Ev'ryday I'm Shufflin'

     This week I was gifted with one of my kids' hand-me-down iPod Shuffles. And like Jimi Hendrix outside the pawn shop in Seattle, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Jimi saw a guitar in the window, I saw myself.

     I adore my husband. He is "handsome and romantic" as Stephanie Miller would say in her puppy dog voice, sometimes breath-stoppingly romantic. But our tastes in music, though they meet at intersections here and there (hi, Robert Johnson!), are not the same, a reminder I got upon receiving this secondhand gift.

     We both seem to harken back to the seventies--by and large--with him enjoying pop and beach and funk styles. All perfectly swell and fun to hear. But something was missing. So armed with my new toy and $22 bucks on the iTunes account, I set out to begin filling the musical pot with a stew of my own design.

     And that's when it hit me like the sight of the clothes I can't wear (yet) in the back of my closet: I'd only forgotten who I was, but POTUS has no choice in what he shows us. He simply has to play it safe. No burnout tees without an undershirt, no shredded jeans with biker chain belts, no lapels unblemished by the holes of his American flag pin. There's no law when it comes to such things of course--the man isn't hiding any clothing in offshore closets after all--but there is a sense of what is proper and dignified. And then there's the added perception of what a black man must do to please us, to not offend our delicate sensibilities.

     I've been to two Organizing For America events this summer and at both, the soundtrack was the same, safe set of R&B classics. There was Aretha and Al, Stevie W. and James B., but what if there had been Jimi Hendrix, Parliament Funkadelic, or Led Zeppelin for that matter? Maybe this other man in my life also has a "softer take" on the era than do I, and I love him anyway as well. But consider this: We'll let our President reach into the Fifth Dimension, but will we allow him to take a "Fantastic Voyage"? Probably not. You'll recall the fake uproar when he hugged a certain Harvard professor, 'fro and all.

     I don't know what type of music George Bush listens to, but I do know that an alcoholic white man trumps a boogying black dude. The unwritten rules are quite clear on this. Maybe when we've finally cycled through an Hispanic President, a woman in charge, a gay or lesbian Commander in Chief, a transgendered top official, an Asian authority, a (gulp) Native American nominee...

     Until that time arrives, I hope for President Obama that somewhere, sometime, somehow he gets to let his hair down and turn his music up. I hope that we can let him have whatever private notions he wants--much like a certain fried chicken purveyor--and that we can decide with our vote (or our dollar) whether or not we agree on what's important, remembering all the while that like those pesky tax rules, we do have EOE and anti-discrimination laws to bring to bear. If in letting your freak flag fly you infringe upon another, then we'll hold you to account. That's the line in the beach music sand.

     But if it's merely a case of the music being a little too loud at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we really should just tap on the door before we call out the goon squads.