Q: What did you write first at The Daily Bugle.
A: Racist, Sexist, Homophobe, Shirker: A Book a Month, Posted Online, Daily.
I had read Paul Bley’s Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz and seen that I was writing books in real time. I thought about what this meant. It meant that I should post them as I wrote them.
Or I started posting books as I wrote them and saw that I was doing what Paul Bley talked about in Stopping Time.
I was doing in books what he had done in jazz.
I was doing in books what Ornette Coleman had done in jazz.
I was the shape of books to come. The shape of writing to come.
I had a jazz sensibility and that meant a black sensibility.
I identified with jazz musicians.
Progressive jazz musicians. Coleman, Albert Ayler, Bobby Bradford, Horace Tapscott.
Tapscott said he got a racist jacket hung on him because he liked black people more than he liked white people.
I liked white people more than I liked black people. I liked crackers.
I wasn’t a racist.
I admired black musicians. Black jazz musicians. I didn’t like black hip-hop musicians. Black rap musicians.
I thought rap music was ignorant.
Q: Oh, shit.
Minor chord.
A: Fate motive in Faust.
To say you like jazz better than hip-hop is to say you don’t like hip-hop. Not that you like jazz.
To say that you don’t like hip-hop is to say you don’t like black people.
If you say, “But I like jazz,” that’s like saying, “But some of my best friends are black people.” You have already shown you are a racist.
There’s no defense.
Whatever you say will be twisted around and used against you.
You can’t defend yourself against the accusation that you are racist.
Especially when you admit you probably are racist.
That you probably do see things through white eyes.
That your whiteness probably distorts what you see.
How could it not.
Q: Oh, shit.
A: Oh shit indeed.