Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Baltimore Culture Wars: A History

Some cultural background could help rebuff intimidation during the current battle of Battle of Baltimore.

Songwriter Randy Newman dealt with Baltimore as urban hellhole back in 1977 on his Little Criminals album.

He'd seen the marble stairs and the urban blight, just like the politicians and journalists who ride the Acela train past Baltimore on their way to D.C. but continue to ignore it.

In her sullen, woeful, jazzy tone, she emphasized the refrain "Baltimore / Man, it's hard to live." Have we forgotten what Simone verified as the unchanging hardship of Baltimore lives with nothing left to lose?

A young black filmmaker and Prince fan told me, "Before the controversy, black folks in Baltimore didn't a damn about Freddie Gray." Prince exploited the controversial deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray by first referencing Ice Cube's great colloquial "It Was a Good Day," then going all Black Lives Matter-commercial.

Filmmaker Barry Levinson became known as "The bard of Baltimore" when his autobiographical movie Diner appeared in 1982, sentimentalizing the arrested-development experiences of the city's young white males - working-class guys aspiring to what politicians fetishize as "The middle class." Fellow Baltimore native John Waters had worn worn the "Bard" moniker previously, for his outré satires - Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Female Trouble - in which he dared to tout Baltimore denizens, such as the drag star Divine, who aspired to validate their outsider, underground status.

The Battle of Baltimore isn't exactly a battle of words, between President Trump's tweet about conditions in Baltimore and Representative Elijah Cummings's race-card-by-tweet defense, but a cultural contretemps suggestive of something more insidious: This sinister propaganda game is really a new culture war in which negative inference is used to distract from the civic issue.


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/baltimore-culture-wars-history/

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