“I’ll Take You There”

Mavis Staples “took us there” last Friday night at a benefit for the Outpost Performance Center in Albuquerque. The “us” were the folks over 50 who grew up listening to Pops, Mavis, and sisters, known as the Staples Singers; the “there” was the place that only live music by one of the great R & B singers of all time can take you. We’re talking Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Laura Nero, Patti LaBelle, and potentially Beyonce, who now says she wants to get back to her “roots” and be a “real” soul sister instead of an MTV playdoll (see "Reflections on the Super Duper Bowl").

Mavis came out with a cane, having “blown out” her knee, with an amazing band that’s been with her as she’s resurrected a career that got a little off track through the eighties and nineties. Even though I could count on one hand the 20, 30, or 40 somethings at the concert, there are a few in the know who helped in her new career: Have a Little Faith was produced by Jim Tulio and You Are Not Alone by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.

These guys know their R & B history. And there must be others out there who know their jazz, but they don’t come to the concerts at the Outpost, either. When I go there to hear Ravi Coltrane or Bill Frisell or Oliver Lake, gray hair and wrinkles predominate.

What’s going on? In the May 27 New Yorker George Packer quotes a Silicon Valley start-up engineer talking about his techie cohort: “They’re ignorant, because many of them don’t feel the need to educate themselves outside their little world, and they’re not rewarded for doing so. . . . People with whom I used to talk about politics or policy or the arts, they’re just not into it anymore. They don’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. They read TechCrunch and VentureBeat, and maybe they happen to see something from the Times on somebody’s Facebook news feed.”

Notice we’re not even talking about reading the New Yorker or Andrew Soloman or Zadie Smith currently on the newstands and best seller lists at Amazon. Ever heard of Edmund Wilson or Twyla Tharp? Janet Frame or Werner Herzog? An entrepreneur Packer interviewed told him he went a few years without reading a single book. Yet these are the guys (and it’s mostly guys, and they’re mostly white) who call themselves the “Best and the Brightest.” Do they even know that’s the title of David Halberstam’s book? Do they really want to be identified with the academic policy wonks in the Kennedy administration who were responsible for the Vietnam War?

But according to Packer’s article, they have no interest in politics or the history that contextualizes it. When they do decide that for whatever reason—good PR? bad conscience?—it might be a good idea to give some of their billions to non-profits and charitable foundations Bill Gates ends up supporting the educational policies of Michelle Rhee, teaching to bad tests, and Mark Zuckerberg wants to reform immigration by bringing in more educated foreigners to work as engineers and designers.

It’s not just the techies, of course, who have no interest in politics, art, literature . . . . but I’m beginning to sound like a broken record (see "Jamaica Kincaid"). It seems a generation of people who knew at least a little about a lot of things is fading away while a generation that knows about nothing but one thing is the future. But hey, the one thing they do know about, social media, is how they’re going to “entertain each other and interact with each other and do things for each other much more efficiently” (as one of Packer’s interviewees waxes poetic). That what they’re doing so efficiently has no content doesn’t seem to matter.