Bang on a Can

Show Him Some Lub is a confessional piece. The All Stars have a "rock star" element in their persona, but are not confessional themselves. Things that rock usually are confessional. For me the biggest issue in a person's life is ethnicity and how they play it, not race. Acknowledging race is acknowledging a whiteness, a cartel whose membership has changed much. In 1900 Jews, Greeks and Italians would not be counted as whites. I prefer to focus on ethnicity. To be white is to live as if that's always been so. While chromatically this may be irrefutable, the circumstances of many white ethnicities' paths tell more complex stories. The Irish and Chinese, now more socially mobile, worked as migrant laborers. Every ethnic group has faced adversity here, and seeks liberation from it. The thing we share is that there is a date, in our past, future or present where liberation was, is, or will be achieved.

I asked the All Stars a series of leading questions about their ethnicities: the name and birthplace of their maternal grandmothers, what their ethnic affiliations were, and when they thought that ethnic group would live or began to live in a discrimination-free America. When Martin Luther King talked about "the mountaintop" that he might not get to himself, he was locating a date somewhere in the future. It wasn't simply a nod to his own mortality; he was saying it might take a while. One All Star correctly understood what was afoot, and answered the question of ethnic affiliation with the word "Gay" and gave a date in the future for his group's freedom. I assume other bands playing the same piece would have different answers. Or, if a band member did some research on their ethnic history, the date could change. And we're only a Supreme Court ruling away from someone's Liberation Date moving forward or backward. I also asked for the names of their favorite music, and times when they got wet in public, and in the ocean. That's a lot of stuff to know about a person.