unaccountable.
00:24:37.000 See, for so long he's been able to get away with things with no accountability at all.
00:24:43.000 Yes.
00:24:44.000 That's what makes him a kind of Peter Pan-like figure.
00:24:49.000 Up until he became president.
00:24:51.000 Rich, he grew powerful, but he hasn't grown up.
00:24:53.000 But even as president, he hasn't grown up.
00:24:55.000 People had thought that he would grow into the office.
00:24:58.000 No, he just hasn't grown up.
00:25:00.000 He uniquely tried to manipulate the office position to change to be what he is.
00:25:05.000 That's right.
00:25:06.000 And I think people love that.
00:25:08.000 There's certain people that that resonates with them.
00:25:10.000 They think that's so attractive.
00:25:12.000 They love it.
00:25:13.000 Well, I think they love it.
00:25:16.000 Because it's exciting.
00:25:17.000 I mean, the first thing that Trump was able to do was to expose the prepackaged commodities that we call politicians, that he came across as somebody who was just himself.
00:25:32.000 Yes.
00:25:33.000 You see? 0.71
00:25:33.000 Just gangster that he is. 0.71
00:25:35.000 Yeah.
00:25:36.000 And he'd just tell the truth.
00:25:37.000 Oh, I was a close friend of Hillary's.
00:25:39.000 I've been at the same weddings and so forth, because that's how the elites circulate in the American empire.
00:25:46.000 But then when they discovered, lo and behold, now he's posing himself as some kind of oppositional figure, and yet He's tied to big money, tied to big military.
00:25:56.000 When he gets in, he brings in the old-school militarist people.
00:26:02.000 He's still dropping bombs on the nine countries that have been dropping bombs for the last number of years.
00:26:08.000 Tax cuts sound exactly the same than Mitch...
00:26:11.000 And McConnell and others wanted...
00:26:13.000 We thought we had something different here, you see.
00:26:17.000 And it has to do with the...
00:26:19.000 Well, it's a larger story.
00:26:20.000 We have to be honest about this.
00:26:24.000 See, we live in...
00:26:26.000 Both a very fragile and precious experiment in democracy.
00:26:32.000 And we live in an empire that is experiencing profound decline, decay, and deterioration.
00:26:42.000 Simultaneous.
00:26:43.000 See, because from the very beginning, the United States was really, in some ways, much more tied to gold and gold.
00:26:56.000 We're good to go.
00:27:07.000 America's original sin is slavery.
00:27:09.000 That's a lie.
00:27:10.000 The original sin was we had to decide whether we were going to coexist with indigenous peoples or dominate them. 1.00
00:27:18.000 And the decision was, for the most part, genocidal effect in terms of domination.
00:27:25.000 So it's a settler colonial society, a colony of Britain, you see.
00:27:30.000 Then we enslaved the Africans who become the basis of our economy. 1.00
00:27:35.000 And the vast majority of prophets made We're actually tied to slavery.
00:27:40.000 That's why so many of the presidents, first presidents in America, were slaveholders and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court were slaveholders and so forth. 0.79
00:27:49.000 That doesn't mean that certain democratic practices were not being enacted, but it was enacted for white brothers with property. 0.97
00:27:56.000 The white brothers who had no property, they couldn't vote at all. 0.93
00:28:00.000 The women, of course, couldn't vote until 1920. So they had domestic households in which they had to find some sense of fulfillment. 1.00
00:28:08.000 That's what history of patriarchy and misogyny, in part, are connected.
00:28:12.000 And then tremendous efforts come to expanding it.
00:28:18.000 Expanding it.
00:28:19.000 And this is why even when Brother Trump talks about socialism, he doesn't realize the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, who was a socialist.
00:28:31.000 The song America the Beautiful, which is one of the most beautiful songs.
00:28:34.000 Ray Charles sing that song.
00:28:35.000 It'll take you to a different place.
00:28:36.000 I mean, he's seeing things that we can't see, and you know he's blind.
00:28:39.000 You know what I mean?
00:28:41.000 America the Beautiful.
00:28:42.000 Elizabeth Lee Bates.
00:28:44.000 Socialist.
00:28:44.000 Professor Wellesley.
00:28:46.000 Who was our greatest poet?
00:28:48.000 Walt Whitman.
00:28:50.000 Deep ties to socialism.
00:28:52.000 Who is our greatest philosopher?
00:28:54.000 John Dewey, democratic socialist his whole life.
00:28:59.000 Helen Keller, deaf, mute, blind, graduate of Radcliffe, socialist.
00:29:05.000 Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest Christian thinker of the 20th century.
00:29:10.000 Democratic socialist, moral man in the moral society.
00:29:13.000 Martin Luther King Jr., democratic socialist.
00:29:16.000 Ella Baker, democratic socialism is as American as apple pie.
00:29:22.000 But with the communists and the communist threat and the Soviet Union and all of its repression and regimentation and violation of liberties and killing of the culottes and so forth, in the American mind,
00:29:38.000 socialism becomes associated with communism.
00:29:41.000 So you saw Brother Lindsay the other day, right?
00:29:44.000 Yes.
00:29:44.000 He looked like a cartoonist version of Joseph McCarthy.
00:29:48.000 They're all communists.
00:29:50.000 They're all communists.
00:29:51.000 And you see, what happens is in a neo-fascist discourse, it's true anywhere around the world.
00:29:56.000 If you can define a community as pure, And then characterize those on the outside who are threatened as impure and then view yourself as those coming to the rescue to preserve the purity.
00:30:10.000 It can be based on race.
00:30:12.000 It can be based on religion.
00:30:14.000 It can be based on politics.
00:30:16.000 Preserve that purity.
00:30:18.000 We saw it in the 50s with the hysteria.
00:30:21.000 The communists were what?
00:30:22.000 Smith Act.
00:30:22.000 They're deported.
00:30:24.000 Or are they taken to jail?
00:30:25.000 I mean, the first city councilman from Harlem, Benjamin Davis, went to jail because he was a communist, you see, because they were the impure.
00:30:35.000 Now, communism needs to be radically called into question.
00:30:40.000 In terms of its dominating forms like the Soviet Union and China on the mile and so forth and so on.
00:30:46.000 But at the same time, when you look at Karl Marx and his critique of capitalism, this is prior to Lenin, prior to Stalin, he says capitalism is tied to this obsession with profit that puts profit before people And it will generate oligopolies in which there will be grotesque levels of wealth inequality and the only way that poor and working people will be able to gain access to any resources through organizing and mobilizing.
00:31:14.000 Now you can accept that Marxist insight without being a Marxist.
00:31:17.000 He's just telling the truth.
00:31:19.000 Do you think that socialism just hasn't been implemented correctly?
00:31:23.000 Is that what you think?
00:31:23.000 Because the argument has always been, show me a socialist economy or socialist government that ever worked.
00:31:30.000 Right, right.
00:31:31.000 But there's so many people that find the idea of socialism attractive because it combines this idea of a community with a nation and that we're all tied together.
00:31:42.000 And we obviously have some socialist aspects to our civilization in terms of, like, utilities and taking care of the road.
00:31:50.000 We're not going to outsource the military.
00:31:52.000 Firefighters, police.
00:31:54.000 There has to be some kind of governmental control.
00:31:58.000 But the problem is this, that we have to view democratic socialism as a moment in the larger movement of democracy.
00:32:09.000 My dear brother Jeff Stout, who's one of the great philosophers and thinkers of democracy, calls them egalitarian freedom traditions.
00:32:20.000 And that's simply a way of saying That if you look at the world through the lens of the masses of people who are poor and working people, what are the conditions under which they can have security from domination?
00:32:37.000 What are the conditions under which they can have dignity by holding forms of oppression at arm's length?
00:32:45.000 And for me, it's not an ism.
00:32:48.000 You see, if capitalism vis-a-vis feudalism can generate liberties and freedoms, I'm for it.
00:32:56.000 And that's precisely what the middle classes did when they broke from feudalism in Europe or broke from feudalism in other parts of the world, right?
00:33:04.000 You had to overthrow kings and queens in the name of personal liberties.
00:33:09.000 But those personal liberties were confined too often to white brothers with property.
00:33:15.000 And the white brothers with no property? 0.84
00:33:18.000 They're either trying to hold on to their whiteness or they become like the white brothers with property, or they make moral choices and say, I want to be a person of integrity. 0.91
00:33:27.000 I want to fight with the folk who are being excluded.
00:33:31.000 And this is one of the problems in talking about race and white supremacy in America, because, you see, we think too often in monolithic categories.
00:33:39.000 There's never been a white supremacy without fighting against white supremacy and that includes white brothers and sisters. 0.83
00:33:48.000 There's a tradition From Ann Braden, from Miles Horton, you know, of Highlander Center, you got that wonderful picture of Rosa Parks.
00:33:56.000 She was at Highlander Center four months before she was arrested, before she sat down on a bus in order to stand up for justice. 0.98
00:34:05.000 Right there at Highlander Center under Miles Horton.
00:34:07.000 Who was Miles Horton?
00:34:08.000 A white brother who brought black folk and white folk together, went to Union Seminary, trained under Ryan Holt Niebuhr.
00:34:16.000 He had cousins in the Ku Klux Klan.
00:34:19.000 So his Thanksgiving dinners were very complicated.
00:34:22.000 But that's true for a whole lot of white brothers and sisters who fight against white supremacy.
00:34:27.000 And Braden, Rabbi Abraham Joshua, Edward Said, you have a whole tradition of white brothers and sisters who've been fighting against white supremacy.
00:34:36.000 You get it in the music.
00:34:39.000 Beck Speiderbeck, he's sitting at the feet of Louis Armstrong, and he's a great artist.
00:34:44.000 Louis is genius of geniuses, right?
00:34:46.000 And that middle class brother from Iowa, you ask him about white supremacy.
00:34:50.000 You ask Brubeck about white supremacy.
00:34:53.000 You ask any of the, Paul Desmond, all of these folk who are connected to traditions in which black humanity, brown humanity is seen and affirmed.
00:35:06.000 You had a point in the book Race Matters that resonated with me that I never really thought of before.
00:35:12.000 And what you said was that because of the fact that the United States has this deep history of slavery and the slavery of African Americans, that white people became white people instead of Polish and German and Italian.
00:35:28.000 Instead of it being like most other countries where the Italians think of themselves as Italians and the Greeks are the Greeks, those were white people. 0.98
00:35:38.000 They combine as white people. 0.58
00:35:40.000 I never thought about that before.
00:35:42.000 You've got these scholars of American studies.
00:35:46.000 Neil Payne is one of the towering ones, but it goes all the way back to Brother Alexander and David Roediger and some others who've been talking about the way in which whiteness was created. 0.93
00:35:57.000 Take, for example, an Irish brother who goes to Ellis Island.
00:36:01.000 His people have been dealing with 800 years of vicious British colonialism and imperialism, vicious attacks, various famines that were in some ways created or at least enabled and so on.
00:36:14.000 They get to New York.
00:36:16.000 And they told that they're white and they said, no, no, because we know the British are white and we're not British.
00:36:22.000 Right.
00:36:22.000 At all.
00:36:24.000 But then they said, yes, you are.
00:36:26.000 Look at Brother West, look at Jamal, look at Letitia.
00:36:30.000 Where are you going to go on the Jim Crow bus if you just get off the boat from Ireland? 0.68
00:36:35.000 Right.
00:36:35.000 If you go to the front, you're with vanilla folk.
00:36:39.000 Right.
00:36:39.000 You go to the back, you're with the chocolate folk.
00:36:42.000 What you gonna do?
00:36:43.000 And for our precious Jewish brothers and sisters, it was even more complicated.
00:36:46.000 More complicated, right?
00:36:47.000 Because they get there and they say, no, we're not with the Goy and we're not with the Gentiles. 0.98
00:36:50.000 Y'all been oppressing us for 2,000 years. 0.54
00:36:55.000 Pogroms, ghettos, holocausts, vicious attacks, and so on. 0.96
00:37:01.000 But then they get there and say, well, are we going to be in the back with the black folk? 0.86
00:37:05.000 Some of them did.
00:37:07.000 You see, because you got a rich tradition of progressive Jews.
00:37:10.000 You know, Chomsky would have got back there.
00:37:11.000 Stanley Aronowitz would have got back there with the black folk. 0.97
00:37:15.000 You see what I mean?
00:37:15.000 But you got some other Jewish folk like any other group.
