Try To Make It Real: Compared to What? – Keeping It Real

In June of 1969, when Les McCann and Eddie Harris recorded the cut, ‘Compared To What,’ America was bogged down in a bloody Vietnam war that was raging out of control. The U.S. military draft was in full swing with the economically poor and disenfranchised of this nation as its primary inductees – cannon fodder in the bloody paddies, fields and jungles of Southeast Asia. Black, Brown, and Red, people and even some Whites in America were demanding not only an end to the Vietnam war but to racial discrimination, racial profiling, and numerous social, political and economic injustices inside of America itself. The Black Panther Party (founded in October of 1966) was in only its third year of existence. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been brutally assassinated a year earlier in April of 1968. Brother Malcolm X had already been dead for four years, also the victim of a cowardly assassin’s bullets in February of 1965.