Thursday, March 11, 2004

We Shall Overcome

An interesting piece by Jeff Chang in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on the Da Capo Best Music Writing series. For me, it was nice to see the selection process explained. I'm still not quite sure how my essay made it into the 2003 anthology. Paul Bresnick, the series editor, emailed me last summer to congratulate me and to ask me to sign a release form. I did so, then kept my mouth shut - partly convinced if I drew attention to myself they'd have second thoughts.

Chang also boldly addresses the types of music written about and the gender/racial makeup of contributing writers in the series. But these sentences on the 2003 book leaped out at me:

Sixteen of the 20 essays were by males, 3 by women (1 was from the Onion). Half the essays were about rock. Only 2 were about hip-hop. None of the writers were of color.

Huh? My race has always been an ambiguous matter, starting with my last name. A typical situation: a waiter at the Bryant-Lake Bowl Monday night looked at my credit card and asked: "Are you Hawaiian?"

Plus I'm 100% Finnish; which makes me 25% Siberian, i.e. Asian. Some studies show this Siberian portion in Finns to be up to 35%. So why did I get lumped in with all the white folks?