KOFI NATAMBU
Notes on the Vernacular in American Culture
I. A Preface
The vernacular is what we have all experienced as a multiplicity of cultures fermenting in the historical cauldron of what we have chosen to call AMERICA, a highly contested emblem bursting with very specific fears, dreams and desires, a very particular confluence of cross-cultural energies, ideas, and possibilities. It is the on-going clashing and nervously ‘harmonious’ blending of disparate sensibilities, rhythms, and emotions. It is the ever-evolving and devoluting motion of what we have known, cherished, believed, hated, caressed and denied. It contains the truths we see and the lies we don’t. It includes, in spite of our multivaried selves, the curious “national” syllogisms of our most extraordinary memories. It is the hieroglyphic semiology of our angry and tragic unconscious. It is the eternal site of our “greatest triumphs” and most humbling defeats. It reveals to us at all times and in all spaces what and who and how we are. It is the power and the glory and the bullshit, amen. It is the Joy we sing and the weight we wear. It is what is behind our eyes. We don’t have to re-member it because it never “really” leaves us. It is Groucho Marx & Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong & D.W. Griffith. It is Duke Ellington & Mae West. It is Paul Robeson & Frank Sinatra. It is Fred Astaire & the Boogaloo. It is Billie Holiday & Langston Hughes. It is James Cagney & Jelly Roll Morton. It is Charlie Parker & Huey Long. It is Bugs Bunny & Woody Guthrie. Lester Young & Smokey Robinson. Orson Welles & RUN-DMC. Cole Porter & the Philly Dog. Richard Pryor & The Nicholas Brothers. Sam Cooke & John Coltrane. Malcolm X & Katherine Dunham. It is Lenny Bruce & the Ku Klux Klan. Thelonious Monk & Martin Luther King. Miles Davis & Bob Dylan. Elvis Presley & Amiri Baraka. Ella Fitzgerald & W.C. Fields. Ishmael Reed & Chuck Berry. Woody Allen & the Coasters. Count Basie & William Burroughs. Zora Neale Hurston & Romare Bearden. Little Richard & the Nation of Islam. Dizzy Gillespie & John Cage. Bob Kaufman & B.B. King. Ray Charles & James Dean. Robert Johnson & George Wallace. Jimi Hendrix & Dinah Washington. Raymond Chandler & Bojangles Robinson. Adrian Piper & Cindy Sherman. Sam Delany & Kathy Acker. Jean-Michel Basquiat & Robert Mitchum. Andy Warhol & James Brown. Eddie Palmieri & Stevie Wonder. Eric Dolphy & De La Soul. Ralph Ellison & Maya Deren. Sterling A. Brown & W.E.B. DuBois. W.C. Williams & Bob Thompson. Bob Fosse & the Temptations. Alvin Ailey & Albert Ayler. James Baldwin & the Lindyhop. It is Pedro Pietri & Sarah Vaughan. Tito Puente & Harry Partch. It is Jacob Lawrence & Curtis Mayfield. Aretha Franklin & Bette Davis. Twyla Tharp & Dionne Warwick. Lena Horne & Tupac Shakur. Jackson Pollack & Toni Morrison. Gayl Jones & Norman Mailer. Wily Coyote & Thomas Pynchon. Donald Duck & Betty Boop. Melvin B. Tolson & Barbara Kruger. The Road Runner & Lauren Bacall. Henry Miller & the Jerk. Kurt Vonnegut & Sam Fuller. Billy Wilder & Madonna. Humphrey Bogart & Ice Cube. Bill T. Jones & Mary Lou Williams. It is SNCC & the White Citizens Council. It is Frankie Lymon & Notorious B.I.G. It is Victor Hernandez Cruz & Felix the Cat. Marvin Gaye & Marlon Brando. Spike Lee & Ida Lupino. Frank O’Hara & Martin Scorsese. Boris & Natasha. Rocky & the Grateful Dead. Prince & Bullwinkle. It is Chester Himes & Sun Ra. Willie Dixon & Josephine Baker. Rita Hayworth & breakdancing. Public Enemy & Anthony Braxton. Stuart Davis & A Tribe Called Quest. Alfred Hitchcock & Etta James. It is a specific way of ‘seeing’ and ‘expressing’ the world. Its realm is the only world we know of course, and that world is called LANGUAGE (the world of speech, of gesture, of sound, of movement, of writing...). The peculiarities of how we do that (thru inflection, accent, syntax, grammar, velocity, sonority, phrasing) is what constitutes vernacular reality, the reality of our everyday existence stylized...
II. An Opening Salvo
Ideas about music, literature and visual art change in accordance with historical shifts in social consciousness. This is especially true regarding the identity and use of these categories over time and across cultures. For example, what ‘classical’ artists meant to their societies in Europe in the 17th century is not what they meant in the 20th. Modernism and postmodernism have changed our conceptions about what constitutes music, literature, and ‘visual art’, as well as their social, cultural and philosophical (i.e. ‘aesthetic’) meaning in our time. Which is to say: No past generalizations about language, sound and image will be able to define what uses they will be put to either now or in the future. These categories are not ‘universal’ in the reductive sense that Enlightenment thinkers and later modernists mean the term, but are culturally and historically specific.
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The advent of vernacular forms in music, literature and visual art meant that new critical sensibilities, ideological conceptions and creative values were emerging in response to particular, specific changes in political economy, social and cultural formations and technological developments, Reality itself was rapidly changing and thus our ideas about the form and content of the Real.
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For example, if we examine the rise of Jazz, Blues, R & B, and Rock and Roll as popular cultural forms we will simultaneously discover how profound changes in political consciousness, economic conditions, cultural values and technological advances brought about new aesthetic realities. These vernacular forms implicitly and explicitly challenged our given and received ‘classical’ (high brow) notions of what ‘Art’ was, especially in the realms of music, art and literature (or literary, visual and sound representations). Thus, considerations of ‘style’ alone could not fully account for how and why these transformations took place in our understanding of what ‘the aesthetic’ (another historically and culturally specific idea!) was, or could be, in an entirely new and different historical context.
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The reasons that Jazz, Blues, and Rock were initially attacked and resisted in high art circles in the West is that they automatically called into question the dominant idea that the only ‘true art’ was that defined and sanctioned by the (bourgeois) State and the upper classes of the society (as well as the institutionalized religious order). The very notion of ‘folk art’ was thus immediately separated from the classical paradigm, and made to seem like a poor, inferior counterpart to the high art model and ideal. This canonical hierarchy positioning of mass-based vernacular (i.e. folk) sources beneath the aristocratic, elitist expressions valorized as classical (read: legitimate) led to the political and cultural institutionalization of differences that in turn created an exploitive/oppressive division between so-called ‘real’ or ‘serious’ art and barely tolerated ersatz versions (folk, vernacular).
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In the context of the United States this meant that traditional and modernist notions of art imported from Europe would eventually prevail over all ‘other’ forms, values, conceptions and traditions originating from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Further, this ethnic and ‘racial’ division would also be expanded to take in oppressive class and gender based hierarchies as well. Thus poor and working-class vernacular expressions and forms of various other nationalities, and those of women generally, would also be deemed inferior and marginal. The rise of the 19th and 20th century notions of ‘serious’ music, painting, literature and dance were the categories proposed (imposed) by European and white American male critics (and their acolytes) to silence and render invisible the ‘artistic’ ideas, values, traditions and expressions of those vernacular American artists who refused and openly resisted the Eurocentric, high art hegemony. These artists were quickly identified as renegades and outlaws who actively confronted and/or opposed the bourgeois traditions coming out of the classical and modern art forms of Western Europe and the white supremacist United States.
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As a result it was easy for the general critical and artistic community to ignore, ridicule, neglect, denigrate, denounce and expropriate the contributions of African American artists, who were perceived as not only being the ‘wrong color’, but expressing the ‘wrong art’ to be properly promoted in high art circles. Folk and vernacular art traditions in the U.S. were considered ‘quaint’, and ‘entertaining’, even ‘interesting’ but rarely important until a new wave of European artists and critics began to openly praise the work of black musicians, artists and writers during the pivotal 1920-1960 period in the United States when all forms of white modernist racist attacks and neglect were at their peak. This resulted in the French, German, Italian, Scandinavian and English critics being the first to acknowledge the innovative artistry of African American musicians and composers.
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It wasn’t until the late 1950s and early ‘60s that a very small but vocal minority of white American critics began to write positively and intelligently about the complex innovations and creative genius of Jazz and Blues musicians and composers (and still later black R & B/Rock & Roll artists). In fact, the few white individual exceptions to the otherwise overt and pervasive racism of the 1920-1960 era (e.g. John Hammond, Leonard Feather, Barry Ulanov, Charles Edward Smith, Roger Pryor Dodge, etc.) were either themselves still hamstrung with various forms of gliberal ‘benevolent condescension’ toward independent black creativity or else simply considered inept, incompetent or ideologically suspect by their more reactionary white colleagues.
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The first black Jazz critics to write in the 1950s and ‘60s, like the novelists, playwrights and poets Ralph Ellison, Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Larry Neal, James Stewart and A.B. Spellman, etc. were (with the exception of Ellison) considered to be either militant or radical malcontents (and thus not to be trusted intellectually), or marginal figures far off the ‘golden track’ of mainstream music criticism. It is only in the past thirty years that this situation has begun to improve from the standpoint of a heightened awareness among some critics (e.g. Frank Kofsky, Robert Palmer, Garry Giddins, Gene Santoro, Francis Davis). The real pioneers in this development however were three of the leading white American critics of the 1950s and ‘60s, Ralph Gleason, Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams.
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The idea of ‘the folk’ in American art began in the 19th century when white American painters, writers, composers, and theatre artists were largely considered inferior to the European classical tradition. The U.S. reaction against this notion started in the 1840-1880 period when American writers and intellectuals began to develop an independent literary tradition informed by vernacular styles in verbal language and literary forms. These pioneering American modernist writers (e.g. Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, etc.) began to consciously challenge and even critique high art traditions by implicitly asserting through their own idiosyncratic appropriations, the aesthetic values, ideas, and expressive forms of Native American, African American, and white working-class cultures in their work.
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The apex of this philosophical and aesthetic reaction occurs in the late 1890s when first Ragtime, then Jazz, began to revolutionize Western music through its rapid, syncretic incorporation of African, Latin American and Afro-Caribbean styles, traditions, forms, modal elements and structures. By 1920 African American vernacular forms had so permeated U.S. culture that the common use of the word ‘folk’ as a pejorative and ethnocentric term of inadequacy, marginalization, and abuse had ceased to be anywhere near an accurate historical account of actual Art practice in the United States. Since the advent of many artistically diverse stylistic forms in the next fifty year period (1920-1970) has also been heavily influenced by Jazz, Blues, R & B, Rock ‘n Roll, and Funk, as well as the literary and oral speech forms of African Americans (and all from a rich, deep and obvious ‘folk’ base), it comes as no surprise that theoretical ideas about the very identity of American culture have begun to change.
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Thus the clearly radical intervention of what once was deemed black as well as ethnic, feminist and multicultural studies since 1968, has forced a still highly resistant academic canon to reconsider its self-serving mythology of ‘universalism’ in the arts, and to openly appeal to fatuous, right-wing repressive strategies of rhetorically declaring all intellectual challenges to its domination as mere ‘political correctness’ and cultural parochialism. Despite the institutional power of academe this strategy has continued to backfire in the face of widespread cultural and political resistance by those Americans who realize that its culture is unavoidably and inextricably multicultural and multinational as a direct result of the hybrid dynamics of social-historical interaction.
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It is this on-going dialogical and dialectical relationship that makes HipHop a logical heir of this cultural legacy. As a multivaried cultural identity that began to emerge in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx and Harlem, NY, and quickly spread to create similar regional formations throughout the United States, HipHop (as form and content), was soon a constituent part of American youth culture, and was used by a decidedly multicultural constituency in the areas of oral language, music, dance, painting, and writing to express its complex, ironic, conflicted (and problematic) alienation from official American society.
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Led by African Americans and Puerto Ricans, as well as first and second generation Caribbean immigrants, HipHop from its very inception spoke to and about the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the society and sought a liberating ethos of creative imagination, political activism, and community involvement as sources of resistance and independence, In the early 1980s HipHop was asserting its right to existence by forming its own network of public and private spaces in communities throughout the country, and by making its presence felt through openly using urban public spaces to construct its images and communicate its ‘messages’ (e.g. graffiti, breakdancing and Rap). By the mid 1980s the corporate culture industries of fashion, music production and recording, TV, radio, movies and the formal ‘art world’--galleries, museums, and the publishing houses of art criticism and theory--had begun to appropriate/expropriate these forms, and by the late 1980s (especially after the rise of Spike Lee and other African American filmmakers in the 1986-1996 period), HipHop had become a major economic success as well, simultaneously raising the inherent political and aesthetic problems of commodification, reification and cultural/ideological absorption under global capitalism to a new hegemonic status in HipHop culture. Thus the fierce, ongoing struggle for a truly radical American vernacular culture continues in the cybernetic world of the 21st century...
Kofi Natambu
July, 2000
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http://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2015/05/miles-davis-1926-1991-legendary-iconic_23.html
Miles Davis: A New Revolution in Sound
by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14, Number 2
Fall, 2014

"Knowledge is Freedom. Ignorance is Slavery.”
—Miles Davis
"That period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s was an era in which the resources of Jazz were being consolidated and refined and the range of its sources broadened. Some of the Jazz of this period reached across class and age lines and unified black audiences. Young people could see this music as "bad" in much the same sense that James Brown used the word, and older black people could see its links to black tradition."
--John Szwed
"To the yang of 'hard bop' Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement; to the yin of 'cool' he brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to funk. By refusing to color-code either his music or his audience, Davis rose at the end of the 1950s to the summit of artistic excellence."
--Marsha Bayles
“What is there to say about the instrument? It’s my voice—that’s all it is."
--Miles Davis
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On July 17,1955 at the second annual Newport Jazz Festival, Davis was literally invited at the last minute to join a group of prominent Jazz musicians in a staged twenty minute jam session that had been organized by the festival s famed music director, impresario, and promoter George Wein as part of an "opening act" for the then highly popular white headliner Dave Brubeck.
Scheduled merely as a quick programming lead-in to stage changes between featured performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras, Lester Young, and Brubeck, nothing special was planned in advance for this short set which, like most jam sessions, was completely improvised by the musicians performing onstage. Davis was then the least well known musician in the assembled group which was made up of Thelonious Monk, individuals from the MJQ, and other individual members of various groups playing in the festival. Wein just happened to be a big fan of Davis and added him because he was "a melodic bebopper" and a player who, in Wein's view, could reach a larger audience than most other musicians because of the haunting romantic lyricism and melodic richness of his style. Wein's insight turned out to be prophetic.
Despite the fact that most of the mainstream audience on hand had only a vague idea of who Davis was, he was a standout sensation in the jam session and his searing performance was one of the most talked about highlights of the festival. Appearing in an elegant white seersucker sport coat and a small black bow tie, thus already demonstrating the sleek, sharp sartorial style that quickly became his trademark (and led to his eventual appearance on the covers of many fashion magazines in the U.S, Europe, and Asia), Davis captivated the festival throng with haunting, dynamic solos and brilliant ensemble playing on both slow ballads and intensely up-tempo quicksilver tunes alike. Taking complete command of the setting with his understated elegance and relaxed yet naturally dramatic stage presence, the handsome and charismatic Davis breezed through two famous and musically daunting compositions by Thelonious Monk ("Hackensack" and "Round Midnight"), and then ended his part of the program by playing an impassioned bluesy solo on a well-known Charlie Parker composition entitled "Now is the Time" which Davis had originally recorded with Bird in 1945. That clinched it. He was a hit. Miles had returned from almost complete oblivion to becoming a much talked about and heralded star seemingly overnight (of course this personal and professional recognition had been over a decade in the making). After a long, arduous struggle as both an artist and individual that began in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois when he started to play trumpet at the age of 13 in 1939, Miles Davis had finally "arrived." For the first time since 1950 he was completely clean and off drugs. No longer addicted, Miles now played with a bravura, command, and creative clarity that he had been fervently searching for well before he had become addicted to heroin. It would be the beginning of many more incredible triumphs and struggles that would catapult the fiery young trumpet player to the very pinnacle of his profession and global fame and wealth over the next ten years.
On hand for that historic summer concert in Newport, RI. was George Avakian, a young music producer from the large corporate recording company called Columbia (now Sony). Miles had been after Avakian for over five years trying to get a recording contract with Columbia which was then the largest and most successful music company in the United States, but Avakian had been cautiously waiting for a sign that Davis had conquered his personal problems and was ready to commit fulltime to his music. Clearly Miles was now ready. Avakian's brother Aram whispered to George during the concert that he should sign Davis now, before he became a big hit and signed with a rival company instead. Miles, himself nonplussed about the critical acclaim he was finally receiving, wondered what the fuss was all about and maintained that he was simply playing like he always had been. While there was some truth to this assertion it was also clear that Miles's highly disciplined demeanor, new responsible attitude, and impeccable playing now indicated his intent on making a new commitment to living a life strictly devoted to his art.
Avakian and Columbia representatives met with Davis two days later on July 19, 1955 to sign him to a new contract with the understanding that Davis would first fulfill the remainder of his contract with the Prestige label by doing a series of recordings in the fall of 1955 and the spring and fall of 1956 while at the same time making his first recordings with Columbia that would not be released until after the public appearance of the Prestige sessions. These small label recordings for Prestige would immediately become famously known as the "missing g" sessions (so-called for the dropping of the letter 'g' in the titles of these records, (e.g. Walkin', Workin', Cookin', Steamin', and Relaxin'). As Miles's first great legendary Quintet this young aggregation (the oldest member of the group was 33 years old) featured then relative unknowns John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. From the very beginning this group and Miles himself would remake Jazz history and become innovative and protean harbingers of great changes to come in the music as well as the general culture.
As with many great musicians, Miles's unique, highly individual sound on his chosen instrument--the trumpet--would be the creative basis and structural foundation of this new cultural and aesthetic intervention. His was a sound that embraced the entire history of Jazz trumpet in its meticulous attention to the demanding technical and physical requirements of the instrument yet also sought a creative and expressive approach that openly allowed for more subtle emotional nuances to emerge from his playing than were common traditionally on trumpet. Miles brought a highly burnished lyricism that was both deeply introspective and fiercely driving all at once. A major characteristic of Davis's playing was a new and different way of phrasing in which a major emphasis and focus on the relationship of space to tempo and melody (and the intervals between notes) became the hallmark of his style. In the process Davis dramatically redefined and expanded the expressive and creative range of the tonal palette and instrumental timbre of the trumpet. By shifting the traditional emphasis from the heraldic and bravura functions of the instrument to a more diverse and expansive range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas Miles was able to openly express the anguished conflict, sardonic irony, restless desire for cultural and social change, and questing existential/ psychological anxiety of the modern age. This intense attention to the broader expressive possibilities of both musical improvisation and composition also turned the feverish search for new forms and methods that characterized the era into a parallel personal quest for discovering a wider range of emotional and psychological contexts in which to play. The sonic exploration of the complexities and ambiguities of joy, rage, love, and melancholia was a major hallmark of Miles's style. Central to Miles's vision and sensibility was an equally exhilarating appreciation for the balanced expressive and intellectual relationship between relaxation and tension in his music.
By focusing specifically on the spatial and rhythmic dimensions of melodic invention Miles developed musical methods that called for, and often resulted in, a precise minimalist approach to playing in which each note (or corresponding chord) carried an implied reference to every other note or chord in a particular sequence of musical phrases. Through a technical command of breath control and timbrai dynamics induced by his embouchure and unorthodox valve fingerings, Miles could maintain or manipulate tonal pitch at the softest or loudest volumes. By creating stark dialectical contrasts in his sound through alternately attacking, slurring, syncopating or manipulating long tones in particular ensemble or orchestral settings (a technical device Miles often referred to as "contrary motion") Miles was able to convey great feeling and emotion through an economy of phrasing and musical rests. This rapt attention to allowing space or the silence between note intervals to dramatically assert itself as much or more as the notes themselves created great anticipation in his audience as to how these tensions would be resolved (or not). In this respect, the insightful observation by the French Jazz critic and music historian André Hodeir that Miles's sound tends toward a discovery of ecstasy is a rather apt description of Davis's expressive approach. What emerged from Miles's intensely comprehensive investigation of the creative possibilities of the instrument was a deep and lifelong appreciation for the tonal, sonic, and textural dimensions of playing and composing music. These aesthetic concerns as well as Miles's innovative creative solutions to the rigorous challenges of improvisational and composed ensemble structures alike in the modern Jazz tradition soon revolutionized all of American music and made Davis one of the leading and most influential musician-composers in the world during the last half of the 20th century.
Davis's widespread social, cultural, and political influence didn't end there however--especially in the black community. Miles also quickly became a social and cultural avatar whose highly personal combination of cool reserve, fiery defiance, detached alienation, intellectual independence, and striking stylistic innovation in everything from clothes to speech embodied, and largely defined for many, the ethos of 'hip' that pervaded the black Jazz world of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Miles, while remaining very hip, at the same time also lived and worked far beyond the insular world of hipsterism and avant-garde bohemia. He was unique in that his stance was simultaneously existentialist and engaged. As many observers, fans, scholars, friends, and critics have noted, Miles became, in many ways, what the critic Garry Giddins called "the representative black artist" of his era. John Szwed, Yale University music professor and author of a 2002 biography on Miles entitled So What: The Life of Miles Davis speaks for a couple of generations of writers, fans, artists and musicians when he states that by the late '50s, early 1960s:
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“Miles was becoming the coin of the realm, cock of the walk, good copy for the tabloids, and inspiration for literary imagination. Allusions to him could turn up anywhere…Tributes to him sprang up in poems by Langston Hughes (“Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”), and Gregory Corso…Young people ostentatiously carried his albums to parties and sought out his clothing in the best men’s stores. In person, his every action was observed and read for meaning…A discourse developed around him, one that bore inordinate weight in matters of race—Miles stories—narratives about his inner drives, his demons, his pain, and his ambition. Invariably, his stories climaxed with a short comment, crushingly delivered in a husky imitation of the man’s voice, capped by some obscenity…He was the man.”
