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three weeks pass...
To finally answer the Rev, yes it does, and here it is:
Cerebral Caustic: a love story
By Donna E. Brown
Maybe I had something to prove, but I doubted it. Maybe I was trying to get back at my parents for dragging me away from NYC at age 4 and dumping the family unit in darkest South Carolina, where it’s always twenty years in the past. Whatever the reason, whatever the motivation, I fell in love with the wrong man. His name was Mark.
The year was 1985. College radio, irony and ethnicity weren’t yet hip, and the fact that my teachers were still referring to me as 'colored' wasn’t helping much either. I was a little black girl in a place and time when being naturally dark was looked down upon, an agnostic bookworm in a culture that mandated church attendance. Nobody liked me, but that was okay, because I didn’t like them either. I had my books and I had my music (but no boyfriends, thanks to insanely strict parents and a lack of dating material.)
Well, I thought I had music. 1985 was a lean period, a decidedly mean period. The University of South Carolina’s radio station wasn’t coming in too well, and if I heard the Thompson Twins in conjunction with "Donna likes this weird music" one more time, I would scream. There had to be someone out there who felt like I did, who would make Camden, S.C. bearable, who knew that nothing should be taken at face value and that what you thought was what mattered, not what everyone thought you ought to think. That was as novel (and convoluted) then as it is now.
One summer night I was watching MTV after my parents had gone to bed. It was a long dark night of the soul; I stayed awake out of sheer desperation, praying for something better. I’d rejected Simple Minds and Tenpole Tudor already. China Crisis and Scritti Politti were cute and lefty, but I wanted a man who’d "say what you mean and say it mean." And boom, there he was.
Mark E. Smith - the name alone made my heart wobble in a way that told me for sure that I was onto something. Not some pop tart name - it didn’t belong to a man who wore Yamamoto suits and bronzer. This was a man who lived. In the now, on the same earth as I did, thinking the same things I did, and saying them. Sort of. Everything I knew in my heart to be true despite it all, that I knew existed in the world beyond me, everything real, condensed into one word. Not even a word - a syllable. Specifically, a syllable-ah. A big ol’ "yeah RIGHT" to all that was bogus in music. That "ah" kept me going. Even if I had no idea what a Fall song was about, the verbal footnote was there. And if the song was relatively clear, the "-ah" became a rallying cry. "All those whose mind entitles themselves, and whose main entitle is themselves, shall feel the wrath of my bombast-ah!"
It mattered not that Mark E. was possibly the ugliest man who walked the planet. The sunken eyes in the ratlike face were raw and honest, and his words were his own. They didn’t have to rhyme. Hell, he couldn’t even sing, at least in a conventional sense. My parents were already horrified that I daydreamed about Bobby Gillespie instead of Bobby Brown (although their parallel drug-use paths eventually led them in the same direction.) I couldn’t let them know about this. Not just a scary-looking white man from England, this was a man whose deal with Motown was perma-scuppered when the Gordy minions heard the line in "The Classical": "where are the obligatory niggers?" Never mind "Take that, fuck-face-ah!" I was already going to hell. And all for a white boy who couldn’t sing!
But the weird thing was that MES made me feel better about being black. Before, I’d felt so uncomfortable in my small-town skin that I fell into self-loathing. I was bad at being a girl, and even worse at being black if it meant I had to go to church every day and listen to the Jets in order to feel at one with my people. But seeing a wiry ex-dockworker from Manchester spin tales that he didn’t expect anyone to understand, much less sing along with, made me breathe a little more easily. He did what he thought was right, took the rap, and remained steadfastly himself. And I thought, if he can do that, why can’t I?
And that, kids, is the (typically convoluted) story of how a white man helped me become a black woman.
The end-ah.
― Mackro Mackro, Monday, 17 March 2008 07:00 (sixteen years ago) link