I remember digging through my Dad's old blues records a few months after I bought my first turntables in 98, asking him what was good and what wasn't. The first one he handed me was an extraordinarily warped and well-loved copy of Oscar Brown Jr.'s Sin And Soul. I remember listening to the album in my bedroom, hearing the bouncy shrieking sounds through a haze of nasty old-record-static, and wondering how many times Dad had stayed up late doing the same thing with the same piece of vinyl.
This record is a freakin classic, hands down. Crazy and smooth and fun and horrifying and deep-- hillarious and catchy-as-hell songs about slave auctions and chain gangs and death and love and kids at the zoo. I bought the repress from Dusty Groove a few months later, and it's been one of only a few vinyls I've taken with me wherever I've moved.
Here's a track: "But I Was Cool"
A few years ago, I finally saw him in person-- he was singing "Bullshit", a song he wrote about the Iraq war, to a Not In Our Name rally at NYU. And then, last week, he passed away at 78.
The obituaries in the mainstream media have done a good whitewashing job on the man's life, with a self-congratulatory good-thing-America-has-moved-past-all-that-injustice-nonsense-from-the-60s attitude that makes me ill. To read NYT or WaPo, you'd believe OBJ did nothing post-1969 besides sitcom cameos. Zero mention that almost all of his performances in the final ten years of his life were at rallies protesting the War On Terror.
Here he is in 2002 on Democracy Radio:
Certainly, terror terrifies me, I don't want to be anyone's damn collateral damage, I don't care what the cause. But on the other hand, I want them to fight all the terror. Not just this perceived terror that scares Bush and his oil interests, but the terror that terrifies the neighbors in my neighborhood in Chicago Illinois, where the police will jump on you and the gangs have been organized to terrorize the communities.
So yeah! Let's have a war on all the terror, and let's have that be an intelligent war that the considers consequences! There are consequences of all these things we're about to do! And when you say 'either you're with us or against us'... that's too simplistic. And so somebody needs to speak up.
The squares are running it. And what we need is hip people. And by hip I mean Human Improvement Potential, that sees that the human race could get better, and not try to beat it down into submission.
Human Improvement Potential. Oscar Brown Junior, Rest In Peace.
Bonus track: "Brother Where Are You"-- OBJ remixed by fellow musicopoliticist, Matt Herbert
