The talented Emily V. Gordon, cohost of the delightful gaming podcast The Indoor Kids and recently the manager of the NerdMelt comedy space in Hollywood, yesterday wrote a post on her Gynomite! blog in which she calls attention to a possible disturbing trend in the recruitment practices of the KKK.

It’s barely more than a sentence: “In my own hometown, the KKK is putting lollipops alongside their stupid flyers in people’s driveways. Fucking ridiculous.” Gordon linked to a gallery posted by imgur user crick3t4.

Under the image at the top of this page, crick3t4 wrote, “My daughter found this at the end of our driveway, candy and hmmmm.” The paper inside the bag is pictured below.
 

 
Gordon hails from the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina, and the area code in the leaflet, 336, corresponds to the Winston-Salem area too. So if you live near there, tell your children to beware of intolerant white men bearing candy.

 
1969’s brilliant Hot Buttered Soul made Isaac Hayes famous as a soul singer, completing his transition to stardom from his past as a behind-the-scenes songwriter and producer. (Did you know that he co-wrote Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man?” That alone would qualify him for eternal exaltation even if he never did anything else.) 1971’s immortal Shaft soundtrack made him indisputably an icon. How do you follow that up? With shitloads of hubris.

It was Dino Woodward who came up with the “Black Moses” tag. “Dino said, ‘Man, look at these people out there,’” explains Isaac. “Do you know what you’re bringing into their lives? Look at these guys from Vietnam, man, how they’re crying when they see you, how you helped them through when they was out there in the jungle and they stuck to your music. You like a Moses, man. You just like Black Moses, you the modern-day Moses!”

“Somebody got wind of that and when I opened in Philadelphia at the Spectrum, [in front of] eighteen thousand people, Georgie Woods, who was a local radio personality and a promoter, introduced me that night. He said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you the Black Moses of the music world—Isaac Hayes,” and the whole place stood, people just screaming and it caught on. A writer for Jet magazine named Chester Higgins did an article on me and he used the term Black Moses, and then [Stax Records’ creative director] Larry Shaw had the savvy to capitalize on it and entitle the album Black Moses.

“I had nothing to do with it. I was kicking and screaming all the way. But when I saw the relevance and effect that it had on people, it wasn’t a negative thing. It was a healing thing, it was an inspiring thing. It raised the level of black consciousness in the states. People were proud to be black. Black men could finally stand up and be men because here’s Black Moses, he’s the epitome of black masculinity. Chains that once represented bondage and slavery can now be a sign of power and strength and sexuality and virility.

—From Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records by Rob Bowman, 1997

Though that’s a LOT for an artist to carry on his shoulders, Hayes did it. And not only was Black Moses successful at cementing Hayes’ status as a symbol, it was an artistic and marketplace success as well. Moses was Hayes’ second double-LP of 1971, his second consecutive release to spend several weeks at #1 on Billboard‘s R&B album chart, AND his second consecutive Grammy winner. Who else has released two double-albums in one year that both went on to become classics? I can’t think of anyone. (Also, Hayes pulled that feat decades before he adopted the tenets of Scientology. Suck on THOSE chocolate salty balls, L. Ron.)

But if you’re going to assume the mantle of Black Moses, not only does your album have to be excellent, the cover needs to be at least memorable if not iconic. But Stax’ covers of that period were not so hot.

Ever since he had come to Stax, Larry Shaw felt that the company had severely lagged behind in its cover art department. The nadir for Shaw was David Porter’s Gritty, Groovy And Gettin’ It LP, released in February 1970, where a naked Porter was pictured with an equally naked female partner from the armpits up.

“To me,” confesses Shaw, “it was just a nasty presentation of an artist humping some chick. The disrespect that the designers of it had for the artist and the music was not necessary. It was their translation of guts. It was not appropriate.

Stax artwork had improved tremendously since Shaw, with help from former Bar-Kay Ron Gordon, took over its direction. With Black Moses he outdid himself, designing what has to be the most elaborate album package for a black artist up to that point. The two records were encased in a regular cover that portrayed Hayes from the neck up, shrouded in a caftan against a backdrop of endless sky. The cover clearly signified the notion of Hayes as Moses in the Middle East. Enveloping the regular cover was a multi-panel graphic that unfolded into a cross shape four feet high and three feet wide. Here was the same image of Hayes as Moses, but now it was a full body shot with the artist at the edge of a large body of water.

—Bowman
 

 
A four foot cruciform Isaac Hayes! I wonder, in how many homes did that hang along with an actual crucifix? In how many instead of an actual crucifix? The 2009 CD reissue, charmingly, reproduces the foldout—underwhelmingly but understandably at CD size. That’s certainly better than the first CD version from 1990, which made no attempt whatsoever to address the fact that the album sported one of the single most badass covers of all time.

