We are all L-Vis

IT'S AS old as American popular culture itself: the white boy playing Black music. Even today, in the post-Obama, "post-racial" world, it still manages to raise hackles. It's a story that's included such legendary performers as Al Jolson, Dave Brubeck, Buddy Holly and the Beastie Boys.

Kevin Coval may well be the latest incarnation of this complicated tale. He knows it, too. In his excellent new collection L-Vis Lives! Racemusic Poems, the Chicago poet takes the whole concept a few steps further--beyond the inequities in album sales and the cries of "poseur," nd into the head of one cultural transgressor. In it, he finds a wellspring of poignancy, humor, pathos and truth.

Coval's L-Vis is an amalgamation of Elvis (of course), Vanilla Ice and Eminem, along with tidbits from other similar artists. All three were or are white boys performing Black art. All three have publicly grappled with some very real demons. And in one way or another, those demons spring from the knowledge that, in Coval's own words, "something is terribly wrong."

In other words, it's those same basic burning questions whose answers seem stunningly simple and yet never, well, black and white:

there was apartheid at the schools. apartheid in the lessons we sat thru. nelson mandela was in america. his name was chuck d. his name was krs-one. what is a Black Panther? there is apartheid on the bus home. there is apartheid in the lunchroom. the sides of the city we don't visit. were told not to. there is apartheid on the television. bill cosby aside.

But, as Coval reminds us, "there was no apartheid in the music." Through a hundred pages, we're reminded of some brilliant and subversive moments in "racemusic" history. We're reintroduced to those days when "Joe Strummer points to the Future," those fateful shows in New York when the Clash told their predominantly white American fans to "shut the fuck up and listen" to the words of Grandmaster Flash.

We're taken through Rick Rubin's evolution from a young white art kid in NYC to one of hip-hop's most bad-ass producers. We're reminded (believe it or not) that Chuck D at one point attempted to sign Vanilla Ice. And we're reminded that the fascinating output of these stabs-in-the-dark at cultural transcendence can quite often finally provoke discussion over the one enduring divide in America that still dares not speak its own name.

All of this, though, is factual backdrop to L-Vis' own (semi-) fictional story. That it's somewhat archetypal doesn't take away from some intensely specific storytelling. From hilarious attempts at getting a fade haircut to ruminations on what to answer when the urban heads ask "where you from," getting to the soul of L-Vis' story is one down the deep fault line of race and culture in America.

Of course, this is all instinctual; there is no real "ideology" backing up the young rebel. It's more the gut feeling that the segregated suburban whiteness covers something that is very wrong with America. It may be an instinct, but it's right; even if L-Vis doesn't exactly know what he's right about.

THAT'S COVAL'S strength as a poet. There's no doubt that he's thought and read endlessly about the contours of race and racism in America. His head is no doubt filled with the ideas he's imbibed via everyone from James Baldwin to Tupac Shakur. What makes these pieces work and flow as poetry and as a narrative, however, is his ability to root their inherent intellect into a place of passion, sensitivity and righteous fury that is never anything less than completely organic.

If the reader didn't already know that Coval indeed shared L-Vis' overriding background--a white suburban kid whose basic alienation made him enamored of hip-hop--they'll certainly know it at the end. That all sounds a bit "meta," but in an age when Black presidents let innocent African Americans get legally lynched, maybe meta is the only way to do it.

Case in point: "holla for Troy Davis," a piece marking something of a halfway point in L-Vis Lives! Though the poem's subtitle is "after L-Vis reads the 3rd section of 'Howl'" (Allen Ginsberg's legendary work), this is clearly Coval speaking through L-Vis, giving voice to that moment when this whole "racemusic" issue becomes a lot bigger than baggy pants or being nice on the mic:

we're waiting for you
to come home and kick it and teach it
and be about it, cuz we are trying to
be about it and rally around you
as symbol, but you are person and flesh
and locked twenty-three hours a day in isolation
and we are here via train or car and some rode a bicycle
and what kind of leisure does that sound like
from the inside
but we're with you in county
despite the distance and hours of sunlight

As the world now knows, Troy Davis was executed on September 21. It was one week after L-Vis Lives! was officially launched. Clearly, the contradictions persist.

Coval also knows that both he and L-Vis have few answers to these contradictions. The book, urgent as it is, also is a humble attempt at "broadening the conversation." So even as it seemingly ends with that most stereotypical of images, L-Vis bloated on the toilet singing his "ode to painkillers," Coval takes a U-turn.

The book's final section is a suite for that most infamous of "race traitors" in post-9/11 America: John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban." As Coval points out, Lindh was born in the suburbs, loved hip-hop, read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He was, like so many others, a kid who saw intrinsic emptiness in the world of middle-class privilege and sought out a life somehow truer. His ultimate reaction was undoubtedly rash, but not, as some have insisted, inhuman:

i am hip to your double speak. i have been lied to. i am aware of this now. i am well / red in Marx. i have allied myself with the proletariat who drive your cabs, press your clothes, slice your kebabs, who silence beneath the weigh missiles close on their throats. there are many like me.

In putting a human face this most villainized of Americans in the "war on terror," Coval slices to the heart, showing that the question of race and identity runs much deeper than the condescension of Norman Mailer's "White Negro." That the story arc running from the Middle Passage through 30 years of hip-hop rebellion has by no means had its final chapter written.

Modest though its author might consider his own contribution, Coval's L-Vis Lives! deserves a place in that saga. We need a few more race traitors like him: the kind who understand that their very existence--complex and twisted though it might seem--also symbolizes the potential for the divisions to be finally closed.