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Among many black people, Davis's outspoken, defiant social stance and hip, charismatic aura signified a profound shift in cultural values and attitudes in the national black community that also had a lasting political significance and influence. This was especially true for the emerging adolescent youth and radical young adults of the era whose overt displays of rebellion and defiance of racism and repression were becoming pervasive with the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Miles quickly became a major symbol of this modern revolutionary spirit in African American culture and was seen by many as an important artistic leader in this struggle and its widespread social and political demands for respect, justice, equality, and freedom for African Americans that marked the period. Thus, it is not surprising that many of the various musical aesthetics that Davis devised and expressed during the late '50s and throughout the '60s consciously sought to advance specifically new ideas about the structural, formal, and expressive dimensions of the modernist tradition in contemporary Jazz music. These changes would openly challenge many of the orthodoxies of this tradition both in terms of form and content while at the same time asserting a radically different set of ideological and aesthetic values about the intellectual and cultural worth, use, and intent of the music that in attitude and style sought to resist or go beyond standard notions of both high art and commercial popular culture. Simultaneously however, Davis sought to consciously establish an even more socially intimate relationship with his black audience (and especially its youthful members) that would embody and hopefully expand Davis's views on the broad necessity for deeply rooted political and cultural change within the African American community and the U.S. as a whole.
In the quest to critique many of the philosophical assumptions governing conventional modernist discourse in art while still retaining a fundamental aesthetic connection to other important aspects and principles of modernism--especially those having to do with the continuous necessity of creative change and revision--Davis epitomized the 'progressive' African American Jazz musician's desire to use black vernacular sources, ideas, and values to engage these modernist traditions and principles on his/her own independent social, cultural, and intellectual terms. In such major recordings from the 1957-1967 period as his orchestral masterpieces Miles Ahead, (1957) Porgy & Bess, (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)--made in collaboration with his longtime friend and colleague, the white composer and arranger Gil Evans --and his equally significant and highly influential small group Quintet and Sextet recordings, Milestones, (1958) Kind of Blue, (1959) Live at the Blackhawk, (1961) My Funny Valentine, (1965) Four & More, (1964) E.S.P., (1965) Miles Smiles, (1966) Miles in Berlin, (1964) Miles in Tokyo, (1964) Live at the Plugged Nickel, (1965) and Nefertiti, (1967) Davis was at the forefront of those African American artists of the period who, in all the arts, were feverishly looking for and often finding fresh, new modes of pursuing aesthetic innovation and social change. By dialectically synthesizing and extending ideas, strategies, methods, and structures culled from such disparate sources as 20th century classical music, the blues, R&B, and many different stylistic forms from the Jazz tradition (i.e. Swing, Bebop, 'Cool' and 'Hard Bop' etc.)--many of which Davis himself had played a pivotal role in developing and popularizing--Miles helped bring about a new creative synthesis of modern and vernacular expressions that greatly changed our perceptions of what American music was and could be.
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Cecil Taylor: The Piano As Orchestra
“The whole question of freedom (in music) has been misunderstood, by
those on the outside and even by some of the musicians in ‘the movement.’
If a man plays for a certain amount of time...eventually a kind of order
asserts itself...There is no music without order--if that music comes from a
man’s innards. But that order is not necessarily related to any single criterion
of what order should be as imposed from the outside. This is not a question
then of ‘freedom’ as opposed to ‘nonfreedom’ but rather it is a question of
recognizing different ideas and expressions of order.”
--Cecil Taylor
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Imagine a short, powerfully built black man with heavy lidded eyes masked with blacker sunglasses and a long distinguished looking mustache that conjures up visions of Emiliano Zapata spread majestically beneath an eagle’s nose and arching eyebrows. Jutting out from under a cap or woolen head wrap are wide sideburns that come to an abrupt stop just below strong Indian cheekbones, and cut to a sharp forty five degree angle above a granite-like jawline. The head held erect sits like a perfectly sculpted rock upon a track star’s neck and shoulders. To complete the picture imagine this same haughty figure perched solidly upon a piano bench directly behind a massive, gleaming black piano with large white letters spelling out BOSENDORFER etched in calligraphic script along the right side of this imposing instrument. Descend deeper into your subconscious and visualize, as if transfixed in a dreamlike haze, this same wiry black man with sprinter’s legs and thighs poised in an aggressive ready-to-fly stance beneath this piano, feet in perpindicular surprise inches from the pedal stops parallel to the floor.
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Don’t look away or even blink. See the sweating boxer’s arms connected to elegant steel fingers raised in cat’s paw claw action now racing in a whiteheat blur across the tonal spectrum of 96 keys glittering? See his painter’s hands grip, jab, caress, stroke and maul the digital slabs of shining white and black ivory? As he dives into the thunder range of the now liquid instrument you glimpse his leaping fingers dancing in quick rhythmic steps across the linear tracks of the piano. The crystalline shower of notes are ringing in spiralling waves of overtones that seem to swallow up the air. Lost in a tornado of lyricism and a pulsating hurricane of instrumental virtuosity, you detect within the maelstrom a beautiful haunting song long since forgotten. It is then you discover that you have not been asleep after all. It is a waking dream and its name is Cecil Taylor.
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CECIL TAYLOR. The very name has come to represent all that is truly creative, vital and innovative in contemporary 20th century American music. In an amazing career that spans some thirty years he has earned the right to be called that which is reserved for only those rarest of individuals: GENIUS. Another member of this esteemed pantheon, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, called these same men and women “beyond category.” Their greatness is not dependent upon the ever changing blandishments of stylistic trends. All forms are subordinate to their compelling vision and spiritual force. It is to this magnificent realm that Cecil Taylor belongs.
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Possessing tremendous energy and range, and an astounding technical facility on piano, Taylor is widely considered one of the greatest virtuosos in the world on his instrument. However, this is only a small part of what he does. A former drummer in his youth and a serious student of percussion, Cecil’s concept of the piano (derived from the African folk tradition) reminds everyone that it is technically considered a percussive instrument. In fact his explosive, riveting touch on piano led the Jazz writer Valerie Wilmer to refer to his keyboard as “eighty-eight tuned drums.” Cecil is a world-class composer whose improvisational skills are unlimited. There is no one who plays as fast, with as much power or as intensely as Cecil Taylor, yet there is a precision and structural control that is also unequalled. Cecil has the kind of stamina that allows him to play for hours(!) at a time. Many times the tempos are set at a demonic speed, yet he will just as often overwhelm the listener with a soft, aching tenderness and translucent ballad style. In order to enter the singular world of Cecil Taylor one must simply be prepared to open up completely and put aside all conventional notions and expectations about music. Since Taylor is always involved in a vigorous redefinition of what is called melody, harmony, and rhythm, there are rarely any stylistic cliches in his playing.
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Taylor’s music is characterized by the creative use of sound as color and texture expressed in overlapping and pyramidal layers of melodic lines, riffs, motifs, tonal clusters, and polyrhythms. Timbral dynamics and constrast, as well as a highly sophisticated use of blues-based call-and-response voicings are also integral aspects of Taylor’s orchestral approach to the piano. In ensemble settings Taylor is deeply indebted to the master Duke Ellington for basic organizational principles. Of this influence, Taylor states” “One thing I learned from Ellington is that you can make the group you play with sing if you realize each of the instruments has a distinctive personality; and you can bring out the singing aspect of that personality if you use the right timbre for the instrument.” This lesson is applied in a particularly striking manner by Taylor and his saxophonist of twenty-three years, the outstanding altoist Jimmy Lyons.
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Born in Long Island City, New York on March 25, 1929, Taylor began playing at age five encouraged by his music loving parents who early on exposed young Cecil to pople like Duke Ellington. His mother was a dancer who could play the piano and violin. His father, a butler and chef by trade, sang blues, field hollers, and shouts in the home, and was also somewhat of an oral scholar in black folklore. Aside from being exposed to a very wide range of black music, Taylor was also learning about the European classical tradition.
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It was because of the example of Ellington that Taylor, after high school studies at the New York College of Music, decided to go to Boston and attend the New England Conservatory of Music in 1951. Because of Ellington’s obvious mastery of large scale orchestral forms, and a casual, ironic remark by Duke that “You need everything you can get--you need the conservatory with an ear to what’s happening in the street”, Taylor decided that no music should be beyond his understanding, or more importantly, absorbed in a creative, dynamic way in the development of his own unique vision of the African American improvisational tradition. as Cecil so eloquently points out: “Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
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Ironically, it was while Cecil studied at the conservatory that he discovered in just what specific ways he could find a functional use for his experience as an African American artist in a hostile and overtly racist environment. While attending this academy Cecil realized that he could learn much more about the creative aspects of music from working musicians in the black music tradition than he ever could from the elitist teachers in the conservatory. As Taylor pointed out: “I learned more music from Ellington than I ever learned from the New England Conservatory. Like learning an orchestral approach to the piano from Ellington, like, I could never have gotten that from the conservatory.”
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It was during his stay in Boston in the early 1950s that Cecil heard many of his idols in live performance for the first time. It was in Boston in 1952 that Taylor first heard the legendary Charles ‘Bird’ Parker at the local Hi-Hat club. Cecil also heard the great pianist-composer Bud Powell at this time, as well as the outstanding pianist/composer/arranger Mary Lou Williams. By this time Taylor had already plunged into an extended and intensive study of many of his major influences, such giants of 20th century piano music as Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Count Basie, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, and of course, Duke Ellington. However, Cecil’s deep and on-going appreciation of these artists did not keep him from also checking out people like Miles Davis, Lennie Tristano, James Brown, Igor Stranvisky, Aretha Franklin, Anton Webern, Marvin Gaye, and Bela Bartok (who Taylor said, “Showed me what you can do with folk material”). It’s important to note that Taylor not only considers these individuals to be seminal sources of inspiration in his music, but that his attitude toward this myriad of influences is not that of the blind, indiscriminate eclectic. Taylor has a very sharp and critical understanding of the relative value of the artists (and art forms) that he chooses to draw from.
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Upon graduation from the conservatory in 1955, Taylor immediately made his considerable presence known with an outstanding group that recorded in December of that year when Cecil was twenty-six. It was Cecil’s first recording (Jazz Advance for the Boston-based Transition label). Many people consider this to be the first so-called” Jazz “avant-garde” recording of the modern era. This recording is now a cherished collector’s item.
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As a fiercely independent and iconoclastic black artist, Taylor has had to pay the severe price of uncomprehending and often ignorant music critics judging his music using alien criteria. This kind of reception to his music by agents, promoters, club owners, and recording executives who cannot neatly package Taylor’s sound for mass commodity sale has caused Cecil’s public career to be interrupted for long periods of time. For example, the general hostility of the music industry in the U.S. kept Taylor from being recorded in America from 1963-1966 and again from 1969-1973. There were also infrequent opportunities to work in clubs or on concert stages during the sixties and early 1970s. Consequently, Taylor has only appeared on 23 records as a leader, and just two other recordings as a featured artist, in thirty years.
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However it a great testament to Taylor’s integrity and inspiring dedication and perseverance that he has not only survived this criminal neglect but has partly compensated for it by performing and recording widely in Europe and Japan (since 1967, ten of his last fifteen recordings released in this country have been for his own, or foreign-owned labels). He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin, (where he taught the largest class in the history of the school--over 1,000 students--and then proceeded to flunk over 70% of them in 1970!), Antioch College and Glassboro State College.
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Cecil’s career, like that of so many great artists, is full of strange ironies and paradoxes. Despite leading recording sessions with many of the finest musicians in the world over the past twenty-five years (e.g. John Coltrane, Sam Rivers, Bill Dixon, Steve Lacy, Albert Ayler, Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons, Tony Williams, and just recently Max Roach); despite winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music (1973); despite playing a masterful performance at the White House in June, 1978 (that literally made then President Jimmy Carter leap up and embrace Taylor), and despite winning countless awards and kudos from all over the globe (and being written about by more poets than any artist in “Jazz” today), Cecil Taylor is still virtually unknown in the United States, even among the artistic cognoscenti.
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Obviously, this shouldn’t be. For there is nothing self-consciously precious or ‘academic’ about Cecil’s playing. Steeped in the rich blues tradition (expressed in an abstract expressionist style) the music is very physical: passionate, sensuous, rigorous, and athletic. The pervasive influence of Dance is forever present in Cecil’s work. In fact, Taylor, who has often collaborated in live performances with dancers, playwrights and poets like Mikhail Baryshnikov, Diane McIntyre, Adrieene Kennedy, and Thulani Davis, has often said that he likes to “try to imitate on piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.” His music has a dancer’s grace and fluidity.
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Taylor, who repudiates the traditional Western idea that form is more important than, or separate from, content in art has said that he is a constructivist (which he explains as “one who is involved in the conscious working out of given materials”). In Taylor’s music the emphasis is on building a whole, totally integrated structure through the application of the principle of kinetic improvisation.
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Cecil is always quick to point out that the real basis of the music is emotional and spiritual. He has stated that “to feel is the most terrifying thing one can do in this society” and that “The thing that makes Jazz so interesting is that each man is his own academy...If he’s going to be persuasive he learns about other academies, but the idea is that he must have that special thing. And sometimes you don’t even know what it is.” Finally he states: “Most people have no idea what improvisation is...It means the most heightened perception of one’s self, but one’s self in relation to other forms of life. It means experiencing oneself as another kind of living organism much in the same way as a plant, a tree--the growth, you see, that’s what it is...I’m hopefully accurate in saying that’s what happens when we play. It’s not to do with ‘energy.’ It has to do with religious forces...it is the ability to talk coherently through the symbols.”
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Today Cecil is at the pinnacle of his artistic powers. Justly lionized in Europe and Japan, and a “living legend” among musicians in the U.S., Cecil commands SRO audiences wherever he performs. For the first time in his career he can afford to pay his rent and live decently on the income he earns from playing. We are the fortunate ones, for despite the on-going attempts of ‘official culture’ to deny the very existence of the contemporary black creative artist (especially as innovator and ‘cultural leader’), people like Taylor continue to provide leadership. At 57 Cecil is one of the major artists in this country. He has changed the very form and content of American music in his lifetime. For this, we owe him and his peers in Afro-American creative music an enormous debt.
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1986
Art, Language, & Culture: A Statement
The history of literary theory is inseparable from the various cultural contexts that literature, as method and mythology, has grown up in. That is, what theory attempts to examine and “explain” is something meaningful about the structures of language as they encounter shifting social, philosophical and ideological notions about “reality.” The fact that these notions themselves are derived directly from the discourse that informs them only serves to reaffirm the inescapable link between epistemology (as well as questions dealing with the origins and historical evolution of ideas about knowledge) and language itself.
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Thus what we know about the conceptual dimensions of narrative is a whole complex of linguistic and cultural significations and associations that constititute a screen upon which “meaning” is inscribed or reflected. These reflections and inscriptions are of course conventions and devices that are used to “tell a story” in a manner that “makes sense” to the person(s) hearing or reading that story. The role of theory is to make a reader more aware of the myriad ways in which that story becomes something of particular value in our lives (as individual student, disinterested observer, or writer/creator). These values in turn attempt to valorize or uphold certain specific ideas, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, etc., over and against other conceptions. The implications of all this for social consciousness and cultural change are profound in that theory challenges us to seriously consider the manner in which language establishes the basis for our very perceptions of the structural hierarchies of thought, belief and expression that characterize society.
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It is in this sense that the text is a metaphor for experience. Like any book, we “read” the world through a massive network of signs that make up the formal content of that world. These multivaried signs and signifiers come from a dizzying array of sources, references, and ideas that “tell” us something about “our world.” What it tells us, like any story, is who we are as “characters” in this on-going narrative we call “life.” Like the world, a literary text both reveals and conceals what it means by our close reading of it.
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This is no more true than in our received conceptions of what “art” is or means. Contrary to the rather banal, cliche and utterly one-dimensional descriptions of Art as an isolated and elitist activity of certain privileged individuals called “artists” we find through even the most cursory investigations of its definition in many cultures throughout the world that what the West conceives this category to mean is simply irrelevant to most other societies. In fact, what we discover if we dig just a little deeper is that the languages surrounding Art in Western cultures are actually often in serious conflict with each other, or at least differ significantly in fundamental ways. If we probe even more we will find that these deeply rooted cultural differences have emerged from a very complex history of engagement, conflict and cross-cultural communication that opens up a raging discourse about what these differences really mean to the various peoples expressing them.
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In the United States then we are told that there is an ideological and cultural consensus about what “Art” means and how it can be expressed. A certain social and economic class generally defines for the rest of us what the “mainstream” is and demands that we all swim in its fetid waters. This class is wealthy, overwhelmingly white and predominately male. It is subsidized by private foundations, public corporations, and federal, state and local tax dollars. Its major institutions support European classical music (and its North American derivatives), operas, museums, dance companies, multimedia productions, and revivals of aging stage plays. This class has a “traditional” and “avant-garde” wing. It makes a point of actively opposing, discouraging or neglecting other ideas and forms stemming from Other/different sources of cultural expression. This class is thus racist, sexist, and reactionary. It can only stomach innovation on its own terms. It is relentlessly condescending, patronizing and contemptuous of the great majority of human beings who do not genuflect to its presumed superiority. This class perceives itself as the moral and political guardian of all that is considered “sacred” and “immortal” about what it calls “civilization.” This class often intimidates and dominates people who are culturally and ideologically different from them. In a word, it RULES.
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However, the hegemony of this class does not obscure or eliminate the multiplicity of sites that “represent” difference. In fact, it is the countervailing force of this reality that allows language to play a leading role in the widespread resistance to this domination., and at the same time provides the energy and intellectual force to suggest or create other modes of thought and expression. In literature we find a corresponding need and desire on the part of writers and critical theorists from these Other traditions and ideological formations to question and critique the hegemonic structures of the “ruling class” and its minions.
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In the arena of theory this is accomplished through entering into a dialogical and dialectical debate with so-called mainstream institutions and sources about the languages that are used to define, classify and determine what “reality” is and means. Thus this discourse always leads us back to reconsider what the epistemological and philosophical dimensions of aesthetics are with respect to history. It is in this context that intricate and complex discussions about the linguistic, cultural and political terms of this discourse have evolved. This is what figures like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Aesop, Humes, Hegel, Kant, Nietszche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl and all the rest signify for the literary theorists and cultural critics who want to understand what the implications of this debate means for the “future” of Western society and culture.
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By rigorously pursuing the analytical conceptions, methodologies and visions of such important 20th century thinkers as W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Amiri Baraka, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, and many others too numerous to mention, we will find the necessary information and systems of knowledge that will enable us to investigate these ideas about the relationship of language, “art” and culture that constitutes the established “mission” of this course. Let us venture forth, kick ass and take names...
Kofi Natambu
Gradute Seminar course: “Art, Language & Culture”
Introductory Lecture (excerpted)
California Institute of the Arts
September 7, 1990
“If I Steal It, Is It Mine?”: Racism, Cultural Expropriation, and the African American Artist in the U.S.
appropriation: 3. To take to or for oneself; take possession of. To make one’s own. The act of appropriating.
expropriation: 1. To take (property, ideas etc.) from another, especially without his permission. 2. To deprive (a person, business etc.) of property. To be separated from one’s own.
--The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
A critical analysis of the structural relationship between the African American artist and the political economy of culture in the United States must begin with a theoretical investigation of the social and cultural history of aesthetics and “race” in this country. However, the major problem with the teaching of this history is that the writing of it is monopolized by "white Americans" who don’t know anything about the subject.
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For example, it is painfully clear that 98% of all the books written about ‘culture’ in the United States don’t have the slightest idea who the following people are or what they’ve “contributed” to American culture: ‘Native Americans (“Indians”), African Americans (“Negroes”), Asian Americans (“Orientals”), Latino Americans (“Hispanics”). As a result these same writers can’t really talk coherently or accurately about the actual historical experience of the Euro Americans (“white people” of English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, German and Eastern European descent). Obviously this creates tremendous confusion when it comes to any clear understanding of the complex meaning of these various histories. This is largely because of a profound ignorance of even the empirical details of what the cross-cultural contacts and conflicts of the many heterogeneous groups that make up the North American continent actually represent. Thus it is not surprising that the ideology of racism (the most powerful instrument of oppression in the world today outside of capitalism itself) dominates contemporary discourse about culture, aesthetics and ‘identity’ in the United States.
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THE RELENTLESS HEGEMONY that this ideology wields continues to distort, obscure, and confuse the issue when it comes to a critical assessment of the major role that appropriation plays in cultural theory and praxis today. This is no less true within so-called “avant-garde” circles than it is in the academic/institutional oligopoly known as the “cultural mainstream.” In fact, what both of these aesthetic communities have in common is an equal disdain for, yet voracious exploitation of, other cultural ideas, practices, traditions and values stemming from different social/cultural groups (e.g. African Americans). These reactionary attitudes and philosophical limitations constitute the basis of the historical expropriation of black cultural forms in all the arts (i.e. music, dance, literature, visual arts, ‘performance art’, theater, etc.) by white artists and critics who seek to not only use (or appropriate) the techniques, methods and conceptual ideas of African Americans but to co-opt, absorb and consume them as their property through the systematic ‘legal’ and criminal theft of their cultural productions.
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This is carried out by the massive structural domination of the art market by huge corporations owned and administered by predominately upper-class white males who, through bureaucratic managerial control, inherited wealth, and monopolistic manipulation of the vast economic network of marketing, distribution and exchange outlets (the various sites of Capital in the political economy of culture in this country as well as globally), determine what the schools and mass media teach about “who did what, when, where and how” when it comes to American cultural history.
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There is nothing necessarily conspiratorial or sinisterly “planned” with respect to this on-going condition. It is simply the way things are when it comes to political, economic and social reality in the United States. The fact that the various cultural/artistic communities (‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’) largely support and accept the rather heinous status quo only exposes the vested interests of the “art world” when it comes to their own privileged position within the system. So the point is not merely that individual white artists “stole” their own “personal” aesthetic styles (and much of their content) from blacks but that as a necessarily privileged group of artists (by dint of their “race”, class, and sometimes gender) they were able to do much more than merely “appropriate” information (i.e. creatively use thematic and stylistic material as aesthetic source, cultural reference or energy conduit). The truth is that white artists have always sought to own the economic rights to, and residual benefits of, African American cultural artifacts and conceptions. What made this possible for them is the surplus value of what black artists and cultural workers have produced (in the form of usurious “contracts”, absurdly exploitive royalty arrangements and rigidly segregated markets at the points of both material production and exchange).
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THE MOST BLATANT and notorious example of all this is the recording industry whose monumental profiteering off the creative genius of such legendary and seminal musicians, composers and singers as Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Louis Jordan, Charles Mingus (and just about every blues artist in history) is scandalous. These are just a very few of the huge number of black artists who have revolutionized music as an art form in the 20th century and who have been mercilessly exploited. Who is the great Jimi Hendrix but a man whose extraordinary talent and vision has been plundered by a whole cottage industry of artistic and financial parasites who continue to bilk millions of dollars from his estate, while doing third-rate imitations of his artistry? In this context, who is Eric Clapton? Who are Mick Jagger & Keith Richard? Who is every ho-hum heavy metal guitarist since 1971? What does the multi-billion dollar music industry represent under these conditions? It’s important to note that this is not simply a matter of “trashing” your favorite white musician/songwriter either. After all, I’m not interested in examining the motives or intent of personalities involved in this process. What’s significant is the political, economic and cultural context that they are a part of, and what they decide to do about these conditions as far as their own cultural work is concerned.
