Interesting point made with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Being part Austrian myself, I would always call my grandmother on my mom’s side “Omama”. She moved to what was the territory of Hawai’i in 1948, eleven years later it became a state. She died in 1994. In the 20 years I knew and interacted with her, I knew she had an Austrian accent but it was part of the norm and “her norm”. Yet her accent would not be singled out until someone outside of her family would ask “oh, where are you from?” Then the pride would come in and she would say “Austria” victoriously. I remember a phone message she left on my mom’s answering machine. I was still at home and I was busy doing whatever, so she says “Chon, pick up de fon.” With her accent, she was asking me to pick up the phone. Now, when she lived in Hawai’i, she would spend a lot of time with her two best friends. They all married “local boys” from Hawai’i, but they also wanted to keep in touch with home by speaking in their native tongue. They found no reason to change, no reason to Americanize, no reason to “fix” what others felt was an error, no reason to assimilate. Then again, they were now residents of Hawai’i, which has a wide range of accents all to itself, including pidgin English. I never once heard my Omama tell me “John Boy, hui: go to da ABC stoa and go pick me up some cauliflower because I hungry, and no fo’get da Kool’s.” She spoke clearly and distinctly, but her accent, like Arnold’s, remained. Granted, my Omama was not in the public eye, a politician, or making millions, but also look at Wolfgang Puck. A lot of times he’ll say something in an interview and I’ll say “that sounds like my Omama”.

To add to this, I used to watch a show on Univision called “Caliente”. It was a dance show, and my Spanish is extremely minimal. These days I know “restaurant Spanish”. Anyway, during commercial breaks, they would often have commercials for English instruction CD’s and DVD’s not only to learn and understand the words, but there was also a push to speak “better English”. In other words, they were supporting English spoken in the dialect of a television reporter or radio DJ, which in some circles is considered an “American accent”. In a blog years ago, someone argued that these instructional recordings were sold so that people from Mexico will be able to speak eloquently and not come off as illegal aliens, or “if they know how to speak American, they will be treated as Americans.” Yet the U.S. is diverse, what is an “American” accent? Sure, it has been mocked in countless movies, the over exaggerated accents one hears in TV shows in movies, from the drawl of the south to the mixture of people from NYC, or a West Coast accent. Then I heard in a documentary somewhere that there really is not one distinct American accent, but what is being pushed is an accent that only exists on radio and TV, where one is meant to speak to a general audience, devoid of the concept of ethnicity.

People do have voices they use in public if they have to, or their “phone conversation voice”, which may also sound different from their outside or inside voice. When I worked in news and was involved in conference calls, a lady in California asked me “you have an accent, where are you from?” Told her Honolulu, but asks where I was working from. I said the Pacific Northwest. She said “I can tell the Hawai’i part because you say your words distinctly. You don’t say moun’n, you say moun-tain.” She then surprised me by saying she heard a slight European influence. and that comes from being in the Pacific Northwest, as many people from Seattle have that accent. I’ve never lived in Seattle, but I’ve lived in a town where many people speak in a southern accent, even though I’m in SE Washington. I can go to Walla Walla and hear a completely different accent there.

It also goes to the argument that with the internet, people are losing “regionality” with the slang. The same could be said for music, when an artist could be a success in one region of the country but were unheard of elsewhere. An artist actually had regional hits and regional success. Now, one has to have “massive success”, as if success means having Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber success, or nothing. It’s a characteristic that some say people are losing, although I think because of that, people are fighting to hold on to it. Or maybe we find a need to fight, and no one has to, for it will always exist. I know some actors and actresses will “let loose” with their actual accents when they are comfortable in interviews, and that’s great. They are not Hollywood for a few minutes, and it’s nice to hear that at times, where I might say “oh, they’re from the South?”

In reference to Australia, I highly recommend a new 6-part documentary series that’s airing there called “Dumb, Drunk & Racist”. It has to do with the interaction between Australians and people from India who come into the country for schooling, work, and living. The issue is that some people in India feel Australians are the title of the show, due to attacks and deaths. It is now where people in India are telling children “don’t go to Australia for schooling, go elsewhere.” There’s a fear because the money used for schooling in Australia is now going elsewhere. In the school, the narration states that Australia tends to have a sports mentality, and that will lead to people accusing Australia of being (and this is their term) “a bunch of redneck hicks.” The premise of the show is that the host brings four people from India to visit Australia, to see if everyone is dumb, drunk, and racist. It brings a completely different view that is generally not reported in the mainstream, but it also focuses on Australia’s treatment of Aborigines, and in many ways it parallels what goes on in the U.S. with its population and indigenous people. It can be a “party hard” country, but the series shows that it is not always that way for everyone who lives there.

Finally, Bill Cosby did indeed release an album with his “after hours” material, but it’s not as explicit or raw as Richard Pryor or full of double-entendre like Redd Foxx. I had briefly talked about Cosby’s own record label in response to another Cortandfatboy podcast, and the album was released on that label, Tetragrammaton. The album is called “8:15/12:15″:
http://www.discogs.com/Bill-Cosby-Bill-Cosby-815-1215/release/758776

Released in 1969, it’s a double album that shows him doing a cleaner set for his shows at 8:15, and something a bit more “grown” for the 12:15 shows. A few of the topics are similar between each show, but he’s a bit more free with his mouth in the 12:15 ones. I believe he has always maintained this throughout his career, so it’s not as if he was doing shows at 3:15 and getting raunchy. When he was suggestive, he would limit that with some of the roles he played in his 70′s movies, or at least to find himself within a scenario that may have been suggestive, but always as a spectator. This is not unlike what Redd Foxx did, as he became more popular with wider/whiter audiences in the late 60′s, before “Sanford & Son”. His brand of humor was always suggestively nasty, but when he was signed to a Warner-subsidiary called Loma in the mid-1960′s, it would consist of adult material but the routines were arguably tamer. He was a bit more loose with a “home” crowd, but in Las Vegas he would push things, but to a limit. Once he became known for the Fred G. Sanford character, a lot of his older material was reissued (some legally, some not). But at the peak of his popularity as Fred Sanford, he released the famous “You Gotta Wash Your Ass” on Atlantic. Foxx was considered to be the fun loving, family-friendly junkyard man and here he was talking about things kids should not listen to. It was then that all his new “Sanford & Son” fans realized that there was a dirty side to him, which lead to people hunting down his albums. Which goes back to my Omama. She loved her Austrian waltzes and played them a lot, but she also had some black comedy records. She lived in a house for awhile in an area of Hawai’i that was close to a barracks, and with that came a record store where I found the kind of records I could never find at Woolworth’s, Kress, or in any department store. The record store catered to a military cientele, and that included a healthy amount of black music and comedy records. At the age of 6, I was introduced to two comedy albums by actors I knew on TV, but I didn’t know they were dirty. One was Richard Pryor’s “Bicentennial N****r”, the other was Redd Foxx’s “Dirty Foxx”. She didn’t mind playing them for my ears, and my parents never pulled me away to close my ears. I may not have known about the real meaning behind the skits on the album, but as I got older, learned and experienced more, I realized how dirty they were, or why these stories were being told. This would also explain why my Omama was free with her dirty words when she got into an argument. My other grandma was a church-going lady and quiet, while my Omama was someone who was the life of the party. It goes back to that Pryor skit where he said how one grandma would give him milk & cookies, while the other would give him beer and reefer. While it wasn’t that drastic, the differences between both of them were world’s apart, and that’s why I always loved my Omama. As with her accent, she didn’t feel a need to change for anyone.

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They’re gonna leave the statue of Joe Paterno up at Penn St. However, there gonna make it look the other way

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