mama didn't know MAJOR LANCE

during the second world war, as a part of the national URBAN RENEWAL intitiative, chicago razed the little sicily/hell neighborhood to build a serial design, utilitarian infill of low-rise housing complexes for wartime factory workers.  the euclidean complex was named CABRINI-GREEN after frances cabrini (patron saint of italian immigrants), the first american (though italian-born) canonized by the catholic church for her work with italian immigrants.  initially, the complex was home to immigrant workers and african americans.  gradually, the complexes became almost entirely black.

curtis mayfield, major lance, and jerry butler were all residents of cabrini in the late fifties, the time when the high rise towers of cabrini were constructed.  they went to the same high school and hung out in seward park.  lance was 22 when he recorded mama didn't know in 1963, the same day that he recorded "monkey time" and "please don't say no more" for the okeh label (columbia's r&b subsidiary).  of the three, monkey time was the bread winner, sending lance to number two on the charts and selling one million plus.  these songs are perfect examples of johnny pate's chicago brass sound, especially the bass trombone.  

this song is early enough in the chicago soft soul canon that it doesn't have the sense of being manufactured, which i think is sometimes very difficult to keep in perspective forty years on.  this was still a young mayfield and a young genre that didn't have the irony of lexicon.  i'm not saying this was a purely empathetic artistic discourse, but it still feels like it has the moments of discovery free of cliche.  the tune was written by mayfield as a direct response to his song "mama didn't lie written " for jan bradley and also revitalized, via mayfield, by the fascinations out of detroit in 1961.

any discussion of equitable housing, with respect to any discipline, should include the willingness to explore its polarities.  in the case of cabrini, the initial rhetoric was decisive and created homes and communities with federal assistance, but a lack of initiative and funding politicized a paradox of equitable housing.  the homes fell into a fierce contradiction as modalities of class and race were redefined throughout the sixties and into the seventies on the one hand, but on the other, the towers served as iconic extensions of chicago's segregation issue, gang violence, and gentrification conversations.

the towers have come down, but they came down painfully slow.  due to irregularities in the cavities of the towers, the ruins stood motionless, whistling in the wind like end-blown memories resonating over lake michigan.  the song of the towers and those of its residents (see also juke house, ghetto house, dj slugo ) are at once a metaphor and an unequivocal manifestation of ALBERT SPEER'S RUIN VALUE THEORY , indelible on cultural memory and the daily life.