eligor

Okay, I'll admit: Most of the fictional male characters I admire are from TV canons. Yes, even Sherlock Holmes, like Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock.

But one of the few books that actually stuck with me away from high school and college was Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. In it, a nameless protagonist explains how he ended up in a basement with 1369 light bulbs and has plans of owning five phonograph players and even more lights.

The book is an allegory of various aspects of African-American life from the Emancipation Proclamation/Reconstruction to the 1920s-30s, from education to migration to northern US cities to "Back to Africa" movements, and more. If you're watching Boardwalk Empire now, you can see some of the themes from the book (like dehumanizing African-American males and how fraudulent the "Back to Africa" movements really were) in action, coincidentally.

The book as well as its protagonist speaks to me because sometimes I do question the motives of certain movements that are supposedly helpful to African-Americans, whether it's the Tawana Brawley case or something more modern like fandom social justice. This book makes you feel like you're not alone in questioning things that seem beneficial at first, like the protagonist eventually does.

This mix is a combination of songs that were recorded around the time the book was set and songs made well after the book was published. It's a combination of songs mentioned in the book and others that I felt fit the theme of the book, whether it was a song cue (like the clarinet at the brawl near the beginning of the book) or a theme (the narrator's grandfather appearing in a dream to tell the narrator to keep running, and this is the abbreviated and censored quote). It's a combination of jazz (original songs and remakes), electronica and gospel (from my own personal collection, I must brag).

I really hope this mix does the book and the protagonist justice.

I am lazy, so I screencapped the tracks on this mix and put them here:

For the revised YouTube mix, I couldn't find the "Happy Hour Blues" remix, so I substituted the original song. The one without the blackface cover art, mind you. (Why would you even put blackface cover art for a big band compilation past well after blackface has been constantly condemned? I can't.)

The mix can be streamed on YouTube.

The cover is from Daniel Hennemand on Flickr, transformed by me with PicMonkey. The font is Metropolis from FontFabric.