Chocolate City Breakdown
[In today's exciting episode, we watch in horror as a little white boy from the vanilla suburbs of New Zealand wades into something he knows nothing about!]
There were obviously many ways to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr's birthday on Monday... A Considerable Speck recalled a passage from one of MLK's sermons, reflecting on our calling in life. O-Dub posted a historic piece of music. And New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin did a Pat Robertson, describing Hurricane Katrina as punishment from God.
In another brain explosion from the same speech, Nagin also promised that New Orleans would be rebuilt as a "Chocolate City": "it’s the way God wants it to be. ..You can't have New Orleans no other way."
Chocolate City. Kenneth Caroll defines Chocolate City as the rise of black consciousness and solidarity in Washington DC in the 1970s... And thirty years later, "right-wing-but-social-liberal" Andrew Sullivan sees the perpetuation of the Chocolate City attitude as reverse racism. In South Auckland, it's a nightclub run by kiwi hip-hop label Dawn Raid.
For George Clinton and Parliament, Chocolate City was a story of black assertiveness in the wake of the civil rights movement, A synth-laced, jive-ass space jazz funk poem. It could only have come out of 1975, and even today, the song is a cultural and political reference point par excellence.
Parliament - Chocolate City
From Parliament's Greatest Hits: Mercury 822 637-2 [Buy]
There were obviously many ways to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr's birthday on Monday... A Considerable Speck recalled a passage from one of MLK's sermons, reflecting on our calling in life. O-Dub posted a historic piece of music. And New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin did a Pat Robertson, describing Hurricane Katrina as punishment from God.
In another brain explosion from the same speech, Nagin also promised that New Orleans would be rebuilt as a "Chocolate City": "it’s the way God wants it to be. ..You can't have New Orleans no other way."
Chocolate City. Kenneth Caroll defines Chocolate City as the rise of black consciousness and solidarity in Washington DC in the 1970s... And thirty years later, "right-wing-but-social-liberal" Andrew Sullivan sees the perpetuation of the Chocolate City attitude as reverse racism. In South Auckland, it's a nightclub run by kiwi hip-hop label Dawn Raid.
For George Clinton and Parliament, Chocolate City was a story of black assertiveness in the wake of the civil rights movement, A synth-laced, jive-ass space jazz funk poem. It could only have come out of 1975, and even today, the song is a cultural and political reference point par excellence.
Parliament - Chocolate City
From Parliament's Greatest Hits: Mercury 822 637-2 [Buy]
And when they come to march on ya
Tell 'em to make sure they got their James Brown pass
And don't be surprised if Ali is in the White House
Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure
Richard Pryor, Minister of Education
Stevie Wonder, Secretary of FINE arts
And Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady
Are you out there, CC?
A chocolate city is no dream
It's my piece of the rock and I dig you, CC
Tell 'em to make sure they got their James Brown pass
And don't be surprised if Ali is in the White House
Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure
Richard Pryor, Minister of Education
Stevie Wonder, Secretary of FINE arts
And Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady
Are you out there, CC?
A chocolate city is no dream
It's my piece of the rock and I dig you, CC
posted by etnobofin @ 18:52
2 Comments:
At 4:04 PM,
DJ durutti said…
had i not been away in NYC, i would have done this very same post! Glad you put it all together. superb job.
At 7:26 PM,
etnobofin said…
matt - Glad I could steal your thunder! (haha) But yeah, I was surprised actually that no other music blog picked up on the "Chocolate City" meme last week. It seemed such an obvious follow-on from the Ray Nagin speech, which was widely publicised.
molo - Parliament can be political at times, but the significant thing is that they always do it with humour. Perhaps George Clinton is the Richard Pryor of music? And I can understand that their lyrics can be hard to understand when English is perhaps not your first language. (Parfois, meme nous les anglophones, on a du mal a bien comprendre ce que dit George Clinton...)
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