I live in Memphis, so summertime makes me think of heat. Hot heat. Sticky heat. Unrelenting heat. Oppressive heat. The kind of heat that you can’t escape and you can’t recover from, despite the fact that you spend most of your time between May and September mad-dashing from one air-conditioned place to another air-conditioned place. The kind of heat that turns everyone’s hair into a hot mess and that makes everyone smell slightly funky all the time. Bad funky, not good funky.
I know there are people who say they love this kind of weather, but I don’t believe them. The thing about cold weather is that you can always put on more clothes, but there’s just no relief from summer heat like the kind that besieges Memphis in the dog days of August. You can only take off only so many clothes. And then you’re just there, naked and sweaty and still helplessly, miserably, wretchedly hot.
The other thing about this kind of summer heat is that it has real, palpable psychological effects. It can make you irritable, tired, impatient, short-tempered. The constant fight against Nature just to stay cool is exhausting. It has a way of fraying the nerves, sharpening the prickly edges of other people, melting away the soft cartilage of politeness that normally cushions the space between us, and making insufferable misanthropes out of even the most long-suffering of souls.
“Summer Heat,” if that were a proper name, would be the uncredited antagonist in Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing, and it was arguably one of the most skillfully-employed nonhuman characters in cinematic history. Like a lot of people my age, Do The Right Thing holds a privileged place in my early understanding of just how polyvalent and ambiguous, how messy and unpredictable, how potentially violent, possibly liberatory “politics” can be.
In 1989, when Do The Right Thing was released, Rodney King had not yet been beaten. South Central Los Angeles had not yet burned. O.J. Simpson had not yet taken to the highway in a white Bronco. President Bill Clinton had not yet called for a “national conversation on race.” Emphasis on systemic and structural forces had not yet become a part of regular, non-academic people’s parlance when we talked about societal ills and tried to distinguish symptoms from causes.
In 1989, the advent of social media was almost decade away; the widespread uptake of it two decades away still. Eric Garner, Philando Castille, and Sandra Bland had not yet been hashtagged. Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice hadn’t even been born. The Ferguson uprising had not yet inspired (or infuriated) the people, and it had not yet instigated a million fights– between citizens, neighbors, and often family members– about the legitimacy of the simple and true claim that “Black lives matter.”
In 1989, we had not yet begun trying to forward the myth of the “postracial” age. (Apartheid was still official state policy in South Africa, and would remain unofficial state policy in the United States, Israel, Brazil, India, and elsewhere throughout the world for decades to come.) Ta-Nehisi Coates had not yet written “The Case for Reparations.” Michelle Alexander had not yet written The New Jim Crow. We had not yet fully reckoned with the consequences of a number of race-based (and racist) practices and policies that had been wearing away at the fabric of our polis since at least the 1960’s: the so-called “War on Drugs” (with its mandatory minimum sentencing mandates, which resulted in soaring mass incarceration rates). redlining, widespread abject poverty, increasing levels of income disparity, suffocating and incapacitating personal debt, violent overpolicing of minority communities, and voter suppression.
And then, 1 year and 33 days ago, we flung open Pandora’s Box. We unleashed a whole new order of racist pathologies that certainly could have been anticipated in 1989, but were not anticipated by most people, even in 2016. Self-avowed White nationalists are running for office in record numbers this year.
The electorate, which has become more and more demoralized, sick, indebted, and afraid over the last forty years, is pissed off. Extremists, for better and worse, have been emboldened. The whistle of the political kettle is deafening. All bets are off.
It doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to look around America in 2018 and feel the simmering heat. The hot heat. The hopeless heat. The backbreaking, exhausting, maddening, infuriating heat. The heat that provokes. The uncredited antagonist “Summer Heat” of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing that, even if it didn’t directly kill Radio Raheem, certainly put a match to the powderkeg of activist outrage. Just as it did in August of 2014, and July of 2016, and May of 2017.
All this was a long way around to saying that summertime reminds me of Do The Right Thing, and Do The Right Thing reminds me of Public Enemy‘s “Fight the Power” (which Spike Lee commissioned as the theme song for his film) and so, by transitive property, “Fight the Power” reminds me of summertime.
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death. We got to fight the powers that be.
Runners-up for #30DaySongChallenge, Day 2:
- Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” (Because in the summer 2014, when Sophie Osella and I were filming for our documentary Working in Memphis, I literally heard this song Every. Single. Time. I got in the car to drive down to or come home from Beale Street.)
- The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around”
- Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” (Because,also in the summer of 2014, I developed a whole theory about what I call the “Memphis” version of “Mustang Sally”– you can read it here— while riding around in a van with my former colleagues Charles Hughes and Hamlett Dobbins. Love those guys.)
- Outkast’s “B.O.B.” (I don’t know why. It just does.)