Feeling in tune with a fellow child of '70s

Everybody's talking about what Obama's inauguration means to them. For me, it all goes back to when I was a kid, hanging out in my neighbor's basement.

It was the '70s. Nobody had video games or computers. What 12-year-old white boys did back then, besides play Nerf hoop or ogle Charlie's Angels, was to troop down into dark, carpeted basements, put on headphones and listen to music.

You may have seen this re-enacted on "That '70s Show."

Except in my version, the other kids were black.

Three of the four families nearest us were black. And it was a different world in their basements. I didn't realize it then, but it ended up blowing my little 12-year-old mind.

It was back in the basement that I first heard a soul radio station, called "WDAO." It played Bootsy's Rubber Band to John Coltrane. The call letters stood for Dayton, Ohio. But in the basement, the black kids said what the letters secretly meant: "White Days Are Over."

One day, my friend's older brother came in the basement and said to me: "Bet you haven't heard this."

He put on Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City." It's from 1973, before Stevie's music got schmaltzy. "A boy is born, in hard time Mississippi," it begins, then chronicles how he grows up and moves to New York and is all but destroyed because he's black.

He's living just enough for the city, Stevie sings angrily. But it ends hopefully, with Stevie calling on people to "change the world."

I've heard that song, I said. Not like this, the older brother said.

Then he played the real version, not the edited one I knew from commercial radio. It has a dramatic interlude, in which you hear the man get framed for a crime, jailed and then, shockingly, called the n-word by his white jailer.

That's right, the n-word is in a Stevie Wonder song. From 1973. (I just sanitized the song all over again, because we probably can't handle it today any more than we could 36 years ago.)

I bring all this up for three reasons. One, Barack Obama, like me, is a child of the '70s. For better or worse, he's our first president who came of age in that era of misery indexes, government lies and other humiliations. Such as disco.

Two, the '70s had a few redeeming qualities. One was that it was the only time black people and white people tried to live together. I mean, made a society-wide effort to integrate, from the schools to housing to the workplace.

It mostly didn't work — in fact, some efforts to force people together ended up widening some racial rifts, especially in school busing. But the point is, they tried. Growing up in the '70s, you could feel the spirit of it, that maybe America could change.

And the third reason is that not long ago Obama was asked who his "musical hero" was.

"Stevie Wonder," he said.

So the other day, I clomped down into my present-day basement and fished out a cracked cassette tape of Stevie's 1976 "Songs in the Key of Life."

I first heard this album in that same neighbor's basement. There's a song on it, "Pastime Paradise," that has turned out to be like a history of black-white race relations in modern America.

It's about how people hidebound by past ways are dupes for "the evils of the world." Which Stevie lists as segregation, isolation, exploitation and so on.

What's revelatory about this song is that the real message is physically in the music. It has classical strings. Latin percussion. A Hare Krishna chant. A gospel "We Shall Overcome." The song itself was integrated. It sang: This is the way to "the future paradise."

For a white kid discovering this alongside black kids — often passing the headphones back and forth — well, those hours in the basement turned me into a believer.

Not that integration went well. Twenty years later, in 1996, the rapper Coolio turned Stevie's rainbow into a gathering storm. He put out "Gangsta's Paradise," which, set to the same tune, is the story of a black 23-year-old "walking through the valley of the shadow of death" — the American system — and losing all hope. The promise of integration and civil rights had failed.

(Weird Al Yankovic also put out a version called "Amish Paradise," proving this one song knows no cultural limit.)

According to Tim Hughes, a professor in England who wrote his Ph.D at the University of Washington on the music of Stevie Wonder, Coolio was asked about the change in the song's meaning.

"Stevie is from that old mode," Coolio said. "That old mode of black people who really believe ... that anybody can do anything they want to do."

Well, guess what, Coolio; your new president is from that mode, too. So, it seems at long last, is America.

This is what Obama's inauguration means to me. I listened again to his race speech from last March, and the sweep of this story is all there. The initial promise. Then the disillusionment. White resentment. Black anger. Finally a call — Obama's audacious hope — for a more perfect union.

It's a great speech. Only it takes Obama 37 minutes to say what Stevie says in three!

Maybe Obama won't be a great president, or even a good one. I am a fellow child of the '70s, but that doesn't mean I want him to start governing like they did in that horrendous decade.

But the dirty business of being president comes later. Inauguration Day — and this column — are like episodes of "This I Believe." And I believe — have always believed, since back in the basement of my boyhood — that when it comes to the American struggle over race, it was Stevie Wonder who had it right.

And I believe we now have a president who believes it, too.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.