Enjoy this Isaac Hayes bio/tribute video, produced for the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, TN.
 

Cast photo of Hee Haw, with Jimmy Riddle up front in overalls

Eefing is one of those things I encountered a few times in my childhood and immediately buried in my subconscious, knowing there was no way I could explain it to anyone without older Appalachian-raised family members. If I had to give a brief description, I’d probably go with “a hundred-year-old Appalachian vocal music technique of percussive gasping, hiccuping, and fart noises.” Praise Jesus, we now have YouTube, and you can just press play and hear for yourself!

Below is a supercut of the absolute f’ing master of eefing, Jimmy Riddle, spliced and remixed, creating a sort of surreal intensity. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
 

A longer version of Jimmy’s description of eefing can be found here.

Jimmy enthusiastically eefed it up on many an episode of the redneck-themed variety show, Hee Haw, the only secular television my evangelical grandparents watched when I was growing up, besides sports and daytime soap operas. (Hee Haw was, ironically, primarily created by two Canadians and a New York Jew.) Jimmy’s accompaniment (and indeed the only accompaniment I’ve ever really seen with eefing), is usually the manual percussive slaps we call “hambone.”

In 1963, in one of the weirder moments American ethnomusicology, a black singer named Joe Perkins apparently became enamored of hillbilly eefing, and released a novelty single featuring Jimmy’s talents. “Little Eeefin’ Annie,” with its “Uncle Eeef” flipside, was actually a minor hit. (Alvin and the Chipmunks released “Eefin’ Alvin” that same year.)

Below you can hear and see Joe Perkins perform “Little Eeefin’ Annie” on a local Nashville R&B show called Night Train, which aired from 1964 to 1967. The program was made by black producers for black audiences, and videos like this one capture how receptive black audiences actually were to hillbilly music, a fact that often goes overlooked in our popular narratives of music history. The second song Perkins performs is also weird as hell. It’s called “Runaway Slave,” and it’s a love song that uses chattel slavery as a romantic metaphor (Nobody could ever accuse the guy of playing it safe!)
 

 
Lest you get impression that eefing is a noble art form, denigrated by the rednecksploitational Hee Haw money men, but held in solemn reverence by Appalachian people, let me reassure you, I spent a large portion of my childhood with my Appalachian grandparents, and on the rare occasion we encountered eefing, it was intended to evoke laughter.

What I’m saying is, eefing is… an acquired taste, and no one will think you a classist cultural chauvinist if you can’t make it all the way through the supercut. And no one will be offended if you laugh at it, either.

Hambone, however, that shit is deadly serious!

“Anthropologist Kayonga Kagame of Kinshasa University” (Actor Frank Oladeinde)

Purporting to be an episode of “Other Countries, Other Customs: Kayonga Kagame Shows Us The World,” a production of the fictitious All African Television network, Darkest Austria (“Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich) is a pitch-perfect 1994 mockumentary produced for Austrian TV. It’s an audacious comic gem, in the same league as Look Around You and one of the funniest, most original things I’ve ever seen. Really clever, a minor masterpiece even. Certainly you will have never seen anything quite like it.

Darkest Austria is simultaneously a satire of National Geographic documentaries—they get the reverse condescending colonial tone down perfectly—as much as it is a send-up of Austrian culture, which is pretty… uniformly white. Monolithically so. The idea—brilliantly realized by writer/director Walter Wippersberg, a celebrated author of children’s books—was to get his countrymen to see themselves, their rituals and local customs as outsiders would see them. I’m guessing this is viewed as some kind of TV classic in Austria. It must be. It would hardly be possible to make something like this anywhere else!

As the on-camera host, ethnologist Kayonga Kagame explains, doing cultural research on Anglo-Europeans for the first time has many pitfalls, notably the delusional way the white man regards himself:

“The white man’s tendency to indulge in narcissistic self-analysis makes ethnographic research in Europe very difficult.

There is not one psychological or social phenomenon that has not been examined in scores of books.

As soon as the Europeans have written up their theories they start to believe in them. If you read these works of egocentric self-justification, you risk being taken in by the elaborate style in which they’re written and by their seemingly logical arguments. It is easy to end up thinking like the white natives that a curved line is straight, nonsense makes sense and the weird is normal.

If you want to keep a clear head avoid all white self-interpretation and rely on your own common sense.”

