I like to listen to music while I’m cooking dinner. It’s usually my opportunity to hear things which don’t go down too well with my wife. There is “cooking music” and there is “dinner music”, and they are quite different. Anyway: tonight I chose to listen to one of my Bob Dylan discs. The track which grabbed my attention in particular was Hurricane, recorded in 1975. If you don’t know the song, it is based on an incident in which a black boxer, Rubin “Hurricane” Coulter, was falsely accused and imprisoned for murders he did not commit. In it Dylan highlights the injustice and prejudice that black people in the USA had come to regard as the norm.
I was struck by the echoes of current controversy, particularly the recent case of George Floyd, but also the many stories we hear of the systematic targeting of black people by the police, acting on the assumption that because of their colour they must be more open to suspicion than white people, and subject to arbitrary violence on that basis. As Dylan puts it:
“In Patterson that’s just the way things go./ If you’re black you might as well not show/ Up on the street/’Lest you want to draw the heat.”*
*Some things do change. In the original sound recording the text is, “If you’re a nigger ….” The text as given today on the inter-net says “If you’re black ….”
Looking at the sleeve note I was interested to see that Dylan’s song was recorded in 1976.