00:37:18.000 Well, we kind of lukewarm.
00:37:20.000 Let's just kind of move back and forth.
00:37:22.000 And then some of them want to assimilate completely, especially the highbrow German Jews. 0.87
00:37:26.000 We're actually white as well as the Gentiles. 0.90
00:37:30.000 You're in America now.
00:37:31.000 Get beyond that old world prejudice. 0.92
00:37:33.000 You say, well, you better check yourself because every Christian civilization we know is shot through with Jewish hatred. 1.00
00:37:38.000 Hmm. 0.74
00:37:39.000 Don't believe the hype.
00:37:41.000 Sooner or later it's going to be manifest.
00:37:43.000 You see what I mean?
00:37:44.000 And so in that way you can see the discourse of whiteness, blackness, brownness, redness and so forth become so deeply rooted in American law, American structures, American perceptions and this is why the arts are so crucial because it's primarily in the music And in the arts,
00:38:05.000 where the breakdown of white supremacy begins to take place in the country.
00:38:09.000 It's not the politicians.
00:38:11.000 It really isn't.
00:38:12.000 It really isn't.
00:38:13.000 There's no accident that the first massive form of entertainment in the United States is what?
00:38:19.000 The minstrels and blackface. 0.97
00:38:22.000 And you say, well, what was going on with blackface?
00:38:24.000 Well, Eric Lott and others have talked about the love and theft.
00:38:27.000 On the one hand, there's a fear of black freedom. 0.86
00:38:31.000 Because black freedom somehow means less freedom for whites. 0.98
00:38:35.000 There's a fear of black creativity because that means maybe white supremacy is a lie. 0.98
00:38:40.000 Maybe they're human just like us.
00:38:42.000 Maybe they're just as creative, imaginative, intelligent, just like us.
00:38:46.000 Then they hear the music and they say, ooh, they got something going on on the black side of town that we don't know. 0.87
00:38:52.000 It's like you're going to see Pryor, right? 0.93
00:38:54.000 If somebody had told you, oh, Brother Joe, White supremacy America tells you that black creativity, black intelligence, black genius doesn't exist. 0.96
00:39:02.000 And you go see pride with your parents and you go away thinking, this Negro's a genius. 1.00
00:39:07.000 Somebody lied to me. 0.94
00:39:09.000 I got to recognize that.
00:39:11.000 And then you recognize, oh, there's a whole tradition of prior, and we can go on and on from the Coltrane, Sarah Vaughn, and on and on and on, right?
00:39:19.000 And so people begin to think, especially white brothers and sisters, our parents have been lying to us when it comes to black intelligence, imagination, and genius, and humanity.
00:39:31.000 And yet the structures make it difficult for us to come together.
00:39:34.000 We're talking about up until 1960. That's a long time though.
00:39:37.000 1776 to 1964 and 5. That's a long time for both slavery and neo-slavery to be in place.
00:39:48.000 And here we are now, 54 years later, trying to create a multiracial democracy, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
00:39:57.000 And it's already been enacted in the jazz groups, Sly Stone's bands, multiracial.
00:40:07.000 The comedies, the studying of the comedies that you all have.
00:40:10.000 You sit down with comics, you all talk about the genius across race and gender as if it's a natural thing.
00:40:17.000 That already shatters.
00:40:19.000 The white supremacist and male supremacist categories of whiteness, blackness, all in different silos. 0.54
00:40:26.000 But it's so hard to do it on the ground.
00:40:28.000 See, part of the problem of talking about race in America, that's why I've been very critical of a number of contemporary black intellectuals, because white supremacy cuts so deep in the culture, people begin to think it has magical powers, and somehow it just floats above American history as if it's just part of our DNA in a biological way.
00:40:48.000 But all conceptions of race in the modern world are grounded in predatory capitalism.
00:40:56.000 So that the talk about whiteness and blackness becomes a way of rationalizing social structures like slavery and Jim Crow.
00:41:07.000 And it has to do with trying to extract labor resources.
00:41:13.000 It's an attack on their humanity and identity.
00:41:16.000 But it's tied to economic structure.
00:41:18.000 So to talk only about race means we hide and conceal the social structures that are generating unbelievable suffering for everybody.
00:41:30.000 Everybody, you see.
00:41:31.000 And so the last thing you want is to talk about race.
00:41:36.000 I'd say the same thing about gender. 0.98
00:41:37.000 In a way, gender is much more complicated because gender has been around for so, so long.
00:41:42.000 Every culture that we know almost.
00:41:44.000 But in modern conceptions of race are tied to modern conceptions of predatory capitalism, here and abroad, which includes imperialism, which includes empires.
00:41:53.000 So the United States comes out of the British Empire.
00:41:56.000 We engage in a heroic, courageous revolt against the British Empire.
00:42:03.000 It was a magnificent struggle.
00:42:05.000 That's what I like about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
00:42:08.000 Because I'm an anti-imperialist.
00:42:09.000 They were anti-imperialists.
00:42:11.000 They're urban guerrillas.
00:42:12.000 They're picking up guns.
00:42:13.000 They're fighting.
00:42:13.000 I don't go that far.
00:42:14.000 But they're also white supremacists.
00:42:17.000 So as soon as they overthrow or push back the British Empire, what do you get in the Declaration of Independence? 0.96
00:42:23.000 Beautiful words about equality, but you also get savages.
00:42:27.000 We've got to take their land. 0.98
00:42:29.000 And you get an empire of liberty.
00:42:32.000 This is where the comics come in.
00:42:34.000 What does an empire of liberty look like?
00:42:38.000 Who's not in on the liberty?
00:42:40.000 It's a whole lot of people not in on it.
00:42:43.000 Well, that was Carlin, right?
00:42:44.000 Carlin had this bit about this country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.
00:42:49.000 That's right.
00:42:49.000 And talking about the American dream, you got to be...
00:42:51.000 Yeah.
00:42:52.000 You got to be dreaming to believe it.
00:42:54.000 You got to be asleep.
00:42:58.000 Do you think that much like this country is an experiment in self-democracy, a very recent experiment, when you look at human history, right, the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been human, there's really only been a couple of years, a hundred years of this.
00:43:10.000 Do you think that that's maybe the lens that we should look at something like democratic socialism through?
00:43:16.000 Not that it can't work, but that it hasn't been implemented correctly before.
00:43:21.000 That's exactly.
00:43:21.000 That's why we got to get beyond the ism.
00:43:23.000 You're absolutely right.
00:43:24.000 See, what makes not just the United States, there's been democratic experiments all around the world in various circumstances.
00:43:31.000 We become central stage because we become a world power that understands itself as a democracy with all the contradictions that go hand in hand with that.
00:43:42.000 Begin as a settler colonial enterprise.
00:43:44.000 Still got slavery, patriarchy. 1.00
00:43:47.000 Workers don't have the right to engage in collective bargaining in the United States until the 1930s.
00:43:54.000 Argentina had it in the 1830s.
00:43:56.000 Argentina is not known to be on the cutting edge for social justice.
00:43:59.000 Love you down there in Argentina.
00:44:01.000 But they know that.
00:44:02.000 But they had collective bargaining.
00:44:04.000 Why?
00:44:04.000 Because our robber barons and our power elites were so popular.
00:44:08.000 Powerful.
00:44:09.000 You see, Rockefeller and Company had private militias that were bigger than a lot of public armies to make sure workers were not able to engage in collective bargaining.
00:44:18.000 I was in San Francisco just yesterday at the Commonwealth Club, which is now lodged in the Longshoremen's Association, which is fascinating.
00:44:26.000 The Commonwealth is a well-to-do ruling class.
00:44:29.000 Harry Bridges, Longshoremen, strong union.
00:44:33.000 Jack London, another great socialist there in Oakland, right?
00:44:36.000 And what were they trying to do?
00:44:38.000 They were just trying to ensure that ordinary people gain access to jobs with a living wage, decent education.
00:44:46.000 This is one reason why I spend so much time with my dear brother Bernie Sanders, right?
00:44:50.000 Because it's a democratic project that simply says, how come poor children can't have access to some of the things that the children of the well-to-do have?
00:45:00.000 They have the same value.
00:45:02.000 And of course, as a Christian, for me, they have exactly the same value.
00:45:06.000 So how will they get it?
00:45:08.000 Well, here comes socialist movements that say, first thing they want to do is, we're against child labor laws.
00:45:16.000 That's the jungle.
00:45:17.000 That's Upton Sinclair.
00:45:18.000 He's a socialist.
00:45:19.000 Tried to be governor of California, right?
00:45:21.000 And what were they doing?
00:45:22.000 What were these capitalists doing?
00:45:24.000 They're hiding these kids at six years old, seven years old.
00:45:28.000 They were dying at 30. There were no laws against child labor.
00:45:32.000 Ended working seven days a week.
00:45:35.000 So the labor movement brought us the weekend.
00:45:37.000 And I'm not talking about the singer from Canada.
00:45:40.000 God bless him.
00:45:42.000 I'm talking about the two days we have off.
00:45:44.000 Because if we didn't have that from the socialist movement and the labor movement, they'd have been working young kids seven days.
00:45:51.000 They did that year after year, decade after decade.
00:45:54.000 That's greed.
00:45:56.000 That's greed.
00:45:57.000 There's no accountability, you see.
00:45:59.000 That's where that whole idea of let the market decide falls apart.
00:46:03.000 Exactly.
00:46:04.000 Because the market just wants profit, right?
00:46:06.000 Absolutely.
00:46:06.000 And that doesn't mean that markets cannot be used in democratic ways.
00:46:11.000 But they need to be ethical.
00:46:12.000 But they've got to be ethical.
00:46:13.000 You've got to have some accountability and regulation.
00:46:17.000 And child labor laws were very important.
00:46:35.000 That's right.
00:46:43.000 That's right.
00:46:43.000 And it's a strange narrative when you consider all the things we talked about already, like what we need with the fire department and the police department and all the different ways that socialism does form utilities and all the different ways that socialism does form a part of our culture and our community.
00:47:03.000 Why do you think that that is this narrative and how does that narrative get reshaped?
00:47:07.000 Because that narrative of that the only reason why people want socialism is because they want a free ride.
00:47:13.000 Right, right.
00:47:14.000 Oh, that's a wonderful question.
00:47:15.000 But the one is that first we have to listen very closely to our right-wing brothers and sisters and conservatives and middlers because oftentimes, I mean, they're human beings like anybody else,
00:47:31.000 and they've had their own arguments.
00:47:32.000 I don't think they have strong ones, but they have their own arguments.
00:47:35.000 So the first thing you'd say about that is, What makes you think that the well-to-do don't have free rides?
00:47:43.000 What is inheriting wealth?
00:47:48.000 Well, inheriting wealth is free ride.
00:47:50.000 Absolutely.
00:47:51.000 That's all it is.
00:47:51.000 What is the connections of getting into the prep schools and the Ivy League schools and so forth, even though they work, it's still a kind of free ride.
00:48:01.000 So if they're preoccupied with this issue of being free ride, we tell them, let's make sure that people do work hard and sacrifice and therefore in some way deserve what they have.
00:48:15.000 Now, if just based on that principle, The upper echelons of American society would be indicted.
00:48:23.000 Yes.
00:48:25.000 And it's not a matter of hating the rich, because I don't believe in hating anybody individually.
00:48:29.000 I hate greed.
00:48:30.000 I hate injustice. 1.00
00:48:32.000 I hate white supremacy. 1.00
00:48:33.000 I hate anti-Jewish prejudice. 1.00
00:48:35.000 I hate anti-Palestinian prejudice. 0.99
00:48:36.000 I hate patriarchy and so forth.
00:48:38.000 But the human beings where these ideologies filter through are still human beings.
00:48:44.000 See what I mean?
00:48:45.000 So that's the beginning of it.
00:48:47.000 Now, of course, part of the question here has to do with...
00:48:50.000 They'll say, well, we wasted this money on the poor.
00:48:55.000 You say, well, wait a minute.
00:48:56.000 Donald Trump just passed a $750 billion dollar military budget.
00:49:02.000 Democrats voted for it, too.
00:49:05.000 How much waste is in the military?
00:49:08.000 Why is 60 cents of every one dollar coming out of the federal budget tied to the military?
00:49:15.000 Why is there no close oversight and accountability of it?
00:49:20.000 How come American people don't know about the four countries that we're bombing or assisting other countries in bombing?
