Bill Ivan
Blog Assignment #2
The way that Mary Pattillo immersed herself in the middle of Chicago in order to better obtain a proper viewpoint of the neighborhoods inner workings was inspirational to me. I really identified with her slow process she took in order to get involved. She refused to take sides and kept her bias to the side. She creates an image of the Black Middleman. The Black Middleman is an important class for the entire African American culture.
And then there was Marvin Snease. Marc Anthony Neal paints the picture of the late Marvin Snease and the way that he interacted with the African American population. He wasn’t allowed on popular hip hop radio because he was too raw and too real. He appealed to a larger adult audience, touring and being real. Its hard to say just how much he played a role in underground African American arts. It seems to me that while some of his songs were raw, he was extremely skilled. I mean from what I heard he was better than most of the songs that are on popular radio and they were probably only as explicit. I understand that his lyrics were not meant for children to hear which is why they wouldn’t play it on the radio. “I wanna lick you till you come”, surely a quite suggestive and descriptive lyric for radio I can see why it’s not being put on television. I, not being someone generally associated with the Chitlin’ Circuit, was very impressed with the way that Marvin was able to work around popular radio. I feel like it’s kind of like being black listed in the 50’s but instead of not being able to perform he just went on tour and made it a success. The way that Marc Anthony Neal, critic, reviews Snease is by first saying that he will not be a part of the great soul singers I think that any adult who looked back at his career would be able to recognize his greatness.
Mary Pattillos black middleman has conflicts with “the man”. The man to Mary Pattillos black middleclass was decidedly the white man. This is actually funny to me as a white man because when I think of “the man”, I think of a rich white male too. Pattillo states that, “The person in the middle, she’s food, speaks at least two languages in order to translate”. Pattillo, I believe, is not referring to French and English or Spanish and English or anything like that; she is referring to the speech of the people, sometimes seen as uneducated or unrefined or Ebonics. I argue however that Ebonics/ the speech of the people are more intelligent and expressive between the people speaking it than the people who can’t understand realize. The middleman is important so that they can express the ebonic concerns to “the man”. While writing this I feel almost ignorant but this is my interpretation of how Pattillo means, “Two languages”.
Marvin Sneases “the man” was public radio. The problem is that he was too raw for public radio and he was happy to be too raw. He was real; I mean his first big hit was called “Ghetto Man”. You can’t get more real than Marvin Snease; he talks that natural language, the unrefined language. He lived in an unrefined world where he could tour the United States and present his views unhindered. There is a connection between Pattillo’s Black Middleman and Marc Anthony Neal. Marc Anthony Neal is portraying the seedy, raw, preposterous, sex machine that is Marvin Snease in a positive light, since Neal is a BLACK MIDDLEMAN. Neal is a direct example of the Middleman that Pattillo describes. Neal is a journalist, a critic of culture and art, obviously not someone who is stuck in the grimes of society. Neal is doing the work of other middlemen before him, portraying a side of the art that people in the middle and upper class don’t get to see because of their limited views. Its middlemen like Neal that enable us to discover the gold of an underground artist like Marvin Snease.
Mary Pattillo also refers to the littleman, not necessarily someone who is poor but it could also be someone who is, “the worker in a big firm, the disaffected citizen who doesn’t vote because politicians never listen, or the shortest kid in the class”. Even someone like myself could be seen as the littleman, while others could see me as the man. I think that it is easy to say one set of people are one way and some people are uneducated so they can’t communicate intelligently but I believe that if we can have more middlemen in the middle we can understand the masses in a better way.
