The Bottom Half of a Music Ethnography Paper I Just Wrote

Yes its been forever, and I have no one but myself to blame....well Fall Semester, but Fall and I are one, so I guess myself after all. The top half of this papers is not shown, it's just all the formal bullshit of seeing Deerhunter the night of the election, but here is where I take off into the sappy poetic world of encountering U Street after the show. I can truly say that this is what living in and around DC has meant to me, for the first time there was actually a tangible sensation to experience:

Emerging from the venue to hit U Street only validated this cyclone of emotions that the show had played upon. Seeing people dancing on the streets, leaning out of balconies, singing, blasting music from cars and from windows was a powerful reminder of what happiness was capable of. I saw the grand crowd of a much larger concert that had been waiting to take place in U Street as long as the urban black experience had been living there. The streets were teeming with people from every walk of life, people collected on the corner of U and 14^th chanting out the victory that resided in everyone who could imagine what this victory meant for their nation. My friend and I ran towards the crowd, lifted our heads to the cool night sky and shared in the shouting that we knew was within us. It was at this moment that I contemplated what a concert meant, in my mind there was no distinction from the time the Deerhunter show ended to the time I found myself lost in the masses of people, people banging on drums, clapping hands, and jumping as high as their joy could take them.

What I began to comprehend was that there should be no formal limitations imposed upon the concert as a mode of cultural exploration of joy and change. That instead it was all around us, it was in the history of this city, and it was in every music venue, every black owned business, every person whose smile on that evening showed who they were in a historical moment in time, and every note that had ever hung on the ears of those who were willing to listen to the music of ongoing time. I have never felt as unified in the political process, because that night it was more than the politics, it was life in music, sound and voice, that came to the forefront; that came to the stage and played for America.

In driving rain, people fill the U Street corridor in an impromptu celebration spanning several blocks, at the news that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is now president elect of the United States, on election night in Washington