Art Neville might just be a prophet.

"Sons and Daughters" (1990)

We think we're safe at home
With our bumper stickers
Saying: "Just say no"
We give up a few freedoms here and there
In the name of a squeaky clean America

Now they have got us hypnotized and hysterical
Now they have got us hypnotized and hysterical
Screaming for blood and justice
Now they have got us hypnotized and hysterical
Screaming for blood and justice

They show us the faces of hatred
Over and over, a new one every week
Could be Manuel Noriega
Could be Ayattollah
Any old scapegoat'll do

The young men will be our sacrificial lamb
Pro-choice, no choice
We are sending our sons and daughters
To this slaughter
Pro-choice, no choice

Slogans mean nothing to a young man
Facing 352 years hard labor in Angola
For a crime he did not commit
It's freedom of speech
As long as you don't say to much

You can't stop running water
You can't kill the fire that burns inside
Don't deny our flesh and blood
Don't forsake our sons and daughters

It's freedom of speech
As long as you don't say to much
I think we're all running
Thinking that we can't hide
I think we're running
Trying to get away

But sooner or later we gonna realize
We gonna meet up with the truth
Face to face...

It almost means as much today, if not more, than when it was written.

I got going on this as I ran across an article in the Austin Chronicle this evening. I was looking at a number of my wife's pictures from her recent trip to New Orleans, and it got me to thinking about how the music of the Neville Brothers and my discovery of New Orleans culture will forever be engrained in my consciousness.

The Nevilles were never too shy about injecting politics into their music. Their activism seems to be deeply rooted in their spirituality.

If you were impressed by Aaron Neville's take on "Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman, you owe it to yourself to hear his take on "With God on Our Side" or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" by Bob Dylan (both of these are on their wonderful disc Yellow Moon, which is also replete with funky hooks straight from the second line, huge brass lines, with Art Neville's booming baritone and keyboard stylings). Their originals on Brother's Keeper include the song fragment which I posted above.

And here's a lengthy series of excerpts from that Chronicle article. Now a resident of Austin, TX, Cyril Neville lays down his take on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

(read more...)

"What happened during Katrina was not an evacuation as much as a roundup and a forced displacement," insists Neville. "It was the height of arrogance, greed, conceit, and disdain for a people who you think are less human than you. As that wind blew through New Orleans and that forced migration took place, that was the end, or at least a lot of people want it to be the end, of African-American political power in New Orleans."

Why it's considered such a stretch for anyone to connect the dots between a boldfaced legacy of oppression and gentrification of black neighborhoods in New Orleans and the marginalization of poor blacks post-Katrina defies common sense. Life in the Big Easy has always been dictated by barriers between white and black. It's no secret that the economic disparity between the two communities serve as a study in violent inequality. Of course, rich whites have been eagerly debilitating poor blacks in New Orleans like a favored pastime. Ku Klux Klan sympathizer David Duke almost became governor of Louisiana only 16 years ago. To anyone paying any attention, no degree of racism in New Orleans should be considered surprising under any circumstance.

"The carving of New Orleans wards for political and economic gain is something that goes back at least to the Forties," says Neville. "At one point, Claiborne Avenue was one of the richest African-American thoroughfares in the United States. So they put the Claiborne overpass through it. There were two rows of oak trees where you could walk in the rain and not get wet on Claiborne Avenue. People picnicked there, people had birthday parties, christening parties. Every carnival, that's where the Mardi Gras Indians would make a straight shoot from uptown all the way downtown and back. Naturally, they tore down all the trees, put an overpass through there, and killed that entrepreneurial area of the city.

"That's the other point that a lot of people missed in what I was saying. It's hard to put into words what it was like on a day-to-day basis living in New Orleans as an African-American, because it's a proven fact in this country that no matter how high you climb up the social ladder or how many degrees and how many letters you have behind your name, if you're black, you're black, and regardless of what you think of yourself, you can get broke down right quick. You could be on your way home from a great meeting – you just did a great thing for your company and everybody is happy. You're in your Porsche on top of the world and then you get pulled over and called the big N and brought back to reality of where you are and who you are to the society that you're coming up in.

"A lot of those people that we saw in the Dome and at the Convention Center had been written off a long time before Katrina. A couple weeks before the storm hit, the oldest masking Mardi Gras Indian, Big Chief Tootie Montana, died at a meeting at the New Orleans City Council protesting how the chief of police and the city itself had been treating our culture, which since 1841 had been happening out in the streets from neighborhood to neighborhood."

Big Chief Tootie's dramatic passing not only foreshadowed the post-Katrina mayhem at the Convention Center, it put into stark relief why Mardi Gras Indian traditions are so threatening to the white establishment of New Orleans. It's the union of African-American and Native American movements that could potentially set back decades of divide-and-conquer imposed by the white establishment. These are the insights proffered by Mike Davis' recent article in The Nation titled "Who Is Killing New Orleans?" which Neville calls a detailed look into an agenda to transform his funky hometown into a homogenized casino waterfront.

"The powers-that-be only want a certain element back as far as black people are concerned," maintains Neville. "But the spirit of New Orleans is African and it ain't going anywhere. I guarantee any convention they have in that Convention Center and anything they have in that Dome will be haunted. People already don't understand that the Dome was built on top of a whole neighborhood. They've got a whole African-American cemetery underneath that Dome. Louis Armstrong's house was taken to the dump, chopped into pieces, and set on fire and a new parish prison was built on where he grew up."

Taking issue with rosy optimists that equate the survival of the French Quarter as signifying the eventual resurrection of the city as a whole, Neville's own diverse musical endeavors paint a more accurate picture of New Orleans as a center of Creole culture. Historians concede that the port city birthed jazz by way of pioneers including Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden, but that's merely the tip of the chocolate-and-cream snowball. If Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino weren't central figures in ushering in the rock & roll era, then throw that music history book in the trash where it belongs. By way of uptown's Dew Drop Inn alone, which from 1945 to 1970 hosted a Zulu's share of ground-breaking performances, a rich roux of blues, gospel, R&B, and funk thickened first and foremost for locals rather than tourists.

"The music that people come to New Orleans to hear wasn't nurtured in the French Quarter. It was nurtured in the lower 9th Ward and in the 8th Ward, and the 7th Ward, and the 6th Ward, uptown in the 13th Ward and places that you would call the ghetto. But it was our ghetto, so we were cool with it. In fact, Irma Thomas recently made a comment that I'm glad she made because if I said it everyone would be jumping down my throat. She said, 'New Orleans didn't make us, we made New Orleans.' That's truly the way I feel."

1915 Deslonde St., New Orleans, LA 70117, approx 1000' E of the breach at the Industrial Canal Floodwall, Apr. 2006

"You can't stop running water."