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In this light it’s easy to see the implications of the infamous “cover song’ tradition of the 1950s and early 1960s by white artists (a situation in which a popular white artist records the song and/or music of a black artist that often results in black artists not being paid royalties for their work and simultaneously being stymied from getting airplay and openly selling their music to a wider audience). Everyone from Pat Boone to Elvis Presley have cashed in on this little strategy. And while the economics and academic recognition of this situation have improved to a certain degree (more people are aware of what is happening and why) it still remains a major concern within the African American cultural community. Just ask the attorneys representing Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the estates of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and yes, James Marshall Hendrix, all of whom are currently involved in massive lawsuits against their respective recording companies. I’m sure there are many more examples.
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Another cultural area where this syndrome of white appropriation turns into its ugly linguistic cousin is literature, where three generations of black writers in this century have been ignored, neglected and ripped-off with hardly anyone in academia or the avant-garde batting an eyelash. How else does one explain the colossal ignorance surrounding the important literary contributions of such major ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ writers as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Melvin B. Tolson, Adrienne Kennedy, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Bob Kaufman, Clarence Major, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Samuel Delany, Gayl Jones, Jayne Cortez, Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, June Jordan, Al Young and even Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (whose towering achievements are far too often dismissed as the infantile rantings of a ‘bitter nigger’). There are many other people I could mention but I think you get the point. How many of you reading this essay have heard of/read Sterling A. Brown, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James or Ida B. Wells? On the other hand how many of you know the work of W.C. Williams, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Ezra Pound, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac? Many more, I’ll bet.
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The fault for all this lies of course with the public educational system whose curriculums and policy decisions throughout the country mirror the already established ideology of the bourgeois class that does indeed “run” the nation. The mere fact that the American literary canon is made up almost exclusively of European and white American males makes this clearly self-evident. The expropriation of the oral tradition in ‘American literature’ begins with the poetic and narrative strategies of Thomas Woolfe and William Faulkner in the 1920s and reaches its apex in the Beat Generation poets of the 1950s (check out Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso for starters). Again the issue is not the individuals who choose to use/appropriate material from other traditions and folk forms, but the supporting political economy that promotes and markets their cultural productions as “representative” or “central” to a certain aesthetic expression. At the same time the culture industry ignores or renders invisible the work of the seminal forces in the field.
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THIS HISTORICAL DYNAMIC continues today with the myriad innovations in popular dance, painting (graffiti, mural art, etc.), ‘performance art,’ multimedia and film by black artists all being mined by white American artists with scarcely any real critical attention being paid to the nature of their technical and expressive achievements. One very significant example of this is the lack of serious critical analysis and commentary surrounding the powerful new hybrid/synthetic form known as RAP. Most white critics and journalists seem more interested in determining whether young black people inventing the form are “underclass criminals” or simply “obscene illiterates.” This is cultural racism of a particularly insidious and manipulative kind, especially in light of the tremendous popularity (as both form and artifact) that RAP enjoys among middle class white suburban youth (records don’t consistently go double platinum without this demographic audience). The corresponding fact that many white and black scholars are beginning to write in literary and cultural journals about the aesthetics and cultural politics of the form also exposes the dangerously reductive and racist attitudes of such middlebrow publications as Newsweek, The New York Times, New Republic, and The New Criterion. Between the “gliberals” (thanks, Ishmael!) and the neoconservatives, African American art is getting slapped around (and expropriated) from all sides.
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But this historical assault on the intellectual and spiritual vitality, creative innovation, and liberating vision of African American art in all its forms cannot and will not stop the contemporary black artist any more than the imitators of Armstrong, Hughes, Hurston, Ellington, Parker, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, Young and Holiday were able to stop their legendary contributions to the 20th century cannon (sic) of world culture. WORD!
Kofi Natambu
St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter
New York
December 1990
Nostalgia For The Present: Cultural Resistance in Detroit, 1977-1987
Paper presented at the national conference on Black Popular Culture sponsored by DIA Center for the Arts and the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York.
Project organized by Michele Wallace;
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December 7, 1991
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Black Popular Culture: Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 9
Bay Press, 1992
Edited by Gina Dent
What I am going to discuss is the relationship between the general political economy governing the metropolitan Detroit community and the largely African American cultural formations that have emerged there since the late 1970s. Within that context, my remarks will be limited to an analysis of how these cultural expressions (music, art, literature, and critical theory) were, in effect, an insurgent political resistance to the dismantling of the city’s economic and social infrastructure. This steady dismantling has taken a heavy toll on the human and material resources of Detroit since 1973--the pivotal year of the so-called ‘Energy crisis’, the Watergate scandal, and the election of the first black mayor in the history of the city, Coleman A. Young.
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I’ll focus on four major cultural formations (or, more accurately, three groups and one individual) from the period 1977-1987, fusing a description of my own experience in black working-class and academic cultural activity with what was occurring in these four sites. In this way, I hope to provide a broad-based perspective on the wide spectrum of cultural expressions that have dominated alternative, oppositional, and “radical” discourse on Detroit’s urban identity since the economic disintegration that began after such cataclysmic national and international events as the “oil crisis” (1973), the defeat of the United States in Vietnam (1975), and the rise of the political right wing on the jingoistic coattails of Reaganism after the 1980 and 1984 national elections. Compounding all of this for the city of Detroit has been Japan’s rise to international domination of the automobile industry during the past fifteen years, and the corresponding collapse of that industry in the United States as demonstrated by the rapidly declining sales, prestige, and reputation of the Big Three automakers--General Motors, Ford, Chrysler--all headquartered in Detroit during this period.
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Contributing to this dreary picture is the subsequent rise in unemployment (reaching a depression level of twenty percent in the black community), the largely passive retreat of the once powerful and progressive labor movement (particularly the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSMCE) unions) in its feeble political response to the conservatives in both national political parties; the large-scale economic and social abandonment of the city by corporations in both the manufacturing and retail sectors through “runaway shop” policies of transferring plants, equipment, and consumer outlets to national and international sites of cheap labor (absent of unions) like the southern United States and Korea; and the massive “white flight” to the suburbs by middle-class residents and companies. Added to this disruptive mix is the tremendous increase in racial conflict and hostility between the predominately black city of Detroit (now seventy percent of its population) and its metropolitan suburbs, which resemble nothing so much as funkmeister George Clinton’s model of a “chocolate city and its vanilla suburbs.” However, given the incredible tension that persists between the city and its mall-driven neighbors (fueled by the pervasive exploitation of the city’s resources by these wealthier former residents), it would be even more accurate to describe it in grim, familiar terms as a blacktown surrounded by a white noose.
The circumstances in Detroit have been made more volatile by the antagonistic relationship between the suburban residents and a mayor with deep roots in both black and labor movements. Mayor Young has the (some say dubious) honor of being not only the first black mayor in the city’s history but also the one with the longest term of service (eighteen years and counting). His feisty, often abrasive personal style is vociferously opposed by a highly contentious group of white politicians, journalists and developers. And there are regular citizens, from the city and its suburbs (some of whom are from the black middle class), who simply despise the mayor and everything he represents as a human being and political force.
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It is within this festering historical context that one must try to make sense of Detroit’s utterly unique, and yet utterly typical, status as an urban industrial/postindustrial center. Its dire situation portends the future of the rest of the nation’s cities. That an understanding of what is happening in my hometown is so important to the rest of the country will be the major subtext of my discussion. I hope such a realization will be the beginning of an ongoing dialogue with other urban centers struggling to define the role of cultural activity in their communities.
Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: Cultural Politics and the Urban Crisis, 1977-1985
In the spring of 1977, I returned to my hometown of Detroit after spending three lonely years in graduate school in the barren and racist wilds of Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts. To say I was ecstatic upon returning is to understate it by half. After growing up in a nearly all-black, working-class environment, which was nothing if not proudly self-sufficient in terms of culture, I was used to, and took for granted, Detroit’s legacy of independent, sophisticated black political engagement. After 1965, white flight and continual black migration to the city led to a dramatic shift in population--from sixty percent white to sixty percent black in just ten years. This meant that people of my generation spent most of their adolescent years, and all of their early adulthood, in a city that was not only the fifth largest in the nation, but also one dominated (at least in physical terms) by a strong and cohesive black working class and the largest black middle class in the country. We had also inherited a long history of independent black radicalism, in both its Marxist and nationalist dimensions, going back to the momentous labor struggles (and the rise of the Nation of Islam) during the 1930s.
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Such legendary black labor activists and leaders as Buddy Battle, Nelson “Jack” Edwards, Erma Henderson, Horace Sheffield, Tom Turner, and John Conyers, Sr. had as much to do with the actual founding and building of the powerful labor movements of the AFL and CIO (which merged in 1955) as any white man. I was also used to the fact that blacks could and should be elected to national political office. After all, both Charles C. Diggs (son of a well-to-do black funeral director) and John Conyers, Jr. had been elected to Congress as early as 1961 and 1964, respectively. To this day, Detroit is the only city where both congressional representatives are black, and, of course, John Conyers is still one of them.
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I also knew about, and followed closely, the exploits of such inspirational figures as George Crockett, an outstanding black radical trial attorney (later, judge and congressman) sentenced, under the notorious Smith Act, to a year in prison for defending the legal rights of Communists at the height of the McCarthy era. Finally, we were all greatly aware of Coleman Alexander Young, a child of the black working class, who after organizing workers in both the Ford automobile plants and the U.S. Post Office, was summarily labeled a subversive and fired from both jobs during this same period. In 1952, Young confronted the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) with an impassioned speech in which he denounced the committee’s existence in Paul Robeson-like fashion.
During the mid and late 1960s, the emergence of such legendary radical organizations as the Marxist League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the nationalist Republic of New Africa led to national reputations for activists such as the late black radical attorney Kenny Cockrel (a founding member of the League who was elected to the Detroit city council in 1977 and was gearing up for a run for the Mayor’s office when he died at the age of fifty in 1989). As a student member of the League in 1969 and 1970, I was inspired by these activists’ example and wanted to emulate their intense organizational and aesthetic style.
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In contrast to that period, the late 1970s represented the rather stagnant cultural and political scene that characterized the somnolent Carter years. Toward the goal of shaking up that stagnation on the local level, I, along with a group of five artists in the areas of music, dance, visual art, and multimedia performance, co-founded a nonprofit community arts organization called Go-For-What-You-Know, Inc. (the title, of course, was taken from a well-known black popular expression of the late 1960s). During the first five years of the group’s existence, we sponsored and organized multimedia art performances, music and literary workshops, and a regular weekly radio program hosted and produced by myself called “Sound Projections” on Detroit public radio (WDET-FM) featuring Jazz, blues, R & B, and Rap, as well as interviews, live performances, readings, and social commentary. We also organized a regular series of lectures and readings by artists and scholars in the city.
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Our most ambitious activity was the founding of a quarterly literary magazine called Solid Ground: A New World Journal, which we began in the spring of 1981. During the six-year history of the magazine, we published twelve issues and one major anthology of essays, cultural criticism, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry covering five years of writing about politics, literature, art, dance, music, and history. Solid Ground was the culmination of a three-year struggle to create an intellectual and cultural organ that would truly engage, critique, and challenge the official pieties of cultural Reaganism and conventional modernist aesthetics in Detroit and the national culture at large. In fact, Solid Ground provided a public forum for a creative and critical alternative to the reactionary social and cultural policies and practices that attempted to destroy all vestiges of political and cultural radicalism during the notoriously backward 1980s.
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Our purpose, as outlined in our first issue, was to “focus on contemporary American and world literature and art from a multiracial, multicultural perspective, and to encourage original, innovative writing that is truly concerned with ‘radical’ ideas about society and culture, especially as they relate to the rest of the world.” In the quixotic tone of that first editorial, we said we also wanted to rely on our own experience as the basis for theoretical and strategic models for change and not be imprisoned by, or dependent on, theories from the past.
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Nearly all of our writers came from the Detroit area, though there were occasional articles and essays by such important figures as the late C.L.R. James, to whom we dedicated a special issue in 1984. In the period from 1981-1987, we featured more than sixty writers, many of whom have gone on to even greater success as scholars and activists, including such Black and Latino working-class intellectuals as Tyrone Williams, Rayfield Waller, Leonard Langston, Leslie A. Reese, Nubia Kai, Schaarazetta Natelege, Larry Gabriel, Kaleema Hasan, Sadiq Muhammad, Stella Crews, Bill Harris, Lolita Hernandez, Ron Allen, Jose Garza, Geoffrey Jacques, and Faruq Z. Bey.
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We saw our activity, and the magazine itself, as an independent response to the exclusive and pretentious white avant-garde, which, in our view, failed miserably, as did the general political Left, to recognize, acknowledge, support or include the different critical perspectives and theoretical positions of African Americans. We also differed with the views of some African American scholars and critics on the question of canon formation and the role of academia in cultural studies and activism.
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In relation to Detroit, we consistently opposed much of the official dogma of the city’s political administration and its corporate sponsors on important questions regarding “race”, class, and the economy. Because so many of our regular contributors were not only writers, but also working people within the larger community, we felt strongly that we should take principled positions on major ideological and political issues that deeply affected the city. Needless to say, given the global nature of the capitalist economy (of which Detroit remains an integral part), this necessitated our bringing critical theories to bear on the concrete international ramifications of these new postindustrial cultural formations.
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In an important ten-page essay/review of our 1985 publication Nostalgia for the Present: An Anthology of Writings (From Detroit), a 210-page collection of the “best” writing in Solid Ground from 1981-1985, we were gratified to see our views vindicated by cultural critic Barbara Harlow.1 Harlow clearly understood what we were trying to do and, through her sharp insight, taught us many things about our own practice.
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In the words of Cornel West, the activity of Solid Ground was conceived and perceived as “insurgent creative activity on the margins of the mainstream, ensconced within bludgeoning new infrastructures.” The focus of all the writing in the anthology is an oppositional critique of the various cultural industries in music, literature, multimedia, and film that attempt to manipulate and circumscribe new conceptual ideas and structures. Thus, much of the critical theory is tied to specific analyses of how these institutional strictures have played a role in the cultural mediation of these aesthetic forms. As Harlow makes clear in her essay:
Indeed, to refer only to mass culture and high art, one of the conceits exploded by Rayfield Waller, is to remain intransigently within the terms defined by the cultural establishment. The writers in Nostalgia for the Present contend for another, oppositional alternative to the dichotomy presented by Patrick Brantlinger, for example, in his recent study Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay. Whereas Brantlinger distinguishes between contemporary critiques of mass culture as either “positive classicism,” looking to the past for an ideal culture, or “negative classicism," comparisons of modern society with roman imperial decadence, politically informed cultural projects such as those that find expression in Nostalgia for the Present suggest a more contestatory practice. The basis of such a practice is neither elegiac nor apocalyptic, but oppositional, with the “nostalgia” rooted in the material conditions of the historical present.
The Lines Series at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1980-1990
In November 1980, poet, critic and educator George Tysh began what became, in my view, the most important reading series in the United States. Called Lines: New Writing at the Detroit Institute of Arts, this series featured more than three hundred writers in ten years of programming. The list constitutes a literal “who’s who in American writing” over the past forty years. Significantly, more than seventy-five of these writers from across the country were black, brown, red or yellow. Of that number, fifty were African Americans, a phenomenal sum, especially when you consider the abysmal record of representing African American voices in nearly every other series of this kind in the nation. The extraordinary quality of this series served as a lightning rod for the entire cultural community of Detroit during a time of concerted assault on the arts, orchestrated by the national right wing.
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The Lines series included both writers of national stature and major voices within the city of Detroit. Speakers included such novelists, poets, critics, and essayists as Samuel Delany, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jayne Cortez, Valerie Smith, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake Shange, Al Young, David Henderson, Quincy Troupe, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor, Charles Johnson, Erica Hunt, Nathaniel Mackey, Terry McMillan, Lorenzo Thomas, Clarence Major, June Jordan, and Sonia Sanchez. Lines also provided the local community with a consistent public forum for the critical examination of ideas and cultural practices through seminars, workshops, and symposia run by, and featuring, major Detroit writers, critics, scholars, and poets. There were regular academic and popular programs, not only in literature and critical theory, but also in art, multimedia, music and film. Artists and theorists featured included John Cage, William Burroughs, Linda Williams, Kathy Acker, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Ron Mann, Lizzie Borden, Pedro Pietri, Jessica Hagedorn, Bob Holman, Erroll Mars, and Gayatri Spivak.
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The exciting and inspiring characteristic of George Tysh’s visionary programming was that it was resolutely multicultural and multiracial. There were African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American and Arab American writers, critics, artists, and scholars, as well as artists and writers from China, Japan, India and Africa. Lines and its offshoots were also heavily involved in the community, offering lectures, panel discussions, concerts, performance art, and classes to a wide spectrum of metropolitan Detroit. Attendance and participation of people of color was always high, and there was a great deal of cross-cultural communication and interaction. Diverse, controversial, and unorthodox views were always welcome, even encouraged. As a teacher in the various workshops and seminars for the period 1983-1987, I can vouch for the tremendous enthusiasm and support for these activities.
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The entire Lines series (some four hundred cassette tapes, and many original brochures, flyers, posters, and promotional materials featuring some amazing graphics and artwork) will be leased, on a long-term basis, to the Contemporary Art and Poetics Archives at San Francisco State University.
Creative Arts Collective, 1979-1990
The Creative Arts Collective (CAC) was formed in 1979 by two Detroit Jazz musicians, Spencer Barefield and Anthony Holland, and the legendary multi-instrumentalist and composer Roscoe Mitchell, from the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Originally conceived as a workshop for Detroit-area musicians and composers interested in new music/avant-garde experimental work, it quickly evolved into a varied program of concerts, workshops, and collaborations with painters, writers, video artists, and dancers. It also became a regular outlet for young musicians and composers to showcase their work.
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Soon CAC was collaborating with an extraordinary Detroit ensemble, Griot Galaxy, which had been appearing, to standing-room-only crowds, at various Detroit clubs, bars and concert stages since 1976. Led by local legend Faruq Z. Bey on tenor and soprano saxophones, Griot featured former Chicagoan Tani Tabbal on drums, percussion, and tabla, and Detroiter Jaribu Shahid on bass. Tenor saxophonist David McMurray (a member of the Detroit-based pop-funk band Was Not Was) also played with the ensemble, as well as the alto saxophonist Anthony Holland. From 1976-1979 the band also featured Elreta “Duchess” Dodds, Sadiq Muhammad, and Kafi Patrice Nassoma on bass clarinet, percussion, and harp respectively.
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By the fall of 1979, CAC and its ten-member group of local musicians were sponsoring highly popular concerts of black avant-garde music at the Detroit Institute of Arts. These performances featured many great names in contemporary black creative music, including Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, Arthur Blythe, Richard Davis, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, AIR, and the World Saxophone Quartet. CAC also included original music and performances by more than fifty Detroit musicians in concerts ranging from solo saxophone to duets, trios, quartets, quintets, octets, big bands, and large orchestra. By 1981, CAC and Griot Galaxy were being offered major recording contracts by American and European companies, which led to a series of records, under the CAC banner, and three independent Griot Galaxy recordings, which received rave reviews in the national music press, including two five-star write-ups in Downbeat in 1982 and 1984.
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The critical praise lavished on the CAC led to a number of art awards, nationally, and from the state of Michigan, and a series of grants from both the state and local arts councils, as well as substantial support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Performances took place monthly over a ten-year period, finally ending in the spring of 1990 because severe funding cuts by state and national arts organizations, cuts that have taken such a devastating toll on art in the United States since 1984. Despite these political and economic problems, CAC managed to educate more than two hundred young people in its music workshops, and thousands more attended CAC concert performances at the Detroit Institute of Arts over the years. All in all, more than one hundred Detroit musicians participated directly in the CAC programming, including such internationally renowned Detroit musicians as Marcus Belgrave, Kenn Cox, Kirk Lightsey, Harold McKinney, Phil Lasley, Kenny Garrett, Pheeroan Ak Laff, and Geri Allen, all of whom were featured in Detroit settings with their peers.
Tyree Guyton: The Struggle for Public Art, 1986-1991
In 1986, a thirty-one year old black Detroit painter, sculptor, and environmental landscape artist, Tyree Guyton, began what soon became an internationally acclaimed public art production known as “The Heidelberg project.” This massive, postindustrial art landscape encompassed three city blocks on Detroit’s east side. Guyton had grown up there in a working-class neighborhood, which, by the late 1970s, had become ravaged by poverty, drugs, and street crime. Determined to continue living in the area, Guyton, with the dedicated assistance of his wife Karen, and his now ninety-three year old grandfather and mentor, Sam Mackey,2 began to transform the very geography of the area by creating a veritable “art park.” This park featured whole houses made over into gigantic sculptures festooned with “found objects” such as bicycles, suitcases, tires, street signs, cast-off TV sets, radios (some of which actually worked), shoes, old clothing, and a thousand other items much too numerous to mention. One stunning two-story house was literally covered from top to bottom with plastic doll limbs (heads, arms, legs, torsos, and feet), which Guyton said “represented the beauty and ugliness of living in the city today with all its homelessness, drugs, and children struggling to free themselves.” In fact, “The Heidelberg Project” (so named because it began on the very street where Guyton and his family live and work their magic) was conceived from the very beginning as a public commentary on social, economic, and political conditions within the city. The artistic spirituality and depth of emotion that saturates all of Guyton’s work is also present in his personality, which is focused, tough, soft-spoken, and eloquent. Guyton’s own words explain his project:
We were talking about how people don’t take the time to really see, and that’s what I see in my work--I’ve learned to listen, and pay attention. Like grandpop was saying, I think that a piece of art should talk about something, it should talk about some life, it should express something, it should have a meaning. And, at the same time, I think you’re supposed to bring that work of art to life, and that’s what I try to put in it. I try to take things that people throw away--they say it’s useless now--but to me, I can do something with it. It’s like it’s talking to me. And a lot of times I tell people, you know, “I hear that piece”, and people think you’re a little cuckoo. But it’s not that--you have learned to listen. I mean, that piece, or that element, or whatever, it’s got a life, and you learn to listen to it...You’re letting it say things, you know, and you’re just listening...it’s so beautiful, I mean the music that I hear from this work.