00:49:27.000 We can go right down.
00:49:28.000 Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, absolutely, Mali, Niger, Somalia.
00:49:38.000 Iraq.
00:49:39.000 I mean, we can go on and on and on, right?
00:49:41.000 How come we don't know about the 4,800 military units, 587 around the world?
00:49:46.000 We got U.S. special operations in 128 countries.
00:49:50.000 There's only 197 in the world, right?
00:49:53.000 What about the soldiers who die?
00:49:55.000 Hardly any talk about it.
00:49:57.000 What about the innocent people we kill?
00:50:00.000 Hardly any talk about it.
00:50:02.000 What about the drones that we're still dropping?
00:50:04.000 And not always on military combatants, but innocent people.
00:50:10.000 Almost primarily on innocent people.
00:50:12.000 Sometimes even disproportionately.
00:50:14.000 Those are precious people too.
00:50:18.000 It may have the same value as anybody in Ethiopia, America, Chicago.
00:50:23.000 Do you feel that drones are particularly insidious because it doesn't even seem like it's really happening because it's a robot doing it?
00:50:29.000 Absolutely.
00:50:30.000 And it's done remotely.
00:50:32.000 Long distance, remotely, no human sensitivity at all.
00:50:36.000 Apparently, the PTSD that's suffered by those remote drone operators is pretty profound, too.
00:50:41.000 You can understand that.
00:50:42.000 Yes.
00:50:43.000 You can deeply understand.
00:50:44.000 And yet, no serious public conversation about it in the country.
00:50:48.000 Very little.
00:50:48.000 I was on the plane the other day, and the pilot says, I hope you all are able to take a few minutes of your time, because we've got a family outside waiting for the body of someone just killed in Afghanistan.
00:51:01.000 There's an Italian family in Chicago.
00:51:19.000 You see, when I was growing up in the 60s, Walter Cronkite in Vietnam, we saw the bodies.
00:51:26.000 Well, during the Bush administration, they made it illegal to take photographs of flag-draped coffins.
00:51:32.000 That's exactly right.
00:51:33.000 Which is unbelievably insane.
00:51:35.000 That's exactly right.
00:51:36.000 And continued under Obama and company.
00:51:39.000 And you say, well, wait a minute.
00:51:41.000 They're paying this ultimate cost.
00:51:44.000 And the...
00:51:46.000 They change the narrative.
00:51:47.000 And the tears of the families.
00:51:49.000 And they can't even put a public spotlight on it.
00:51:53.000 My God.
00:51:54.000 And then, of course, they lie to us.
00:51:56.000 Well, our drones are not in any way killing civilians and they end up killing an American.
00:52:01.000 And they have a press conference the same day and economic compensation for the family the rest of their life.
00:52:07.000 I agree with that.
00:52:08.000 But what about the drones that are killing folk in Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan and Afghanistan?
00:52:14.000 Oh, they deny they're even killing them.
00:52:17.000 You say, quit lying.
00:52:18.000 That's John Brennan and company.
00:52:19.000 He's in both Bush and Obama administration, you see.
00:52:23.000 How do we keep track of those in the name of what?
00:52:26.000 Democratic accountability.
00:52:28.000 That's not socialism.
00:52:30.000 Socialism is...
00:52:32.000 Democratic accountability, but there's been socialism without democratic accountability, and what do you get?
00:52:36.000 Tyranny.
00:52:37.000 That's Soviet Union and company. 1.00
00:52:39.000 But when you get capitalism with no democratic accountability, what do you get?
00:52:44.000 You get a predatory capitalism with gross wealth inequality and everyday people, the masses of poor and working people fighting for crumbs.
00:52:54.000 And there's also this denial of it amongst the most patriotic.
00:52:58.000 They don't want to consider it.
00:52:59.000 They don't want to factor it in to what we think of when we think of America the Great.
00:53:04.000 You don't want to factor in those innocent people.
00:53:07.000 What was the last time we checked?
00:53:08.000 It was in the 90% of people that are killed by drones are actually innocent.
00:53:15.000 It's some insane number.
00:53:17.000 But we have to have voices.
00:53:19.000 That's part of the problem, though.
00:53:21.000 You have to have voices that say, I don't give a damn for popularity.
00:53:26.000 I'm trying to be wedded to integrity.
00:53:29.000 I want to put a smile on my grandmama's face in the grave.
00:53:33.000 And she told me as a Christian that if the kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little heaven behind.
00:53:42.000 And heaven takes the form of laying bare the humanity of each and every one of us, especially the least of these.
00:53:50.000 That's the 25th chapter of Matthew, right?
00:53:52.000 What you do to the least of these, you do unto me.
00:53:55.000 Who are the least of these?
00:53:56.000 The orphan, the widow, the poor, the children, the elderly, the workers, the gays, the lesbians, the trans, especially the trans these days. 0.97
00:54:06.000 They're just trashed like I don't know what. 0.99
00:54:08.000 But they're black folk, they're brown folk, they're white poor. 1.00
00:54:13.000 They're indigenous peoples.
00:54:15.000 Not just here, but around the world.
00:54:18.000 And what does that mean?
00:54:19.000 That means that you have a certain kind of calling that will always pit you over against those who are well-adjusted to injustice.
00:54:31.000 No matter what color they are.
00:54:33.000 Well-adjusted to injustice is a very, very beautiful way of putting it.
00:54:38.000 No, that's part of the problem.
00:54:42.000 The American dream doesn't go far enough.
00:54:45.000 The American dream says, I'm going to work hard, sacrifice, and get mine, and live large in some vanilla suburb, maybe with a trophy spouse, and feel good about myself.
00:54:58.000 You say, nothing wrong with wanting to gain access to resources.
00:55:01.000 Nothing wrong with working hard.
00:55:03.000 Nothing wrong with living where you want to live.
00:55:05.000 But then the question becomes, now you're successful.
00:55:08.000 But you're not great.
00:55:10.000 Greatness has to do with he or she who uses their success for something bigger than them.
00:55:16.000 Service to others.
00:55:17.000 Service to the least of these.
00:55:18.000 So that the great ones, like the Richard Pryor's, Not a matter of how much money he made.
00:55:24.000 It's a matter of his soul in his comedy and the love that he left in his legacy.
00:55:32.000 Martin Luther King Jr. died.
00:55:34.000 Basically a broke man.
00:55:36.000 Gave every penny that he won from the Nobel Prize to the movement.
00:55:40.000 Malcolm X only had $150 in his pocket.
00:55:43.000 Who cares about the richest black person in 1968 and 1965? 1.00
00:55:48.000 That's ephemeral.
00:55:50.000 We're talking about deep joy, deep love.
00:55:53.000 We will remember those who raised their voices and said, in the name of something bigger than my ego and my narcissism and my hedonism, and we all have it.
00:56:03.000 We all have it.
00:56:03.000 So, you know, we have to always be self-critical in that regard.
00:56:06.000 We all fall short.
00:56:07.000 You know the great Samuel Beckett, another great comic writer.
00:56:10.000 Try again, fail again, fail better.
00:56:12.000 That's the story of our lives.
00:56:14.000 Try again, fail again, fail better.
00:56:17.000 But even in failing better, we can at least raise our voices.
00:56:20.000 And try to connect it to movements and organizations and structures.
00:56:24.000 And thank God we still do have a significant number of decent people in the American empire.
00:56:32.000 They just feel powerless.
00:56:34.000 Well, there's this conversation that's happening now, right?
00:56:36.000 And there's a conversation that's based on the information of recognizing the fact that so many people have wasted deep aspects of their lives, long, long lives pursuing meaningless things and recognizing that there is a lot of injustice in this world and that people are afraid of admitting that injustice because then they would somehow or another be complicit in the enactment of that injustice.
00:57:02.000 I think it's one of the things that people are terrified of when you talk about We're good to go.
00:57:22.000 Absolutely.
00:57:23.000 There's a concept that I've been talking about, that if you really cared about America, you would want less losers.
00:57:28.000 Like, what is the best way to love America?
00:57:32.000 Well, would you want more winners?
00:57:34.000 You'd want everybody to be a winner.
00:57:35.000 Absolutely.
00:57:36.000 If we have these disenfranchised parts of this country that have been that way forever, there's a guy that's been on this podcast who was a police officer in Baltimore.
00:57:43.000 His name is Michael Wood.
00:57:45.000 And he talked about how when he was a police officer, he recognized the systemic racism and how crippling it was.
00:57:53.000 And one of the things that he recognized was they found a piece of paper that was a blotter report of all the different various crimes that were committed from the 1970s.
00:58:01.000 It was some year in 1970. It was the exact same crimes in the exact same communities that he was dealing with them.
00:58:10.000 Generation after generation.
00:58:11.000 Recognizing the redlining about the fact that there was areas where black people were not allowed to buy homes, that they kept them in these communities, the same crimes kept occurring in the same places, and all they were doing was going in there and arresting people. 0.85
00:58:23.000 And nothing changed and nothing was fixed.
00:58:25.000 And as a police officer, he was realizing and just becoming aware of the fact that he's a part of this system.
00:58:34.000 He didn't want to be a part of the system anymore, but he was a part of this system that is creating this problem.
00:58:40.000 When you address that though, the people that don't suffer in those communities that aren't a part of that community, there's a natural inclination to resist.
00:58:49.000 Oh, that's true.
00:58:50.000 And it's because they don't want to do anything.
00:58:52.000 They don't want to think they're responsible.
00:58:54.000 They don't want to think they're a part of it.
00:58:56.000 They don't want to discuss it.
00:58:57.000 Even discussing it, you feel resistance.
00:58:59.000 They were in a state of denial.
00:59:01.000 Yes.
00:59:02.000 Trying to avoid and trying to evade.
00:59:04.000 No, that's very real.
00:59:06.000 That's very real.
00:59:07.000 But, you know, it also works within communities of people of color.
00:59:14.000 And this is, again, why I think we have to resist any monolithic or homogeneous characterizations of people.
00:59:22.000 So anytime you talk about white supremacy, you've got the John Browns.
00:59:26.000 And you know Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was a black woman who was worth $347 million in the 1840s.
00:59:35.000 Whoa.
00:59:35.000 She's called the mother of human rights in California.
00:59:38.000 What did she do? 0.80
00:59:39.000 She made a rich white brother and he died on her. 0.73
00:59:43.000 So she ended up with millions of dollars.
00:59:46.000 Worst thing she did, she gave John Brown a million dollars. 0.75
00:59:49.000 Wow.
00:59:50.000 John Brown had a note from her in his pocket when he was at Harper's Ferry.
00:59:56.000 That's how he survived.
00:59:58.000 Wow.
00:59:58.000 You see, now John Brown was killing innocent people.
01:00:00.000 I think that's wrong.
01:00:01.000 I don't believe in innocent people no matter who they are, no matter what color. 0.99
01:00:04.000 But at the same time, John Brown had a love of black people much deeper than many black people have of themselves because he's willing to die for black people.
01:00:11.000 But the same is true within, let's say, black communities.
01:00:14.000 You've got, okay, 1% of the population in America who own 41% of the wealth.
01:00:18.000 You've got three individuals who have wealth equivalent to 160 million fellow citizens.
01:00:23.000 But within the black community, the top 1% of black folk have over 70% of the wealth. 0.57
01:00:29.000 So that means you've got a lot of precious Jamals and Letitias out there. 0.97
01:00:34.000 Who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities. 0.97
01:00:40.000 So it's all about representation rather than substantive transformation.
01:00:46.000 You get that in politicians.
01:00:48.000 You got a black president. 0.98
01:00:50.000 All of y'all must be free.
01:00:53.000 Isn't that a beautiful thing?
01:00:54.000 Live through him.
01:00:55.000 Live through the family.
01:00:57.000 Beautiful achievement.
01:00:59.000 Magnificent achievement.
01:01:00.000 But it's not about symbolic representation only.
01:01:02.000 This is about fundamental transformation.
01:01:04.000 So it's a challenge.
01:01:06.000 Mary Ellen Pleasant and others, and Martin King and others, are challenges for those of us who do have some resources to still raise our voices.
01:01:16.000 Because you can be black, We're highly well adjusted to injustice, economically, in terms of race and so forth.
01:01:25.000 And the same is true. 0.93
01:01:27.000 You can be brown, you can be rich.
01:01:28.000 So it's not just a matter of looking for that one individual who represents.
