transemacabre

How much control did y'all have over your personas, clothes, lyrics, etc?

What a bizarre life for teenagers -- did y'all attend school in L.A.? You must've been educated, right?

Wow! I can't believe they didn't just enroll y'all in the local public school if nothing else. This is sounding more and more like y'all were work animals/investments to your handlers and not human beings with rights.

Add to that a dash of Stockholm Syndrome. It's hard for us to imagine the life of an old time Southern slave -- especially if you were a house slave, you lived and worked alongside the people who owned you and controlled your life. You bathed their babies. You cooked their food. You saw them when they were sick and when they were crying and when they died. The shadow they cast over your life was immense. Sometimes they were your own blood kin. I don't think there's anything in the modern, Western world that's analogous to such an experience, and as such we have trouble conceptualizing how these ex-slaves could have felt about their former masters.

Edit: I highly recommend the novel "Kindred" by Octavia Butler. It's sort of a historical fiction/scifi mash-up, as a modern (1970s) black woman is pulled back in time to the slavery period and meets her white great-grandfather. The relationship between Dana (the black woman) and Rufus (her white slaveowning ancestor) is totally fascinating and co-dependent and twisted.

I've heard similar sentiments from ex-Soviet peoples. They suffered horribly under the Soviet regime but on another level they knew the system and what was expected of them, and were conditioned to accept it.