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The project over here on Heidelberg, I did that because I felt that it needed to be done-because the house next door was speaking to me. Then the whole area started to--to sing to me. I just wanted to answer, you know, and I felt that I did. And even today, it’s still telling me to do things. See, I grew up on the street here, Heidelberg Street, and I have seen war in the area, growing up. And what I decided to do, once I got grown, is that I wanted to talk about this here, I wanted to talk about this love that I really didn’t see growing up...When I try to do the work, I try to bring that work alive. I mean I want that work to say something, you know, whatever I might be thinking at that moment. We’ve had people from as far away as Japan and Malaysia to come on over to see it--people from Zimbabwe, people from Kenya, Paris, London, Italy, all over the world. They come to look at this and talk with us about it. And bringing something different to the neighborhood has truly been a blessing for the neighbors, because the people who were not speaking and the people that didn’t associate with each other, they came together, you know, and the people in the area, they tell family members and friends from the west side and the north end, and they bring them over to see it. We had some people in the neighborhood to come over and give me a donation, to keep it up! We had a woman in the next block to come over and say “Can you put a piece over here?” And having the kids in the community to come over and paint, you know, to sign the street, to be a part of it--to bring stuff. We’ve had little kids bring some of their old toys over here and donate to us and say “Can you put this on the house for us?”...
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The whole idea of taking a neighborhood that’s basically been discarded, and picking it up, and cleaning it off, and then starting from that, and bringing in other stuff that’s been discarded in other parts of the city, and putting it all together, and painting it, or whatever-and then you got something that’s better than what they had to begin with. It’s incredible!
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In the summertime we go sit outside and just look around--you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just come out here and sit and look, and really enjoy yourself. Not only do we have the art out here, but at times you could come down the street and hear Jazz playing--always had some music playing coming from the back of the house, and then at night we would cut the TV set on that’s on the top of the Fun House next door, and people really get a kick out of that...The neighbors are really proud of the street, and I could tell by their reaction, how they would bring people over and the neighbors would come into the studio and get me and say, “I’ve got somebody here from out of town who wants to meet you.” So now there’s a constant stream of people driving or walking through the neighborhood to see the work.
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Even today I can still hear the Heidelberg Project talking to me--it changes all the time, it keeps growing--and I feel the project itself is growing too, like the Fun House or some of the other large sculptures are growing. Heidelberg Street is at the heart of the project, between Ellery and Mt. Elliott. The project covers two blocks--it covers Heidelberg between Mt. Elliott and Ellery and also Elba between Ellery and Mt. Elliott. So both of those blocks we decided to utilize and make them into works of art. We wanted to let people know what was happening over here, so we put that sign up on Mt. Elliott and started calling it The Heidelberg Project...”
The preceding remarks, taken from a December, 1988 interview with Guyton conducted by Detroit writer and poet John Sinclair (then editor of the City Arts Quarterly, sponsored by the Detroit Council of the Arts), turned out to be not only a very informative general statement on the aesthetic and social objectives of “The Heidelberg Project,” but also an eerie counterpoint to the tragic series of events that have taken place since the triumphant summer of 1990, when Guyton’s work was given a critically acclaimed one-man exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum.
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Postscript
The rise to national power of a highly racist and sexist right-wing coalition has played a major role in the systematic dismantling of the cultural work presented here. In 1990, George Tysh’s budget was cut so severely that he was forced to end his Lines series, as well as all but one of the regular seminar classes that he and various writers from the city taught. All lectures and performances by guest artists were also eliminated. On December 4, 1991, major budgetary cuts at the Detroit Institute of Arts led to the dismissal of more than one hundred employees, including Mr. Tysh. This was part of an on-going economic gutting of the city by Republican governor John Engler, a forty-two year old draconian politician who, since he became head of the state government in January 1991, has eliminated all general assistance in the state (to some 100,000 welfare recipients, many of whom are disabled); axed the Michigan Council for the Arts; eliminated most state monies for Medicare, Medicaid, and allotments for the homeless; and put the internationally prestigious Detroit Institute of Arts on a half-day schedule by eliminating $16 million in state funds from its budget. Even the Detroit Public Library is seriously threatened by Englernomics. In late spring 1991, all of the Creative Arts Collective’s budget was cut by the State council and the Detroit Institute of Arts because of budgetary problems. I don’t have to tell you what happened to their NEA funding, do I?
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In 1987, I left Detroit to live in New York. Money was very scarce. I had to abandon my original idea of continuing the publication of Solid Ground. In early 1991, I was informed that the grant I had finally received in late 1990 had been cut sixty percent by Engler, thereby effectively delaying the journal’s return.
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As for Tyree Guyton and “The Heidelberg Project,” there has been a series of demolitions by the city government--beginning with “the Baby Dollhouse” in 1989. On November 26, 1991, city bulldozers, accompanied by five Detroit police cars, engaged in a sneak attack at 5AM. They informed Tyree that he had fifteen minutes to recover whatever materials he wanted to salvage from his artwork. Essentially, one whole block of art was leveled, with the encouragement of a local citizens group that had petitioned the city to destroy the work because they considered it a public eyesore. These, and related events, finally led to formal charges against Guyton, for creating a public nuisance with his “Shoe Project.” The Shoe Project included littering the streets of three city blocks with old shoes so that automobile traffic could run over them. Guyton did this as a public protest against the abandonment of the poor, and as a comment on the reactionary nature of the city’s response, not only to his work, but also to the general needs of the community. In January 1992, he was told to pay a small fine and won a victory (of sorts) when a judge declared his work was indeed “art,” and not “junk.”
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Even though Guyton’s work has been lauded by critics throughout the world and has appeared in magazines like People, Art News, and Newsweek, much of the Heidelberg Project has now been destroyed. Guyton even made an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to discuss opposition to his work. Although currently discouraged by the city’s brutal response, Guyton has, as always, remained dedicated to continuing his work in the face of those determined to dictate the terms of his art. Despite these and other negative turns of events, the struggle for a truly radical and transformative culture continues in the beleaguered city of Detroit.
For Samuel “Grandpa” Mackey (July 29, 1897--June 29, 1992) whose artistry and wise counsel continues to serve as an inspiration
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Bob Kaufman: A Great American Poet
1925-1986
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Bob Kaufman
(b. April 18, 1925--January 13, 1986)
Photo by Robert E. Johnson
On January 13, 1986 one of the finest American poets since 1945 died in San Francisco after a long illness. His name was Robert Garnell Kaufman and he was 60 years of age. He was also an internationally acclaimed writer who was virtually unknown in the country of his birth. The story of how this happened is yet another blatant example of the tremendous ideological and social power of racial oppression, and its poisonous impact on American cultural life. In fact, it is a great testament to the artistic integrity and independence of Kaufman’s work that he was able to make such a significant contribution to American literature under such hostile conditions.
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To fully appreciate the comprehensive scope of Kaufman’s oeuvre it is necessary to talk a bit about his personal biography. Born April 18, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kaufman was one of 14 children born to a white Jewish father and Black (and Native American) mother. At the age of 13 Kaufman, a brilliant student yearning for adventure, left home to join the Merchant Marines. It was during his twenty-year career as a seaman that Bob developed his lifelong love and fascination for books and writing. It was also where Kaufman first met an older seaman who introduced young Bob to the classic and modernist tradition in European and American literature: Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Whitman, Joyce, Williams, etc.
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During this period Kaufman also became a widely respected shipmate who was well known for tackling the most dangerous jobs aboard ship. Later during the 1940s Kaufman became a Communist labor organizer for the Seaman’s Union. This political activity leads him to being barred from leaving port at the height of the ear reactionary McCarthy era in the early 1950s. However, this did not deter Kaufman from continuing his organizing forays into the south were he was often beaten and arrested by vicious racist mobs and local police authorities. At the time that bob first met his future wife Eileen in Texas in 1958, she recounts that “Bob was so badly beaten in the chest and stomach that he literally could not eat any solid food for six months.”
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After traveling all over the globe nine times with the Merchant Marines Kaufman finally settled down to live in San Francisco in the late 1950s after frequent stops there while on leave during the ’40s and early ’50s. Sandwiched in between all this activity Bob managed to take academic courses for two years in literature and sociology as well as labor history and politics at the famed New School for Social Research in New York City in the late 1940s, early ’5Os. It was during this time that Bob first met and established a long-term personal and artistic friendship with Jack Kerouac, the acknowledged “leader” of the still underground Beat literary movement. During the next 15 years Kaufman would go on to have a singularly powerful and seminal impact on the movement through his excoriating and lyrically captivating poetic style. His personal relationship with Kerouac is documented in the exhaustive 600-page biography on Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia entitled Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1984). Bob would go on in 1959 to start a legendary literary magazine with Allen Ginsberg and Bob Margolis called Beatitude, which just recently published its 33rd edition, and is the only non-academic journal from the Beat school still being published today.
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So given all this information (which understandably only touches the bare surface of the complexity of Kaufman’s contributions) it would be more than a “fair” question to ask: “How is it that only two short articles have ever been published in the United States on this major literary figure?”
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Furthermore, despite appearing in over 75 anthologies and having his poetry critically acclaimed and honored in Europe and Asia, and particularly in France where he was enthusiastically reviewed in all the major French literary journals and newspapers (and was so loved that he was known as the ‘Black American Rimbaud’), Kaufman was openly ignored (some say snubbed) by the tight coterie known as the Beats.
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As a result, Kaufman was left out of many of the most well-known anthologies featuring the work of leading American ‘avant-garde’ writers, including Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960), Seymour Krim’s The Beats (1961), and two books edited by LeroiJones/Amiri Baraka: The Moderns (1963) and the seminal anthology of Afro-American writers Black Fire (William Morrow, 1968). Kaufman was also noticeably absent from the ground-breaking edition of Evergreen Review # 2 (Grove Press, 1957) which featured the work of Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Henry Miller, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al, and no Blacks, Native Americans, or Latinos at all! So much for truly progressive attitudes and values among the “radical wing” of American letters...
II. Kaufman The Poet
But what of the writer who so outraged local police authorities and staid newspaper columnists and academicians that he was often openly attached and/or ridiculed by them in the 1950s; and who so delighted and entranced brilliant Jazz musicians, poets and painters that he was just as openly revered as a heroic cultural figure setting the pace for a true revolution in American literary circles?
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For insights into just how Kaufman was able to crack through the cultural somnolence of this country it is necessary to examine the broad range of his work. For Kaufman’s poetry is in many ways the very embodiment of 20th century modernism with one distinct and very significant difference: his work is at the same time a brilliant synthesis and extension of the many streams of Afro-American poetics over the past sixty years. Which is to say that Kaufman is a master of Western and Afro-American literary and oral traditions. Kaufman’s highly original use of the vernacular modes in American art (e.g. Blues, Jazz, urban argot-slang, and the ‘pop’ innovations in painting, film, and cultural speech) had a considerable impact on his poetic stance, and is largely responsible for one of the most lyrically intense and highly imaginative poetic expressions in the post World War II period. What is of paramount importance to Kaufman’s vision and poetic practice is a flexible language form that will simultaneously allow for and reveal imagery, syntax, and rhythms that critically question or celebrate the vagaries of human existence as lived in social culture:
The whole of me
Is an unfurnished room
Filled with dank breath
Escaping in gasps to nowhere.
Before completely objective mirrors
I have shot myself with my eyes
But death refused my advances.
I have walked on my walls each night
Through strange landscapes in my head.
I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,
Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.
My face is covered with maps of dead nations...
“Would You Wear My Eyes”
(from: Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness)
Ray Charles is the black wind of Kilimanjaro
Screaming up-and-down blues,
Moaning happy on all the elevators of my time.
He burst from Bessie’s crushed black skull
One cold night outside of Nashville, shouting
And grows bluer from memory, glowing bluer, still...
“Blues Note”
(from Solitudes...)
Love tinted, beat angels,
Doomed to see their coffee dreams
Crushed on the floors of time, -
As they fling their arrow legs
To the heavens,
Losing their doubts in the beat.
Turtle-neck and angel guys, black-haired
dungaree guys,
Caesar-jawed, with synagogue eyes,
World travelers on the forty-one bus,
Mixing jazz with paint talk,
High rent, Bartok, classical murders,
The pot shortage and last night’s bust
Lost in a dream world
Where time is told with a beat...
“Bagel Shop Jazz”
(from: Solitudes...)
Five square miles of ultra-contemporary nymphomania,
Two dozen homos, to every sapiens, at last countdown,
Ugly Plymouths, swapping exhaust with red convertible buicks.
Twelve-year old mothers suing for child support,
Secondhand radios making it with widescreened TV sets,
Unhustling junkies shooting mothball fixes, insect junk,
Unemployed pimps living on neon backs of
Unemployed whores...
“Hollywood”
(From: Solitudes...)
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
People shouts/boy alto dreams/Tomorrow’s
Gold belied pipe stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/shadows of Lester/realization
Bronze fingers-grain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/bandstand courage/solo flight...
“Walking Parker Home”
(from: Solitudes...)
The Poet Nailed On
The Hard Bone of the World
His Soul Dedicated to Silence
Is a Fish With Frog’s Eyes,
The Blood of a Poet Flows
Out With His Poems, Back
To the Pyramid of Bones
From Which He is Thrust
His Death is a Saving Grace
Creation is Perfect...
“I Am A Camera”
(from: The Ancient Rain)
Piano buttons, stitched on morning lights
Jazz wakes with the day,
As I awaken with jan, love lit the night:
eyes appear and disappear,
To lead me once more, to a green moon.
Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets ofjoy,
And jazz.
“Morning Joy”
(from: The Ancient Rain)
In summation, part of Kaufman’s greatness lies in his absolute refusal to allow any external forces (academic or popular) to determine the form or content of his art. Kaufman was decidedly not interested in being a mascot-member of any literary/artistic club, clique, or “school.” He was always the authentic rebel and iconoclast who was never controlled by any literary sect. As a master craftsman of language who fused grand passion, a mad subversive sense of humor, and a cutting satirical intelligence in his work, Kaufman found new and innovative uses for late modernist poetics, as well as the ancient oral tradition of the griot, street troubadour, and bard. As the quintessential Jazz poet he prophesized the creative unity of text and sound that characterizes contemporary postmodernist writing and performance art. And as a consummate poet of the bittersweet ballad that stings and haunts Kaufman, an accomplished songwriter who influenced Bob Dylan and a number of other folk and blues artists, was one of those poets responsible for bringing back lyricism as an effective method of expression.
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Finally, the incredible range of Kaufman’s obvious intellectual and emotional references, sources, and influences: Modern American poetry, Modern Spanish and Latin American poetry (particularly Frederico Garcia Lorca), Walt Whitman, the Greeks, ancient Egyptian literature and history, the entire corpus of European “avant-garde” poetics and art, the Bible, the Harlem Renaissance writers (especially Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown), Eastern and Western religious iconography and philosophy, Native American literature and oral history, Blues and Jazz, not to mention American comedy, journalism and politics, is the mark of a great literary intellect with an extraordinary command of tradition.
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During Kaufman’s life, his artistic talent and visionary spirit was able to survive drugs, imprisonment, racism, and even an unjust public obscurity. In death it is our responsibility to see to it that Bob receives the proper recognition for his prodigious efforts. I can’t think of a writer who deserves it more.
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1987
Bibliography:
BOOKS:
The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, (New Directions Books, 1981)
Golden Sardine, (City Lights Books, 1967)
Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness, (New Directions Books, 1965)
BROADSIDES:
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Second April
Abomunist Manifesto
Does The Secret Mind Whisper?
(All published by City Lights Books, 1959, 1960)
MAGAZINES:
Beatitude, (founded 1959)
Articles about Kaufman:
“Bob Kaufman: Hidden Master of the Beats” (by Steve Abbott; Poetry Flash, February, 1986)
“Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?” (by Barbara Christian; The Beats In Criticism, 1981-Lee Bartlett, Editor)
“Private Sadness: Notes on the Poetry of Bob Kaufman” (by Raymond Foye; Beatitude #29, 1979)
REFERENCES:
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Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 1981
Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, by Gerald Nicosia, Grove Press, 1984
Kerouac And Friends: A Photographic History of the Beat Generation, by Fred McDarrah, William Morrow, 1985.
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NEWS UPDATE: posted by Kofi Natambu
August 3, 2018:
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/i-die-i-wont-stay-842706
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'And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead': Film Review
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11/24/2015
by Neil Young
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Courtesy of Rosa Filmes
Conscientious tribute to a wayward soul.
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Beat-poet Bob Kaufman is profiled in Billy Woodberry's long-awaited comeback documentary.
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One seminal, under-heralded African-American cultural figure salutes another in When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead, Billy Woodberry's profile of beat-poet Bob Kaufman. An oral biography nimbly combining rich, varied archival footage with talking-head present-day interviews, the U.S.-Portugal co-production picked up the prize for best investigative documentary when world-premiering at DocLisboa in October and will doubtless grace numerous discerning festivals over the coming months. Small-screen play is also indicated for this slightly rough-edged but heartfelt, quietly inspiring attempt to shed light on a compellingly enigmatic individual ("most of what was known about Kaufman's life and biography was shrouded in myth and legend.")
The doc marks a welcome and overdue comeback for Woodberry some 31 years after his sole drama feature Bless Their Little Hearts, a neo-realist study of a cash-strapped Watts family, made considerable impact on limited Stateside release. Along with his sometime collaborator Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), Woodberry was a leading figure in the L.A. Rebellion, the loose collective of black filmmakers who emerged from the UCLA Film School in the mid-1970s and foregrounded social and political issues in their work.
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Woodberry has taught at CalArts since 1989, and provided narration for his campus colleagues Thom Andersen (Red Hollywood, 1996) and James Benning (Four Corners, 1998). But his only directorial credit in the past three decades was a two-hour video installation about the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, The Architect, the Ants, and the Bees (2004). Woodberry's reputation received a boost when Andersen gave significant prominence to Bless Their Little Hearts — alongside Killer of Sheep and Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles — in his epic survey of L.A.-shot cinema, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, re-edited and re-released in 2014). Restored by UCLA in 2011, Bless Their Little Hearts was placed on the National Film Registry two years later.
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When I Die shows a few signs of cobweb-blowing here and there — audio-editing is uneven; typos abound in the on-screen captions (on the version caught) — but confirms Woodberry's commitment to the marginalized sections of American society. Kaufman is summed up at one point — in the words of his better-known peer Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones) — as "the maximum beatnik ... the most uncompromising, most principled, [making] no concessions to bourgeois culture."
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In a meandering, non-chronological manner, Woodberry traces Kaufman's New Orleans origins, his involvement in labor struggles in the immediate aftermath of World War II — particularly strong stuff here, with the rough-and-tumble realities and injustices of the time economically and movingly evoked — to his flowering as part of the teemingly rich poetry scene of San Francisco's North Beach in the late '50s, and then his relocation to New York in 1961.
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Kaufman arrived in Greenwich Village just as the folk scene was taking off — he wrote the lyrics to Dave Van Ronk's "Green Green Rocky Road," as heard in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis. But in late 1963 he suffered a double blow: the assassination of John F. Kennedy reportedly hit him very hard, and he underwent severe psychological trauma as a result of electro-shock treatment meted out after an absurd arrest for walking on the grass in a Manhattan park.
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Sustained harassment from authorities, plus his own multifarious, hardcore substance abuses, exacted a severe toll through the '70s and '80s. By this point, however, Kaufman, while never any kind of household name, was revered within poetry circles. Woodberry includes copious extracts from Kaufman's jazz-inspired, enduringly quicksilver work ("love-tinted beat angels doomed to see their coffee-dreams crushed on the floors of time ...") read by such magnetic voices as Roscoe Lee Browne, often with propulsive bongo accompaniment. Comparisons with Rimbaud and Lorca are plausibly thrown about by Woodberry's collaborators.
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He films his interviews in conventional style, with his own presence discreetly minimized — he's never seen, and we don't hear his questions, but from time to time his chuckling is audible, adding lovely little touches of warmth. Further personal interjections from Woodberry himself would also have been welcome in a film which generally adopts a steady-hands, traditional approach to a man who was evidently a genuine maverick and ahead-of-his-time innovator, instinctively swimming as far from any mainstream as possible.
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Production company: Rosa Filmes
Director-screenwriter: Billy Woodberry
Producers: Rui Alexandre Santos, Billy Woodberry
Director of photography: Pierre H. Desir
Editors: Amir Masesh, Luis Nunes
Sales: Rosa Filmes, Lisbon, Portugal
Not rated, 89 minutes
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The AIR Trio: Take a Deep Breath
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AIR (L-R): Steve McCall, Fred Hopkins, and Henry Threadgill in 1980
Photo by Bobby Kingsley
AIR is a trio of black musicians from Chicago who have become one of the leading musical units in the world since the late 1970s. Now based in New York, AIR began its official association as a working group in 1972. But AIR was always more than an extraordinarily talented three man ensemble. Its cooperative concept of performing a very wide range of creative music from a myriad of black musical traditions epitomizes the diversity and aesthetic depth of contemporary Afro-American music, and truly indicates why the music has had such a major impact on world culture today. In its adherence to the most vital and dynamic values of this tradition, AIR has given us a deeper insight into the nature of ensemble communication and improvisational expression.
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The collective spirit that anchors and serves as a structural reference in the music is reinforced by a very high level of musicianship. All three members of the group--Henry Threadgill (saxophones, flute and hubkaphone), Fred Hopkins (bass), and Steve McCall (drums and percussion)--are masters of their instruments in ways that make the word virtuoso seem tame and irrelevant. What we actually have in AIR is one unified voice with multidimensional extensions. An examination of the unique gifts of each member of the member of the band will clearly reveal why this is so.
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Henry Threadgill is, at 38, already one of America’s finest composers and improvising musicians. He writes almost all of the band’s pieces. Threadgill’s background includes blues, gospel, R & B, ragtime, spirituals, marches, show music, swing, classical, bebop and various “avant-garde” settings. However, what distinguishes Threadgill from the ordinary eclectic is a disciplined command of the artistic and emotional elements that inform, and give substance to, his creative synthesis of the varied materials he uses. He brings a strutting, swaggering, and swaying elegance to his alto and tenor saxophone playing that recalls the majestic power and grace of earlier champions of modern American music like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster. At the same time he evokes the latter day shouts, cries, and melodic force, logic, and dynamism of recent legendary stalwarts like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.