01:01:34.000 It's a matter of connecting that representation to fundamental transformation.
01:01:39.000 If there's no fundamental transformation, you end up with a whole generation of peacocks. 0.74
01:01:44.000 Look at me, look at me, look at me.
01:01:47.000 All about foliage.
01:01:48.000 And what does that do?
01:01:49.000 That falls directly into the culture of superficial spectacle.
01:01:54.000 Last thing we need is just spectacle with no substance in that way.
01:01:59.000 And this is a battle within the communities of peoples of color because it's not going to be a matter of just pointing out white supremacy.
01:02:09.000 Of course, white supremacy is a fundamental foundation in part of the country.
01:02:14.000 It's not the only foundation.
01:02:16.000 Because you got resistance to white supremacy.
01:02:19.000 You got Lydia Maria Child.
01:02:21.000 She wrote a book in 1834 called An Appeal for That Class of Americans called Africans.
01:02:27.000 It was deeply influenced by one of the greatest works ever written at that time by David Walker, Appeal to Colored Citizens of the World.
01:02:34.000 She's a white sister. 0.99
01:02:36.000 She is as vanilla as Doris Day.
01:02:39.000 In the 1830s, fundamental part of the Black Freedom Movement, right?
01:02:45.000 Well, you see, those folk need to be lifted up because what does that do?
01:02:49.000 That exposes our humanity in terms of the choices we make, not just the skin color we have.
01:02:58.000 And I would say the same thing in terms of gender. 0.67
01:03:00.000 The brothers who are fundamentally concerned about breaking the back of patriarchy.
01:03:06.000 Even we know patriarchy is shot through us because we grew up in the 1950s and 60s.
01:03:11.000 No man escapes it.
01:03:12.000 But you try to reconquer it all.
01:03:14.000 And the same is true of our precious gays and lesbians and trans folk, you see.
01:03:18.000 To be decent human beings who make moral choices.
01:03:21.000 I believe in the primacy.
01:03:24.000 Of the moral and the spiritual, the centrality of the artistic, especially the musical and especially the comics, as the vanguards who represent a freedom and a courage and a vision to connect us as human beings.
01:03:40.000 Because you can't really be a comic with a wholesale Nazi ideology.
01:03:46.000 Now, you can be a Nazi genius like Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher and a genius and a thug when it comes to politics, you see. 0.98
01:03:54.000 But a comic has got to be able to be open enough to deal with the incongruity and inconsistency and the sheer absurdity of it all.
01:04:04.000 You talked about moments of freedom earlier, and I recognize that as one of the greatest things you ever see when someone's on stage and they're killing.
01:04:12.000 There's moments where everyone's together.
01:04:14.000 They're all together, locked up in the laughter, and they're all together.
01:04:18.000 There's a sense of community that you share with the people that are in the room.
01:04:22.000 It does bring people together, even if it's for brief moments, for a few seconds or as long as it takes.
01:04:28.000 Moments are not to be trashed.
01:04:31.000 Life consists of moments.
01:04:33.000 Yes.
01:04:33.000 You know what I mean?
01:04:34.000 Yes.
01:04:35.000 Definitely.
01:04:36.000 And see, in a democracy, you see, it's those moments that constitute the memory of what could be as opposed to what's in place.
01:04:49.000 You know, the great August Wilson, the great playwright, black playwright, deeply influenced, he said, by the blues...
01:04:57.000 Baraka and Bearden, Romain Bearden, the great painter, and Mary Baraka, of course, from Newark, like yourself, just like Sarah Vaughan and Philip Roth, right there from Newark.
01:05:06.000 He used to say that performance authorizes alternative realities for the audience that gets them to unsettle their conventional perceptions of the world.
01:05:20.000 And that's what great artists and great comics...
01:05:23.000 But that's what you do in strange times, though, brother.
01:05:26.000 That you bring in the fact that we're living in such a grim moment, what I'd call, you know, the American empire in decline.
01:05:33.000 And we all need to call for its regeneration, its democratic revitalization and regeneration.
01:05:38.000 How do we do that?
01:05:40.000 Only by example, man, because there's a difference between what the great Roberto Unger calls biographical time and historical time.
01:05:49.000 All of us are born in circumstances not of our own choosing.
01:05:52.000 We're only here for so long.
01:05:54.000 We all have insecurities, anxieties, and fears knowing that our bodies will undergo extinction one day very soon.
01:06:01.000 And therefore, to deal with those insecurities and fears and anxieties, you have to have certain structures of feeling and value that give you some sense of worthwhileness as you move through time, from mother's womb to tomb, right?
01:06:15.000 And it's only in biographical time, because we only got one life this side of the Jordan, and there's no person who's a messiah.
01:06:24.000 Now, people will tell you they are, but you say, okay, just call it.
01:06:27.000 Be self-deceived and drink your coffee.
01:06:30.000 Yeah, I can keep moving.
01:06:31.000 Because there's no messiahs out there.
01:06:33.000 There's no saviors out there.
01:06:35.000 There's no messiahs in groups.
01:06:37.000 There's no messiahs in collectivities.
01:06:39.000 There's only lives to be lived.
01:06:42.000 We back to check off again.
01:06:44.000 Lives to be lived.
01:06:47.000 Acknowledging things were in place before we arrived.
01:06:50.000 So therefore we ought to have gratitude for the love that we received.
01:06:56.000 That's how I begin my whole life.
01:06:59.000 I am who I am because somebody loved me.
01:07:02.000 It's mom, it's dad, it's my brothers, it's my sisters, it's my friends, right?
01:07:08.000 And I don't deserve it.
01:07:10.000 And I have to somehow follow in Ashford and Simpson when they say, send it like a puff of smoke.
01:07:17.000 You got to let it go.
01:07:18.000 Spread whatever love justice by example.
01:07:22.000 Examples are the go-cart of justice.
01:07:25.000 That's a wonderful line in Kant's critique of pure reason.
01:07:27.000 Examples are the go-cart of judgment.
01:07:30.000 The judgments we make are predicated on the examples that we have.
01:07:36.000 And we must have examples of greatness.
01:07:39.000 If you're going to be a classical composer, You better study some Ludwig Beethoven.
01:07:45.000 If you're going to be a serious artist of musical theater, you better study a genius who's still alive named Stephen Sondheim.
01:07:54.000 From West Side Story to Company to Sunday in the Park with George to Passion to Sweeney Todd across the board.
01:08:02.000 Not to imitate, but just to know what greatness is in your genre.
01:08:06.000 If you're in hip hop, You better study some Rakim.
01:08:10.000 Oh, you better study some...
01:08:12.000 Follow the leader.
01:08:13.000 That's Tupac.
01:08:14.000 That's right.
01:08:14.000 You better study the folk who are great.
01:08:16.000 It's the same way, you know, you study Pryor and Bruce, Lenny Bruce, and the others.
01:08:21.000 Roseanne Barr and the others.
01:08:22.000 But that's one of the more important parts of being a person, right, is to...
01:08:25.000 Really, your diet of what you take in, in terms of whether it's your art or whether it's your education, try to take in the best and most inspirational and the most spectacular versions of human endeavors.
01:08:41.000 Absolutely.
01:08:42.000 See, that's one of the reasons why sports is a kind of American religion.
01:08:46.000 Sure.
01:08:47.000 Because in sports or whatever form, I know that you got the Taekwondo thing.
01:08:53.000 Yeah.
01:08:54.000 Yeah, I mean, and you understand the role of excellence with the Greek score, I tell you, that plays.
01:08:59.000 But to be able just to turn on our television and see Brother LeBron James do his thing, that's another context that cuts across race, class, gender, and so forth.
01:09:14.000 LeBron, how you doing?
01:09:15.000 Then memories of Michael.
01:09:17.000 Jordan and Jerry West.
01:09:18.000 That's why Ali was so important.
01:09:20.000 When he sat out those three years in the late 1960s because he wouldn't go to Vietnam.
01:09:25.000 Courage, man.
01:09:26.000 Muhammad Ali, along with Richard Pryor, it was the freest black man in the 20th century.
01:09:32.000 But see, the boxing is so crucial as well as the other sports because for black people, every other sphere in the society is unfair and unfree. 1.00
01:09:45.000 But when you get in that ring and the referee is fair, you finally get fair competition.
01:09:52.000 That's why Jack Johnson was such a threat.
01:09:54.000 Remember when Jack Johnson was knocking white brothers out? 0.99
01:09:57.000 There would be racial riots against black folk, killing black folk all across the country. 0.97
01:10:01.000 Don't you get the idea that just because he beat the white man in the context of fairness that you can beat anybody? 0.99
01:10:07.000 Right.
01:10:08.000 And that goes all the way to Muhammad Ali.
01:10:10.000 It's very interesting, you know, the time I spent with another genius named Prince, who we miss so, so, so very much.
01:10:16.000 There's nobody like him.
01:10:17.000 But he, like Miles Davis, viewed Jack Johnson as his favorite black man.
01:10:22.000 Isn't that interesting?
01:10:23.000 Well, he was a pioneer because there was none before him.
01:10:26.000 Jack Johnson was literally the first.
01:10:29.000 Jack Johnson was out there all by himself.
01:10:31.000 In many ways.
01:10:31.000 There was one, I think, but not as famous.
01:10:33.000 Not as famous.
01:10:33.000 But in terms of the spotlight.
01:10:35.000 Yeah.
01:10:35.000 There was other great boxers that were black at the time.
01:10:37.000 But he just took it to a height and leave the country and so forth.
01:10:42.000 Yeah.
01:10:43.000 And with Muhammad Ali, you know, you got someone who was just himself in the context of a social movement that was taking place at the same time.
01:10:56.000 So he would associate himself with the Black Freedom Movement called the Civil Rights Movement.
01:11:01.000 He joined the Nation of Islam.
01:11:03.000 I think?
01:11:26.000 The Nation of Islam probably had about 0.1% approval in the country, and probably about 4 or 5% in the black community, because at that time, black folk and black Christians were just afraid of the black Muslims.
01:11:43.000 But it was Malcolm X who, in all of his genius, made it so broadly conceived that That even Christians like myself, I'm a Jesus-loving, free black man, but I can't live my life without Malcolm, you see?
01:11:58.000 And he's Muslim to the core.
01:12:00.000 He's praying five times a day, you know what I mean?
01:12:02.000 That's just the beginning of it.
01:12:03.000 He's also very complicated, too, because his grandfather was white.
01:12:07.000 Well, his father was a Garveyite. 0.99
01:12:09.000 His mother was tied to the interracial, but the father was a Garveyite who was killed.
01:12:13.000 His mother, of course, put in a sane asylum.
01:12:16.000 He's a foster child.
01:12:18.000 The great stories he tells in the autobiography of Malcolm X, one of the great classics, really, and memoirs in the history of American civilization.
01:12:26.000 But he's very misunderstood in terms of the cultural narrative of who he was?
01:12:31.000 Absolutely.
01:12:32.000 No, it's true.
01:12:33.000 He used to say, sincerity, sincerity.
01:12:35.000 It's my only credential.
01:12:38.000 Isn't that powerful? 1.00
01:12:39.000 Damn. 1.00
01:12:40.000 Sincerity. 1.00
01:12:42.000 So when he said, white men and women are devils, and he believed it. 1.00
01:12:47.000 Now he's wrong. 1.00
01:12:49.000 White brothers and sisters are not devils.
01:12:51.000 Then he says, I changed my mind. 0.78
01:12:54.000 They're not devils.
01:12:55.000 Too many got devilish behavior.
01:12:58.000 He's right.
01:13:00.000 Because that's true.
01:13:01.000 Too many of all of us have devilish behavior.
01:13:03.000 But when he said the first thing, he said what he meant, he meant what he said.
01:13:07.000 When he said the second thing, he said what he meant, he meant what you said.
01:13:10.000 How many folk do we have like that today?
01:13:13.000 That aren't scared to change their mind.
01:13:15.000 And speak what's deep in their soul.
01:13:19.000 See, one of the great gifts of the artists, and I speak about this especially in the black tradition, is what we could call soulful kenosis.
01:13:30.000 K-E-N-O-S-I-S. Now, kenosis means self-giving, self-donating, and self-emptying.
01:13:42.000 So if you go to a James Brown concert, that brother goes for four and a half hours and gives everything, every fiber of his being.
01:13:51.000 And at the end of every concert, what does he say?
01:13:54.000 I'm an extension of you.
