Book Review: The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, by Charles M. Blow (2021)

 

Author Charles M. Blow, and the cover of his 2021 book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.

I’ve been a fan of Charles M. Blow’s op-ed pieces for The New York Times for a few years now. When I heard last summer that he had a book coming out, I was looking forward to reading it. (Late last year I read Blow’s memoir Fire Shut Up In My Bones, which I reviewed here.)

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, puts forth Blow’s ideas about how Blacks in the United States can gain more political power. In short, Blow thinks that Blacks should move to the South and attempt to consolidate their political power in these Southern states. The cities Blow specifically mentions are: Shreveport, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta, Columbia, Charlotte, Richmond, Baltimore, and Wilmington.

Blow writes about wanting to launch a movement of Black resettlement that would in some ways reverse the trend of the Great Migration of Blacks who moved North during the 20^th century. It’s an interesting idea, and a migration that might indeed end up consolidating Black political power, as Blow posits.

Blow’s call for migration would presumably lead to a block of Democratic Senators from the South. However, a fact that Blow never mentions in his book is that Donald Trump won more Black voters in 2020 than he did in 2016. To cite just one example from the exit polls, Business Insider’s data shows that Trump won 6% more of the Black male vote, and 5% more of the Black female vote than he did in 2016. Yes, Biden still trounced Trump soundly among Black voters, but by a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton did. That doesn’t mean that Republicans will suddenly start winning the Black vote, but it will be interesting to see if Republicans continue their gains among Black voters in the 2024 Presidential election, or if Trump’s gains in 2020 were just an anomaly.

The Devil You Know loses momentum during the book’s second half, after Blow has explained his theory. A review I read suggested that Blow might have written more about what is happening in these Southern cities right now. I think that’s an excellent point, and it’s something the book lacks.

I’d also be interested to learn more about Blow’s experiences as a Black man living in New York City. There’s a bit sprinkled throughout the book, and then a few more details on the last page or two, but I would have been interested in reading a whole chapter about Blow’s time in New York City.

The Devil You Know makes a compelling argument, and it will be interesting to see if Blow’s ideas gain traction in the years to come.

Book Review: Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion (2021)

 

The front cover of Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, 2021. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Back cover of Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, 2021. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a collection of Joan Didion essays that have never appeared in book form before. It’s not recent work: 6 of the 12 essays date from 1968, and the most recent essay is from 2000. As much as I like Joan Didion’s writing, I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for Let Me Tell You What I Mean to exist as a standalone book. It’s a collection of leftovers, essays that easily could have been included in previous Didion collections like We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, or the Library of America collections of Didion’s work. But publishing Let Me Tell What I Mean as a standalone book certainly gives these essays higher visibility than they would enjoy as part of a larger collection.

The design of Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives the game away, that this is a slim volume stretched as far as possible to make it an actual book. First, there’s the size of the book itself: just about 5x7 inches, when a more typical size for a hardcover would be 6x8.5 inches. Because of the book’s small size, there are fewer words per page than usual. The length of the book is expanded by including a whopper of an Introduction by Hilton Als—35 pages long! You might want to read the introduction after reading the essays, since Als excerpts most of the great lines.

There are strong moments in the 6 essays from 1968, which were published in The Saturday Evening Post as a column titled “Points West” that Didion shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In the first essay, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” Didion highlights an issue that is very much with us today: “the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way.” (p.3)

“Pretty Nancy” is a withering takedown of Nancy Reagan, then First Lady of California. It’s a great example of the New Journalism technique of close observation. Didion doesn’t intrude into the story, but she makes it clear that she thinks Nancy is an empty vessel.

“Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles,” is a look at the annual reunion of the 101^st Airborne, and presents the reader with a glimpse of men who fought in World War II, and whose sons were then fighting in Vietnam. It’s a poignant examination of loss, and probably my favorite of the 1968 essays.

For me, the highlights of the book are the 3 essays that deal with writing: “Why I Write,” “Telling Stories,” and “Last Words.” Didion writes very well about the mysteries of writing fiction. I’d be fascinated to read her thoughts about writing non-fiction, but she doesn’t discuss that here.

“Last Words” is a 1998 essay about Ernest Hemingway, and it’s clear that Didion is a studied devotee of his “less is more” style. “The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source. If we bought into those sentences, we would see the troops marching along the road, but we would not necessarily march with them. We would report, but not join.” (p.103) This seems to be a maxim of Didion’s as well, as it exemplifies the kind of cool detachment that she brings to so many of her essays.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a good example of Didion’s style, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to her work—read Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album first.

