RTP-area local music and culture

[Bryk <chscene AT bryk.com>]

So this whole zipadeedoodah thang got the best of my curiosity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South


Wow! I had no idea that Disney has not released Song of the South on  
video in the U.S. (although I swear I watched a 16mm afterschool  
print in the school gym around 1979. Mind you, this was suburban  
Toronto.)

Disney has clearly internally debated over releasing it as a bottom- 
line-versus-potential controversy issue, and no doubt there will be  
much gnashing of teeth over how racist it is, or on the backlash  
right whether or not it even _is_ racist.

I suspect young American kids today would see right through it to  
what it is--smug, anachronistic nonsense, albeit with a bunch of  
enduringly great tunes. (Does anyone care to debate the intractable  
damage our generation is doing by parking kids in front of the TV to  
watch DVDisneytainment on auto-repeat until they can recite Ariel  
like Shakespearean soliloquy?)

I guess what I find most awesome about all of this is realizing that  
Song of the South has remained in video circulation in Asia and  
Europe all this time!

So, while Americans engage in asinine culture warfare as to whether  
or not it's a racist film, EVERYWHERE ELSE we've pretty much  
internalized the glaring fact that America was and remains a racist  
culture. Even though it's no longer as blatantly offensive as in the  
Jim Crow era (ie. when the leading actor of this film did not attend  
the premiere since he couldn't rent a room anywhere near the  
theatre), America was and is built on fundamental economic inequities  
that are self-perpetuating, whether or not those are set to a  
complicitly racist soundtrack (and I find the Gangsta/MTV Cribs world  
to be a transparent minstrelsy, cf. "Bamboozled")

Therefore we foreigners can smugly enjoy the movie on its own dubious  
merits.  Pass the popcorn!

dB