01:13:55.000 You're an extension of me.
01:13:56.000 I don't exist without you.
01:13:58.000 Did we fail to play a song that somebody came to hear and the sister hollers out, you didn't play so fast. 0.92
01:14:08.000 And he say, hit it, Bootsy!
01:14:11.000 Got to play that song.
01:14:12.000 Because his service, you see?
01:14:15.000 Al Green.
01:14:16.000 Go to Al Green concert.
01:14:18.000 That brother can't walk.
01:14:20.000 After the concert, he's given everything from falsetto to tenor to everything.
01:14:25.000 Well, ultimately, that's what happened with Prince, right?
01:14:28.000 I mean, Prince had such incredible pain in his hips.
01:14:31.000 Jumping off pianos.
01:14:33.000 I saw him jump off.
01:14:34.000 That's how he got hooked on pain pills.
01:14:35.000 That's exactly right.
01:14:36.000 And that's what killed him, ultimately.
01:14:38.000 John Coltrane blowing his horn as if his neck is going to snap every night.
01:14:44.000 And then he gave a concert November 1966, right before he died in July 67. He drops the horn and starts beating on his chest, man.
01:14:54.000 Rashid Ali said, what's happening, Train?
01:14:56.000 He said, I'm just giving the people all that I can and now my horn's getting in the way.
01:15:01.000 Oh, wow.
01:15:02.000 You know what I mean?
01:15:03.000 But don't you feel that when you walk off the stage, man?
01:15:05.000 When you walk off the stage at Strange Times, man, you're giving everything.
01:15:11.000 All that Joe is at that moment.
01:15:14.000 Now, what is that?
01:15:15.000 You see, that is the example of a love supreme that is there to serve the people.
01:15:22.000 Now, you're going to make a living, too.
01:15:24.000 They're going to get paid.
01:15:25.000 You're going to get paid and so forth.
01:15:26.000 But that's not the primary thing.
01:15:28.000 That's not it.
01:15:29.000 See, when Curtis Mayfield sings his songs that the radio won't play, when he's told not to go to the rallies and he shows up with his guitar anyway and plays We a Winner, That's self-giving, self-emptying. 0.99
01:15:45.000 And I tell that to the young musicians these days, because a lot of, you know, in the culture of spectacle, nowadays, you get these performers, they just show up and think they ought to get a standing ovation for 10 minutes, say, no, Negro sang a song first, man, shit! 1.00
01:16:00.000 This ain't no spectacle. 0.93
01:16:02.000 You're saying something that's going to stir our souls the way Sam Cooke and Johnny Taylor and Lou Ross when the soul stirs did.
01:16:08.000 Now, we respect that genius and so forth.
01:16:11.000 See, Beyonce is fascinating in this regard because she's a genius. 1.00
01:16:14.000 There's no doubt about it.
01:16:15.000 I think she's the greatest entertainer.
01:16:18.000 Of our day, I've been very critical of her because there's a sense in which she's still tied to the cultural superficial spectacle in terms of the way she looks and girls in formation and so forth.
01:16:29.000 But at the same time, she's also grounded in the tradition.
01:16:32.000 And there's a new movie that she made.
01:16:34.000 You see that?
01:16:34.000 No.
01:16:35.000 Homecoming?
01:16:36.000 No.
01:16:36.000 I haven't seen it.
01:16:37.000 Oh, man, you got to see that's one of the greatest performative films ever made, man.
01:16:40.000 Really?
01:16:41.000 When she goes to Coachella.
01:16:43.000 And she shows up Coachella with all of the bands of black colleges.
01:16:49.000 And performs all of her songs with all of them moving, 150, 200 of them.
01:16:55.000 Wow.
01:16:56.000 And then reflections of Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin.
01:16:59.000 Oh, no.
01:17:00.000 Beyonce.
01:17:01.000 See, I was wrong about Beyonce in a certain sense.
01:17:03.000 Now, I'm telling you.
01:17:04.000 That sister, she brings a tradition with her.
01:17:08.000 That is the highest level of both respect and of excellence.
01:17:14.000 Well, maybe she changed who she is because of criticism like yours.
01:17:17.000 Well, I've never met her.
01:17:19.000 But it reflects, for sure.
01:17:21.000 It really is hard to say.
01:17:23.000 When people hear things like that, it does make them...
01:17:25.000 I think that could be the case.
01:17:27.000 I mean, she's married to a genius.
01:17:29.000 For sure.
01:17:29.000 With Jay-Z, too.
01:17:30.000 And, of course, the kids and her lovely parents and family and things.
01:17:34.000 You never know what goes on in the mind and heart and soul of a great artist like Beyoncé...
01:17:40.000 What was it that led you to be critical initially?
01:17:43.000 Oh, just because I'm very concerned about young folk. 1.00
01:17:45.000 You know, I've made three Smoking Word albums with Prince.
01:17:48.000 He would not allow any of his music to be sampled by hip-hop artists.
01:17:55.000 He was very hard on hip-hop.
01:17:56.000 But when we asked him for spoken word, he said yes, and thank God we did.
01:17:59.000 Same is true for the greatest soul singer of his generation, Gerald LeVert, who really deserves so much more attention.
01:18:21.000 I've been blessed to do a number of things with the young folk, but I tell them, I say I'm old school y'all.
01:18:28.000 You need to know that.
01:18:29.000 See, we're into originals, not into copies.
01:18:32.000 You see, that we're into lifting every voice that's soulful so that we stir souls.
01:18:37.000 We don't want to just titillate bodies. 0.66
01:18:39.000 We don't want just stimulation of body edges.
01:18:44.000 Now, I'm not a Puritan, so, you know, I believe in body stimulation at the right time.
01:18:49.000 You know what I mean?
01:18:50.000 I ain't got nothing against orgasm.
01:18:53.000 But the thing is, you can't just orgiastically move through life.
01:18:57.000 You got to have context.
01:18:58.000 You got to have tradition.
01:18:59.000 You got to stir souls in that way.
01:19:02.000 And so I put a lot of pressure on them.
01:19:04.000 One of the things that I bring a lot of critique to bear is, see, I am deeply shaped by...
01:19:10.000 The dramatics, the delphonics, the main ingredient, the whispers, lakeside, James Brown's band, George Clinton Bootsy's band, I'm shaped by the emotions, I'm shaped by the Jones girls, the miracles,
01:19:25.000 the temptations, marvelettes, all those were groups that expressed their soulful self-emptying in a form of sweetness.
01:19:37.000 See, I believe in sweetness and kindness.
01:19:40.000 And we're losing that.
01:19:42.000 I go to the young folk.
01:19:44.000 Where is your dramatics?
01:19:47.000 Why is it we don't have large numbers of groups that sing in tune with a beauty and a sweetness and a gentleness and a kindness?
01:19:56.000 When you hear the voice of David Ruffin sing Ain't Too Proud to Beg, the vulnerability, the flexibility of it, the intensity of it, And it goes straight to your soul.
01:20:10.000 That's why the people keep listening to David Ruffin from Why Not Mississippi.
01:20:15.000 I would say the same with Ted Mills of Blue Magic.
01:20:19.000 I get the young folk, let's just stop. 1.00
01:20:21.000 Let's just listen to Ted Mills of the Blue Magic.
01:20:24.000 Let's just listen to Russell Tompkins Jr., the stylistic.
01:20:29.000 Oh, Brother West, you just old school.
01:20:31.000 You just nostalgic.
01:20:32.000 No.
01:20:33.000 Love, sweetness, gentleness.
01:20:35.000 Never go out of style, as my brother would put it clear.
01:20:39.000 Never go out of style.
01:20:40.000 Everybody needs sweetness, kindness, gentleness.
01:20:45.000 Black music used to be the fundamental conveyor of that sweetness.
01:20:51.000 So that the Bing Crosby's, the Frank Sinatra's, these are great, great geniuses themselves.
01:20:56.000 You ask Frank, who were you inspired by?
01:20:59.000 Billy Holiday.
01:21:01.000 Oh, you talking about the genius from Baltimore City, Billy?
01:21:04.000 That's right.
01:21:05.000 You Italian working class brother from Hoboken?
01:21:08.000 That's right, because I'm tied to excellence and sweetness.
01:21:12.000 Now, Frank Sinatra, he sings some sweet, gentle songs now.
01:21:17.000 But the younger generation these days, they've got him and some others who are beautiful, don't get me wrong, but it's smaller and smaller.
01:21:25.000 But it's partly a matter of the oligarchs in the recording industry.
01:21:30.000 See, Boyz II Men, in a way, is the last great group singing performative act that connected to the dramatics and delphonics that I'm talking about.
01:21:42.000 You say, well, what happens?
01:21:43.000 Well, they think they could make more money with just one Negro with a microphone running their mouth. 1.00
01:21:49.000 So you get a genius like Kanye, deeply confused politically.
01:21:53.000 We won't go into that right now.
01:21:56.000 Oh, this Trump connection.
01:21:58.000 We need some serious pushing on that, brother.
01:22:00.000 But they'd rather have an individual isolated, easier to control in the industry.
01:22:06.000 And the same oligarchs run live performance, radio, and the music, and the products.
01:22:13.000 You know how they've now undergone this fundamental transformation in the industry, especially given the new technology and social media.
01:22:20.000 So I tell the young folk, I say, you know...
01:22:23.000 I could not have grown up without the sweetness of those rhythm and blues groups.
01:22:31.000 Now, I know the circumstances are different, but where do you get your sweetness from musically?
01:22:37.000 What will be the soundtrack of your freedom movement?
01:22:42.000 Geniuses like Kendrick Lamar.
01:22:45.000 Providing some of the soundtrack.
01:22:47.000 There's no doubt about that.
01:22:48.000 And then there's others as well.
01:22:50.000 But not enough.
01:22:52.000 Not enough soul-stirring music, in your opinion.
01:22:55.000 Not enough soul-stirring music.
01:22:56.000 There's no Curtis Mayfield.
01:22:57.000 Nobody near Aretha.
01:22:59.000 Nobody near Smokey Robinson.
01:23:00.000 Do you think that's connected to the peacocking?
01:23:03.000 Oh, Lord, yes.
01:23:04.000 Social media.
01:23:05.000 Absolute image, spectacle, money, Instagram, push-button culture.
01:23:11.000 Standing in front of the Bentleys.
01:23:12.000 Always got to be in front of the commodity and so forth and so on.
01:23:16.000 Big house, big jewelry.
01:23:17.000 I mean, Pendergrass, he had his sharp cars, but when that genius got into the studio and saying, love TKO, you don't give a damn what kind of car he got.
01:23:29.000 He's going to touch your soul.
01:23:31.000 You know what I mean?
01:23:32.000 And it's not just on the black side.
01:23:34.000 You got vanilla bluesmen like Bruce Springsteen and the Jewish Brothers genius Dylan from Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman.
01:23:44.000 All of these folk were involved in the kenosis activity of self-emptying, but they were deeply shaped by... 0.99
01:23:51.000 The Sun Houses, the Robert Johnsons, the Muddy Waters, the Ma Rainies, the Bessie Smiths, the blues tradition.
01:23:59.000 Do you know Gary Clark Jr.?
01:24:00.000 Gary Clark Jr.?
01:24:02.000 I've heard the name, but I understand.
01:24:04.000 I've got to check him out.
01:24:05.000 I'm going to educate you.
01:24:07.000 Oh, I need some education, my brother.
01:24:09.000 He's good.
01:24:09.000 He is one of those rare musicians where you hear a riff, and it's a Gary Clark Jr. Pull up that video.
01:24:18.000 I've got to check him out.
01:24:19.000 Of when he played with my friend Suzanne from Honey Honey.
01:24:22.000 Yeah.
01:24:22.000 And they did Midnight Rider from the Allman Brothers, but he did it as Gary Clark Jr. He's got a sound of his guitar.
01:24:30.000 It reminds me of Hendrix in a way.
01:24:33.000 It's very different than Hendrix, but it reminds me in that it's so distinctively him.
01:24:37.000 Wow.
01:24:37.000 Oh, I got to hear this.
01:24:38.000 Yeah, he'll pull it up right now.
01:24:40.000 I got to hear this.
01:24:40.000 Thank you so much, brother.
01:24:41.000 He's a brilliant guy and a great guy, too.
01:24:43.000 But he's just a unique, unique artist.
01:24:47.000 I don't know anyone like him.
