The ESAD Archives and Bloomington’s Racist, Misogynist 90’s Music Scene
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7nLd5TlrYVQ7gqMUFP1mPg
I just took a stroll through the ESAD archives. It’s on YouTube if you haven’t see it yet. It’s an amazingly awesome video archive of B-town bands from the ’90s. It was a scene for sure. I was there. I participated in it, but missed a lot of it too. I was on drugs for the first half and was a bit of a hermit for the second half when I lived in an ashram and didn’t get out much. There’s some really good music there and some truly great talent. I was in Clay Boy. Our video is sort of embarrassing to me, but it’s also charming in it’s own way. We were basically the only band to approximate the Chili Peppers’ funk side of “alternative” music. Pretty much everything else is punk/post-punk. Shout out to the Swing Rays though for doing their Stray Cats thing!
Here’s the thing though. It’s 90+ percent male and 99+ percent white. Which is kinda funny considering how rebellious we all probably thought we were being. Did anyone else know they had created a white boys only club? Well if not, please consider this a gentle call-out. I’ll be honest. I actually didn’t realize that’s what we were doing until much, much later. I was totally oblivious. I just thought I was playing music with my friends. But my inherent bias from being raised white in a white racist environment could only have led me there.
I probably even had a more diverse experience than most of us. I had lived in west Africa as a baby and my parents had many friends who weren’t white. I was raised to reject racism, but wasn’t given the tools to recognize racist systems or my own inherent bias. Racism was taught to me as just harboring feelings of racial hatred. I wish I had been given an education in critical race theory, but I just wasn’t.
The ESAD archives represent a very narrow selection of music from the time and place it came from. I honestly don’t think the videographer meant create such an exclusive thing. I know him to be an anti-racist person who was an instructor with the Coretta Scott King Center. Years after these videos were made, I studied Kingian non-violent resistance to unjust authority in a workshop that he co-facilitated. And I know I’m not the only person from the B-town scene who played Black music with Black people. But why weren’t we getting our Black friends up on stage with us? For me, the only stages I shared with my Black friends were mostly at the university.
Anyway I made a decision a while back to stop recreating white boys only bands, and with rare exceptions have declined to play in them. But I’m not a full time performing artist. I’m a semi-pro at best. And I would never judge a professional musician for taking just about any gig to pay the bills. Music might actually be the hardest industry to make a living in. I’m just saying that some of us, starting with me, need to reexamine where we came from and what we’ve done. We need to face up to he harm that we have participated in creating. And if we want to live in a better future, a Beloved Community if you will, we need to do whatever it takes to get there. It’s not gonna happen on it’s own. We have to reach out across race and gender lines and extend a welcoming hand. And we have to stop recreating racist, misogynist systems.
Our position on those stages was and is a position of privilege, and it was always going to be us that needed to make the moves to diversify them. And it takes sacrifice. The stages aren’t becoming more numerous. They've been disappearing since the 90’s. And the pandemic has absolutely decimated live music. So yes, we need to invite people onto the stage with us. But I’m just doing the math here. If anything the opportunities appear to be shrinking, so if we seek justice and equity on stage, then some of us are going to have to step off stage and make way for others. We’re going to have to learn to feel comfortable being in the audience more. And if we want the few stages that are left to survive, then we’re going to have to show up and support live music. Music made by people that don’t look just like we do.
Music is Life