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But unlike so many others, Threadgill has absorbed these influences without allowing his own distinctive creative identity to be buried. There is nothing faceless or derivative about this musician’s playing. Threadgill uses a wide, but tightly controlled vibrato that flows easily and imperceptibly from vocal speech-like stutters, moans, slurs, and howls to clipped staccato phrasing, and voluptuous legato singing that sounds as warm and lush as the great Johnny Hodges rising out of Duke Ellington’s orchestral inferno. On baritone saxophone Threadgill is downright magisterial as he intones a soaring lyricism that is capable of gruff swing, steamrolling screams, or whispered intimations. He, like Rollins, Trane, and Ayler, also plays with a stunning rhythmic intensity and skill that insure tempo and textural variety. His music is joyous, bittersweet and grand.
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Fred Hopkins is a member of the Charles Mingus-Wilbur Ware-Jimmy Garrison-Malachi Favors school of bass playing. In other words he plays with a huge, rich tone that is melodically graceful, harmonically daring, and rhythmically unrelenting. Hopkins’ style is characterized by kinetic phrasing that is both dense and dark. He is lyrical, passionate and deep-heavy in a way that recalls Mississippi delta slide guitarists and Andulusian flamenco masters. Both his arco and pizzicato technique are wonders of clarity, taste, precision, and artful control. Hopkins’ broad expressive range allows him to shift from high harmonics to thick slurs and strong, shattering rumbles. Hopkins often plays low in the instrument with a cavernous sonority that invokes rolling oceans of sound. Like Threadgill and McCall, Hopkins also has an extremely varied background in music. Conservatory trained, and bred in the streets of southside Chicago, Hopkins reflects this wide range of experience and knowledge in his past musical associations with symphonic orchestras, blues bands, funk groups, and an array of contemporary creative music ensembles. Wit, intelligence, and power make Hopkins one of the world’s best bass players.
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Steve McCall is one of the finest drummer-percussionists in music today and is one of the original co-founders of the world famous musicians’ cooperative and school out of Chicago known as the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). Since the late 1950s, McCall has anchored the bands of people like Anthony Braxton, Joseph Jarman, Marion Brown, Ben Webster, and Ted Curson, just to name a few.
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McCall is a deft, quick, sensitive, and gifted drummer who possesses a wizard-like command of the entire trap set. His subtle action on snares and toms, coupled with crystalline cymbal work recalls the melodic genius of Max Roach, and his bell-like tonalities on ride cymbals and driving fullness of sound on drums conjure up a “free” Art Blakey. McCall is the dancer in this group. His uncanny intuition and knowing insight never misses. He also listens in a way that puts most drummers to shame, and is one of the most consistently creative musicians I have ever heard. Like Roach, Blakey, Andrew Cyrille, and Sunny Murray, McCall has the instinctive and technical ability to anticipate and lead in any musical context. The old cliché about McCall is that he can “break your heart with a drum solo.” The magical thing about him is that he can.
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So there you have it. Of course none of the above statements would mean a thing if these individuals didn’t know how to play together. The fact that they can and do is what makes their appearance here in Detroit so exciting and worth hearing.
[The Detroit Institute of Arts in association with WDET presents AIR on Friday, January 21, at 8PM at the DIA Recital Hall]
Kofi Natambu
Detroit Metro Times
January 20, 1983
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STUDIES IN AMERICAN CINEMA: Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
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The Gangster Ethos: The Cinematic Portrayal of Organized Crime, Violence & Corruption in American Society, 1930-Present
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by Kofi Natambu
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NOTE: The following is a reprinted essay/lecture on the films The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) and their intertextual relationship to the social reality of gangsterism & organized crime in the U.S. from 1945-1970​.
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In the first two ‘Godfather’ films (a third was produced in 1990) director-writer Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939) provides us with a stunning social critique and cultural analysis of 20th century American life through a visionary use of fictional narrative and cinematic techniques that both depend upon, and deeply question, the received meaning of Hollywood conventions in the gangster film genre. One of the most significant results of this bold reinterpretation of conventional aesthetic representations is a multidimensional analysis of such mythical material as the American immigrant experience; the role and impact of the patriarchy on the American family; the disturbing relationship between organized religion and economic materialism in U.S. culture; the reality vs. the mythology of the ‘American Dream'; and the central place of crime, corruption, violence and hatred (racial, gender, sexual and class-based) in contemporary American society.
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The highly distinctive manner in which Coppola and his outstanding team of film technicians and artists approach this historic and thematic material is a testament to Coppola’s incisive knowledge and understanding of the social and cultural period that his films investigate (i.e. 1945-1985). It is this profound insight into the implications of these issues for not only the gangsters but also the general population in the United States that audiences readily responded to when these films were first released in the 1970s.​
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What is most innovative about Coppola’s cinematic portrayal of actual social and political history is his frank and penetrating discussion of how the Mafia emerged and evolved in the United States in this century. In fact, the ‘Godfather’ series of films can be read as a trenchant commentary on how the cultural traditions of gangsterism have influenced our contemporary ideas about politics, economic power, and masculinity (male identity). What these films also make clear is exactly how and why these distorted yet respected values have created a major crisis in a society and culture addicted to various forms of self-destruction. What Coppola reveals is that the drug of capitalist exploitation and America’s self image are mutually dependent on each other. As Michael Corleone puts it in The Godfather, Part II (in response to the ethnic and ‘moral’ put-downs of a corrupt WASP politician named Senator Geary): “We are all part of the same hypocrisy.”
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However, what even Michael fails to grasp or honestly admit (denial and willful self-delusion also being typical American responses to painful truths) is that this hypocrisy and lethal dishonesty not only applies to his ‘business’ (which is the corporate business of merciless and ruthless capitalist profiteering), but also to his personal family. This neurotic inability or refusal to see that the “personal is the political” or that one cannot separate one’s individual ethics and morality from that of the entire society because one supports and reinforces the other is at the center of the dilemmas expressed and examined in the films. Not surprisingly this contradiction and delusion haunt the attitudes, values and behavior of many other Americans besides gangsters.
In both ‘Godfather’ films we get almost a chronological examination of how the major criminal syndicates in this country began to consolidate their collective power in 1946 when crime boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano was pardoned from a New York State prison and given his conditional release by the federal government. The condition the government stipulated was that Luciano be deported back to Italy. However by this time Luciano (with his top lieutenant Meyer Lansky acting as emissary) had already done an important series of ‘favors’ for the feds during World War II (1939-1945), including working with U.S. Naval Intelligence in 1942-43 in providing much needed security for merchant vessels and troopships departing for England and other ports beyond the Atlantic ocean. Since New York was the single busiest port in America, the government and U.S. military were greatly concerned that thousands of men and millions of tons of war materials would be sabotaged and sunk off the east Coast by German Nazi U-Boats (they had already suffered major losses of both men and material in the previous year when spies who had learned the secret sailing schedules along with other crucial data helped the Nazis destroy the vessels).
In response to this crisis the government and the military both assumed that the Mafia controlled the International Longshoreman’s Association of the Port of New York, one of the most powerful unions in the country. Thus the commanding officer of the Third Naval District concluded that the best way to improve security was to win the cooperation of the ILA. Thus in the spring of 1942 the head of Naval Intelligence operations called on the New York District Attorney for help with the gangsters running the union. The D.A. got in touch with Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a small time hoodlum and boss of the Fulton Fish Market on the East River. Lanza was a minor figure in the criminal syndicate however and could not do much so he referred the government officials to Luciano. It was Meyer Lansky who conveyed the government’s message to Luciano and secured Luciano’s agreement to do whatever he could on behalf of the war effort. Lansky in turn worked diligently as Luciano’s emissary to the ILA union leadership. Luciano also granted the U.S. government one other major favor: He saw to it that his Sicilian Mafia paisanos (who were chieftains of notorious village gangs in Sicily, Italy) gave the American and Allied military forces quite valuable paramilitary assistance and support when their troops landed there in September, 1943.​
Officially, all the government and military people involved in these deals with Luciano--the D.A. , Governor Dewey, the Navy--denied making any promises or consenting to any “arrangements” with Luciano though they naturally told him his contributions to the war effort would be “taken into account” when he appealed for clemency or parole for his thirty year sentence (Luciano was tried and convicted in 1936). In 1945 Governor Dewey (who as former New York State D.A. had been responsible for putting Luciano in jail in the first place) handed Luciano’s petition for release to the State Parole Board. The Board in turn recommended that he be rewarded(!) for his tremendous help in “defeating the Axis Powers (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan), and for his exemplary behavior in prison.” Since the government was full of gratitude to those who helped win the war no one in political or legal authority objected when Gov. Dewey accepted the Parole Board’s recommendation and had the notorious Luciano pardoned. It was only then the feds stepped in to declare that Luciano’s pardon was conditional: Luciano had to return to his native Italy for the rest of his life.
However it became immediately clear when Luciano left prison in January, 1946 and was taken to a Brooklyn pier where a ship was waiting to take him back to Italy, that his power as a major gang syndicate leader was still virtually intact. In fact Luciano was given an elaborate and festive party at dockside with only his most intimate and loyal criminal assocaiates present (including the ever present criminal mastermind, friend, and partner Meyer Lansky). Everyone assumed (correctly) that even if Luciano was not allowed back into the United States that he could control his now international criminal empire from Cuba. A year later in February, 1947 Luciano did enter the tiny island nation of Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, where he and his criminal partners were given carte blanche by the corrupt Cuban government (under the auspices and control of the Cuban president, the dictator Fulgencio Batista) to openly build massive illegal enterprises like gambling casinos, prostitution rings, loan sharking, political bribes, extortion and racketeering. In return for allowing this rampant criminal activity to flourish the gang syndicate gave the government a healthy slice of the profits.
It is in this complicated historical context that The Godfather, Parts I & II are to be properly understood and examined. What happens after Luciano and his gang syndicate colleagues set up shop in Cuba is key to following the general narrative structure of both films. What Coppola and co-screenwriter (and novelist of the Godfather series) Mario Puzo did is establish a series of composite characters who symbolize in mythical and metaphorical fictional terms the major real-life gangsters who dominated organized criminal activity in the United States after 1945. Thus the Corleone family, led by the first ‘Godfather’ Don Vito (Don being a Sicilian term for Chief) and played magnificently by the legendary actor Marlon Brando (then only 47 years old under all that makeup) represents figures like the notorious Frank Costello, Carlos Gambino, Lucky Luciano, and others who formed the ‘Family’ network of criminal gangs that were based loosely on the village cell-like structures that had ruled with an iron and bloody fist for hundreds of years in Sicily, Italy. It was the ‘Five Families’ (each with their own geopolitical and economic ‘territories’ throughout the East Coast--in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Boston, etc.) that controlled the national gang syndicate by dividing power, capital and influence over a very broad range of criminal activities among various other geographical regions of the country.
In this structure each large family ‘Family’ unit had their own ‘soldiers’ (called capo) who took care of the dirty work of the mob (i.e. murders, beatings, physical threats, etc.), carried out extortion and racketeering activities in the unions, race-track betting establishments, and hotel, trucking, and restaurant industries etc.); maintained control over the extremely lucrative numbers racket and served as ‘enforcers’ and protection for prostitution and police payoff rings. As the Godfather films point out this structure is strictly hierarchical and authoritarian, with the upper echelon leadership, consigliare or attorney/advisors, and family ‘team captains’, like the film characters Tessio and Clemenza, giving orders to paramilitary underlings, etc. while the various ‘Dons’ rule the general family units by determining, in consultations with their lieutenants, all necessary strategy, goals and policy within the hierarchy.​
In the postwar period 1946-1960 that the two films focus upon (with elaborate flashback references to the ‘immigrant era’ captured in Part II being from 1900-1930) we also get to see parallel fictional accounts of the real wars between family groups in New York that occurred with some regularity in the late 1940s and early 1950s before Congress, under the tenacious leadership of Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee (who chaired the “special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce” began to hold open public and televised hearings from 1950-1952 to expose how these national gang syndicates were operating, as well as where and under whose specific leadership.
These films also take us into the fascinating story of the ‘Cuban Connection’ and the subsequent revolution led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that successfully overthrew the American-backed corrupt dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959 (an extraordinary event that is brilliantly depicted in Godfather, Part II). The film also takes us into the real historical backstory of the rise of Las Vegas in the early 1950s and the crucial role of Meyer Lansky (who is depicted as the composite character Hyman Roth, in another outstanding performance by the Actor’s Studio co-founder, the legendary Lee Strasberg). The meaning of this latter history will be chronicled and examined in next week’s lecture...
Kofi Natambu, Senior Lecturer
Film Course: Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
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THE MUSICAL LEGACY OF AMIRI BARAKA:
The Modern Jazz Critic As Cultural Historian, Creative Artist, Social Theorist, And Philosophical Visionary
by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14, Number 2
Fall, 2014
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AMIRI BARAKA
(b. October 7, 1934--d. January 9, 2014)
This essay is dedicated to the memory and eternal presence of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014) who was not only a great artist, mentor, friend, colleague, and comrade but also--like he was for so many others around the world--a towering influence on my art and life
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"Leroi Jones has learned--and this has been very rare in jazz criticism--to write about music as an artist."
--Nat Hentoff, Jazz & Pop magazine, 1966
“ ... Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made...Usually the critic's commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude that produced it. This difference meant that the potential critic of Jazz had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and that he did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes which produced it...The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy…”
--Leroi Jones, "Jazz and the White Critic," Downbeat magazine, 1963; later reprinted in his book of critical essays and reviews Black Music (William Morrow & Co. 1968)
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“Jazz and the White Critic” was a challenge to jazz writers of all backgrounds to reckon with the lived experience of black Americans and to consider how this experience had been embedded in the notes, tones, and rhythms of the music.”
--John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
In the name of sheer historical accuracy and perhaps even ultimately a triumphant kind of poetic justice the following emphatic statement bears repeating as often as possible: For fifty years from 1963-2013 Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones) wrote and published the most profound, influential, and strikingly original body of musical criticism in the United States, as well as some of the most significant--and enduring--cultural and social criticism generally that this country has produced since 1945. This is especially true of his stunning and groundbreaking work in the musical genre of 'Modern Jazz' and his extensive, dynamic, and typically incisive examination of the music's rapid evolution since 1900 in both its visionary "avant garde" modes as well as its more traditional vernacular styles and expressions.
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An essential aspect of Baraka’s critical writing on jazz however is also rooted in a deep consciousness and visceral understanding and love of the rural and urban blues/rhythm and blues traditions not only in formal and aesthetic terms but as a complex and historically cumulative social and cultural statement about the ongoing meaning(s) of the content of these musics in both their structural and lyrical dimensions. Thus an appreciation and respect for the ideological complexities and contexts of African American culture as an important economic, social, and political reality as well as an essentially protean artistic force is integral to fully engaging and grasping what Baraka is primarily focused on and concerned with in his writing about the music.
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Thus it is not surprising that Baraka's first book about the music, originally entitled Blues People: Negro Music in White America became a seminal, widely acclaimed, and subsequently never out of print historical text. Published by the then 28-year-old writer in 1963, the book was also importantly subtitled in at least a few of its other many editions as "The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It." Disdained and even dismissed in some quarters by some haughty and self-important highbrow critics, both white and black, as being too steeped in what they perceived as a fundamentally reductive sociological emphasis in Baraka's analysis of the blues as art and history (a highly inaccurate and quite dubious line of argument echoed in a particularly patronizing and intellectually self serving manner by the celebrated African American novelist and cultural critic Ralph Ellison) Blues People clearly marked a major new turning point in not only the history of Jazz and blues criticism in the United States but in its perception and intellectual appreciation and understanding by music critics generally. Not surprisingly this new consciousness was also beginning to be reflected to some degree in its public reception by audiences.
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Despite its ill-informed detractors Blues People also firmly established Baraka as a major intellectual and literary force to be reckoned with because he was not afraid of expressing a strong and independently assertive viewpoint alongside a persistently sharp critical analysis of what the music has meant to black Americans from the standpoint of not only individual citizens or artists but of the mass culture generally. He insisted on an interpretive POV that saw class relations as well as "race" in terms that established a clear hierarchy and division of attitudes and values that informed one's deep affinity for or relative indifference to the various forms and expressions of the blues as creative/stylistic form and artistic identity as well as a distinct and thus substantive and independent sensibility in the larger society as a whole. Consequently Baraka declared that the purveyors of the blues sensibility and its primary cultural progenitors were not only the artists and the intellectual connoisseurs of the form (i.e. critics, academicians, and scholars) but the so-called 'ordinary citizens' who loved and represented and embodied the art themselves (the actual "Blues People" of the book's title). Therein, Baraka insisted, lay the music's true power and ultimate potential as both a creative and social/philosophical force.
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In that light it is important to consider that as the great poet Langston Hughes and many other critics and commentators pointed out when the book made its initial appearance that Blues People was in many ways the intellectual and critical culmination of a contentious historical debate raging then (and even to a great extent today) within Black America as well as the larger society over the cultural and thus political and ideological value and meaning(s) of the African American experience and the role of its various artistic forms and artists who through their creative work publicly represent and embody this cultural history. In Baraka's analysis the music serves as both a crucial narrative record (literally as well as on vinyl) of what black people have experienced and an ongoing emotional and psychological register of the impact and effects this experience has had on them and their larger spiritual, existential, and philosophical conception of themselves. As he puts it in his original introduction to the book in 1963:
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"In other words I am saying that if the Negro in America, in all its permutations, is subjected to a socio-anthropological as well as musical scrutiny, something about the essential nature of the Negro's existence in this country ought to be revealed, as well as something about the essential nature of this country, i.e. society as a whole...And the point I want to make most evident here is that I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene...When America became important enough to the African to be passed on, in those formal renditions, to the young, those renditions were in some kind of Afro-American language..."
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Baraka also was deeply concerned with how and why these specific musical traditions, techniques, and innovations took the various forms and stylistic identities that they did from the dialectical standpoint of their creators' dynamic, and critically informed engagement with their aesthetic material. One of Baraka's major strengths as a critic is his emphasis always on the process of the creative act in the course of expressing ideas and emotions via the integral elements of music making. This is a major even central aspect of Baraka's writing as a music critic that he strongly maintained and greatly enhanced in all future critiques and celebrations of Jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues following the publication of Blues People.
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In Black Music (William Morrow, 1968), his second book devoted to the extraordinary social history and cultural identity of this musical art, Baraka lays out what amounts to a very erudite and casually elegant book-length manifesto on the most advanced, radical, and innovative developments in modern Jazz during the culturally and politically tumultuous 1960s. A trenchant and mesmerizing collection of many of the finest theoretical essays, feature articles, and music reviews that he had written for various national magazines and journals from 1959-1967, Baraka not only critically interprets the revolutionary music of this fascinating historical period but discusses its myriad meanings and values from the direct viewpoint of the individual musicians themselves. What results is a series of riveting, complex, and always critically challenging portraits of these musicians as dedicated cultural workers and the often visionary perspectives that these artists embodied and conveyed to their audiences. Baraka especially draws the readers' attention to the largely black working class and sometimes even more economically challenging (i.e. poor) social and cultural milieu that so many of these musicians and their peers and colleagues lived, created, and performed in. In doing so he reminds us that many of the most profound, lasting, and useful modern art expressions in the United States (and elsewhere) are not merely or exclusively the products of the academic “Ivory Tower” and foundation grant institutions nor are they dependent on the often fickle largesse of wealthy patrons. In fact as Baraka amply demonstrates in his analysis the evidence everywhere of the deep desire and demand for aesthetic, economic, and political self determination among this intrepid generation of musicians, composers, and improvisers is one of the major principles animating their work and overall vision. One of many brilliant examples of this analytical focus can be found in Baraka's intricate, detailed, and powerful dissection of the general aesthetics and cultural values of such legendary and even iconic musicians, composers, and improvisors of the post 1945 modern music era as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Milford Graves, Don Pullen, Bobby Bradford, and Roy Haynes, among many others who emerged as a self consciously radical, innovative, visionary. and transformative force in the music since the late 1950s.
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Dedicated to “John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit” Baraka's Black Music posed a tremendous intellectual and artistic challenge to a entire generation of artists, critics, and cultural/political activists (and I might add is still doing so some two generations and 45 years later!) to begin to seriously address and attempt to resolve many of the major structural and institutional problems and crises facing not only our creative artists in the realms of music, literature, dance, filmmaking, visual and media art, etc. but our larger communities as well. Toward that end the book provides an important ongoing subtextual narrative about the insidious political economy of the music business and its direct and indirect effects on the musicians themselves who not only have to withstand and tragically negotiate the oppressive and exploitive impositions of white supremacy/racism in all its guises but the even more comprehensive venality of corporate capitalism in the studios, clubs, theatres and general commercial venues where the music was being recorded and/or performed for various live audiences during an era when Jazz, despite its growing richness and vitality in a creative sense, especially was suffering greatly economically as a result of its clearly limited reception and appreciation by the larger society. This unfortunately also included the growing commercial interest in and support for pop, rhythm and blues, and rock musics (resulting in the increasing exclusion and marginalization of Jazz and blues) in the national black community.
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Finally, the flagship essay of Black Music that opens the volume contains one of the most prescient, eloquent, historically significant, and intellectually honest essays ever written about the “Modern Jazz” dimension of African American music. Entitled "Jazz and the White Critic" the piece had originally appeared in Downbeat the largest national 'mainstream' Jazz magazine in the country in August, 1963 just before the appearance of his first book on the music Blues People later that year. What remains essential about this prophetic essay is its analytical insistence that the philosophical and cultural aspects of African American music like that of all major aesthetic traditions throughout the world is key to acquiring a genuine knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the art. As he states in his concluding paragraph:
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“We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it...this is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of Jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some attention to the attitudes which produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. There is, of course, much more to it than that.” (Italics mine)
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The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (William Morrow, 1987)
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The long awaited arrival of Amiri's third full volume of music criticism in 1987 published some twenty years after Black Music and twenty-five years after Blues People was not only well worth the wait but added still more brilliant wrinkles to his long-term critique of the music, its artists, and the larger social, economic, and political contexts that it existed and persisted in. Both a dynamic synthesis and extension of previous writing about its historical identity as well as an celebratory examination of its contemporary expressions, The Music is divided between a series of poems that center on Jazz and the blues by both Amiri and his wife, Amina Baraka, which takes up a third of the text, an extraordinary political play entitled The Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Musical by Amiri that uses both “avant-garde” as well as more traditional Jazz and blues elements, techniques, and styles in an updated and innovative operatic context. Most of the actors in the production are the musicians themselves who both play and sing their parts. Such important and highly accomplished 'avant' Jazz musicians of the post-1970 era as the tenor saxophonist David Murray, drummer and percussionist Steve McCall, violinist Leroy Jenkins, and the pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers acted and played in this production.
