The Rolling Stone Music Now podcast had Questlove as a guest star. He is there to talk about the many documentaries that he is working on. However, he said something that intriguing. He compared the world of “Summer of Soul” to the year 2020. You can listen to the podcast below.
It begins with talks of how he started thinking about demographics. This came after his incident with President Obama, where he was asked to play more recent music. This was the first thing that he asked himself when he started making his “Summer of Soul” documentary. The documentary is about the Harlem Culture Festival in 1969. The festival lasted from June 29-August 24, with 6 concerts.
He knew that most of the living generations would understand enough of the things that were going on back then. All of the generations besides Gen Z would have enough of a cultural understanding to know enough about what was happening back then. “Then a weird thing happened, and that’s called life after March 16, 2020. In which… you could not tell the difference between our stock footage of 1969 and what’s happening in real-time in 2020.” He professed that March 16, 2020, was what led to a similar political context to the world back then. Covid was not the only part of 2020 that is similar to 1969, but many other parts of 2020 as well.
The political context of the stock footage is now very similar to the current state of the world. The political context is similar for both Covid and Black Lives Matter.
Covid and the Cold War
Covid and the cold war are the most obvious, well-known similarities. They are both concerns hiding within the back of the mind, that is their general safety. The main difference is just how pronounced the fear was in their daily lives. The Cold War was in the back of the general citizen’s mind, while Covid was more in the forefront. However, they both led to general uneasiness.
Black Lives Matter and Vivian Strong
On June 24, 1969, Vivian Strong and at most 8 other teenagers were having a party at a vacant apartment in Nebraska. There was a call to the police about a suspected robbery. When the 2 officers arrived, the teenagers ran out the back door, where Jame Loder, the white officer of the two, shot without warning. He shot Vivian in the back of the head. Both Carol, Vivian’s sister, and Loder’s African American partner, asked him “why did you shoot her?” to which he gave no reply.
There were riots in the streets of Ohama for the next 3 days. 2 days after that was the first day of the Harlem Culture Festival. There was massive distrust between African Americans and the police, so instead of having the police provide security, they instead had the Black Panther Party do it.
Police brutality was just as much of a problem back then as it is today. It is nowhere as obvious as the George Floyd case, where a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck and back for 9 and a half minutes because the store clerk suspected that Floyd used a counterfeit bill.
The major difference between the two, however, is how long the civil unrest remained from these murders. Strong lasted three days, while Floyd continued for a full year, with the aftereffects still being felt to this day.
Politics in 1969 and 2020
The one case where there is no major connection between the two is, ironically enough, one of the things that made Questlove consider 1969 and 2020 close enough for Gen Z. In 1969, there was no uncertainty in the upcoming reelections, from what I could find online. They were under the Nixon registration. From what I could find, people generally liked Nixon, even after Watergate in 1972. People did not stop liking him until he stepped down.
History repeats itself. If we do not learn from it, we are doomed to follow it. Summer of Soul is a vertical slice of life in the 1960s for an African American. It can be watched on Hulu.
Written by Justin Acosta
Twitter: @hahalacka
