Reality Theater: A Profile of Sarah Jones
Wright, Kai
Reality Theater: A Profile of Sarah Jones By Kai Wright Illustration by Yuko Shimizu Ghetto daffodils: That's what Sarah Jones sees. Some people walk through neighborhoods like Manhattan's...
...But the culture that grew up out of the South Bronx has grown into a multibillion-dollar global industry, in which four corporate record labels control 85 percent of the market...
...But you can just like take it home with you and just ruminate...
...Her acclaimed debut show, Surface Transit, blended the lives of a cast of characters trying to make it in New York City, from a bigoted Italian cop to a Caribbean immigrant auditioning for MTV...
...midnight ghetto daffodil like the ones in the poems about Spring, right...
...And those folks who control not only the means of production but what the content is have the power to influence public opinion in a way that I don't think anything else does...
...Kai Wright is a contributing editor of City Limits magazine in New York City...
...She portrayed a teenage black girl waiting at the bus stop, getting harassed by men ogling her...
...That means entering into what she calls a "crazymaking wrestling match" with the barons of the airwaves...
...What a terrible thing that we've been conditioned to immediately respond to certain people's accents as demeaning or embarrassing...
...Because of her style-a character artist doing poignant, comedic skits-many compare her work to that of people like Lily Tomlin and early Whoopi Goldberg...
...You can check out more of his work at www.kaiwright.com...
...But what's most striking about Jones is her romance with unvarnished urbanity-an appreciation for fully human portraits of city life, warts and beauty marks alike, that is more commonly associated with artists like Spike Lee and Richard Pryor...
...Yet the music is now a far cry from what it was when artists like Public Enemy and KRS-One ruled the charts with songs railing against political and economic oppression of black neighborhoods...
...A rich Haitian homebuyer recounts the racism she endures from her realtor...
...On stage Jones morphs into the young woman, with a fast-talking Dominican accent and gum-popping bounce...
...She's already churned through one TV opportunity when she abandoned her role on an MTV program after one episode...
...Meryl Streep is producing Bridge & Tunnel and is among Jones's loudest backers...
...The show is a fantasy open mic night in Queens, and Yajaira recites a poem...
...This is Jones's fourth show...
...You can take that same kind of packaging-the same black machismo, or in the case of women just the cool, that idea of black cool that goes back to jazz-and insert into that package a message that reinforces some really problematic notions of who urban people are, who people of color are," Jones argues, slipping into one of her MC characters...
...So if I go to the executives at the television network," she explains, "and say I want to push the envelope and all this, and they say 'Well, we'll only give you 50 percent of the leeway you want or you're not going to get on television,' I'm going to take the 50 percent...
...The FCC fined a Portland station for playing it, calling it "patently offensive...
...Hip hop has barreled past crossover status and into market dominance for youth culture, not just in big cities but in suburbs around the country...
...As the kid of a family that has immigrants in it, I know there's a long history of people saying, 'Get rid of your accent'- well, unless of course you're British, in which case you're dignified...
...I know the title is a little bit esoterical...
...Your Revolution" sought to reclaim black cool...
...The New York City native is a product of it, and she lets its aesthetic pulse throughout her work...
...We are meant to laugh at the immigrants and black folks she portrays as often as we cry for them...
...Jones is perhaps best known for her fight with the Federal Communications Commission over her 1999 song "Your Revolution...
...The track's slow, easy pace, mixed with harsh, biting lyrics, evoked Miles Davis...
...Jones wants her audiences to question these values and to consider what role they play in cementing America's race, gender, and class hierarchies...
...But she's finally starting to get noticed by showbiz's big names-and big money...
...Jones instead notices people like Yajaira Hernandez, one of a kaleidoscope of characters she conjures in her latest one-woman show, Bridge & Tunnel...
...It's a hugely important cultural movement that has a far-reaching influence on young people in particular and culture in general that is unparalleled," she muses...
...Yajaira is a fifteen-year-old, first generation immigrant from the D.R...
...One unfortunate lesson is that you've got to take what you can get and move on to the next fight...
...That's something Jones is sick of...
...She's toured India, performing an early version of Bridge & Tunnel...
...Jones is also talking with Bravo about a new television series...
...The piece picks up demeaning lyrics about women from hip hop songs played on the radio every day and splices them through a Gil Scott-Heron-inspired poem...
...But rather than railing against the powers-that-be, she subtly illustrates how our common fight against them binds us...
...Jones abandons progressive pathos for honest humanity...
...I am not interested in only preaching to the converted," says Jones, who is launching what sometimes sounds like a spiritual quest to move from the small stage to the small screens of America's living rooms...
...One of her funniest skits is in Surface Transit, where she portrays a young rapper at a recovery program for MCs addicted to rhyming...
...She's performed for the United Nations, depicting women around the world facing discrimination...
...Calm, sassy, and self-aware, the young ghetto daffodil shows how she's growing into a street-smart woman when she responds by breaking into "Your Revolution...
...a working class East European Jew, who is not at all comfortable with her grandson's love of hip hop ("Now he wants me to call him Funkmaster Sherovsky" she gripes), remembers getting the same sort of welcome seventy years ago...
...Nah . . . she dips and sways with breezes bullet raindrops forecast for her red-brick hi-rise is mostly crowded...
...She's learned from that experience-and has taken some advice from progressives like Streep and Tomlin...
...So what are all these value judgments that are attached to our supposed warts...
...Some people walk through neighborhoods like Manhattan's Washington Heights, populated by poor Dominican migrants in gloomy high-rises, and they see blight...
...From their accents and their bungled English to their often off-kilter understanding of American culture, her characters represent the hodgepodge of sights and sounds that make up a place as diverse as Queens...
...It turned out the network wanted a heavy dose of the sort of comedy she refers to as "bitch, nigger, shit," and Sarah Jones does not do "bitch, nigger, shit...
...And that, says Jones, has turned what was once an empowering thing into a modern-day opiate of the black masses...
...The name of it is called Midnight in Harlem Feels Like Noon," Yajaira begins, haltingly, trying to wrap her multilingual tongue around the King's rigid English...
...Jones has the sort of textured love affair with urban environs that we rarely see today...
...Nothing else...
...Yeah, I'm a drug slingin' nigga.' And you begin to create that as your cool...
...She shares their sharp progressive wit and is making a name for herself as heir to their feminist performance-art thrones...
...Jones sued-and won...
...Jones loves hip hop...
...There are some people who cringe as soon as I start speaking because their context on accents on an immigrant is negative," says Jones, riffing in her own rapid-fire diction...
...All of this work has been overtly political and, not coincidentally largely outside the mainstream...
...But Jones did her own repackaging of that macho cool when she performed it as part of Surface Transit...
...Your revolution will not be you smacking it up, flipping it, or rubbing it down Nor will it take you downtown and humpin around Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs...
Vol. 68 • June 2004 • No. 6
