Giving Spike Lee a microphone and a captive audience works in much the same way as placing him in a director’s chair – he’s got something to say and now he has the platform needed to say it. Lee was alternately angry, insightful, curmudgeonly, pandering and quite funny over a 45-minute keynote address as part of Canadian Music Week on Saturday.
Lee, who anchored the keynote inside the Sheraton Centre’s CMW headquarters, was in town to promote an upcoming documentary on the making of Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album. Before the chat, he also received the Nile Rodgers Global Creators Award for both his cultural influence and humanitarianism. The Chic guitarist, for whom the award was named at last year’s CMW event, presented the award via video conference.
Not that the award softened the tone of the legendary director. During a talk driven by audience questions, Lee drove home the importance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement while also recognizing that incidents of police violence towards black youth is nothing new in the US. Those incidents, he argues, have simply been more visible in the digital media age.
“This stuff is not new,” says Lee. “This thing’s happened forever, back to lynchings. So please do not believe that this is a phenomenon that all of the sudden is sweeping America. Now it’s just being caught. Everybody now, with a camera, is a photojournalist.”
It is morbidly ironic that Lee’s 1989 classic “Do The Right Thing”, in which rising racial tensions in a New York City neighborhood culminate in the death of a young black man via suffocation from a NYPD officer’s choke hold, mirrors recent events with an eerie level of similarity. In July 2014, nearly 25 years to the day of the film’s release, Eric Garner was killed after being held in a 15-second choke hold by an NYPD police officer.
Lee, however, is quick to argue that this isn’t merely a problem for one race.
“This is not just about African Americans,” he points out. “I think we’re all concerned anytime people lose their lives over some bull—-, it’s not just black people.”
Although race dominated the discussion, it wasn’t the only topic that Lee had something to say about. He criticized our over-reliance on digital media tools, suggesting both that video games and smartphones have played a role in the declining health of American children and that movies don’t carry the same impact when viewed on small digital devices by oneself.
It wasn’t all serious business on Saturday, though. After being asked about his beloved New York Knicks, who just wrapped up an abysmal NBA season with the second-worst record in the league, he was quick to turn the tables on the hometown Toronto Raptors, who recently flamed out of the playoffs.
Upon being asked if the Knicks would make the postseason next year, he replied, “Yeah. And NOT get swept the first round. Where’s Drake at? Where’s the ambassador? Where you at?”