When the All African Television documentary team wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps, they are perplexed by such “patently useless activities” as bike riding for pleasure or mountain climbing, which is viewed as complete lunacy until they conclude that it’s a cult. Oktoberfest’s gluttonous goings-on are seen as Christian rituals, with beer steins and heaping plates of chicken replacing the wine and communion wafers. Money is termed “magic paper” and bemuses the visiting ethnologists. The activity called “skiing” where the local people line up to be chair-lifted to the top of a mountain only to slide down it and then repeat this over and over again all day long is seen as a symptom of an epidemic regression to infantile behavior.

When I first saw Darkest Austria I liked how it referred to an earlier program and assumed this was just a trope that allowed for the African documentarians to be “returning” to the Alps and to make it seem more real, but in fact, the film is not a one-off, there actually was an earlier film, Das Fest des Huhnes (“Festival of the chicken”) but sadly, I wasn’t able to turn up one dubbed into English on YouTube.
 

Hattie McDaniel and Fay Bainter
 
Ah, award shows! Those infamously schlocky and monumentally affected parades of self-congratulation! Often we’re left wondering how such talented actors can come across so plastic on stage, but Hattie McDaniel’s acceptance speech for her 1939 role of “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind is truly moving.

Gossip columnist Louella Parsons wrote:

“Hattie McDaniel earned that gold Oscar by her fine performance of ‘Mammy’ in Gone with the Wind. If you had seen her face when she walked up to the platform and took the gold trophy, you would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had when Hattie, hair trimmed with gardenias, face alight, and dress up to the queen’s taste, accepted the honor in one of the finest speeches ever given on the Academy floor.

McDaniel, of course, won for playing a maid—one of the only roles a black woman could get at the time. And while her most famous scene may be cinching up Scarlett O’Hara’s bodice, the night promised a moment of recognition for her amazing performance. The heartfelt words of a groundbreaking actress are only half the story, though.

When Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta in 1939, all of the black actors were barred from attending. Producer David O. Selznick asked that an exception be made for Hattie McDaniel, but MGM advised him not to because of Georgia’s segregation laws. Clark Gable threatened to boycott the Atlanta premiere unless McDaniel was permitted to attend, but McDaniel herself convinced him to go.
 

 
There is a cut between Fay Bainter’s presentation of the award and McDaniel’s acceptance; this was the part where she had to walk up to the podium from her segregated table in the back: Even in Los Angeles, McDaniel and her date were required to sit at a segregated table for two, apart from her Gone with the Wind colleagues. Regardless, she delivers one of the most poignant speeches in Oscar history. In 2006, she was depicted on a United States postage stamp, wearing the dress and gardenias from that historic night.
 

 
You may have recently heard of Leith, North Dakota, the town of only 24 people currently at risk of Nazi takeover, because apparently the middle of the goddamn country now contains a rip in space-time, leading directly to Poland in 1939. An opportunistic white supremacist has been buying up land in Leith with the express intent of organizing a “white nationalist intentional community.” (I’d argue a lot of those already exist more discreetly in the gated communities of America, but I digress.)

Obviously, there has been some push-back from Leith citizens, including Bobby Harper, the one black guy in town, who’s clearly the most patient and laid-back man alive. But a town of 24 people isn’t the most intimidating mob, so friends and allies from nearby towns have shown up in support, most notably the above crew of Lakota and Dakota grandmothers, who stole and burned a swastika flag in protest. You have to admit, there is some serious irony in attempting to create a Nazi town in a state that shares a name with the indigenous people who lived there prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Check out the video below for Bobby Harper and his wife, who now live right behind white supremacists.
 

 
Via Last Real Indians

Nina Simone and her daughter, who recently caused a stir by criticizing the casting of Zoe Saldana as Simone in a bio-pic. Noting that a large part of her mother’s impact stemmed from her dark skin, wide nose, and full lips, Simone’s daughter asserted that casting another fine-featured, light-skinned woman simply reinforced the anti-black beauty standards Nina stood in defiance of.
 
A few seconds into this interview, I heard Nina Simone defend conservative Republican pervert and all-around dirtbag Clarence Thomas. Honestly, after that, I didn’t think there was anything else she could say that would shock me. But I was quickly taken aback by her response to the final question. The interviewer asks Simone (in French) if she sometimes has regrets of not pursuing a career in classical piano. Nina, who attended Juilliard, and was normally so confident and poised, breaks down. Her voice cracking, she admits quite frankly that she wishes she had become the first black classic pianist, and that she believes her unhappiness stems from the lack of that achievement.

