The Rolling Stone interviews
Page 29
Then, if you happen to be born into a black, single-parent family in the inner city—impoverished, disadvantaged, along with all the shocks and traumas that man is heir to—by the time you go to school, if you’re not a Hasidic or Sikh child who’s learned to lick the honey-coated letters (wherever the written tradition is important), you’re already completely resistant to learning. And the more poverty and greed of the Reagan-Bush kind around you, the greater the attraction of the streets—the instant gratification of crack, television, fast food.
Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant”—you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?
In the introduction to your book ‘The Infinite Variety of Music’ [1966], you wrote: “At this moment, as of this writing, God forgive me, I have far more pleasure following the musical adventures of Simon and Garfunkel or of the Association singing ‘Along Comes Mary’ than I have in most of what is being written now by the whole community of ‘avant-garde’ composers. . . . Pop music seems to be the only area where there is to be found unabashed vitality, the fun of invention, the feeling of fresh air.” What do you think of rock music today?
Boo, hiss! I’ve become very disappointed with most of it. In the Sixties and Seventies there were many wonderful musicians I liked. And to me the Beatles were the best songwriters since Gershwin. Recently, though, I was at a party where there were a lot of kids in their twenties, and most of them didn’t even know songs like “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “She Said She Said” or any one of ten other Beatles masterpieces. What is that? And if I hear one more metallic screech or one more horrible imitation of James Brown, I’m going to scream.
When I was in Spain several years ago, I remember watching huge rings of people in the square of a Catalonian village, joining arms and dancing sardanas to a type of band called a cobla—dances with twenty-seven counts, dances of such complexity that I couldn’t learn them. Talk about innate dance and musical competence! Those people just did it. Like those drunken Greek sailors who come into a tavern and start dancing in fives or sevens . . . and the band doesn’t know that it’s playing in fives or sevens. That is extraordinary music—much more exciting than almost anything the current rock world has to offer.
I want to ask you about your refusal to accept an arts award from President Bush and to attend a dinner given by John Frohnmayer, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in response to the latter’s decision to withdraw the agency’s sponsorship of an exhibition about AIDS—a result of congressional legislation against government financing of supposedly “obscene” and overtly political art.
The last time I went to the White House was during Jimmy Carter’s administration, when I was honored along with Agnes de Mille, James Cagney, Lynn Fontanne and Leontyne Price, among others—a good bunch. I love the White House more than any house in the world—after all, I’m a musician and a citizen of my country—but since 1980 I haven’t gone there because it’s had such sloppy housekeepers and caretakers.
With regard to the Jesse Helms–inspired restrictions on federal funding, the worst thing concerns the removal of politics as an acceptable subject of artistic works. Because then you’d have to forget Goya, Picasso’s Guernica, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Forget everything. And as for “obscenity”: Almost the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art would have to come down—Mars fucking Venus, the Rubens collection of large, fleshy ladies with wet thighs and the naked ephebus from ancient Greece, Hermes with his cock up innumerable inches! And the picture of little Jesse Helms running around the Senate as if it were the boys’ lavatory of a high school, showing dirty pictures to the other senators, is so disgraceful that I cannot ever forgive him.
We had eight lovely, passive, status quo, don’t-make-noises years with Ronald Reagan. The fights I had with my mother! “Don’t you dare say a word against our president!” she’d say to me. She’s now ninety-one years old—God bless her!—and she’s still bright and witty. She doesn’t like the family name being dragged in the mud; and when she saw my name in the newspaper every day regarding my refusal to attend the White House luncheon awards ceremony given by Bush (or the Frohnmayer dinner), she’d call me up to say, “You’re on the front page of the New York Times.” And I’d say, “Hold your water, baby: I was also on the front page of the Washington Post.” And she’d exclaim, “Well, that’s horrible!” So I informed her that some of my most conservative Midwestern friends sent me congratulatory messages . . . people who voted for Reagan!
We now have a black governor in Virginia, the right governor in New Jersey and Dinkins in New York City. That’s terrific! In the past I’ve met and argued, in pessimistic fashion, with Helmut Schmidt, Ted Heath and François Mitterrand about the mindlessness, carelessness and heedlessness of the Reagans of the world. But I think there’s a turnaround coming—look at what’s happening around the world from Central Europe and South Africa to Haiti. And I’m looking forward to Jesse Helms being routed in the near future.
