[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]Some have advised me to maintain a strict journalistic public persona.
They said if I begin to indulge my passion for music and poetry, I won’t be taken seriously as a journalist.
I have decided to take the chance because I’m not just a journalist. I am a writer first, and my primary mission is to chronicle my times, from my perspective, for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren just as I wish someone had thought to do for me.
I don’t want my descendants to have to ask, who was “Poppie”? What was he like.
I want them to see my world through my eyes, to see my reaction to it. They won’t have to speculate about who I am. I want them to know me so they will have a better understanding of who they are. They need more than sterile opinions, a frame of reference for perspective into the well from which my opinions are drawn.
Since I am both a musician and a poet, music and poetry are a big part of my life. I use both mediums to define myself, just as a Ph.D. uses the letters behind his or her name to define himself.
I wish I could simply put Uh.R (Unrepentant ‘hood Rat) behind my name. It would be such an uncommon convention no one would get my meaning.
Compared to the Ivy League
Many take issue with defining myself in that manner, but I wear the education gained through surviving the adversity of the Black experience with the same kind of pride any Harvard or Yale graduate places in his background. I take even more pride in it.
The degree I obtained through my “formal” education was theoretical. I received a receipt attesting that I was warming a chair in an environment where psychology was discussed. It says nothing about whether I absorbed knowledge in a meaningful way.
Otherwise, with all the receipts being handed out across this country every year, we would be in better shape as a nation. George W. Bush managed to obtain a receipt from Yale. That should speak volumes regarding their intrinsic value and Yale. I come from a tradition where a person cannot hand me a receipt. He must show me what he thinks.
While I didn’t get a receipt for my education on the streets of Watts, the Pueblo Del Rio projects and various other areas in inner city Los Angeles, the fact I am sitting here writing proves I have been dragged through the pits of hell and came out the other side fully functional. Those are credentials. My education is hands-on. I have wounds to show that I graduated magna cum Lawdy.
My Authenticity
My education is real, not theoretical, the same education Obama is using to make the GOP look like idiots. You didn’t think Obama learned to make Trump look like a fool at Harvard did you? Rubbing Trump’s face in his shortsighted idiocy at the White House Correspondents dinner, while at the same time, coolly accomplishing what the chest-beating Bush administration was unable to do in seven years . . . that was classic ‘hood rat. It was uncharacteristically flamboyant of our President, but I never have been so proud.
My professors in the ‘hood were among the greatest minds I have known. They held court in the finest Socratic tradition, sitting on empty milk crates in the parking lot of ghetto liquor stores. Tuition was cheap, a half-pint of Silver Satin.
These were the “Eulipians,” writers, poets, musicians, painters and uncommon drunks — shade-tree philosophers who contemplated the fungus between the toes of society. They danced with reckless abandon, unfettered by formal inhibition, through the presumptuous speculation of the ages. An assorted bunch, some lived in county jails, cardboard boxes and alley ways. Others, in luxury apartments. They had in common that their existence exposed the hypocrisy of “that shining light upon the hill.”
While these obscure intellectuals stood outside the mainstream of the academy, I watched with astonished delight as they sang, scat and scribed their philosophy into the mainstream of human knowledge. They rammed forth the proposition that knowledge was free; thus, it would transcend all attempts to be contained through caste and privilege.
Malcolm, Bird, Langston Hughes, John Coltrane; they were all Eulipians. Even old Gigglin’ Willie was a Eulipian. Some thought he was crazy. We never figured what he was gigglin’ about. During his more lucid moments he had us all gigglin’ at the absurdity of what we have been conditioned to accept as truth. While the Eulipians used different lyrics and mediums, they all sang one song. We must dedicate ourselves to the proposition man’s innate thirst for knowledge would someday overwhelm his passionate lust for stupidity. That is my one commandment.
As a lifelong musician, one of my favorite Eulipians was Dexter Gordon. He was one reason I dedicated myself to the saxophone as a pre-teen. He went to school with my mother, and grew up a couple of blocks from my house. Dex never did get a formal receipt because he left Jefferson High School at 16 years old to go on the road with Pops, and then Billy Eckstine. He never made it to Juilliard. But before he was done, there wasn’t a music conservatory in the world that didn’t speak his name, even as I speak to you now. Dexter Gordon. World renowned ‘hood rat:
A Swingin’ Affair
I was told as a child Blacks had no worth, not a nickel’s worth of dimes. I believed that myth ‘til Dex rode in with his ax in double time.
His horn was soarin’, the changes flyin’, his rhythm right on time. My heart beat with the pleasure of newfound pride, knowing his blood flowed through mine.
Dex took the chords the keyboard played, danced around each note, then shuffled ‘em like a deck of cards. He didn’t miss a stroke. B minor 7 with flatted 5th, a half-diminished chord, he substituted a lick in D, then really began to soar.
He tipped his hat to Charlie Parker, and quoted Trane with Miles, then paid his homage to Thelonious Monk, in Charlie Rouse’s style. He took a Scrapple From the Apple, then went to Billie’s Bounce, the rhythm section, now on fire, but he didn’t budge an ounce.
He just dug right in to shuffle again, this time a Royal Flush, then lingered a bit behind the beat, still smokin’ but in no rush. Then he doubled the time just like this rhyme, in fluid 16th notes, tellin’ Charlie and Lester, “your baby boy, Dexter’s, on top of the bebop you wrote.”
Wailin’ like a banshee, this prince of saxophone, his ballads dripped of honey, his Arpeggios were strong.
Callin’ on his idles, ghost of Pres’ within in the isles, smiling at his protégé, at the peak of this new style. His tenor drenched of Blackness, and all the things we are — of pain and pleasure and creative greatness, until his final bar.
Eric L. Wattree, Uh.R
(Unrepentant ‘Hood Rat)
The major problem in the Black community is not that there are too many ‘hood rats. Not enough of us left.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