It’s an incredibly vulnerable moment. Simone openly longs for a life that, in all honesty, would have reached far fewer people than the one she actually lived. She was notoriously dismissive of pop music, and openly maintained that classical music was a higher art form- a claim that ironically lead many to accuse her of adopting white artistic standards. It’s both heartbreaking and unfathomable to think that one of the most dynamic voices of black liberation, the woman who wrote “Mississippi Goddam” and “Young, Gifted and Black,” could yearn for any other legacy.
 

 
I couldn’t tell you what year it was when I bought Herb Jeffries’ Devil Is A Woman, but it had to be in the mid to late ‘90s, when I was neck deep in ironic acquisitions—mass-produced thrift store kitsch paintings, boxes of ‘50s vacation slides, vanity pressed gospel and lounge organist albums purchased for their endearingly cheap cover art but almost never listened to. I’m sure a fair many DM readers know that whole drill.
 

 
One night back then, a friend was over for company and cans of cheap beer, and he played DJ with one of my crates of weirdo records. Most of it was boring dross, as was to be expected, but soon enough, lo, a gem didst shine out for us. It was, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the aforesaid Jeffries LP, sporting a K-Mart price tag of 77¢, probably purchased for more like a quarter.
 

 
As soon as the needle settled into that thick old slab of Golden Tone Hi-Fidelity vinyl, a potent, red-blooded, exotic rhythm underpinned a horn section’s dramatic spy-movie stabs, and then the delightful vocalist entered the fray, crooning in a huge, unlikely wail and a surely fake, vaguely Mediterranean/Caribbean/somethingorother accent,

YOU’RE NOT HUMAN WOMAN YOU’RE A DEBBIL DOOOOOOOOOOON’T BOTHER MEEEEEEEE!

I’ve searched for a freakin’ hour, dear reader, and unless my Google Fu is just totally garbage today, the entire song is nowhere to be found online. The 30 second sample on Last FM is crystal clear and representative. Also there’s this:
 

 
The rest of the album is similarly filled with eye-widening delights, so there my friend and I sat, two newly minted fans of - who? Jeffries’s name is set in uncommonly tiny type on the cover, which may be just as well, as it’s misspelled. But off I went to find more, and so I did. Not only more recordings under his own name, but I learned that this odd pop singer was also pedigreed as the golden Jazz voice atop Duke Ellington’s very large hit “Flamingo.”
 

 
And it gets weirder - Jeffries initially became known in the ‘30s singing for the Earl “Fatha” Hines orchestra (he’s the lone surviving member of both Hines’ and Ellington’s bands), and improbably parlayed that into a career as a singing cowboy in low-budget western films with all African-American casts. Well, all African-American save for Jeffries himself, whose background, in reality Irish/Sicilian unless he’s still bullshitting, was a matter of some chicanery throughout his career, and it seems like no two bios are in exact agreement on the matter of his ethnicity. His astonishing passing himself off as black in everyday life during the segregation era - how that might sit in relation to blackface performance is a discussion I’d love to hear from people better informed on such matters than I - earned him the nickname “The Bronze Buckaroo,” from the title of one of the films. This film, in fact.
 

 
Per his Wikipedia biography, Jeffries discovered his birth certificate in 2007, learning then that his birthdate is September 24, 1913, making this performer with a crazy back story a centenarian as of today. And so we salute and congratulate Herb Jeffries on his 100th birthday. Here’s a short documentary celebrating his career, showing him spry as a damn kitten and in full possession of his faculties even in his nineties.
 

 
In just a few days all of Germany will decide between the Christian Democratic incumbent chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Social Democratic challenger, Peer Steinbrück. (Germans sensibly schedule their elections for the weekends, when people don’t have to deal with workday commutes and so forth.) Merkel is overwhelmingly likely to win, the polls tell us.

Last month the Italian chocolate company Ferrero decided to capitalize on election fever by releasing a politics-themed commercial in order to promote their white chocolate kisses (called Küsschen) that has irritated more than a few observers. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the concept is a little bit like McDonald’s McRib sandwich; the point of the commercial seems to be that the little white chocolate kisses—emphasis on “white” here—will stick around for good, i.e. they’ll stop being a seasonal product. Something like that, anyway. The ad was created by M&C Saatchi.

In the commercial, a package of white chocolate Ferrero Küsschen is giving a political address in a large hall packed with lily-white and faintly Aryan Bürger (citizens). I scoured the commercial for a nonwhite face, but I failed to find any. I say “faintly Aryan” but in fairness most of the people I saw have brown hair—perhaps M&C Saatchi was anticipating the outrage the commercial would cause? It’s pretty creepy either way, it’s just so many smiling white faces.