01:24:49.000 And his sound, it's one of those things where there's no mistaking who's playing the music when you hear him play.
01:24:58.000 He's got his own signature.
01:24:59.000 Oh, yeah.
01:24:59.000 Even when he's playing Midnight Rider, which is a classic.
01:25:02.000 You have so many people who play that.
01:25:04.000 Classic song.
01:25:05.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:25:05.000 Put this on.
01:25:06.000 Put up.
01:25:08.000 This is them.
01:25:10.000 Up there, there's Gary.
01:25:12.000 Oh, oh, yeah.
01:25:12.000 There's Gary on guitar.
01:25:14.000 This is me filming this.
01:25:15.000 Is that right?
01:25:16.000 Yeah, it was in the crowd.
01:25:18.000 They did this midnight on a Tuesday in downtown LA. Now, how long ago was this?
01:25:23.000 A year ago or so?
01:25:24.000 Oh, just recently, huh? 1.00
01:25:27.000 This motherfucker. 1.00
01:25:28.000 Oh, no. 1.00
01:25:32.000 He's one of my favorite artists for sure.
01:25:34.000 I can hear that Robert Johnson in him already.
01:25:36.000 He's got everything in him.
01:25:38.000 But it's also...
01:25:39.000 Buddy guy, buddy guy.
01:25:41.000 Once you hear more Gary Clark, you realize this is him.
01:25:44.000 This is him.
01:25:45.000 I hear you.
01:25:56.000 You could feel it in the air in that club.
01:25:58.000 There was maybe a hundred people in that club.
01:26:01.000 Suzanne is reading the lyrics from her phone.
01:26:03.000 She didn't even know the lyrics.
01:26:04.000 They did this totally impromptu.
01:26:06.000 It was right on the spot.
01:26:07.000 Totally on the spot.
01:26:08.000 Totally on the spot.
01:26:09.000 Unprepared.
01:26:10.000 They talked about it.
01:26:10.000 They said, let's do Midnight Rider.
01:26:11.000 Okay.
01:26:12.000 So they didn't rehearse this.
01:26:15.000 They didn't rehearse it.
01:26:15.000 They didn't at all.
01:26:16.000 This is live.
01:26:17.000 And he just takes off on it like that.
01:26:18.000 Just takes off on it.
01:26:19.000 Just did his version of it.
01:26:21.000 Austin, Texas.
01:26:22.000 Oh, he's from Texas.
01:26:23.000 Oh, yeah.
01:26:23.000 Lightning Hopkins and Company.
01:26:24.000 He's a bad motherfucker. 1.00
01:26:26.000 He's a bad motherfucker. 1.00
01:26:27.000 I got to check him out. 1.00
01:26:29.000 He's one of those guys that you watch him and you just get a tingle.
01:26:33.000 There's an energy that comes out of him.
01:26:35.000 Undeniable greatness.
01:26:36.000 Yeah.
01:26:37.000 That's part of that self-improvement I'm talking about, though, man.
01:26:40.000 But he's also an incredibly humble guy.
01:26:42.000 No peacocking at all.
01:26:44.000 He's not that at all.
01:26:45.000 He's an artist.
01:26:45.000 But that's a sign of spiritual maturity and moral security.
01:26:50.000 It's the insecurity that makes you want to peacock all the time.
01:26:53.000 Yes.
01:26:53.000 Yes.
01:26:53.000 He's just devoted to the work.
01:26:56.000 Devoted to the art.
01:26:57.000 How old brother is he now?
01:26:59.000 Gary's probably in his 30s.
01:27:00.000 He's very young.
01:27:02.000 Yeah.
01:27:02.000 He's still getting better.
01:27:04.000 His latest shit is his best shit. 1.00
01:27:06.000 He lives here in LA or goes back and forth to Texas? 1.00
01:27:08.000 He's around here all the time.
01:27:09.000 35. Yeah.
01:27:10.000 I don't know.
01:27:11.000 I think he's out here now, right?
01:27:13.000 Isn't he out here?
01:27:14.000 He was just...
01:27:15.000 Suzanne just sent me a text message. 0.98
01:27:17.000 They were just jamming at his house last week, so he must be out here.
01:27:20.000 Oh, yeah.
01:27:21.000 He's got some shows here in September.
01:27:22.000 I think he's opening for the Rolling Stones. 1.00
01:27:24.000 Oh, shit. 1.00
01:27:25.000 Oh, no. 1.00
01:27:26.000 Oh, shit. 1.00
01:27:27.000 Good God Almighty. 1.00
01:27:28.000 That's a hell of a show right there.
01:27:32.000 There's a signed poster of him over by the kitchen.
01:27:35.000 He signed something for me.
01:27:36.000 You're educating me, brother.
01:27:38.000 I'll tell you which one to get.
01:27:42.000 He's got some great work.
01:27:44.000 But there's those artists that when you hear their thing, whatever it is, it literally gives you energy.
01:27:51.000 You feel it in your body.
01:27:53.000 It's like a drug.
01:27:53.000 It changes your state.
01:27:55.000 Absolutely.
01:27:56.000 I mean, when you have the very creative marriage of technique and vision of craft and imagination mediated through sound,
01:28:14.000 the vibrations that are sent, Just beyond language.
01:28:20.000 You know, the great John Coltrane had a whole philosophy of vibrations.
01:28:25.000 Sun Ra was part of that dialogue as well.
01:28:28.000 Eric Duffy, some of the old geniuses of that time, you know.
01:28:32.000 And these vibrations are just, they're as real as a heart attack, but you can never see them.
01:28:42.000 Charles Baudelaire defined a materialist as someone who is obsessed with utensils and afraid of perfume.
01:28:51.000 Because perfume, you can't touch it, but it's as real as a heart attack.
01:28:55.000 Well, the vibrations of deep music, Mozart to Miles.
01:29:01.000 Or Mary Lou Williams or Jerry Allen or any of the great artists.
01:29:06.000 It just goes through you.
01:29:08.000 Yes.
01:29:08.000 And it's not simply cerebral.
01:29:10.000 It doesn't bypass the brain.
01:29:13.000 But it doesn't stay in the brain.
01:29:15.000 It goes through your whole body, man.
01:29:17.000 It's like a drug.
01:29:20.000 It changes your state.
01:29:23.000 If there was a drug that you could take that made you feel the way you feel when a great song comes on, you'd want to take that all the time.
01:29:30.000 Yeah, if it had no side effects.
01:29:32.000 Well, in a way, you can play that song over and over again.
01:29:35.000 Yes, you can.
01:29:36.000 I mean, eventually you get a little bit tolerant of it, unfortunately.
01:29:39.000 But when you were growing up, though, brother, who were the major musicians that were shaping your sensibilities?
01:29:45.000 I was always into rock and roll.
01:29:47.000 I was always into classic rock when I was young.
01:29:49.000 I was always into, God, everyone from Queen.
01:29:53.000 I was a big Queen fan when I was a kid.
01:29:57.000 And this is New Jersey.
01:29:58.000 You hadn't got to Boston yet, huh?
01:29:59.000 No, I left New Jersey when I was seven.
01:30:01.000 Oh, no, seven.
01:30:02.000 No, this was Boston.
01:30:03.000 I lived in San Francisco from seven to eleven.
01:30:05.000 Then I lived in Florida from eleven to thirteen.
01:30:08.000 And then Boston from thirteen to twenty-four.
01:30:12.000 See, it was mainly that Boston context where you had the classic rock.
01:30:15.000 Yeah, a lot of Aerosmith, which is a Boston band, of course, you know, a lot of Van Halen.
01:30:21.000 Oh, yeah.
01:30:23.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:30:24.000 There's a lot of that.
01:30:25.000 See, I didn't get into classic rock as much as I probably should have.
01:30:30.000 It's only so much time you have.
01:30:31.000 There's only so much time to listen to music.
01:30:33.000 That is an issue, right?
01:30:34.000 There's so much great work, and every year, new great work gets created.
01:30:38.000 I keep track of all of them, because it was mainly rhythm and blues on our side of town, you know what I mean?
01:30:43.000 In Sacramento, California.
01:30:45.000 Jazz came later, and then for me, musical theater came, and then classical music.
01:30:50.000 I played classical violin for 20, 20 years, yeah.
01:30:52.000 Oh, wow.
01:30:53.000 And so classical music was always very important to me.
01:30:56.000 That must absorb a lot of time to learn.
01:30:58.000 It did.
01:30:58.000 Oh, man, I was first violin, man.
01:31:00.000 I used to conduct, too.
01:31:01.000 Oh, man, I declined to knock music with Mozart.
01:31:04.000 We'd play Egmont and Beethoven and so forth.
01:31:08.000 And as soon as it was over, I'd go home and, you know, rock with Otis Redden, man.
01:31:13.000 And with Isaac Hayes and Black Moses and Great Barry White and others.
01:31:19.000 But it's fascinating how you begin to see these connections, the broader connections.
01:31:24.000 And so classic rock was something that I got to real late.
01:31:28.000 But late as in, you know, 21, 22 in that sense.
01:31:33.000 Very, very much so.
01:31:35.000 But a world without music.
01:31:39.000 That would suck.
01:31:40.000 Well, it's interesting, too.
01:31:42.000 It's all about the context of when the music was created, too.
01:31:45.000 Because if you go and listen to Robert Johnson today, it's still undeniably brilliant.
01:31:50.000 But what's interesting is it was so good back then that people thought he sold his soul to the devil.
01:31:55.000 I mean, that was the narrative.
01:31:56.000 That was the legend.
01:31:58.000 Yeah.
01:31:58.000 But if you listen to it today, in comparison to something like Gary Clark, it's so simplistic.
01:32:03.000 That's true.
01:32:04.000 If Gary Clark could go back in time to when Robert Johnson was alive, they would think he was from another planet.
01:32:10.000 But that's the truth.
01:32:11.000 They wouldn't even understand it.
01:32:12.000 They wouldn't even understand what he was doing.
01:32:14.000 That's very real.
01:32:16.000 I was blessed to have dialogue with B.B. King on a number of occasions.
01:32:22.000 He was really the king in a lot of ways.
01:32:25.000 King, not because he was the greatest blues artist, but because he was a great blues artist who, through his personality and through his generosity, was able to create such a presence that he becomes the king in that way.
01:32:41.000 I had a chance to see him live.
01:32:42.000 You saw him live, too?
01:32:43.000 Yes.
01:32:43.000 Was that at the very end when he was sitting most of the time?
01:32:47.000 No, he was still standing.
01:32:48.000 He was still standing.
01:32:48.000 It was in the late 90s.
01:32:50.000 Oh, yeah.
01:32:50.000 No, no.
01:32:51.000 Absolutely.
01:32:52.000 The power out of his voice.
01:32:54.000 Oh, man.
01:32:56.000 But he used to say that the blues was a kind of high school vis-a-vis the jazz.
01:33:04.000 Who are those who went to college?
01:33:06.000 And by college, he meant just studying with Byrd, with Armstrong, with Duke, with Rutherford and Mary Lou Williams and the others.
01:33:15.000 And I always tell him, I said, I don't know about that because, you know, genius and excellence comes in a number of different forms.
01:33:21.000 Most jazz musicians don't have the genius of a Robert Johnson.
01:33:26.000 And yet, you know, Charlie Christian's guitar is more complicated in a variety of different ways than Robert Johnson, too, so that You have to be able to be flexible enough to see the differences, the development, building on the genius of those who came before.
01:33:41.000 So you can end up being a very good guitar player who plays some unbelievable chords that Jimi Hendrix created.
01:33:52.000 Yes.
01:33:53.000 But you build it on Jimi.
01:33:54.000 Right.
01:33:55.000 And it becomes almost, not taken for granted, but something you can use as a launching pad.
01:33:59.000 Like Stevie Ray Vaughan did.
01:34:01.000 Yes.
01:34:01.000 He wrote Jimmy's Vibrations.
01:34:04.000 That's a great example.
01:34:05.000 And added his own feel to it.
01:34:07.000 Absolutely.
01:34:08.000 Absolutely.
01:34:09.000 And here again, you see, you have that common humanity that cuts across color.
01:34:17.000 There's a lot of controversy these days about cultural appropriation.
01:34:21.000 Can white brothers and sisters really... 0.77
01:34:24.000 I'll be part of a black genre and so forth and so on.