Movie Review: The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, a documentary Directed by Frank Marshall (2020)

 

Poster for The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, directed by Frank Marshall, 2020.

The Bee Gees, late 1970's. Talkin' 'bout chest hair, talkin' 'bout crazy cool medallions. Left to right: Robin Gibb, Barry Gibb, and Maurice Gibb.

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a new documentary directed by Frank Marshall. It premiered on HBO in December of 2020, and it’s a highly entertaining look at the group’s music and lives. The Bee Gees were three brothers: handsome and immaculately coiffed oldest brother Barry, and fraternal twins Robin and Maurice. (I never knew that Maurice’s name was pronounced Morris, I always assumed it was pronounced More-eeece, like Maurice Chevalier.) The film inevitably focuses slightly more on Barry, as he’s the last surviving brother, but there are still lots of archival interviews with Robin and Maurice. We get a sense of each brother’s personality, and Maurice’s ability to be the connector between Robin and Barry, who sometimes clashed. (Robin left the group for a while in 1969-70, and Barry and Maurice recorded the album Cucumber Castle without him.)

It’s fascinating to me how many great musical groups have featured siblings: the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, the Bee Gees, the Carpenters, Heart, Oasis. (I’m sure there’s probably a million I’m missing.) As Noel Gallagher says in the movie, “When you’re singing with a sibling, it’s like an instrument that no one else has.” That was certainly true for the Bee Gees, as their high tenor voices blended to create gorgeous harmonies. I can’t imagine adding the stress of sibling relationships to the strain of being in a band, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why several of the aforementioned groups have had such strained relationships.

This sounds kind of stupid, but I didn’t realize how young Maurice and Robin were. They were 17 years old when they sang “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “To Love Somebody,” and “Massachusetts.” I know that all 3 brothers had been singing and performing together from the time they were children, so they were certainly very experienced by the time they had their first hits, but still, it’s amazing how good they sounded at 17. And they sounded like themselves. Even if you only know the Bee Gees from their disco songs, if you hear those early records, you can still tell it’s the Bee Gees. That’s something that continually amazes me about singers is how a voice can be like a fingerprint, it’s like, “Yup, that’s Robin Gibb.”

The film tells us the story of how Barry Gibb discovered his trademark falsetto during the recording of “Nights on Broadway.” Producer Arif Mardin wanted someone to scream during the fade-out. Barry opened his throat and out came a powerful falsetto. Soon the brothers were writing songs around Barry’s falsetto. It’s curious to me that it took Barry so long to find his falsetto—after all, all 3 brothers had very high tenors. I guess they never tried singing along to Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons? Joking aside, Barry’s falsetto gave the brothers another tool in their formidable musical arsenal.

It’s fun to watch the brothers’ comeback in the mid-70’s as they fully embraced the new disco sounds coming out of the gay, Black, and Latin clubs. You could argue that the band was co-opting the music of minorities and making it more mainstream by making it straight and white. But I’d argue that in 1975 the Bee Gees weren’t a commercial juggernaut cynically co-opting disco. Their embrace of disco and funk really started with the album Main Course, released in June of 1975. Their previous album, Mr. Natural, released in June of 1974, had peaked in the US at #178. The group hadn’t had a Top 20 album in the US since 1969, and they hadn’t had a Top 10 single in the US since “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” in 1971. The Bee Gees were not exactly riding a commercial wave when they embraced disco.

There’s a great sequence in the movie where the engineers explain how they made a tape loop of a drum sample from “Jive Talkin’” to create the beat of “Stayin’ Alive.” In the mid-1970’s, this was a very laborious process, all done by hand. Now you could probably create that drum loop in 10 seconds.

The film also shows how the Bee Gees became a symbol of everything disco, as they had a phenomenal run of success during the late 1970’s, highlighted by the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album, which spent an incredible 24 weeks at Number 1 in the US. The Bee Gees even had their own plane for their 1979 tour, a Boeing 720 customized with their logo on it. But as the backlash against disco gained traction in the media, it seemed as though people took their frustrations out on the Gibb brothers. Disco faded from the mainstream, even as the brothers continued to write hits for other artists. The Bee Gees ended with Maurice’s death in 2003, although Robin and Barry did perform together several times before Robin’s death in 2012. Barry’s latest project is an album of duets with country singers titled Greenfield, The Gibb Brothers Songbook, Volume 1. It went to Number 1 in the UK, and the success of the Gibbs’ brothers continues into the 2020’s.

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a fascinating portrait of 3 brothers who made unforgettable music together.