American Politics & Pop Culture

This article talks about the race discrimination in L.A. and how music played a part in keeping groups together and pushing them apart. The article takes us back to the 1940’s where it started with the zoot suits. The Bureau of Music was made to control with kinds of music would be allowed. This organization was supposed to “bring proper music to the people of the city.” This meant no R&B or anything associated with minorities.
The article talked a lot about the discrimination of Mexican Americans along with African Americans. In class we mainly talked about the discrimination of African Americans. I want to go back to the zoot suit riots. In the first three weeks of this class we read an article that talked about how by wearing the zoot suits they were making a statement. In the 40’s money was limited and these people were wearing suits with excessive fabric, they were not being conservative. Some owners of stores that sold zoot suits were getting in trouble with the law. This reminded me of something Alexs said during our discussion. It’s the same reason why the hip-hop culture wears their pants on their ass and hats to the side. They wanted to make a statement by the way they dressed and they weren’t going to do it in a way that was republican. “We’re tired of being told we can’t go to this show or that dance hall because we’re Mexican or that we better not be seen on the beach front, or that we can’t wear draped pants or have our haircut the way we want to” (Macias, 695).
All of these new rules that the Bureau of Music were making were to make the minorities more like white suburbia. This has been a theme throughout our class. During the Cold War everyone was considered to be communist, WWII it was the Japanese, and even the Beatles shook up what the government wanted to keep as a “civil” America. Any group that was different from strait American whether it’s hippies or hip hop was treated as a virus and they needed to be disinfected. Blacks and Mexicans were often arrested for disturbing the peace. When they claimed they were doing nothing wrong. To me I think disturbing the peace really means, if you make white people feel uncomfortable.
To me the Bureau of Music is a conforming tool. Every movement that has taken place is represented by a group that looks different and is acting different: the hippies with their music and hip-hop with its dance and rap. The Bureau wanted to sensor it. Make it okay for their youngsters to listen to. Just like in the movie This Film in not yet Rated, even today they are still trying to keep us from the truth of reality. They have been doing this for a long time, all they way back to Double Indemnity. This is why I like Talk to Me; Petey tells it like it is. I don’t know why our country wants to hide us from the truth; I think it’s only hurting us in the long run.