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The last third of the book features 26 virtuosic and typically incisive essays, reviews, liner notes, and feature articles by Baraka written for and published by various national magazines, journals, and newspapers in the 1975-1987 period as well as some new and important critical essays written specifically for the book. Covering everyone and everything from Miles Davis (in a masterful 1985 article for the New York Times) to the history of Jazz and other African American musics in Greenwich Village in NYC to a series of briliant book and music reviews of books and recordings about and by such major musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Woody Shaw, Cecil McBee, Gil Scott-Heron, Chico Freeman, Ricky Ford, and Craig Harris. There are also a scintillating collection of extremely informative, lyrically written, and politically astute theoretical and critical essays like "Where's the Music Going and Why?", "Jazz Writing: Survival in the Eighties", "The Phenomenon of Soul in African American Music". "Masters in Collaboration", "Blues, Poetry, and the New Music" "AfroPop", "The Class Struggle in Music" and "The Great Music Robbery." There is simply not enough space in this piece to do justice to the crackling intellectual firepower and truly impressive depth and scope of Baraka's writing here; suffice it to say for now that he (re)proves all over and once again exactly WHY he is the preeminent American music critic of the past half century by a very wide margin with virtually no real contenders in sight. Long out of print (and criminally never republished in paperback!) one MUST track down this 1987 hardcover classic and read what it says about a massive range of issues and concerns with respect to the music in not only aesthetic and ideological terms but from the equally profound standpoints of literature (and rhetoric), social theory, cultural history, and political analysis and journalism. One will not come away disappointed. If only the academic departments of 'American and African American Studies' (and all other so-called "ethnic", "humanities", and "cultural studies" programs generally) had professors, public intellectuals, and social activists of Baraka's caliber and clarity running them instead of the often pretentious, biased, and myopic fetishists of "language and culture" who too often ride herd in these fields in U.S. colleges and universities today, we would all be much better informed about the actual strength, beauty, and complex reality of the multiracial and multinational society that we all in fact inhabit. As Baraka makes clear in the essay "Blues, Poetry, and the New Music" from what is finally a GREAT book:
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"Each generation adds to and is a witness to extended human experience, If it is honest it must say something new. But in a society that glorifies formalism, i.e. form over content, because content rooted in realistic understanding of that society must minimally be critical of it--the legitimately truthfully new is despised. Surfaces are shuffled , dresses are lengthened or shortened, hair is green or blond, but real change is opposed. The law keeps the order and the order is exploitive and oppressive! The new music reinforces the most valuable memories of a people but at the same time creates new forms, new modes of expression, to more precisely reflect contemporary experience!"
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Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press, 2009)
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After an astonishing forty five years of endlessly writing, teaching, and lecturing about African American music all over the world it was an absolutely thrilling and inspiring surprise to find yet another extraordinary volume of music criticism by Amiri in the 21st century. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press, 2009) is an epic 411 page text of 84 essays, reviews, liner notes, articles, and precise literary portraits of and about musicians and their art over a fifty year period. Taking on a huge canvas of critical themes and musical personalities Baraka carries off what can only be described as a penultimate triumph of the art and craft of music criticism at its highest possible level. In a stunning display and critical synthesis that includes an encyclopedic knowledge of the music, a razor sharp attention to the historical nuances of the music and how it it has stylistically evolved and mutated over the years, and finally a thoroughly independent theoretical and critical perspective on the music in aesthetic, historical, and social/cultural terms, Baraka compiled and summed up what constitutes a comprehensive philosophical treatise on Jazz and blues music in U.S.--and by extension the world-- over the past century.
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In this quest Digging joyously and fastidiously examines the work, philosophy, craft, and vision of such GIANTS as John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, David Murray, Art Tatum, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Billie Holiday, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Cyrille, Barry Harris, James Moody, Jackie McLean, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Hopkins, Pharoah Sanders, Charles Tolliver, Odean Pope, John Hicks, Von Freeman, Jimmy Scott, and Reggie Workman (WHEW!). Baraka also writes with great insight, intelligence, and passion about such exciting and important emerging musicians and composers of the past two decades as Vijay Iyer, Rodney Kendrick, Ralph Peterson, Jon Jang, and Ravi Coltrane.
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Finally Digging is an intense, wide ranging, and deeply philosophical and scholarly meditation on, and relentless excavation of, the multidimensional aspects of the music's varied diasporic genealogies, and a celebration of its ongoing presence and importance on both a national and global level. Amiri incorporates everything he has learned and experienced in the both the music and his life (and their endless interconnections). This synergy of the personal and aesthetic gives the book an organic unity and focus that shapes and informs the text as the essays strive to fuse an understanding of politics, history, ideology, and art with a larger vision of "what it all means." Confronting this complicated task is handled beautifully in such sage and critical essays as "The 'Blues Aesthetic' and the 'Black Aesthetic: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture ', "Jazz Criticism and Its Effects On the Music", "Black Music As A Force for Social Change", "Bopera Theory", "Jazz and the White Critic: Thirty Years Later" , "Newark's "Coast" and the Hidden Legacy of Urban Culture", "Blues People: Looking Both Ways", "Miles Later" and "Griot/Djali: Poetry, Music, History, Mesage". "Cosby and the Music", and "The American Popular Song: The Great American Song Book" among others. In other words NO ONE has written about American music with a wider, deeper, and more informed LOVE, UNDERSTANDING and KNOWLEDGE than Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones or what this music means to the artists who create it and the millions of blues people/citizens from all over the world who listen, dance, sing and live their lives to and with it. On this and much much more besides, Amiri has--as always-- the 'last word' (for now) on the subject:
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"...So Digging means to present , perhaps arbitrarily, varied paradigms of this essentially Afro-American art. The common predicate, myself, the Digger. One who gets down, with the down, always looking above to see what is going out, and so check Digitaria, as the Dogon say, necessary if you are the fartherest Star, Serious. So this book is a microscope, a telescope, and being Black, a periscope. All to dig what is deeply serious. From a variety of places,,,the intention is to provide some theoretical and observed practice of the historical essence of what is clearly American Classical Music, no matter the various names it, and we, have been called. The sun is what keeps the planet alive, including the Music, like we say, the Soul of which is Black."
Kofi Natambu
Berkeley, California
April 9, 2014
(Paul Robeson's 116th birthday)
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED MUSIC CRITICISM BY AMIRI BARAKA (aka Leroi Jones): 1963-2009:
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Blues People: Negro Music in White America. by Leroi Jones. William Morrow, 1963
Black Music. by Leroi Jones. William Morrow and Company, 1968
The Music: Reflections On Jazz and Blues. by Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka. William Morrow and Company, 1987
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music by Amiri Baraka. University of California Press, 2009
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https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/01/amiri-baraka-1934-2013-legendary-and.html
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Saturday, January 11, 2014
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AMIRI BARAKA, 1934-2014: LEGENDARY AND ICONIC WRITER, POET, CRITIC, PLAYWRIGHT, NOVELIST, PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, TEACHER, AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVIST
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All,
The death of Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) at the age of 79 on January 9, 2014 in his beloved Newark, New Jersey marks the passing of one of the greatest and most important American writers and thinkers of the past century and in my view the preeminent African American writer of his generation as well as the most consistently profound, innovative, and creatively influential of the entire post 1945 era. A charter member of an extraordinary generation of U.S. writers who were born between 1920-1940 (an innovative, dynamic, visionary, fiercely independent, highly contentious, and openly raucous group that includes such pivotal post WW2 literary/cultural figures as James Baldwin, John A. Williams, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Truman Capote, Toni Cade Bambara, Larry Neal, Diane DiPrima, Charles Stevenson Wright, Al Young, Joan Didion, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Bob Kaufman, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, Susan Sontag, June Jordan, Edward Albee, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, William Melvin Kelley, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and Clarence Major), Baraka (formerly known as Leroi Jones until 1968) was a truly revolutionary artist in every sense of the word. Blazing a fifty year trail of innovative literary triumphs in poetry, drama, fiction, music criticism and history, cultural and political essays, and social criticism that began formally with the publication of his first book of poetry Preface to A 20 Volume Suicide Note in 1961 Baraka was a also a consummate political organizer and activist who had a seminal impact on two generations of African American activists in a wide myriad of radical political movements that formally began in 1964 and lasted until his death. It is impossible in this limited space to properly comment on and explain just how protean and fundamentally groundbreaking so many of Amiri's stunning achievements in literature and cultural/social activism were or fairly assess the immense and invaluable intellectual and creative legacy he has left us all. As someone who was personally fortunate to have known and on a number of occasions worked with this figure in our contemporary art and politics for many years I was a personal witness to the kindness, generosity, warmth, humor (Amiri was a very funny individual), honesty, wicked sophisticated wit, and deep sincerity that Baraka so often embodied. It should also be noted that unlike far too many other intellectuals in general Baraka was also one of the very best DANCERS that I ever saw. To say that I and many, many other people throughout not only this country but the world (Amiri was a longtime and very enthusiastic global traveler) will miss this literary and cultural GIANT is a massive understament. Amiri was simply one of the those individuals whose extraordinary work and loving humanity constituted and represented the very best in the inspirational history of the powerful African American cultural, aesthetic, and political tradition(s) that informed everything that Baraka did and tried to do in a nearly six decade career. May Amiri rest in eternal peace and may his ongoing legacies continue to inspire, guide, and motivate us to fight for freedom, justice, and self determination in the arts, in our politics, and most importantly in our lives. As Baraka always taught and reminded us: A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues)...What follows is an extensive textual and visual tribute to Baraka's art and life from many different archival sources, including from his own great body of work. Enjoy and spread the word...
Love and Struggle,
Kofi
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Thelonious Monk: The Jazz Composer As Visionary
by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14 Number 2
Fall, 2014
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THELONIOUS MONK
(b. October 10, 1917--d. February 17, 1982)
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"They were always telling me for years to play commercial, be commercial. I'm not commercial. I say play your own way. Don't play what the public wants--you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing--even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
—Thelonious Monk
"Monk is a virtuoso of the specific techniques of Jazz, in challengingly original uses of accent, rhythm, meter, time and of musically expressive space, rest, and silence ... He is a major jazz composer, the first since Duke Ellington ... His repertory abounds with intriguing melodies, truly instrumental pieces ... To play Monk properly, musicians justly testify, you have to know the melody and the harmony and understand how they fit together ... It is a sign of the great Jazz composer that his sense of form extends beyond written structure and beyond individual improviser, to encompass a whole performance ... So it is with Monk.”
--Martin Williams
By 1955 the legendary pianist-composer Thelonious Sphere Monk had been playing music professionally for over twenty years.
Like everything else about him--from his highly original name to his stubbornly independent, innovative, and utterly idiosyncratic approach to nearly every aspect of his extraordinary life and career--Monk was his "own man" from very early on. Moving with his family from North Carolina to New York at the age of five in 1922, the precocious Monk always went his own way and made his own decisions about how he wanted to live--even as a child. Thus, during his junior year in the spring of 1934 Monk left the academically rigorous and prestigious Stuyvesant High School in New York (which was and is a very competitive citywide magnet school which only admitted the best and most gifted students in the city) to pursue a professional career in music. He was just 17 at the time but had already impressed a number of his teachers and musical peers as a young man of great talent and potential. Coming from a very proud and independent black working-class family who loved music and insisted that their three children take music lessons (both of Monk's parents worked and Thelonious, Sr.--Monk's father--also played piano), Monk initially resisted his mother's suggestions that he play violin and later the trumpet (neither of which Monk liked). However, young Thelonious was utterly fascinated by his sister Marion's piano lessons which she took on the family's upright piano and the ten year old much preferred listening to her, especially when her music teacher came to their house. By the age of 12 in 1930 Monk had already learned to play the piano very well on his own by ear and keen observation. Highly impressed, the music teacher, a Mr. Wolfe (who was then a student at New York's famed Julliard School of Music), told Monk's parents not to waste any more money on their daughter's lessons since Marion had no real interest in playing music, but it was very apparent to the teacher that her younger brother Thelonious had "a prodigious talent." This quickly led to the highly precocious youngster enrolling in music courses in school and taking professional lessons from a series of private teachers. Since Monk also excelled academically in math and physics it wasn't long before Monk began formally composing music, using his command of harmony and melodic ideas to augment his already extraordinary rhythmic sense. By the time Monk turned 19 in 1936 he had already written a number of major compositions, most notably "Ruby My Dear," that were destined to become Jazz classics.
In 1936 Monk began playing on the road as a touring professional with an evangelist from the Sanctified Church named Reverend Graham (known publically as "The Texas Warhorse") who sang and preached in various churches while Monk's trio played rollicking gospel and rhythm & bluestunes behind her. It's important to note that as early as 1934 Monk and his trio had already worked at small gigs and dances in New York, usually earning small amounts in tips and cover charges. Monk remained with the evangelist's troupe for over two years traveling all over the country in both cities and small rural towns alike. This day-to-day immersion in the challenging demands of black folk vernacular styles as both accompanist and ensemble leader gave the dedicated young musician very valuable experience and provided the early aesthetic foundation for his eventually unique and independent styles of composing and improvising music in the Jazz tradition.
In 1938 Monk, homesick from the lonely rough and tumble life of the road, returned to his beloved New York and soon based his own playing style on the stride piano traditions established by such living African American piano legends (and Monk's personal idols) as James P. Johnson (who happened to live near Monk’s west side Manhattan neighborhood at the time) and Fats Waller. In addition, Monk was being deeply influenced by the pianist/ composer/bandleader Duke Ellington who also rooted his piano style in the stride tradition, a profound black vernacular music aesthetic of the early 1900s. It was the highly innovative modernity of Ellington's fecund ideas in piano harmony, rhythmic structure, and orchestral arrangements that inspired Monk in a particularly special way and revealed the possibilities for him to continue and expand on his own experimental efforts.
In 1940 the now 22-year-old Monk became house pianist at Minton's Playhouse, a small Harlem nightclub and nightly gathering place for many aspiring young Jazz musicians and composers who came together on a regular basis at the club to jam and experiment with new musical ideas during afterhours at all night and early morning sessions. These sessions soon became legendary as the place where, in the mid-1940s, the revolutionary Jazz style 'Bebop' was born. Monk's deep involvement with this movement during endless jam sessions in the early and mid-1940s made Monk's name well known to other musicians who became very familiar with his challenging compositions and unusual solo playing. This was of course long before the general listening public became aware of his talents. From 1940-1945, an intensely creative period in which Monk wrote many new compositions including his signature classic "'Round Midnight" in 1941 and continued to work in relative obscurity at Minton's and other small clubs in Harlem and in the famed midtown 52nd street clubs and bars where his angular dissonant harmonies, dynamic rhythms, and soaring, lyrical melodies quickly made him a leading and influential figure among the modernist Jazz cognoscenti. Working closely with such fellow pioneers of this exciting new music as the extraordinary drummer Kenny "Klook" Clarke, revolutionary guitarist Charlie Christian, iconic saxophonist Charlie 'Bird' Parker, and trumpet legend John "Dizzy" Gillespie, Monk soon became a major mentor to many young emerging musicians like the then newly arrived 19 year old Miles Davis in 1945. By this time scores of musicians were experimenting with new harmonic structures, melodic ideas, and rhythmic conceptions. The intense cross-fertilization of styles, ideas, and musical structures were deeply rooted in the modern experimentations with form and content that were sweeping all the arts of the period in literature, painting, dance, and cinema and "Bebop" (or as the musicians themselves simply called it "modern music") was at the forefront of this cultural and aesthetic revolution.
It was abundantly clear, as Monk himself told a number of interviewers, that his style was "more original" than many of the standardized, generic, and conventional forms of the Bebop movement. Yet Monk was already one of the primary architects of the best and most creative aspects of this movement and was a major source of distilling, synthesizing, and extending the ideas and structures from the myriad of historical musical sources that this generation of modernist musicians consciously absorbed, honed, and developed: Jazz swing styles inherited from the 1920s and '30s (e.g. Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Art Tatum, Lester Young, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, etc.) both 'popular' and 'avant-garde' advances in 20th century classical music (e.g. Stravinsky, Varese, Hindemith, Ives, Bartok, Prokofiev, Ravel, Debussy, etc.), and new black vernacular uses/appropriations of the rich blues and rhythm and blues/rock 'n roll traditions, as well as various forms of gospel/spiritual music.
All this and more went into Monk's complex and powerful compositions that, while quite intricate and even difficult in harmonic terms, somehow remained both very lyrical (if quirkily idiosyncratic) melodicaliy, as well as creatively connected to black vernacular dance rhythms. This combination of stylistic elements became a trademark of Monk's compositions and improvisations and led him to finally getting an offer in 1947 to record as a leader of his own ensembles. Now thirty years old and a mature young artist in many respects (though still unknown to people outside of the music), Monk recorded two albums worth of his original compositions (and a few standards) with the small recording label known as Blue Note. Boldly entitled The Genius of Modern Music, Volumes I & II these records put Monk on the mainstream music map for the first time and introduced the man often rather archly referred to in Jazz publications and the mainstream media as "The High Priest of Bebop," to a new Jazz audience that were just beginning to respond to the innovations of the modernists in the music. Despite this new limited recognition, Monk was still barely making ends meet and was desperately struggling to stay above water economically. However, Monk categorically refused to give up his musical identity or compromise his artistic vision in any way despite many pressures to do so. His first recordings were often lauded (or greatly misunderstood) by the critics and journalists who continued to interview and write about him for a wide range of magazines and newspapers both in and outside the general Jazz world. The laconic, witty, and candid pianist was always considered great copy for the media. However Monk remained almost invisible to any mainstream audience of music lovers.
This situation of severe commercial isolation and economic marginalization during a very creative and productive period of composing and performing his music was juxtaposed to a concomitant rise in status and prestige among fellow musicians, composers, and critics that continued well into the 1950s. Monk continued to record on a regular basis for the important small recording labels Blue Note, Prestige, and Riverside. Thus he began the series of major, classic recordings that quickly established his reputation as one of the most significant Jazz composers and soloists in modern music. It was also during this time that Monk first began to be mentioned as the most important composer in the music since the great Duke Ellington revolutionized the Jazz orchestra in the 1920s. At the height of the Bebop craze from 1948-1954 and the justly rapid ascension of Charlie "Bird' Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as living icons of the movement, Monk made an equally revolutionary breakthrough himself in an utterly independent personal style that drew from Bebop conventions (as it did from Swing, Rhythm and Blues, classical, and gospel traditions) but were at the same time completely fresh and different in form and content from his numerous influences. These recordings were made with many of the most important, original, and talented musicians in Modern Jazz--Parker, Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Percy Heath, Max Roach, and Kenny Dorham, among others--and in many ways served as the basic creative and aesthetic foundation of where Jazz was to evolve and grow after 1955.
Thus by the mid-fifties Thelonious Sphere Monk II was a man who already had a very clear and completely masterful command of the modernist and vernacular traditions that characterized the revolutions in both popular and avant-garde music during the post WWII era. This knowledge and understanding on both an innovative theoretical and performance level profoundly transformed the 1955-1975 era in Jazz and made Monk, along with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Ornette Coleman the leading musical figures in a particularly tumultuous and exciting period of American art and culture.
The visionary quality of Monk's musical aesthetic lay in an intensely self-conscious and self-reflexive effort to simultaneously question, critique, and fundamentally rethink the traditionally specific roles and identities of harmonic structure, melodic form, and rhythmic content in modern music and reassert/reclaim SOUND itself as the most important individual and collective element in both improvisational and composed ensemble settings alike. For decades since the 1890s both African American and European/white American popular, vernacular, and (semi)classical musics had been dependent on inherited conventional modes of organizing musical patterns through the predominance of either harmony (songform structures), melody (songform lyrics), or rhythm (fixed metrical time). By the early 1900s various avant-garde practices in the United States and Europe had begun to overtly upset and challenge these conventions somewhat (by breaking up and/or distorting/rearranging the forms themselves) but still largely in terms of the central role of fundamentally Western conceptions and methodologies that favored a critical embrace (dissonance) or dismissive denial (atonality) of the diatonic scale as a 'negative' reference (e.g. Schoenberg, Ives, Webern, etc.). However, through the then revolutionary interventions of such major figures as Louis Armstrong and Ellington by the early 1920s, Jazz began creatively embracing and appropriating conventional music structures and ideas from a myriad of western sources while subtly transforming and subverting them with highly idiosyncratic (and African derived) methods of either using dissonant or unorthodox harmonies as well as crosscutting and constructivist architectural rhythms (a structural and expressive device known as 'riffing') in both compositional and improvisational contexts. It's crucial to note that the major black Jazz composers, improvisors, and arrangers of the 1920s and '30s (Jelly Roll Morton, Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins) were very adept at using these sources while also creating and improvising entirely new ways of expressing melodic lyricism and 'pop' song forms such as Louis Armstrong's brilliant inventions of 'scat' singing and 'swing' instrumental styles.
Out of this historical maelstrom of multinational aesthetic and cultural traditions and conceptions, Monk consciously critiqued, individually reworked, and creatively extended and subverted the conventions of 20th century modernist and vernacular sources (including those of 'Bebop') to forge his own vision of what constituted 'modern music.' The first principle was a reliance and insistence on changing the sound of the piano (and by extension other instrumental voices in the ensemble) through an entirely new approach to note articulation, timbrai dynamics, and use of temporal/spatial elements in his own improvisations and composing material for other musicians in his groups. As a result many early listeners of Monk's music--musicians, critics, and general listeners alike--thought that Monk was not a very technically accomplished pianist (again in the strictly Western European traditional/ classical terms which were the canonical norm in the United States). This misunderstanding and profound ignorance of the actual sources of Monk's methods and approach to instrumental expression and compositional structure was an impediment to many people in Jazz circles until the critical and listening Jazz public (and many musicians as well) finally 'caught up' to many of Monk's innovations by the late 1950s. By then Monk was already an established twenty-five year jazz veteran whose once radical contributions to voicing, phrasing, and tempo were finally the 'new modern mainstream' of the Jazz tradition.
The extraordinary recordings that Monk made from 1955-1965 only further solidified and cemented this reputation and suddenly made his work de rigueur for the young, emerging innovators and radicals of the period. In 1955 Monk finally began to receive the commercial attention (and monetary success) that had previously eluded him without compromising himself by 'going commercial' in any way as an artist. This reality completely validated Monk's famous assertion that one must 'play [your] own way' and ensured that he would enter the rarefied pantheon of the greatest musicians and composers in the history of his art completely on his own terms. It was a profound lesson in artistic integrity, dedication to craft, and disciplined perseverance that would serve as a beacon for an entire new generation of gifted, ambitious players and composers in the 1960s, the '70s, and beyond who recognized that Monk's greatest and most significant contributions lie not only in his fierce aesthetic commitment but in not allowing himself to be corrupted and distracted by the relentless demands and pressures of the marketplace. The result was one of the most singular, influential bodies of work in the entire canon of 20th century music.
