Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo

Author:Gregory Pardlo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

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Some pop music fans misinterpreted City High’s hit song, “What Would You Do?,” as social critique. Listeners mistook the song’s moralizing respectability politics for affirmation meant to empower a stereotypically young, financially insecure single mother trying to provide for herself and her child. Slut-shaming was seen as a pep talk. The music video begins with my brother and his bandmates, Ryan and Claudette, sitting on the stoop of a brownstone in Brooklyn. “Bottom line, Lonnie’s a ho, yo. She’s a ho,” says Robbie in the opening segment.

“What Would You Do?” is the account of a young man, a few years out of high school. He goes to a party and unexpectedly runs into a former classmate. Her name is Lonnie. Lonnie is among the “five or six strippers tryna work for a buck.” In the music video, there are two women. One wears a red-and-black negligee. The white feathered negligee belongs to Lonnie, I’m sure, who ditches it as she dances for the men. Then Lonnie lifts her matching white bikini top over her head, and pixels bloom to cover her breasts, either to protect her modesty from my gaze or to protect me from her immodesty, while the men in the video stand shoulder to shoulder, watching. The women could be roosters slashing each other with lethal talons. Some of the men sway tensely like straphangers on a subway. Others throw bills and wag wads of cash in time with the music.

Robbie told me a bachelor party inspired the song, although the video depicted a gathering somewhat more debauched for its lack of a discernible purpose. I felt complicit. I couldn’t be a disinterested onlooker. The camera made me aware of my masculinity, and ashamed. I was one of these men. I was in my kitchen, scrubbing the video back and forth, as if to shake my head no and to say, “I don’t belong here, I am better than them.”

I’d wondered about Robbie’s motives. Pop Star Robbie singles “Lonnie” out of the crowd and leads her away from where she was earning money to the rooftop. There, in private, he intervenes and attempts to rescue her, convinced his intrusion is necessary and gallant. He urges her to find a respectable way to provide for her fatherless son. Her appeals, protests, and recrimination are no match for his disapproval and Freudian logic: “If my mother could do it” (is he implicating my mother?), could raise a fatherless child without banking on the wages of erotic dancing, then “baby you can do it.” The question I couldn’t ask Robbie because it would uncork a miasma of misogynistic fears was why should it be any of his fucking business.

For the record, I was not at the bachelor party; nor was I in the video. I was interviewing Robbie for this book, and he was on the phone with me. I was reminding him—an entirely rhetorical extravagance on my part—that we grew up with our father. I wanted to figure out where he’d gotten these ideas from.

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