People like William Buckley Jr., William Safire and George Will think of me as a kind of “liberal” fool. Basically, a liberal is a progressive who wants to see the world change and not just remain stuck in the status quo. So, yes, I’m a liberal, but one who believes in people, not in some “thing.” And I’ve never felt more strength and confidence.
What you call “liberal” was once termed “radical chic” by Tom Wolfe in his infamous article about the party you gave in 1970 to raise money for the Black Panthers.
Wrong on all counts! What happened is that my wife hosted a meeting in our New York City apartment for the American Civil Liberties Union in connection with its defense of thirteen Black Panthers who, at the time, were imprisoned in the Tombs without the right of due process. At our reception were one Black Panther and two pregnant Black Panther wives; and Felicia gave the reception in order to raise contributions for the ACLU defense fund and to allow invited friends of ours to ask questions. My wife had requested that the press not cover this event; and Charlotte Curtis—then the editor of the women’s page of the New York Times—arrived (simply as an individual, we thought), accompanied by a young friend of hers in a white suit. He turned out to be Tom Wolfe. So what am I to do? You can’t beat the legends. Fortunately, legends eventually die. And maybe I can help this one on its way.
SPIKE LEE
by David Breskin
July 11, 1991
As far as your image, people think of you as a hustler. Now, we know that everybody has to hustle to make it as an artist. . . .
Do people accuse Madonna of hustling? I’m asking.
It’s got a different spin with you. In other cases, it’s “So-and-so is hard-working,” but with you it’s—
Self-promotion.
Are you conscious of that?
Look, I know there are two sets of rules. So, that’s just the way it is. I just have to keep doing what I do best—and know what I have to do—and pursue that. I can’t let other people dictate the agenda.
Do you still see your function as a filmmaker as one of “shedding light on problems” so they can get discussed and understood?
Not every film. It depends on the subject matter. I think we start to get in trouble if we expect the artist to have answers all the time. For instance, School Daze was the examination of petty, superficial differences that still keep black people apart. To me, we black people are the most ununified people on the face of the earth.
The same differentiations exist within a lot of cultures.
Yeah, but they ain’t in the shape that we’re in. We don’t have the same liberties as other people.
There’s a tension, maybe a fundamental contradiction between unification and diversity. How do you deal with that?
I think Jewish people are very diverse but they are very unified, on a lot of things. You talk about Israel: Jewish people are unified on the state of Israel.
Y
ou’ve never heard people argue like Jews argue about what to do about it, or how to deal with Israel.
I know Jewish people are more unified than black people, I know that.
Why do you think that is the case, historically?
I don’t want to get into the whole Jewish-black thing.
I’m not asking about Jewish-black relations, I’m asking why you think Jews are more unified than blacks.
As far as America is concerned? Because I don’t think Jews have ever been taught to hate themselves the way black people have. That’s the whole key: self-hatred. That’s not to say that Jewish people haven’t been persecuted. I’m not saying that. But they haven’t been taught to hate themselves to the level black people have been. When you’re persecuted, it’s natural for people to come together; but when you’re also taught at the same time that you’re the lowest form of life on earth, that you’re subhuman, then why would you want to get together with other people like that? Who do you hate? Yourself.
‘Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,’ your thesis film, brings up the problem of economic self-reliance. What kind of economic—
I don’t really have a program. All I’m saying is that black people for too long haven’t really thought of owning businesses. That’s the key. Because when you own businesses, you have more control and you can do what you want. That was one of the key things about Do the Right Thing—the whole thing about Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, between Sal and Buggin’ Out. Buggin’ Out rightfully felt that Sal should have the decency to at least have some black people up on the Wall of Fame, since all his income is derived from people in the community who are black and Hispanic. Sal had, to me, a more valid point: This is my motherfucking pizzeria, and I can do what I want to do. When you open your own restaurant, you can do what you want. Of course, now Buggin’ Out countered by trying to organize a boycott of Sal’s, which has always been one of our ways of fighting that type of thinking. But in the case of Buggin’ Out, it didn’t work.
A boycott takes patience, organization, determination—
And more than rhetoric, and that’s something that Buggin’ Out didn’t have.
It’s sad that the fight is over a symbol when the economic realities are so much more significant. You can spend all your time trying to boycott a Korean deli in Brooklyn—
Black people should have their own fruit and vegetable stands in Flatbush. I’d be crazy to spend a year out there boycotting that one Korean place! That doesn’t make any sense to me.
How many people have asked you, “Does Mookie do the right thing?”
How many people are there in New York City?
And what’s your answer to them?
Black people never ask that. It’s only white people.
Why’s that?