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[This essay is an excerpt from a new book-in-progress by Kofi Natambu entitled A BRAND NEW BAG: How African Americans Revolutionized U.S. Culture & Changed the World, 1955-1975]
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The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945
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NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:
THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE
(PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
March, 2, 2016
The Panopticon Review
... There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.
For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated 71% of the black vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.
What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether he was the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and probably including 2020)...
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© 2016 by Kofi Natambu, The Panopticon Review
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Beyond Personal Ego and Social Opportunism:
What's Really At Stake In the Michael Eric Dyson vs. Cornel West Dispute?
by Kofi Natambu
April 24, 2015
First, let's be clear: The bizarre, petty, wildly exaggerated, histrionic, and finally deeply egregious attack by Dr. Michael Eric Dyson (“The Ghost of Cornel West: What Happened to America’ most exciting black scholar?" by Michael Eric Dyson, New Republic, April 19, 2015) on the private life and public career of Dr. Cornel West is not only mindlessly vindictive and brazenly self serving on Dyson’s part but intellectually evasive and dishonest as well. The infantile, pompous, and clumsy attempts at junior league psychoanalysis which has Dyson arrogantly passing severe moral and ethical judgments on everything from West’s academic bona fides, scholarly status, and professional achievements to his personal love life and even his taste in co-authors of some of his books is a sign by Dyson not of a genuine or mature criticism of West as either an intellectual, scholar, academic, social activist, or flawed individual human being but simply a desperate, adolescent, and woefully inadequate attempt on Dyson’s part to in effect "pay West back” for West publicly questioning, ridiculing, and subsequently denouncing Dyson’s actual or alleged role as an intellectual defender of many of President Obama’s public policy positions and stances on domestic and foreign affairs. The fact that Dyson spends nearly 10,000 words(!) on this decidedly not so profound or complicated task is a sad and petulant indication that what really rankles Dyson more than anything else is that West categorically refused to simply “agree to disagree” in public with Dyson on these matters involving the President and their differing critical views of him and his policies without using, in Dyson’s view, any personal invective by West in heavily criticizing or again even ridiculing Dyson’s personal and/or intellectual motives for expressing differing viewpoints of the President in both style and substance. More directly Dyson was deeply upset and hurt by West’s rhetorical street level tactics of calling Dyson a political Uncle Tom who was simply a "sellout on Obama’s plantation.”
However Dyson wasn’t content to simply call West out on this one legitimate area of personal disagreement and professional/ideological opposition. Instead Dyson tellingly subjects the public to an embarrassingly gratuitous display of massive rhetorical overkill and (pseudo)intellectual hubris that clearly demonstrates that this public conflict is not merely about the delicacy of his and West’s personal egos but about the much larger and ultimately far more important conflicts at the heart of radical black political and intellectual engagement and commitment in the United States today and what it really means for our collective future of African American citizens in a still deeply white supremacist society—regardless of whether we have a 'black president' or not. So while Michael Eric Dyson chooses to make a big and outrageously loud display of his current displeasure with his former mentor Cornel West, it is more than safe to say that the rest of us have far bigger fish to fry and devour than passively following the public melodrama of whether two minor celebrity Ivy League professors/activists can or will become genuine friends and professional colleagues again—or not.
At the same time however let’s not pretend that this ugly personal spat between Dyson and West is not also about or at the very least symbolizes the ongoing very real and important political, intellectual, and ideological conflicts within national black political circles generally over the larger question of what if any role truly radical and/or progressive politics have had or will continue to have during and after the so-called 'Age of Obama.’ For what this contretemps between these individuals ultimately represents and signifies on the level of both theoretical discourse and practical political activism alike is discovering to what degree black political actors and “public intellectuals” are seriously involved—or not!-- in actual critique and fighting for general radical transformations in our politics and our lives or are instead abdicating or shunning our deeper responsibility to widespread social, economic, and political change to simply curry favor with (and be rewarded by) opportunist politicians of either national political party (and this includes everyone from the President and Congress to one’s local municipality or statehouse).
Only time of course will conclusively tell us what individuals or larger social forces will be at the forefront of genuinely fighting for these changes or consistently engaging in the rank abdication and abandonment of this struggle in the face of entrenched corporate structural and institutional control and hegemony. And what’s most important is that this dialectic of power relations in the larger society and culture will not be ultimately dependent on the race, gender, sexual identity, or class of the people who serve as our “representatives” in government and in our many other social, economic, and cultural institutions, but will depend on a sustained revolutionary concept of democracy that openly opposes and goes far beyond the manipulative and public celebrity/corporate power fueled antics, evasions, misrepresentations, and lies of the forces who oppose democracy in favor of the oppressive and exploitive power of the state and its various elites.
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OPEN LETTER TO CORNEL WEST
RE: YOUR EGREGIOUSLY DISHONEST ATTACK IN THE GUARDIAN (UK) ON TA-NEHISI COATES AND HIS WORK
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December 18, 2017
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Cornel,
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This idiotic, egregious, and completely baseless attack on the work, character, and integrity of Ta-Nehisi Coates (see: "Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle” by Cornel West, The Guardian (UK), December 17, 2017) is not merely shocking and ludicrous beyond words it is intellectually and politically wrongheaded, dishonest, and profoundly absurd in ways that I find difficult to even enumerate. Just as I was equally stunned and appalled by the nearly hysterical and equally infantile and way-over-the-top 10,000 word attack on you as well as your work, integrity, and character by Michael Eric Dyson in New Republic magazine back in 2015 (and I said as much publicly here I find it deeply disturbing, tiresome, and annoying as hell to find you also engaging in asserting what amounts to a series of brazen FALSEHOODS about who Coates actually is and most importantly what his work actually says and advocates. In fact your incredibly dubious and distorted claims and assertions about Coates’s work makes it appear as if you haven't even read (or properly understood) his latest book at all. So with all that in mind let’s go through your transparently dishonest and wildly inaccurate laundry list of complaints about Coates right now.
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FIRST: Coates is most emphatically NOT a neoliberal (and certainly not the “neolberal face of Black America") and nothing he has ever said or written in public (and especially in his new book) would give anyone that idea. No one with even a cursory understanding of the word in terms of either ideology or a critical analysis of political economy and culture in the U.S. today would make such a silly claim. And BTW and FOR THE RECORD: Coates endorsed the exact same candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 as you did, Senator Bernie Sanders. Remember?
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SECOND: Coates does not even remotely "fetishize white supremacy" nor is he by any stretch of the imagination a “racial tribalist” (whatever the hell that is). NEVER does Coates ever assert, suggest, or imply that in your words "racial groups are homogeneous and freedom is individualistic in his world. Classes don’t exist and empires are nonexistent." Quite the contrary in fact. Nor does he ever claim, suggest, assert, or imply that white supremacy is "almighty, magical and unremoveable.” That’s a straightup LIE brother and again if you had read or were intellectually and politically honest about what his new book actually says about all this and related matters you wouldn’t make these utterly FALSE statements. It is also demonstrably false to claim as you do that Coates "hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination).” Nor does Coates analysis "omit the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America." Again that's not even remotely true. READ HIS NEW BOOK and listen carefully to his endless talks on youtube, in the general media, and at university campuses across this country for the clear and absolutely decisive evidence.
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It really makes one wonder: Where does all this BULLSHIT come from Cornel? Certainly not from Coates (for starters I defy you to actually closely read the brilliant essays and critical journalism “The Case For Reparations”, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration", and "The First White President") which appear in the book and which makes many of the most sophisticated, nuanced, informed, and intellectually sound as well as useful analyses of the deep and historically inextricable links of "race" and white supremacy to class, gender, and patriarchy that have appeared in public discourse on these and related issues in the past 50 years in this country and at the same time not realize their sheer analytical depth and explanatory power.
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THIRD: While Coates's individual ideas about "defiance" may very well differ from yours in some respects both on a personal and professional level at least as far as methods and tactics go it is simply not true at all that Coates doesn't believe in "collective action" or the moral and/or ethical responsibility to critically engage issues and realities that face us all on the level of not only politics and economics, but cultural and social reality as well. And as for one's strategic and tactical approach to the challenges one is presented with differ in form or content from yours, so what? Coates or anyone else for that matter has just as much right as YOU to decide what constitutes the proper approach to "defiance" as a writer, a citizen, and human being. Furthermore, do you really think that in the case of Coates that your following statement is accurate on any level whatsoever?: "For example, there is no serious attention to the plight of the most vulnerable in our community, the LGBT people who are disproportionately affected by violence, poverty, neglect and disrespect." Anyone who's read or heard Coates in public simply KNOWS that this is patently untrue.
AND LASTLY: Coates is NOT a mindless or hagiographic mouthpiece for Obama. He has always been critical of the President on a number of different issues over the years and has said as much in his Atlantic magazine columns and throughout the essays and political reportage in his new book. The fact that he personally thinks the President is a decent or basically moral human being doesn't mean that he doesn't see or acknowledge when and where he has been wrong in terms of public policy and/or general political positions (or lack thereof). I'm sure that you Cornel have known or currently know individuals whom you trust, respect, and think are "basically moral people" who you are nonetheless deeply critical of when and where it is necessary to be so. And I'm certain that any number of people may very well feel the exact same way about you. Of course, this is a fundamental reality about life that we ALL share. Now this doesn't excuse in any way whatsoever whatever blindspots or illusions Coates or anyone else (including you Cornel!) may have about Obama and his actions but it's going much too far in this context to pretend as though Coates has been and is currently complicit in approving or accepting such behavior. Clearly he isn't and no amount of pompous rhetorical bluster on your part is going to make it so.
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In conclusion I think this sort of intellectual grandstanding and political smacktalk ('the dozens', anyone?) is far beneath you Cornel and you are capable of far better and much more honest, sincere, and mature political thought, analysis, and expression than this gaseous self aggrandizing display. The differences that you have with Coates and more importantly his general public profile which seems to bother you so much are not nearly as "substantive and serious" as you seem to think. And the idea that you keep strangely and rather bizarrely insisting that Coates is somehow LESS progressive, courageous, and intellectually sophisticated than yourself and those black public intellectuals that you personally approve of is not only specious but downright jejune.
Finally given the actual evidence to the contrary of your many spurious claims about Coates and his work it makes you sound like an incredibly myopic, petty, envious, immature, and shallow person and I know like so many others throughout the world who seriously follow and even cherish what you generally have to say, write, and do on behalf of our collective struggle for freedom, justice, equality, and self determination not only here in the U.S. but throughout the world that this is not the case.
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So please Cornel let this silly nonsense about Coates go. We all have much more important matters to attend to as you know. And I am dead certain that like you Ta-Nehisi Coates believes deeply in this ongoing struggle and has absolutely no intention in either his work or life in turning his back on it, no matter what you may think or assert otherwise. Besides, you and I both know that the real "neoliberal face of Black America" is (and always was) none other than former President Barack Obama himself. So don't be shallow and petty Cornel. I really hate to have to say this but here goes: GET OVER YOURSELF! There's real WORK to be done with respect to our real enemies and this ill-informed and petulant screed about Ta-Nehesi ain't it...Stay tuned…
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Love & Struggle,
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Kofi
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Book Review
Redemption Song:
Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties
by Michael Marqusee
Verso, 1999
This is an extraordinary book. It is especially astonishing because just when I began to despair that any one text could possibly do justice to accurately documenting and analyzing the often badly misunderstood and largely misrepresented complexity of either Muhammad Ali, the African American civil rights and black power movements, or that endlessly fascinating and elusive historical moment known forever as “the sixties”, an heretofore obscure author restores my faith in the illuminating power of great writing to do much more than merely chronicle legendary events. That the author would be a white American expatriate who left the U.S. in 1971 at the age of eighteen to settle in England and become an award-winning sports historian is all the more amazing and, in this particular case, gratifying.
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For what Michael Marqusee has accomplished with this elegantly written book is nothing short of providing the most lucid, succinct, intellectually honest and even handed account I have ever read of what Ali, and the various black political and cultural movements for radical social change both in this country and abroad (especially in Africa) of that volatile period really meant to its massive legions of fans and supporters throughout the world. But Marqusee doesn’t stop there. His highly insightful and sharply analytical prose, which always somehow manages to remain both graceful and completely devoid of dogma, also incorporates an analysis of the significant social and cultural impact of such archetypal figures of the ‘60s era, as well as earlier 20th century American history, as Malcolm X, Bob Dylan, Elijah Muhammad, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Armstrong, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sam Cooke and Martin Luther King. In doing so we learn how and why these seemingly disparate figures had such a profound effect on the anti-war movement against the American intervention in Vietnam, as well as the on-going struggles for human rights and social revolution in the United States, the African continent, the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe. Toward that end Marqusee ties in the revolutionary movements against colonialism and for political and economic democracy in what was formerly known as the Congo (now Zaire), Ghana, and South Africa. Thus the reader is also treated to an analysis of U.S. complicity (through the CIA and the State Department) in the the military overthrow and assassination of the first and only democratically elected President in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960 by none other than the vicious military officer and subsequent dictator Joseph Mobutu (who bankrolled the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ heavyweight championship fight between Ali and George Foreman with state funds in 1974).
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In fact it is one of the many engaging aspects of this book that it seriously investigates the many links between individuals like Ali, Malcolm X, Dr. King and Elijah Muhammad within the broader context of such major institutional forces as the Nation of Islam, SCLC, SNCC, the Organization of African Unity (founded by Ghanaian president and Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah), the FBI, the CIA, and the American government. What emerges from this meticulously detailed attention to the intricate nuances of history is a book that tells us precisely who Muhammad Ali was as both boxer and human individual without sacrificing an understanding of how massive political, economic and social forces of the 1960s and ‘70s impacted Ali’s perceptions of himself and the world. At the same time Marqusee allows us to see the champion’s considerable strengths and weaknesses in a way that doesn’t dehumanize him through either too much misplaced adulation or petty criticism. In fact the truly heroic dimensions of Ali’s stand against the war in Vietnam and his sincere commitment to his chosen religious and philosophical beliefs at great personal and professional cost is even clearer and more profound after reading this text.
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As a result the extended and brilliantly written passages on the champion’s personal and political relationships with such icons of the period as Malcolm X, the major mentor and confidant of Ali’s before the acrimonious split between Malcolm and the authoritarian patriarch of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad in March, 1964 (and which helped lead to the tragedy of Malcolm’s assassination just eleven months later) is filled with well researched and captivating accounts of the complex personalities and stances of all three men. For example we learn that Ali, who first began secretly attending meetings of the Nation of Islam as early as 1962 (some two years after he received a gold medal as the American representative in boxing at the Olympic Games, and two years before he fought and defeated Sonny Liston in February, 1964 for the world heavyweight crown), was already fascinated with the militant black nationalist oratory of Malcolm X (the leading national minister of the NOI) at a time when the Nation was still almost completely unknown to the general American public. It was Ali’s intense interest in the sect as well as his highly confident and independent attitude that supported Malcolm’s typically prescient insight that a then relatively unknown 20 year old kid named Cassius Marcellus Clay would very soon become world heavyweight champion.
Thus began Malcolm’s recruitment of a young man that he insisted from the beginning was more than capable of becoming a very important force in the organization. That this prophecy was not shared by the then sixty five year old founder and leader of the NOI, Elijah Muhammad is a major understatement since the old man not only considered boxing to be a morally inferior pastime but the idea of the young Clay as an important member of his organization struck him as pure folly. Of course none of this kept him from fully endorsing and embracing Clay as a leading (and now wealthy) member once he did become champion or bestowing on him the very rare privilege of a new Islamic name, Muhammad Ali, on the very night he became champion. This resulted in the older man being able to not only wean Ali away from Malcolm who, after being suspended by the Nation in December, 1963, formed his own organization just two weeks after Ali won the title on February 25, 1964 but also enabled the elder Muhammad to take over the new champion’s financial affairs through his appointment of his own son Herbert as Ali’s business manager. Ali admits years later that his painful split with Malcolm at Elijah’s bidding was a big mistake on his part and the major regret of his life. As Ali put it: “It was a pity and a disgrace he died like that [assassination] because what Malcolm saw was right, and after he left us, we went his way anyway. Color didn’t make a man a devil. It’s the heart, soul and mind that counts.”
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Marqusee also provides us with a particularly astute and dynamic comparative analysis of Ali and another ‘60s cultural hero and icon, singer and songwriter Bob Dylan. What is revealed in this luminous comparison is how Ali and Dylan, who were only eight months apart in age, both symbolized and represented in strikingly similar and different ways the alienation, restlessness, rebellion and deep thirst and desire for social and cultural change that was so characteristic of an entire generation throughout the world. As Marqusee writes:
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“Ali and Dylan were first generation children of the burgeoning
electronic audio-visual culture, which was still at that time largely
unrecognized as anything other than an inferior and distant cousin
to the mature forms of “high culture.” Their public achievements
and the controversies that surrounded them helped compel the in-
telligentsia to take pop culture seriously. By their boldness, their
ambitions and, paradoxically, their playfulness, they made their dis-
ciplines--sport and popular music--worthy of study...”
The deep appreciation for, and understanding of, popular culture that Marqusee consistently demonstrates in this book is never smug or condescending. In fact his clarity regarding how cultural values, politics, and ideology intersect and influence each other is echoed in his riveting accounts of the rise, rapid expansion and agonizing decline of the black power movement in the 1965-1975 period. This section of the book is framed by a dizzying number of major historical events, two of the most pivotal being the public assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who both died at the age of thirty nine only three years apart in 1965 and 1968. In recounting and critically examining these earth shattering incidents Marqusee very deftly weaves the parallel narrative of not only Muhammad Ali but the history of the Vietnam war (and the intense national anti-war activity and draft resistance against it) and such well known organizations as SNCC, the Black Panther Party, SDS, and SCLC. In highly dramatic yet measured prose we see in great and fastidious detail how Ali’s courageous stands play a key role in the tremendous explosion of black political and cultural consciousness among young African Americans, as well as the millions of whites who were just beginning to seriously question and oppose the government’s war in Vietnam. We also witness Ali’s impact on global affairs as the U.S. moves swiftly to prosecute him for his public opposition to the war and the draft. In England, France, Germany, Africa, South America and throughout the Caribbean island nations Ali is universally hailed as a hero moving everyone from the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to foreign government leaders, political revolutionaries, peasants and workingclass people alike to sing his praises and openly defend his position.
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Meanwhile Marqusee takes us on a philosophical journey of his own, musing about the historical implications and consequences of Ali’s role in terms of the ultimate meaning of sports in the United States as well as a scintillating critique of what dramatic changes have occured in American political economy and culture (and in the national African American community) since Ali was banned from boxing and had his passport revoked in 1967, was finally legally reinstated (by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court in June 1971), and defeated Joe Frazier in 1973, George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, and Leon Spinks in 1978 to become world heavyweight champion for a record three times. During this critique Marqusee demonstrates how and why the conservative white and black American establishment began to embrace and co-opt the former militancy of Ali after 1975. Thus begins the media’s concerted (and on-going) attempts to distort and manipulate the true meaning of his public legacy.
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Finally Marqusee takes the reader full circle from his opening paragraph where he ponders the sobering yet curious fact that where once Ali had been fiercely opposed and reviled by the government, sports writers and media executives he was now in the 1990s being openly lionized and feted by the same powerful public figures and corporate institutions that had once denounced him, took his championship title away and tried to send him to prison. It is also revealed that because of backstage lobbying by NBC Sports Ali was chosen to light the famous torch at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia before a sold out crowd of 83,000 people (paying $600 per ticket), and a global TV audience estimated at three billion. However in the final chapter to this seemingly dense, but never boring or ponderous, three hundred page masterpiece, Marqusee provides an eloquent, powerful and compelling counterstatement and critique of this cynical appropriation by American and other global capitalists who use the symbolic power and authority of Ali’s international image to sell the Olympic Games and its endless spinoff products. In a parallel, and very interesting, assessment of the contemporary sports scene Marqusee openly criticizes the global corporate and media absorption of Michael Jordan who, unlike Ali, has always been willingly complicit in the highly profitable exploitation of his image:
“Nothing could be further from the ethos of Muhammad Ali than the no-risk business acumen of Jordan. When campaigners trying to draw attention to the plight of low-paid workers in Nike’s Southeast Asian sweatshops appealed to Jordan for help, they got the brushoff. So did black Democrats in Jordan’s home state of North Carolina when they asked him to endorse their efforts to defeat the racist, homophobic tobacco champion, Jesse Helms...Ali’s embrace of an alternative nationality, in the form of the Nation of Islam, evolved under the pressure of events into a humanist internationalism, a sense of responsibility to the poor and powerless of all nations. Jordan’s subordination of himself to “America” made him an emblem of “globalization”, a form of rule from above by multinational corporations. His astonishing achievements on the basketball court, and the huge rewards he has reaped from them, are advanced as justifications for “the American way”, the capitalist way. Jordan has become the embodiment of the Social Darwinism of the new world order...”
By historical constrast then we learn the real reasons why Ali and his mythic yet all too real example continues to be of great value today despite the greed-based blandishments of advertisers, promotors, athletes, and consumers alike. It is a fitting coda to a great book that, like its main subject, continually inspires, educates, entertains and transforms our understanding of ourselves, our shared history and the incredibly complex world that we live in. Nothing could be a greater tribute to a true champion of the people.
Kofi Natambu
Konch
Oakland, California
March, 2000
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As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz
by Valerie Wilmer
Lawrence Hill and Co., 1980
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“Black Music has always been free. It’s the white critics and media, it seems to me, who want to chain it.”
—Valerie Wilmer, from the introduction to As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz
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Since 1955 (the year of Charlie Parker’s death), there has been a rapid series of distinct and dynamic changes in the content and identity of contemporary black creative music. Of course this is not a new phenomenon--if there has been one major characteristic of improvisational music historically, it has been its constant change and development. However, the past 25 years have been one of the most tumultuous and revolutionary eras in world history, and as always the music has served as an artistic barometer of “new realities.” This is especially true of the conceptual and spiritual values of the aesthetic. Meanwhile, the social/cultural context of this music has shifted from previously parochial and regional modes of communication to more “universal” matrices. That is, the Folk basis of the music (and its culture) has expanded to a pan-World concept that simultaneously embraces traditions, ideas and values from other cultures as it continues to creatively examine, redefine and express its own fundamental traditions and forms. That this music continues to evolve under extremely hostile and oppressive conditions (especially in the U.S.) is a living testament to its immense spiritual strength and broad social consciousness. It is also an indication that the aesthetic that spawned it (an ancient cultural history and philosophy that has survived a severe transition to the “New World”) is far from being dead as some of its virulent detractor-critics have claimed. In fact, there is ample empirical evidence to suggest this artistic philosophy is as strong and influential on an international level as ever. Further, the rich innovative quality that is reflected in the music’s stylistic and symbolic dimensions is also seen in its social content. It is these themes (among many others) that concerns the English writer/photographer Valerie Wilmer in her new book: As Serious As Your Ljfe: The Story of the New Jazz.
