Road trippin' and listening

Bakersfield x Beyonce

The first time I drove to Texas, I was 10 years old, riding in the backseat with my best friend Sally, her mom Donna at the wheel. It was a big deal, my going on a multi-state road trip without my family, and I recall my mom having some tense conversations with Sally’s mom before she finally let me go.

Silk Degrees, by Boz Scaggs, had been out a couple of years by then, and may or may not have been one of the few cassette tapes in the car, but driving across the desert with ‘Lido Shuffle’ is one of my top memories from the trip. That and making an unplanned pit-stop in Bakersfield to see an orthodontist.

I remembered this bit a couple of weeks ago, when Kwame and I were in Bakersfield at the start of our road trip to Texas to witness the solar eclipse. The capital city of Kern County is also the ‘Oil Capital of California,’ home to multiple large oil fields, and the hotel we were staying at had an old surface oil pump in its parking lot, a relic of the properties former uses.

When I saw the pump I immediately flashed back to that early road trip. At age 10, having never seen such a thing (and blissfully unaware of the consequences of all that oil industry), I was excited when we first caught a glimpse of the fields from the interstate. I was leaning over the backseat, my mouth resting on my arms, and when I went to point the insect-like pumps out, my Snoopy watch caught on the wires of my braces, and yanked it partway out. Whoops.

There was no put the wire back in without professional help, so Donna pulled over at the next exist, called my mom from a phone booth, then looked up a local orthodontist. Fifty dollars later, we were back on our way. “What can I say? /(What can I do?) Ooh, what can I do?/(What can I say?) What? …”

This year, we left Bakersfield without having to see an orthodontist, and while I thought fondly of Silk Degrees, my nostalgia about listening to Boz was eclipsed by the reality of new music from Beyonce. The day we left for Texas was release day Beyonce’s much anticipated Cowboy Carter. I’m a fan of the fact of Beyonce more than I’m an avid listener of her music; however, I was curious about her new project both for its content as for its serving as a litmus test for so many people’s biases around race and gender.

As the comments started flying on social media, I was amazed at how many (white) people I knew who just ‘didn’t get it’, or were stuck on whether it was ‘country’ or not, or bent on discrediting Beyonce. To my ear, listening as I drove across Arizona, New Mexico, and Beyonce’s home state of Texas, Cowboy Carter was a deep, sprawling, artistic, personal and cultural statement - as much ethnomusicology as entertainment, an exploration of country music roots and roots in Black music, and influences more than (modern genre) ‘country’ music. I also heard the sound of someong having what was likely a lot of fun in the recording studio when you have every resource available. I heard a great singer, an ambitious, often brilliant artist. I was excited by what she did. It made for a helluva soundtrack for a long road-trip and made me think bigger about the possibilities of making music, of making art.

Can we stand for something?
Now is the time to face the wind
Now ain't the time to pretend
Now is the time to let love in

— Beyonce, ‘American Requiem’