Erykah Badu does Dallas

Erykah Badu

Singer Erykah Badu has been given a $500 fine in April for filming a video in the streets of Dallas, in which she's naked for perhaps a minute; she's now also been sentenced for 6 month in jail, though on probation. All this sounds quite excessive but does not surprise me for in my humble opinion, Dallas is not a normal place.

The music video is called "Window Seat" and was recorded in one take in Dealey Plaza on a warm Saturday afternoon in March 2010.It shows Erykah Badu, Dallas native and R&B star, doing a slow motion striptease down Elm Street on her way to the spot where JFK was assassinated. Commercial filming shoots require a permit from the city of Dallas, but here, no such permit was sought or granted.


JFK

“She said she was frankly kind of surprised nobody made a formal complaint at the time, though on her Twitter account she says people were yelling at her while they were filming" said Richard Ray, a FOX reporter who spoke with Badu. According to her Twitter post, Badu stated that people she passed shouted things like "This is a public place,” “you ought to be ashamed,” and “put your clothes on."

To my eyes, what she did was bold and remarkable, as she walks the gauntlet of people gazing at her in never changing strides towards her goal: the exact spot at which John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and it is there that she lets herself fall to the ground. Debbie does Dallas this wasn’t rather I saw it as a brave piece of performance art dealing with alienation in Dallas. Let me explain why I found Dallas somewhat surreal.



I went down to Dallas in 1982 and the first shock was the flight from Chicago O’Hare Airport which left at an unearthly hour of 5.30 in the morning. I ran up the air bridge with minutes to spare and settled into the American Airlines flight to Dallas. I then looked at the safety card and realised this was a DC10. Now it just so happens that the deadliest airliner crash on US soil was an American Airlines DC10 taking off from O’Hare three years earlier when an engine separated from the wing and destroyed the control mechanisms. On May 25, 1979, AA flight 191, operated by a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10, crashed moments after takeoff from Chicago. The jet had 258 passengers and 13 crew on board, all of whom died in the accident, along with two on the ground. As we started to roll the video monitors flickered into life and we were presented with a camera behind the pilot giving us a cockpit view of the takeoff. I thought “not only are we going to crash but we’ll see it happen in real time and hear the Captain scream!”

Never mind – we got to Dallas in the Republic of Texas safely following the mighty Mississippi River through this vast land for much of the way and Paul Simon told no lie; In the morning sunshine the Mississippi really did shine like a National Guitar. Arriving at Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW) the surreal feeling continued. Braniff International Airways had just collapsed and there were over 100 of their aircraft impounded on the tarmac surrounded by barbed wire and with guards with shotguns patrolling. The sight of these beautiful looking orange, green and purple aircraft imprisoned on the tarmac was astounding. But then DFW was astounding being designed (in more innocent times) so the Texan cowboys could park their Cadillac’s within 150 feet of the departure gate. This resulted in a huge land grab as confirmed by the hubristic billboard on the exit road “DFW the world’s biggest airport; When DFW is completed it will be bigger than Bermuda; DFW 68 square miles, Bermuda 66 square miles.”


Downtown Dallas from the flood plain of the Trinity River

In Dallas after my business was finished I had a few hours to kill before flying back so I asked my host to drop me to downtown Dallas, for these were the days of Dallas on TV and Ewing Oils gleaming glass office block so I wanted to see for myself. Now the thing is Dallas doesn’t really have a downtown, it has about 14 office blocks on a mound beside the flood plain of the Trinity River, the dried out (in summer) bed of the Dallas River and despite owing its existence to the railway a station with one working platform with the rest being developed into a “themed retail and dining experience.”


JFK memorial

Despite the temperature in the hundreds I went to see the JFK memorial, for after all in Ireland we looked upon him as “our” President. I found it strange, for all the world looking like a raised stylised concrete wall with two gaps and at its centre an empty plinth which looked like it was made for a statue which never arrived. Undaunted I headed from there down Elm to Dealey Plaza, the same route taken by Erykah Badu in her video, where John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963. Now today there is a memorial there and on the 6th Floor of the Texas Book Depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots (don’t mind the hocus theories Oswald did the deed – the only question is who was behind him) there is now a Kennedy Museum but in 1982 there was nothing, zero, zilch. It was as if Dallas wanted to forget about JFK.

It became obvious talking to people that JFK was not particularly welcome in Dallas in 1963 and he was still not thought much of today. For people in Dallas, TX, were right wing often wrapped up in a large dose of old time religion. It was obvious that many didn’t accept the Civil War had ended and cars with “Yankee Plates” were honked off the streets. There were still very obvious racial undercurrents here in the “Deep South”, you only ever saw blacks queuing for buses and even the bars appeared to be de-facto segregated being either white or black but not mixed. Indeed there were no bars in much of Dallas as part of the city was in a “dry” county. It was obvious that the White Texans didn’t much care for their black neighbours and didn’t much care for that “Catholic” 35th President of the United States from up north. Whatever else Dallas was, it was no melting pot.


Dealey Plaza, site of the assassination

I’m sure Dallas and the Southern USA has moved on greatly since 1982 and is a very different city today but Erykah Badu’s video and public striptease is not a titillating Debbie does Dallas reprise but rather a brave and challenging piece of performance art. It is about alienation and is associating the exclusion of JFK, made manifest by his assassination, with the exclusion of black people from the city government and opportunity in Dallas as in much of the Deep South for much of its history. By this gesture Erykah Badu, a women of colour, has cast aside the deference to those who have excluded black people and declared that even if they have nothing, they will overcome. It is a brave manifestation of one women’s determination that the future will not mirror the past.