01:34:28.000 I had a dialogue at my class at Harvard this spring where I teach a course on black intellectual tradition, and I include some white intellectuals as part of it.
01:34:39.000 There's a strange career, Jim Crow, for example, by the great C. Van Woodward.
01:34:43.000 History of Jim Crow, which is the Bible. 0.93
01:34:46.000 Martin Luther King said it was the Bible of the Civil Rights Movement.
01:34:48.000 Woodward was a white Southern brother.
01:34:50.000 And I asked him, they said, we don't understand completely, Brother West.
01:34:54.000 I said, well, let me ask you this.
01:34:55.000 Is Eminem a part of the hip-hop tradition at the highest level?
01:35:01.000 Yes, he is.
01:35:01.000 Yes, he is.
01:35:02.000 That's what we're talking about. 0.99
01:35:05.000 You see, you had to be a fool to deny the genius of Eminem. 0.99
01:35:09.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:35:10.000 Of Eminem, you see.
01:35:11.000 And there's no Eminem without Dr. Trey and so forth.
01:35:13.000 So he immerses and soaks himself in it, but he puts his own distinctive stamp on it.
01:35:19.000 Holland Oaks would be another.
01:35:21.000 Righteous Brothers, another.
01:35:22.000 Average white band from Scotland.
01:35:26.000 Wow.
01:35:27.000 Well, you know the average white band.
01:35:28.000 Sure, sure.
01:35:28.000 And the funk that they were generating.
01:35:30.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:35:30.000 Oh, my God.
01:35:32.000 Now, of course, no average white band without James Brown.
01:35:34.000 James Brown had took it to places nobody took it.
01:35:35.000 Right, right.
01:35:36.000 But shh.
01:35:37.000 Right.
01:35:38.000 You let those Scottish brothers play person to person on you.
01:35:42.000 Yeah.
01:35:43.000 Oh, Lord have mercy.
01:35:44.000 Pick up the pieces.
01:35:46.000 Why?
01:35:47.000 Why?
01:35:48.000 Why'd you have to go?
01:35:50.000 Why'd you have to go and make me love you?
01:35:54.000 And it's slow.
01:35:56.000 I mean, it's just soulful, man.
01:35:59.000 You say, Scotland.
01:36:01.000 Scotland.
01:36:03.000 Robert Burns.
01:36:04.000 Walter Scott.
01:36:07.000 David Hume, colonized by the British Empire, responding in their own creative ways, and by the 20th century, they soaked in rhythm and blues, too.
01:36:19.000 Wow.
01:36:19.000 Korea's like that today.
01:36:21.000 Really?
01:36:22.000 Oh, man.
01:36:24.000 K-pop and K-rhythm and blues.
01:36:26.000 I know.
01:36:26.000 They've got a lot of break dancers over there.
01:36:29.000 Oh, but it's not just BTS now.
01:36:30.000 BTS is something else.
01:36:32.000 They pack massive squares on it.
01:36:33.000 But I'm talking about like Urban Sakapa, man.
01:36:37.000 Oh, you put on coffee, man.
01:36:40.000 Oh, Lord, have mercy.
01:36:42.000 I played that to Danny Glover the other day on the Bernie Sanders campaign.
01:36:45.000 We traveled way off in the country in South Carolina for Brother Bernie.
01:36:49.000 I say, Danny, you from San Francisco.
01:36:51.000 I say, man, listen to these young Korean brothers, man.
01:36:54.000 They're going to remind you of the natural four of Richmond.
01:36:58.000 And I put it on.
01:36:59.000 Oh man, they can't be career.
01:37:01.000 What you talking about?
01:37:05.000 Korea's got a soulful sound, man, that'll blow your mind.
01:37:10.000 I was just reading a book called The Birth of a Korean Cool by Sister Wong.
01:37:14.000 Oh, wow.
01:37:15.000 And it shows, again, how that human spirit is always grounded in something local and particular like black music.
01:37:23.000 Right.
01:37:23.000 But it travels.
01:37:24.000 It's the roots and the routes.
01:37:27.000 Yeah.
01:37:28.000 So the roots are black, but the R-O-U-T-E-S is global. 1.00
01:37:32.000 Right, so just immersing themselves in the tradition and the culture of it all.
01:37:37.000 It's like Japanese jazz.
01:37:38.000 Jazz artists, man.
01:37:39.000 It's like, you just got back from Thailand.
01:37:41.000 Yeah, that was last year, yeah.
01:37:43.000 That was last year.
01:37:44.000 But no, man, it's a human thing.
01:37:48.000 It's a global thing.
01:37:49.000 It's a beautiful thing.
01:37:50.000 The momentum of culture is so strange, because Thailand's a great example of that.
01:37:54.000 It's like, they're so different.
01:37:56.000 And the momentum of culture, like, I just got back from Italy.
01:38:00.000 They're so different, but yet they're so similar.
01:38:04.000 There's a momentum of the way they live their lives.
01:38:07.000 It's very unique and unusual, and I think that's one of the great things about traveling is you get to see, oh, well, the way we live here, especially here in Los Angeles, which is preposterous.
01:38:17.000 I've never lived in LA. I mean, Sacramento, I grew up, but I never lived in LA. Where do you live now?
01:38:21.000 I live in Cambridge now.
01:38:23.000 Yeah, Cambridge is fine.
01:38:24.000 It's fine until four months of the year when it's just a frozen wasteland.
01:38:28.000 I don't know.
01:38:29.000 I don't know.
01:38:30.000 I used to perform at Catch a Rising Star.
01:38:32.000 Oh, yes!
01:38:33.000 Yeah, in Harvard Square.
01:38:34.000 Absolutely, right there in Harvard Square.
01:38:36.000 Cambridge is, I mean, it's a great place.
01:38:39.000 It's wonderful.
01:38:40.000 Well, intellectually, it's got some wonderful things.
01:38:42.000 And you hang out with brothers.
01:38:43.000 There's a lot of...
01:38:44.000 Skip Gates and Brendan Terry and Tommy Shelby.
01:38:48.000 Boston's a strange place.
01:38:49.000 It really is.
01:38:50.000 There's so many different flavors to it, you know. 0.98
01:38:53.000 But it's so goddamn cold. 0.97
01:38:55.000 But it gets cold. 0.97
01:38:56.000 But that's when it's time to go in the library and read some books.
01:38:58.000 Yes.
01:38:58.000 You know what I mean?
01:38:59.000 It also builds character.
01:39:00.000 But that's true, too.
01:39:01.000 There's something about people that grow up in cold climates.
01:39:04.000 You've got to be able to just come to terms with it, like Chicago or Detroit.
01:39:06.000 Yes, Chicago is a perfect example.
01:39:08.000 Yeah, there's great people there because they have character.
01:39:12.000 Absolutely.
01:39:12.000 Detroit.
01:39:13.000 They deal with that shit. 1.00
01:39:15.000 They deal with it. 1.00
01:39:16.000 You're right about that, though, man.
01:39:19.000 I mean, one of the sadder features of our moment, given all the joy of reveling in each other's humanity and music and so forth, is that you've got impending ecological catastrophe, escalating nuclear catastrophe.
01:39:39.000 Economic catastrophes of grotesque wealth inequality all around the world.
01:39:44.000 Spiritual catastrophe in terms of intensifying forms of depression, suicide, wasted lives, lack of self-respect, not believing in oneself and thinking that the only way you can really make it is by imitating the mainstream forms of conformity.
01:40:02.000 And then the political catastrophes of right-wing movements all around the world.
01:40:07.000 And by right-wing movements, what I mean is the rule of big money, big military, and then scapegoat the most vulnerable and try to convince the most vulnerable that it's their fault that they're in the subordinate positions that they are, rather than giving them a fair chance,
01:40:24.000 you see.
01:40:24.000 And that's the makings of new forms of fascism and so on, you see.
01:40:29.000 And you say to yourself, you know, how do we hold on to some sense of hope?
01:40:37.000 And there is no hope without wrestling with despair.
01:40:41.000 If you're afraid of despair, you never have hope.
01:40:45.000 You've got to wrestle with it.
01:40:48.000 Not allow it to have the last word, but you've got to wrestle with it.
01:40:50.000 When you're talking about your concern about nuclear catastrophe, impending nuclear catastrophe, are you talking about what's going on right now with Iran?
01:40:58.000 Well, I'm thinking about Russia, Russia, China, U.S. missile heads, Iran, North Korea, the possibility of war, U.S. bombing, precious Iran.
01:41:07.000 Iranian brothers and sisters are as precious and priceless as anybody else.
01:41:12.000 They just happen to be under Iran.
01:41:13.000 An authoritarian rule that does need to be changed and transformed, there's no doubt about it.
01:41:18.000 But you think, you know, all the hell they've been through, man.
01:41:21.000 They had eight years when the United States was on the side of Saddam Hussein.
01:41:25.000 And they were all alone in the world.
01:41:29.000 I mean, very much like our Jewish brothers and sisters felt in 1973. They'd already undergone a genocidal attack. 0.72
01:41:37.000 One out of three precious Jews killed.
01:41:39.000 And in 1973, they're in the world...
01:41:43.000 All by themselves other than the U.S. Empire.
01:41:45.000 And you say, oh my God, who can I rely on?
01:41:47.000 And that brings out the worst in people.
01:41:52.000 We're good to go.
01:42:15.000 How an underdog, because that's the history of Jews in 2,000 years, is basically an underdog.
01:42:20.000 Became an oppressor.
01:42:21.000 And how they become top dogs, tied to the U.S. top dogs.
01:42:25.000 Now you always have, again, those Jewish voices and organizations.
01:42:29.000 That are critical of Israeli occupation, critical of any actions of human beings, including Jews, that need to be called into question. 0.58
01:42:37.000 But it's hard to keep track of the rich and priceless humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters under occupation, second-class citizenship, when it's very clear that Jews have been so viciously treated for 2,000 years in the history of the West as well as the history of the Middle East.
01:42:58.000 And yet we have a moral duty to keep track of the preciousness of Palestinian babies, just as we ought to keep track of the preciousness of Jewish babies.
01:43:08.000 And Gaza and Tel Aviv must have a spotlight in terms of what those human beings are going through on both sides of that divide, as it were, even given the asymmetric relation of power and And that structure of domination called the occupation.
01:43:26.000 I'd say the same thing about Tibet.
01:43:27.000 I'd say the same thing about Kashmir.
01:43:29.000 I'd say the same thing about Western Sub-Sahara under Moroccan domination. 0.63
01:43:35.000 There's so many examples that we human beings generate that require our moral and spiritual witness and our analytical attention and our artists who can authorize an alternative.
01:43:52.000 Even if only for a moment.
01:43:54.000 An alternative.
01:43:56.000 What is the art like in Palestine?
01:44:00.000 The art?
01:44:01.000 The art.
01:44:02.000 The art in Palestine? 0.51
01:44:03.000 Oh, it's unbelievable.
01:44:04.000 I mean, I would imagine when you're dealing with such an oppressed group of people that are living in such a precarious situation in time and history.
01:44:12.000 It's unbelievable.
01:44:13.000 I was just talking to my dear brother, Mark Lamont Hill.
01:44:16.000 We just had him at Harvard for a dialogue on the Palestinian and black situation.
01:44:20.000 And he goes back and forth and he talks about the Palestinian hip-hop artists.
01:44:24.000 Really?
01:44:25.000 Oh, my God.
01:44:26.000 They got one of the richest subcultures of hip-hop.
01:44:29.000 Isn't that always the case when you have a culture that's...
01:44:33.000 Absolutely.
01:44:35.000 You get the Kurds and Turkeys who apply the disproportionate amount of influence on Turkish culture. 1.00
01:44:43.000 What's a good Palestinian hip-hop band to look into?
01:44:45.000 That's a good question because I didn't really follow through.
01:44:49.000 I like to listen to that too because I don't know what they're saying.
01:44:51.000 I love listening to music where I don't know the language.
01:44:54.000 You can just feel the spirit coming through and the vibrations.
01:44:57.000 Brazilian.
01:44:57.000 I love Brazilian hip-hop because I don't speak Portuguese and it's just amazing the sounds.
01:45:03.000 I've never heard Brazilian hip-hop.
01:45:05.000 A lot of UFC fighters from Brazil, they'll come out to their soundtrack as Brazilian artists.
01:45:12.000 Yeah.
01:45:15.000 To me, one of the uplifting features of being rooted in the arts and music is that no matter how ugly and vicious and hateful things are, it never suffocates the human spirit.
