This song comes from that season of The Wire with all the Polish dock workers bullshit, which my first time through The Wire labyrinth, I did not enjoy so much, naturally inclined as an American male mutated by hip hop culture to more closely want to experience vicariously the gangster shit like Avon Barksdale's crew. However, the second time through while laid up with the gut rots earlier this year, I much more loved on the second season of Polock bullshit. This song was used as a montage point, and just caught the fuck out of my ear, so I searched the dude out. I guess he's some famous Greek singer from like the '30s or something. This song is dope as fuck though.
I work with a Russian chick now, and I have become fairly interested in the whole European heritage thing, mostly because in America, as a Southern man with mixed Scots/Irish bloodlines chock full of all sorts of other flavored creamers, I don't know shit about personal heritage beyond like my grandpa being an alcoholic who hated black people and never knew Mexicans. I think that's standard issue heritage in America, which touts the Great Melting Pot as a selling point, but it's also a weakness exploited by our pop cultures. Not many of us have any sense of personal identity outside of the things we consume, and this is true whether you are white or black or whatever. Not many black dudes or chicks know what specific area of Africa they descend from, much less an ethnic heritage beyond "black". This allows us to buy into whatever the fuck we want to be I guess, which kinda sucks, because I'd rather have a better idea of how my great grandmother on grandpa's Polish branch of my personal family tree might have made fermented foods in the old country. Or maybe my Norwegian parented grandmother had a grandma who actually used a "magic stick" to stir gruit ale. I will never know.
Too often in the American myth, the desire to know one's personal heritage is mislabeled as a distillation process for hatred of others. I would rather we all know more about where we came from and not be entirely dependent upon this American culture that's built with brick facades and a whole shitload of shine on it. Doesn't necessarily mean I'm gonna get all noose-happy when I see a Ghanaian dude from New Jersey dating a perfectly Scots/Irish trashy white gurl from South Cackalacka.
There is some level of basic white guilt thrown into being a white mutt as well, even though - and I have no researched proof of this - as far up my family tree as I know about, no relatives were industrial overlords, 33rd degree Freemasons, plantation owners, or even successful enough to be considered a millionaire. We're mostly just shit of the earth struggling to connect this Monday to next Friday. So I try to detach myself from any feelings of wrongdoing perpetuated by America. Most likely my bloodlines were "given" free land in the wild west of Appalachia to either kill or be killed by the Injuns until the land was fit for colonial expansion.
Oddly enough, on my mom's side, my grandfather was the son of Polish immigrants (I've even seen the Ellis Island papers on my great grandmother), and my grandmother was the abandoned daughter of Norwegian peoples. You can see it in her cheekbones too. My dad's side though is straight Southern mutt Scots-Irish-German-teaspoon of cumin-tablespoon of cream of tartar nonsense that most everybody else who would be classified as "white" that is around me comes from. We are everything, and thus nothing.
STEAL "Efige Efige"
NEXT: Big pharma jingles from the street!
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