Because black people understand perfectly why Mookie threw the garbage can through the window. No black person has ever asked me, “Did Mookie do the right thing?” Never. Only white people. White people are like, “Oh, I like Mookie so much up to that point. He’s a nice character. Why’d he have to throw the garbage can through the window?” Black people, there’s no question in their minds why he does that.
Yeah, but why you do something and whether what you do is right are very different things. I know why he does it but—
But only white people want to know why he does it. I spoke at twenty-five universities last year, and that’s all I ever got asked. “Did Mookie do the right thing?”
What do you tell them?
I feel at the time he did. Mookie is doing it in response to the police murdering Radio Raheem, with the infamous Michael Stewart choke hold, in front of his face—also knowing this is not the first time that something like this has happened, nor will it be the last. What people have to understand is that almost every riot that’s happened here in America involving black people has happened because of some small incident like that: cops killing somebody, cops beating up a pregnant black woman. It’s incidents like that that have sparked riots across America. And all we were doing was using history. Mookie cannot lash out against the police, because the police were gone. As soon as Radio Raheem was dead, they threw his ass in the back of the car and got the hell out of there so they could make up their story.
What about attacking Sal?
I think he likes Sal too much. For Mookie, in my mind, Sal’s Pizzeria represents everything—and that’s why he lashed out against it. It was Mayor Koch, it was the cops—everything.
That’s “the power” to him?
It’s the power at the moment. But when it’s burnt down, he’s back to square one, even worse. Look at all those riots: Black people weren’t burning down downtown; they were burning down their own neighborhoods.
You end up with no place to have pizza; that’s the net effect of the whole action. You haven’t stopped the police, you—
That’s the irony. Because that’s the only way they can really fight. They felt very powerful at that moment, but it was fleeting.
Now Malcolm X said that whether you’re using ballots or bullets, your aim has to be true, and you don’t aim for the puppet, you aim for the puppeteer. Isn’t everybody on the corner there in ‘Do the Right Thing’ aiming for just a puppet, and not a very powerful puppet at that?
That’s true. But Mayor Koch is not in front of them. Rarely do you get a chance to actively engage the enemy, and the closest there was, was Sal’s Pizzeria.
One of the disturbing things to me about the reaction to that film is that people focused on the burning of the pizzeria and not the death of Radio Raheem, and that there might be a reason for that other than just hog-calling racism.
The thing I liked about Do the Right Thing, especially for critics, is that it was a litmus test. I think you could really tell how people thought and who they were. And if I read a review and all it talked about was the stupidity of burning the pizzeria, the stupidity of the violence, the looting, the burning, and not one mention of the murder of Radio Raheem, I knew exactly where they were coming from. Because people that think like that do not put any value on black life, especially the life of young black males. They put more importance on property, white-owned property.
I’m going to assume that that’s true, that those people don’t put a value on black life. But let me suggest another reason why the burning of the pizzeria becomes the centerpiece of the picture and not the death of Raheem. I think there are aesthetic, as opposed to racial, reasons. Two reasons: One, Radio Raheem is not a fully drawn character—he’s a caricature. He’s a type, albeit a new type for many people. But the audience doesn’t really develop an empathy for him.
I don’t know if I agree with that. I think a life is a life.
It is, but Mookie’s life would have meant more to the audience, because they knew Mookie better. The second reason is that the burning reads as the climax of the film in terms of the way it’s shot and structured.
What you’re saying are both good points. But I’m talking about people that don’t even think about the death of Radio Raheem. What’s important to them is that the pizzeria was burnt. For them, Sal is the cavalry. Fort Apache among savages. That’s who their interest is with.
One of Malcolm X’s favorite quotes was by Goethe: “Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.” If Malcolm was watching that scene go down, would he have felt fear because it was ignorance in action?
[Pause] He might. But he would have perfectly understood why they were doing what they did. See, Malcolm never condemned the victim. And the people who were burning down the pizzeria were the victims.
Let’s talk more about black film. You said, in the documentary on the making of ‘Do the Right Thing’: “The No. 1 concern is to try to be the best filmmaker you can be and not be out there bullshitting, saying you’re a black filmmaker.”
I think it holds true more now than when I said that.
Are there people out there bullshitting, saying, “I’m a black filmmaker, love me!”
Not “love me,” but a lot of people are getting deals now, to make films, and I’m not begrudging anybody, but we’ll find out the contenders from the pretenders.
Do you still want to be seen as a “black” filmmaker, or a filmmaker first, who happens to be black? It’s a subtle but important distinction.