01:45:34.000 Somebody gonna tell a joke and make you laugh.
01:45:37.000 Somebody gonna sing a song and touch your soul.
01:45:40.000 You know what I mean?
01:45:41.000 And it's almost a way of saying, I love you, not in a sentimental, Hollywood, stereotypical way.
01:45:50.000 But you know that song by Stevie Wonder, these three words?
01:45:54.000 Oh, Lord.
01:45:56.000 You got that, man?
01:45:58.000 We can't play.
01:45:59.000 Oh, you can't play?
01:46:00.000 Oh, I thought he'd go.
01:46:01.000 No, because that was a video that you put up there before.
01:46:05.000 Yeah, but that video was Gary Johnson singing in a concert.
01:46:08.000 Oh, that you did?
01:46:10.000 Yeah.
01:46:10.000 Yeah, we can get away with that.
01:46:12.000 Listen to Stevie, man, because he's talking about how an aching heart can be kindled to smile and open and connect.
01:46:24.000 In a world overwhelmed by hatred and distrust that is shot through all of us, and we all contribute to it.
01:46:32.000 We all contribute to it, you see.
01:46:34.000 I mean, that's one of the reasons why even when I talk about, you know, Brother Trump as the gangster, I call him, we have created a fascist Frankenstein, and he's the creation of the worst of America in the way in which Martin King represents the best,
01:46:51.000 and they are both America's apple pie.
01:46:53.000 But any critique of anybody ought to begin with yourself.
01:46:59.000 Ought to begin with who we are, because we all got gangster elements inside of us.
01:47:05.000 No way around us.
01:47:06.000 Do you know Trump?
01:47:07.000 No, I've never met him.
01:47:08.000 I met him one time, I think, at the end of a Nita Baker concert in the casinos.
01:47:14.000 Atlantic City, way back in the 80s.
01:47:17.000 And it was interesting.
01:47:18.000 He was there with Mike Tyson, I think.
01:47:19.000 And it was interesting because it was a chocolate affair, you know what I mean?
01:47:22.000 He owned the vanilla brother there.
01:47:24.000 And you know, one of the first things that come across to the brother is that he's just so glad to be there hanging out with the black brothers, cool and so forth.
01:47:33.000 You could just tell he's just as square as a rectangle.
01:47:38.000 You go listen to your Beach Boys, man.
01:47:41.000 We got J's Brown, brother.
01:47:43.000 We got Brian Wilson.
01:47:44.000 We love you, but we got JB, man.
01:47:47.000 And it's a cultural dynamic because he was the richest one in the room, though.
01:47:53.000 And Mike Tyson got a lot of money.
01:47:54.000 Don King got some of that money, too.
01:47:57.000 But it was a different kind of dynamic.
01:48:00.000 And so it's a context in which you embrace.
01:48:03.000 We embrace them because that's the best of black culture.
01:48:07.000 We embrace every.
01:48:09.000 You know what I mean?
01:48:11.000 If Donald Trump's mother shows up from Scotland in 1930, black people been here nine generations, we ain't going to say, go back where you come from.
01:48:20.000 Come on in here, sister. 0.99
01:48:21.000 Be part of this democratic experiment.
01:48:23.000 We're on the other side, the chocolate side of town, but we welcome you.
01:48:27.000 But don't say nothing about our brown brothers and sisters coming in from Mexico. 0.94
01:48:32.000 Because if anybody's definitive about what is America, it's going to be red and black people. 1.00
01:48:38.000 Because they're the ones who undergo the monstrous crimes against humanity, the genocide, the stolen land on the one hand, and the stolen peoples and the human bondage on the other. 0.99
01:48:49.000 Those are the pillars, the worst pillars of the country.
01:48:52.000 Then you've got democratic visions coming not just from Thomas Jefferson, but they're coming from the slaves like Frederick Douglass. 0.94
01:48:59.000 See what I mean?
01:49:11.000 Yes.
01:49:12.000 Yes.
01:49:18.000 Of drug dealers and gangsters and gang members, cartel members, making their way across and victimizing our citizens.
01:49:26.000 And both things are human.
01:49:27.000 Both things are real, too.
01:49:28.000 But if you tell the lies and make it as if the latter represent the whole, then that's what Trump specializes in, you see.
01:49:35.000 Did you see the video of Pence when he was down there at the detention centers and just looking away, no humanity?
01:49:43.000 Very disturbing.
01:49:45.000 And it's so, you know, it's so sad because here's a brother who speaks his whole personal identity on being a Christian.
01:49:55.000 And you say to yourself, like, Brother Michael, I mean, as a fellow Christian, I'm not trying to call into question your Christian faith or nothing.
01:50:04.000 I don't have authority to do that.
01:50:05.000 But the Bible says in part, by thy works you shall know thy...
01:50:15.000 And, you know, nowadays you've got commodified Christianity and a commodified culture of a declining empire. 0.90
01:50:23.000 And you get Christian evangelicals, 91% or so pro-Trump, 79% say he's doing the best possible job.
01:50:32.000 And you say to yourself, Wow, Christianity seems to have lost meaning of the cross and has become so accommodated to the Empire. 0.93
01:50:44.000 And it was the Roman Empire who put Jesus to death. 0.80
01:50:48.000 The Roman Empire.
01:50:50.000 You had some neo-colonial elites who cooperated, but it was the Roman Empire who put Jesus to death.
01:50:56.000 It was the greatest empire of its day, very much like the Persian Empire.
01:51:01.000 The largest, greatest empire of its day with Cyrus the Great.
01:51:06.000 Now you got the Roman Empire putting Jesus to death.
01:51:10.000 And here Jesus is sent there by the crowd, by the mob.
01:51:16.000 And you say to Brother Michael Pence, so you're going to accommodate yourself to Donald Trump?
01:51:23.000 You're going to accommodate yourself to policies that are so inhumane and barbaric just to retain your position and try to then rationalize it as a Christian? 0.97
01:51:39.000 We need some music and some comedy to try to get in contact with his humanity to change him.
01:51:44.000 But most importantly, you just need a social movement.
01:51:47.000 You need to get him out of office.
01:51:48.000 You need some accountability.
01:51:49.000 But with Pence, just seeing him in reaction to those people is just a failure of perspective.
01:51:56.000 Just cold, distant, callous.
01:51:59.000 Well, the narrative is that they broke the law and that they're imposing upon our great nation.
01:52:04.000 And, you know...
01:52:06.000 It's crimes of opportunity.
01:52:08.000 They're just trying to find opportunity.
01:52:11.000 They're coming over here because they want a better life.
01:52:14.000 To not have sympathy for that.
01:52:16.000 And other than indigenous peoples and my own African peoples, that is the history of the country. 0.87
01:52:25.000 Yes.
01:52:28.000 Into the country, those who are eager and have energy, willing to work and sacrifice and the unbelievable contribution of voluntary immigrants to the making of America.
01:52:42.000 Now, America is not a nation of immigrants. 0.85
01:52:43.000 I don't like that language because it overlooks indigenous peoples and involuntary immigrants like black people. 1.00
01:52:50.000 And slavery was not America's original sin. 0.75
01:52:53.000 That's another neoliberal lie that you hear all the time on the corporate media, as if indigenous people's suffering has to be rendered invisible to highlight black people.
01:53:02.000 What's one of the least discussed injustices of this nation, right?
01:53:06.000 Absolutely.
01:53:07.000 And then their current situation in these reservations with extreme alcoholism and drug addiction.
01:53:15.000 Social misery, and they still got their rich music and poetry and resistance, but the social conditions are just...
01:53:22.000 But they are the casualties of a settler colonial enterprise, and we'd rather act as if they don't exist.
01:53:29.000 I mean, we black people became central because our labor and our imagination and culture became central, and we had a barbaric civil war, 750,000 people dead, each life precious.
01:53:42.000 And that has been the central event in the shaping of America.
01:53:45.000 So when people talk about race, they go straight to blackness, as if indigenous peoples in redness is not integral to.
01:53:53.000 It's just that they've been really so invisible and the vicious attack has been so immense.
01:53:58.000 Well, it's so complicated, too, that they have their own rules on the reservations.
01:54:02.000 They're allowed to have gambling.
01:54:04.000 They can have all sorts of—they have their own sovereignty in a certain way on the reservations.
01:54:10.000 It's very odd.
01:54:11.000 Oh, no, it's true.
01:54:12.000 And I was blessed to be there in Standing Rock a couple of Decembers ago.
01:54:16.000 It was one of the marvelous moments in my life to stand there with the— The group there was a multiracial group.
01:54:24.000 People came from all around the world.
01:54:26.000 Naomi Klein from Canada.
01:54:28.000 For the most part, it was a matter of the indigenous peoples coming together.
01:54:32.000 Memories of Wounded Knee in 1890. Over 400 people.
01:54:37.000 Could you remind people what Standing Rock was about?
01:54:39.000 Standing Rock was a struggle over that pipeline.
01:54:42.000 Absolutely.
01:54:43.000 Trying to put pressure on the Obama administration to ensure that a pipeline was not We're good to go.
01:55:14.000 Unified against the greedy corporate elites who were trying to promote this pipeline through Canada all the way down to the southern section of the United States.
01:55:26.000 How did that resolve?
01:55:27.000 Well, first, we got an announcement right when we were there.
01:55:30.000 It was freezing to me.
01:55:31.000 It was December.
01:55:33.000 And they were hosing people down, too.
01:55:35.000 Oh, Lord, yes.
01:55:35.000 They were hosing people down, wetting them down while this was all going on.
01:55:39.000 And it was about minus 15 or whatever it was.
01:55:42.000 It was freezing up there, you know.
01:55:45.000 But no, we got an announcement from the Obama administration for a suspension of it.
01:55:52.000 Because they had planned to do it, too.
01:55:54.000 I mean, you know, Obama administration can be very accommodating to Wall Street interests and corporate elite interests and so forth.
01:56:01.000 Even given the image and spectacle of a black president being a progressive and what have you. 1.00
01:56:06.000 Much more progressive than Trump.
01:56:08.000 That's not saying too much.
01:56:10.000 But we got a suspension and the struggle continues really.
01:56:16.000 But it sent tremendous ripples through the cultures of indigenous peoples and their nations in terms of coming together.
01:56:25.000 And the fact that it was successful.
01:56:27.000 Absolutely.
01:56:28.000 And there was at least a relative victory.
01:56:29.000 All these victories are relative, but a very relative victory.
01:56:32.000 It was beautiful just to see again.
01:56:34.000 You know, you can't downplay the role of joy, though, brother.
01:56:40.000 This is so very important.
01:56:41.000 The joy in struggle.
01:56:43.000 The joy in organizing.
01:56:45.000 The joy in fighting for justice.
01:56:48.000 The joy in the nightclubs.
01:56:50.000 The joy in the churches and mosques and temples and synagogues.
01:56:54.000 Joy is something that we need to come back to.
01:56:57.000 That's one of the great secrets of the human condition.
01:57:01.000 What are the sources of joy?
01:57:03.000 What are the conditions for the possibility of joy?
01:57:06.000 We've been obsessed with pleasure for the last 100 years or so.
01:57:11.000 There's nothing wrong with pleasure, but pleasure is not the same thing as joy at all.
01:57:16.000 When you look at the sparkling eyes of your precious daughter, that's not pleasure, that's joy.
01:57:25.000 It's deep, deep joy, you see.
01:57:28.000 That's what endures.
01:57:30.000 You could be broke as the Ten Commandments financially, but that memory will bring you joy.
01:57:37.000 That's real joy, not peacocking.
01:57:39.000 That's exactly right.
01:57:40.000 That's exactly right.
01:57:43.000 You said so many amazing things today.
01:57:45.000 This was one of my favorite podcasts of all time.
01:57:47.000 I just want to thank you for being here.
01:57:49.000 Is the time up already?
01:57:50.000 It's already 11 o'clock.
01:57:52.000 No.
01:57:52.000 No.
01:57:53.000 Good God Almighty.
01:57:55.000 But brother, man, this has been a blessing though, brother.
01:57:58.000 My pleasure.
01:57:59.000 And what an artist you are.
01:58:00.000 What a human being you are, my brother.
01:58:02.000 You stay strong though, man.
01:58:03.000 You too, sir.
01:58:04.000 Thank you very much.
01:58:06.000 Is it really 11, man?