Baltimore— Nina Simone
#365Songs: July 31st
Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Tryna find the ocean
Lookin’ everywhere
Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain’t nowhere to run to
There ain’t nothin’ here for free
Fifty years earlier, almost to the day, the river that runs through my hometown of Cleveland was so polluted it spontaneously caught on fire. This wasn’t the first time it had happened — or the last — but it was certainly the trigger event that attained national attention. I wasn’t born yet, but I lived with the ghosts of that burning river for my entire childhood. Back then, there was no script about Cleveland that didn’t include the reference. By the time I was old enough to understand the jokes — the mistake by the lake, as well as songwriter Randy Newman’s famous lyric “the Cuyahoga River goes smoking through my dreams” — the city was in deep depression: the factories closed, historic unemployment ravaged local life, and the downtown was so abandoned there were too few people who’d even notice if a new blaze started. For locals, the narrative shifted away from why a river would ignite and centered instead around how to win these polluting businesses back to the city.
Cleveland might as well be an island 700 miles in the middle of nowhere. Even though the city underwent a massive migration in the ’70s and ’80s, those who remained aren’t likely to abandon ship now. Just like in parts of the American South, there’s still a small town attitude even in the urban areas in and around Cleveland. Travel far — mostly in a car — but home is here. Always here. The loyalty is endearing, but with limited local and international industry there’s not much to do for those with broader aspirations. Underemployment breeds more underemployment, and a desire to do it the old way comes at the expense of attracting new industries. Why try something new when you can simply reopen the closed factories? The “this is the way it always was therefore it should be how it always is” mindset infiltrated just about every aspect of life.
Growing up there, a few things mattered more than others: sports, family, and tradition. What didn’t matter, at least in my small-ish, urban-ish suburb, was the world outside Cleveland. I played sports to fit in — and because I was naturally built to pull it off — but in my spare time I sat on the floor between library stacks, where nobody would ever find me, and I read books that made me question everything around me. The more I read, the farther I wanted to go.
I flew only twice before I was 23, from Cleveland to Orlando, FL and back. Basically, if we couldn’t drive there we didn’t go there. This was part a result of growing up in a blue-collar family — my parents were frugal and prioritized that one big family trip a year to Disney World or coastal South Carolina — and part lack of curiosity. If it works, keep doing it. That was my Mom’s way of thinking. One great trip to Myrtle Beach led to three more, not-quite-as-great trips back. Or least that’s how I see it now, 30 years later.
Waiting for a train
Drunk, lying on the sidewalk
Sleeping in the rain
And the people hide their faces
And they hide their eyes
’Cause the city’s dyin’
And they don’t know why
Oh, Baltimore
Let’s get back to Randy Newman — the singer songwriter who has interjected his raggedy-ass voice into far too many films you probably love. He has the sort of sardonic and satirical sense of humor that can often be mistaken for condescension and a lack of empathy. He fueled the “Cleveland is a joke” sentiment for decades with 1972’s Burn On, a song about the flammable river that still fuels the city’s less-than-desirable reputation.
Truth is, a lot of rivers start on fire. It’s called pollution, which is caused by greedy corporations and laissez-faire politicians who welcome profit at all costs. The true victims of this crime are the employees, who are stranded when those companies want cheaper labor overseas, and the entire population left to breathe, drink, and eat the bi-products.
Newman’s song, Baltimore, was released in 1977. His version in his voice feels like blasé commentary, as if those he wrote about were made of papier-mâché, incapable of suffering. Then, a year later, the great Nina Simone released her interpretation. She built a different world, a place so visceral you can almost feel the pavement against your cheek, drown in their shame and disappointment.
Ain’t it hard just to live?
Oh, Baltimore
Ain’t it hard just to live?
Just to live
Baltimore is Cleveland is Pittsburgh is Detroit is Milwaukee is St. Louis is everywhere in the Midwest, all these cities left behind by globalization and corporate greed. All these cities where, every four years, the DNC and RNC fight to call home in attempts to “reach” the ones who feel left behind. And to be clear, they have been left behind, and while a few too many did, in fact, become “deplorables,” perhaps Hillary Clinton could’ve saved us the path to Fascism by instead visiting those towns, acknowledging the existence of their pain.
Hillary Clinton was Randy Newman’s version.
So who will step forward as Nina Simone’s version? Kamala’s off to a good start, at least.
That’s the thing about most of us. On the hierarchy of social needs, we first need to be seen. From there, we can be understood. That’s how communities form, how movements spread, how change happens. Sadly, that’s also how Trump successfully built a cult.
Get my sister Sandy
And my little brother Ray
Buy a big old wagon
To haul us all away
Live out in the country
Where the mountain’s high
Never gonna come back here
’Til the day I die
Oh, Baltimore
Only 48% of Americans have a passport. That means fewer than half have ever left the country — and for most that also includes Canada and Mexico. On average in a given year, only 53% of Americans read one or more books. I’m not good at math, but those two numbers = this is all most Americans know: what happens in and around wherever they live. This part is anecdotal, but based on personal experience I’d imagine that the numbers within these percentages skew much higher in the South and Midwest, and much lower on the coasts.
In a great article in the MIT Press Reader, writer Alex Coles said about Nina’s version: “Simone’s ‘Baltimore’ is a paean to a city with deep personal and political significance. ‘Nina had a way of taking a piece of music and not interpreting it,’ says Simone’s long-term guitarist Al Schackman in Alan Light’s biography of the artist,’ but morphing it into her own experience.’ This is precisely what Simone does on ‘Baltimore,’ turning it into a love song to a city experiencing rapid, racialized socioeconomic decline.”
These are cities deserving of love songs, these places on whose shoulders so much of our economy and public services were built upon. And though the masses have become unsavory in their anger, sexism, racism, agoraphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and insurrectionist instincts….
Wait, I lost my train of thought, what was I talking about again?
Ain’t it hard just to live?
Oh, Baltimore
Ain’t it hard just to live?
Just to live
~
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