“Dear friends!” cries the cute little box. “We all have one common wish, to make the country more delicious! We want white Ferrero kisses for ever! And because friendship is no minor matter (kein kurzer Trend ist), we demand—white nut stay! and now everybody: White nut stay!” The crowd chants: “White nut stay!” (In the original German, the phrase is not quite grammatical, and it sounds virtually identical to the sentence “White must stay”) The voiceover intones: “Germany votes white! White Ferrero kisses, now available forever!” As the commercial ends, a poster unfurls reading “Germany Votes White.”

Cue one gigantic facepalm.

Where to begin? For reasons I needn’t detail here, racial purity is quite obviously an extremely touchy subject in Germany—indeed, perhaps it’s a touchier subject in Germany than any other place in the world. Germany since World War II has behaved much better on tolerance issues, but xenophobia is a persistent problem in Europe generally. The depiction of a political rally full of enthusiastic Germans emphasizing the virtues of whiteness—I mean, you don’t have to be Dr. Siegfried Kracauer to detect the uncomfortable symbolism lurking within.

One irritated person wrote on the Facebook page dedicated to the ad campaign, “I hope the advertisers behind this dumb campaign get a chocolate kiss stuck in their throats, and there aren’t any Nazis around to dislodge it.” Ouch. Tahir Della, Chairman of the Initiative for Black Germans, notes that the very fact that this commercial made it as far as the airwaves “shows how subtle racism can be in Germany. It’s recognizable to people who are affected by it but the majority doesn’t catch on so quickly.” He points out that Germany is becoming more diverse but still largely regards itself as a homogeneous country, a dynamic that we also see playing out in the United States, if only in the minds of some of our less evolved citizenry.

Ferrero has pulled the commercial. In an email statement, Ferrero offered the following CYA blather: “It is important for us to clearly stress that we are strictly against any form of xenophobia, right-extremism or racism. . . . All of our assertions were purely about white chocolate—and without xenophobic intent. We regret that the commercial was misunderstood and the product messaging was otherwise construed.”

“Misunderstood,” right . . . it’s really the fault of everyone else who isn’t willing to cut the Ferrero company a break. Ah, how about making a commercial that doesn’t obviously brush up against such sensitive issues?

In an odd twist, the commercial appropriates (not very cleverly, in my opinion) the best-known slogan of the most famous multicultural candidate in the world. In the commercial some of the audience members are holding signs saying “Yes Weiss Can” (Yes, White Can), which is an obvious nod to President Obama’s 2008 slogan “Yes We Can”—but it doesn’t even rhyme or anything, and weirdly mixes German and English. (It should be noted that President Obama is wildly popular in Germany, as he is in most of Europe.)
 

 
via Spiegel Online

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
 
The video below is an excerpt from the 1970 documentary, Finally Got the News. The film tells the story of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, a radical organization of black auto workers from Detroit. Throughout the 60s, many working class black youth of Detroit began to radicalize in response to unemployment, police brutality and underfunded schools and housing. Culminating in the violent 1967 Detroit Riot, the growing civil unrest of black Detroit was quickly repressed by authorities (Mitt Romney’s father, Governor George W. Romney, sent in the Michigan National Guard, while LBJ sent in the US Army). The League was formed to fight back.

In his book, A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit, Michael Hamlin recounts his first-hand experiences as one of the leaders of the movement. Hamlin was one of the prime movers behind both the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

“As the League was organized, we realized that to organize people in the community we would need many communication tools.  Two major goals of the “Black Manifesto” were to raise money to establish black printing and film operations.  We had started a newspaper and Black Star Publishing was working on two books.  We were speaking in the community, writing articles and giving interviews to radical magazines but our audience was small.  John Watson was interested in making films that could be widely distributed.  We established Black Star Productions.

Obviously the group was media savvy. Like the Black Panthers, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were primarily informed by Marx and Lenin. Unlike the Panthers, the LRBW actually focused their militancy on labor, and seizing the means of production in the workplace. Their concerns were largely ignored by the United Auto Workers and its largely white leadership, in 1968 the LRBW organized a wildcat strike (a strike that doesn’t go through official union channels) alongside Polish women workers, to protest a speed increase on the assembly line. Most subsequent firings targeted black workers, though many were rehired.

The organization followed the trajectory of most radical groups on the American left—splits, splinters, rebirths, disbands, reformations, etc—and no longer exists, but with Detroit in perpetual free-fall, it’s damn near impossible to organize labor when there are no jobs. Regardless, they remain an inspiring moment in radical history and an insightful voice of radical ideology.
 

 
You can see Finally Got the News in its entirety here.