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This work, first published in England in 1977 and reprinted by an American publisher in September 1980, is an excellent addition to the historiography of black creative music and culture because it attempts to tackle the vitally important issues of the art in relationship to contemporary society. Despite the fact that the author tries to take on too many topics in the relatively short space of 300 pages, the book often succeeds in its self-appointed mission. Its over-ambitiousness as a general survey of the massive black music scene (including its intricate relationships to the various “art industries” in the world today), is more than compensated for in this case because the author is genuinely concerned about the serious implications of the crucial issues she raises about Art and Politics, and their effect on the actual development of the music itself. That Wilmer has the foresight and perception to raise these significant points is cause for (mild) celebration at a time when (once again) the music and its artists are being ignored by the traditional arbiters of “public taste.” The cultural landlords of the “Big Art” world (i.e. the recording industry, journalism and mass media—TV and radio) are also the targets of Wilmer’s study, and some of the most interesting passages in the book deal with real-life horror stories involving these exploitive middlemen and the artists who create the music. To understand the full dimension of Wilmer’s contribution, however, some background information is necessary.
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With the arrival, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, of outstanding new artists in black creative music like John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Bill Dixon, Marion Brown, etc., it was clear that black music was moving toward a new set of ideas and values. Not only in terms of creative content, but in broad-based cultural, political and economic areas as well. This direction was marked by an intense preoccupation with the disciplined redefinition of “traditional” modes of improvisation and composition, and a strong dedication to the principles of artistic independence and political/economic self-determination in the black community. This of course was consistent with the general mass movement taking place throughout many black communities in the world during the volatile 1960s. In Wilmer’s book there is considerable discussion of, and information about, the attitudes and activities of contemporary black musicians toward these developments. A great deal of Wilmer’s attention is focused on the lives and careers of lesser-known musicians whose major contributions have been largely neglected or ignored. The important inclusion of the stories of such creative people as Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, Eddie Blackwell, Andrew Cyrille, Albert Ayler, etc., goes a long way toward balancing her accounts of slightly “better known” artists like Coltrane, Taylor, Ra and Coleman (each of whom are represented by a chapter in the book). Among the many other highlights of the book is a revealing chapter on creative music and the politics of the media (particularly the recording and television industries).
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In the chapter entitled: “Politics, The Media and Collectivism,” Wilmer chronicles the course of the ill-fated Jazz and Peoples Movement (JPM) led in the early 1970s by the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the late Lee Morgan, Andrew Cyrille, Billy Harper, Cecil Taylor and others. This coalition of black creative musicians organized large public protests against racism and cultural exclusion in television. The bold strategy of going on the sets of shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin to interrupt their programming and present demands for a truly representative voice in the media for black music and musicians, was met by stern opposition from the white corporate mongrels. In the book, Wilmer details this conflict in striking factual terms and exposes the tremendous obstacles that the musicians’ movement still has to face. In chapters devoted to the history of independent black artists’ organizations like the famed Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), New York’s Collective Black Artists (CBA), and the Black Artists Group (BAG) out of St. Louis, Wilmer demonstrates through the artists themselves how many of them are meeting the severe challenges and responsibilities of self-reliance today.
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All this, however, is not meant to give the impression that the book contains no flaws. It is important to note that Wilmer does not possess the musical knowledge or training necessary to make informed judgments or opinions about the relative merits or shortcomings of an artist’s work. Nor is she really adept at interpreting for the reader the philosophical and cultural meaning of the music that she describes. Despite her obvious zeal and actual friendship with many of the musicians in this book, it would be remiss of this reviewer if I did not mention that when she tries to intelligently discuss these issues, her usual critical understanding fails her. It would be much better for all concerned if these extremely delicate areas of analysis and interpretation were left to the artists themselves or experienced scholars who would be more capable of doing this important work. There are also some curious omissions of seminal artists in the field. To Ms. Wilmer’s credit, however, she does not claim that her work is in any way definitive (which is refreshing after wading through too many amateurish attempts on the part of other writers in the “jazz journalism” field who swear to their comprehensiveness).
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On the definite plus side of the ledger Wilmer knows what she wants to write about and does it with a lover’s sense of discovery and flourish. For a professional photographer whose previous foray into this area was in a book of interviews (Jazz People, 1970), and an interesting book of black musicians’ photographs (her collection entitled The Face of Black Music, 1976), her prose and research ain’t bad. Care and compassion, as well as skill, went into the making of this book, As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. As an ardent follower of the music and its creators, you owe it to yourself to check this book out. It will be a welcome addition to your library.
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1982
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Roscoe Mitchell and the Sound Ensemble
Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancin’ Shoes
Nessa Records 1981
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In 1961 Roscoe Edward Mitchell left the U.S. Army after a three- year hitch and returned to his native city of Chicago, Illinois. He was 21 years old. During that same year the legendary John Coltrane left the Miles Davis band and recorded his first album on a brand new label called Impulse! This seminal recording was called Africa/Brass, and marked the real beginning of the famcd Coltrane quartet (Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Trane). Coltrane was 35, and even though he had recorded 25 albums as a “leader” of various groups before 1961, this was the year that he clearly emerged as a dominant force in American music. It was also in 1961 that his Atlantic recording “My Favorite Things” was released. The record was so popular that it made the charts in many areas of the country, and sold over 50,000 copies its first year—a phenomenal total for a “jazz” record. This classic Coltrane record received very heavy airplay throughout the country and turned an entire generation of musicians around with its sound. One of those musicians was Roscoe E. Mitchell, who was just beginning to, in his words, “take music seriously.”
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1961 also marked the year that an ex-Ford assembly line worker and blues songwriter by the name of Berry Gordy, Jr., first made it big with a black owned recording company that he founded called Motown. The first major hit of this struggling new enterprise was a record called “Shop Around” by a 20-year-old singer/songwriter by the name of William “Smokey” Robinson and The Miracles had sold over one million records, and popular music in the U.S. would never be the same again. Back in Chicago, Mitchell and his fellow musicians and friends listened closely and played. Clearly an exciting new era had begun. But the creative and spiritual influences didn’t end there. There were other voices and sounds to contend with as well. These new sounds exploded on the consciousness of young, dynamic artists, who, like Mitchell, were searching for new ideas and values. Also like Mitchell they were unknown “local cats” learning their craft in bars, nightclubs, churches, community centers, basements and living rooms all over the black community. These young turks became the nucleus of a revolution in black creative music. This group of musicians: Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jack DeJohnette, Steve McCall, Scotty Holt, Fred Anderson, Billy Brimfield, etc., all later became renowned as innovative forces in contemporary music. But in 1961 everyone listened carefully to such masters as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, the Temptations,James Brown and B. B. King. SOUND was everyone and everywhere, and the intensity of the period swept everything before it--including Roscoe Mitchell. It was becoming increasingly clear with each new extraordinary voice that only those artists who continued to study and grow and LISTEN would ultimately be HEARD. And Roscoe had real BIG EARS.
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Throughout the fiery 1960s, Mitchell and his colleagues absorbed and became an integral part of the newest developments in world music. An incredible period of activity and gestation of ideas and procedures took place. An extremely wide range of methodologies and systems were used, refined, manipulated, extended and abandoned. Formal elements introduced by artists as seemingly disparate in taste, sensibility and philosophy as Kartheinz Stockhausen, Jimi Hendrix, John Cage, Jackie McLean, Cecil Taylor, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, Ornette Coleman and Lamont Young were all considered grist in the creative mill of these visionaries.
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In 1965 this group of black musicians decided to take the next step in their cultural and social evolution. In March of that year over 300 musicians came together to implement the move toward artistic independence and political self-determination. The name of the organization that was formed was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The members of this grouping included the core of the original Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble that in 1967 metamorphosized into the now world-famous Art Ensemble of Chicago.
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From the very beginning all of the philosophical and technical values that currently characterizes Mitchell’s music were present. There was a deeply felt appreciation and understanding of the entire history of creative music, especially its rich swing, blues and bebop traditions. There’s an intellectually rigorous attention to structural detail and a telepathic perception of the intricate relationship between style and content in modern art. Mitchell is a painter of sound who uses his broad strokes to evoke a bright kaleidoscope of melodic and rhythmic colors. The canvas can be informed by collagistic elements or a severely minimalist pointillism. Mitchell also works as a sculptor of organized “harmonic” areas that create a lush landscape that is often juxtaposed to a cartoon-like whimsicality of improvised imagery. These images are derived from Mitchell’s encyclopedic knowledge of formal, stylistic and technical devices drawn from many different traditions in 20th century World Music. But the ironic thing is that he is not merely eclectic. All of these ideas and methods are subsumed under Mitchell’s uniquely prophetic vision. The fact that Mitchell, who has influenced the direction and activity of an entire generation of new musicians throughout the globe, is almost completely ignored by reviewers and “critics” in the United States shows how backward and uninformed the established critical community really is.
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In Mitchell’s latest opus entitled Snurdy McGurdy and herDancin’ Shoes (dedicated to his two daughters Lisa and Atala), we witness a true giant of contemporary music fuse these concerns into a wide palette ofsound that is stunning in its conceptual depth and creative execution. The musicians who Mitchell recruited for this awesome task are especially suited for his purposes because they are not tied to any particular stylistic idiom. In fact, these musicians share Mitchell’s vision of an independently expressive music that embraces and extends thy myriad cultural and intellectual traditions that makes use of.
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This flexibility and extensive experience in the many musics that have characterized American culture in the post-World War I period serves as both the metaphorical and literal focus for the work in Snurdy McGurdy For in this suite-like opus we find Mitchell still, in the highly perceptive words of Lawrence Kart, “jitterbugging with the artifacts in the imaginary museum.”’ That is, Mitchell has appropriated the “languages” of other distinct artistic idioms and played (improvised) with them in order to reveal the essences of his own conceptual and spiritual philosophies. In Mitchell’s world irony leads to clarity.
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Thus, in composition like “Sing/Song,” “The Stomp and Far East Blues” and the title track, we find Roscoe calling on musical devices and resources from Bo Diddley and Louis Jordan, Traditional Japanese forms like the Kabuki, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, Albert Ayler, and lyricist-composers from the American popular song genre. But the fascinating feature of these compositional frameworks for improvisational communication is that the contexts that the ensemble has chosen for itself only serve to complement and enhance their own vision of the music. This is achieved with a high level of wit, dramatic force and instrumental virtuosity--three ever-present qualities in Mitchell’s art.
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Elsewhere in this recording, particularly in pieces like “Round” and “March” (by Anthony Braxton), the ensemble draws on Mitchell’s highly original approaches to well-known “western” music forms. By accentuating the rhythmic contrasts peculiar to these rather conventional frameworks, and then overlaying them with broad melodic and tonal variations that leap and glide away (then thru) the fading form itself, Mitchell redefines the nature of the form. The result is what all innovators in the arts create: the foundation for a new aesthetic.
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With Snurdy McCurdy, as in his brilliant work as a solo performer, and as an integral member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roscoe reminds us that the function and responsibility of all true “art” is to get us to see, feel and experience more than we are “accustomed” to perceiving and knowing. That it’s not enough to interpret and intellectualize about the possibilities of creative development, but to express them as well. In Mitchell’s music CHANGE is the password. Ask Snurdy McCurdy. Her dancin’ shoes will show you the way...
NOTES:
1. Lawrence Kart. (Liner Notes). Old/Quartet. Nessa Records, Chicago, Illinois, 1975.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY:
Roscoe Mitchell
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The Roscoe Mitchell Quartet (w/Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Spencer Barefied). Sackville 2009, Toronto, 1976.
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Roscoe Mitchell Sextet (w/Lester Bowie, Lester Lashley, Maurice Mcintyre, Malachi Favors and Alvin Fielder). Delmark Records, DS-408, Chicago, 1967.
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Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. Delmark Records, 1966
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4.Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble (w/Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and Robert Crowder). Nessa Records, Chicago, 1968.
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The Roscoe Mitchell Solo Saxophone Concerts. Sackville 2006, Toronto, 1975.
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Nonaah (w/Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, Henry Threadgill. Wallace McMillan, Muhal Richard Abrams.JosephJarman and George Lewis). Nessa Records N-9/10, Chicago, 1977.
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Numbers 1 & 2. Lester Bowie. (w/Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors). Nessa Records N-l, Chicago, 1968.
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The Maze. (w/Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Thurman Barker, George Lewis.JosephJarman, Don Moye, Malachi Favors). Nessa Records, Chicago, 1978.
And over 20 albums with the Art Ensemble of Chicago on the following record labels: Nessa, Delmark, BYG (France), ECM, Atlantic, Prestige and Affinity (England).
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1982
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The Blues in 4D
by Kofi Natambu
Detroit Metro Times
June, 1982
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ORNETTE COLEMAN
(b. March 9, 1930--d. June 11, 2015)
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For over 20 years now, Ornette Coleman has been a major innovative force in world music. During this period Coleman has been able to consistently change the direction of his music and still greatly influence other musicians. Ornette has been able to do this in spite of the fact that his massive achievements have often been misunderstood, vilified, ridiculed or patronized by dense white American “music critics.” Through it all, Coleman has prevailed because his artistic vision is so clear, strong and compelling that no opposition could stop him. Like most “great masters,” Ornette has been forced to fight for his art.
That is why Coleman’s latest recording, Of Human Feelings, is such an inspiring triumph. In this record we get an intimate look at a brilliant musician/composer organizing the varied elements of his music into a multi-tonal mosaic of great power, humor, color, wit, sensuality, compassion and tenderness. The fact that Ornette has once again managed to create such intelligent and passionate music using only the most venerable and fundamental of all African-American “forms” (i.e. the Blues) as an aesthetic focus is cause for celebration in a culture that worships gimmicks and cant over vision and heart. It is also an indication that like all truly “great artists,” Ornette recognizes and uses the eternal value(s) of simplicity. Of course, as any working artist can tell you, this is one of the most difficult things to do. Luckily for the rest of us, this is Coleman’s strength.
In this record, Ornette and his now six-year-old Prime Time Band never lose sight of the essential conceptual and spiritual aspects of Ornette’s musical philosophy: “Play the music, not the background.” In the eight pieces on this recording, as in all of Ornette’s music, the emphasis is never on virtuoso pyrotechnics for their own sake, or in empty stylistic phrase mongering. In every composition there is a synergy of thought and feeling that communicates instantly. There is always a dynamic unity of structure and execution that is performed with spirit and expressive animation. Coleman’s intricate and functional knowledge of black creative music tradi tions allows him to do this in a deceptively easy manner. The music literally pours out of this ensemble in strains of melody and rhythm that sums up the last 100 years of creative development in Afro-American music.
This awesome command is augmented, in Coleman’s case, with a very strong emotional affinity for the most ancient and basic “folk musics” developed by black people in the New World. Thus, in this recording there are rocking riff figures, field hollers, intensely lyrical worksongs, roaring call-and-response counterpoint, wailing melodic laments and exultations, wry little stompdown ditties and jumptime rent part be-bopping. There are also multi-rhythmic chants, sound clusters, tonal density and instrumental speechmaking. This colorful tapes try is held together by Coleman’s famous Harmolodic method, a theoretical construct that Ornette devised in the early 1970s to “allow all instruments in the band the equal opportunity to lead at any time...” This means that all members of the band can play melodic lines in any key at any time, because structurally the tempo, the rhythm and the harmonics are all equal in terms of what they can express. There is a constant modulation of tonality and rhythms as a result. In this liberated environmental setting the tonal “jumping-off point” is always the Blues, and I mean all kinds of Blues!
Ornette plays every conceivable Blues ever invented and a few that he introduced to the world. In every sound, gesture, cadence and juxtaposition. Coleman reminds us that without the Blues there would be no “jazz,” no “rock,” no “pop,” no “funk,” no “punk.” In short, no American vernacular music, just bland one-dimensional imitations of European, Asian, Latin and African musics. It is a humbling and sobering thought that makes us reflect even as we dance like mad to the throbbing, driving rhythms. Strangely, despite the echoes of Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix (among many others) throughout this music, the overall effect is unlike any Blues you have heard before. This is because of what Coleman does with the form in contemporary terms.
Meanwhile, Ornette rides the swelling and descending crest of these tidal waves of melody and sound through keening, darting and singing improvisations that convey a very wise and ancient message. This is the eternal blues message of joyful affirmation in the face of adversity and despair. A “heroism” based on hard-won experience and not media posturing. Whether shouting, screaming, moaning, laughing, crying or sighing, the music in Of Human Feelings never fails to express this message that lifts you higher and makes you dance no matter what “the problem.” The energy derived from the spirit of this recording is the “solution” to our problems. In fact, the title of one of Ornette’s tunes in this recording is “What is the Name of that Song?” I betcha Reagan doesn’t know. I hope we do.
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Epistrophy: Jazz & American Writing Since 1945
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The recent death, in January 1986, of Bob Kaufman, the legendary African American poet who played a leading aesthetic and social role in the literary movement known as The Beats (ca. 1945-1960), once again demonstrates the need to critically re-examine many of this culture’s beliefs, ideas and assumptions regarding the history of literature in the United States. In light of the extraordinary impact that Jazz has had on all modern art in the 20th century (particularly painting, architecture, film and dance) it is no surprise to find that many of the major innovative writers to emerge in the U.S. since the end of WWII have been deeply affected by it. In fact, it would be fascinating to explore just what ‘techniques’, methods and values from the oral tradition (represented here by the music and aesthetic called “Jazz”) have shaped and influenced our perceptions of, and ideas about, literature in this part of the world.
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The purpose of this survey essay will be to identify some individuals who, within the context of both modern and postmodern poetry and fiction, have used the Jazz Aesthetic in their work. In doing so I believe we will be able to gain a much broader and deeper understanding of the actual intellectual and cultural bases of contemporary writing, as well as seriously challenge many of the encrusted and powerful artistic/philosophical myths governing our knowledge of the relationship between Orality and Literacy in American culture today.
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The major reason why Jazz has been such an important force in American poetics is that its aesthetic and social sensibility is tied to a formal and philosophical concern with PROCESS as the fundamental basis of the creative act. Furthermore, the Jazz Aesthetic’s emphasis on thematic variation, repetition, inversion, revision, and transformation of given or received materials is an essential structural characteristic of contemporary literary modes in the U.S. Even a cursory look at the innovation in American poetry and fiction since WWII will reveal how central Jazz has been to the artistic experience and work of two generations of American writers.
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The radical assault on traditional ideas and values governing form, content and subject matter in postwar American literature was initially led by a resolutely anti-academic, romantic and socially rebellious group of young poets, novelists, playwrights (and later critics) who began to emerge from their underground subcultural status in the mid and late 1950s. Significantly, these writers had been initially inspired in their late adolescence and early adulthood by the extraordinary artistic contributions of such legendary/heroic black musical figures as Charles ‘Bird’ Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown and Tadd Dameron (not to mention Lester ‘Prez’ Young, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington). However, it was the explosive creative energy and vision of the former group (Bird, Dizzy, Monk et al), known to the media and the general public as “The Beboppers” that especially fascinated a highly critical and searching ‘avant-garde’ of white and black writers who, like their fiery idols, were also engaged in a feverish quest for new ideas and values. This group of writers and intellectuals was widely known as the Beat generation.
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BEAT MEETS BOP
Aldrich: Just before Howl was written, the only people who were singing, that way, out of themselves completely, out of their bodies, were blacks. And then along came Elvis, and that revolutionized white music--”Ah sing thuh way ah fee-ul.”
Ginsberg: Yeah. Kerouac learned his line from--directly from Charlie Parker and Gillespie, and Monk. He was listening in ‘43 to Symphony Sid and listening to “Night in Tunisia” and all the Bird-flight-noted things, which he then adapted to prose line.
Aldrich: ...I wanted to see what you think about this remark about Howl that I made several years ago.
“—Howl, the most famous of his poems, is extremely rhythmical. The meter is sustained primarily by anaphora, the repetition of the same work or words at the beginning of two or more successive verses (lines), clauses, or sentences, a device also used by Shakespeare in Sonnet 66 and by (Walt) Whitman throughout his poetry...To use musical terms (particularly appropriate because the lines of Howl use almost exactly the same methods as Charlie Parker’s saxophone improvisations), a repeated cadence of anaphoric words like “Who” and “Moloch” is taken off from the cadenzas, long swirling patterns of movement is interrupted recurrently by one unit of that movement...”
Ginsberg: Yeah.
Aldrich: To use musical terms--saxophone improvisations--
Ginsberg: Lester Young, actually, is what I was thinking about...”Lester Leaps In.” And I got that from Kerouac. Or paid attention to it on account of Kerouac, surely--he made listen to it...
‘The Beat Generation’ was a media moniker attached to a widely divergent but loosely unified coterie (in terms of artistic sensibility and attitude) of predominately white writers, artists, intellectuals and friends/supporters who began to band together and develop alternative sources of artistic/social unity and activity. Led by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), novelist and poet (and in the eyes of the literary establishment artistic ‘enfant terrible’), Columbia University dropout, Merchant Marine, and ex-football star from the minority French-Canadian community of Lowell, Massachusetts, the Beats worked to establish a radically new criteria for the creative uses of written language in the United States. The focus of the prolific writings of this group (which included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, among others) was on discovering a uniquely ‘American’ literary idiom that was primarily based on vernacular ideas and colloquial styles of expression. Thus the essential use of the Jazz Aesthetic.
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The Beats were also heavily involved in doing an on-going critique of those beliefs, philosophies, and attitudes they felt were destructive in American life: sexual repression, the bureaucratic tyranny of the modern state, the political hegemony of technology and the military, the consequent loss of ‘individual’ freedoms, and the cultural and economic mania for mass conformity. These writers also sought to directly influence the society by living out its admittedly romantic ideals/ideas in pursuit of sexual hedonism, bohemian defiance of all conventional morality, spiritual renewal (especially in the forms of Zen Buddhism and other eastern religions), consciousness altering drugs, and a great love and support for all art-forms (especially music, painting, and cinema). The Beats (at least in principle) were for Joy, Erotica, Satire, Humor, Art, Wisdom, and Imagination as the foundation of a ‘new society and culture’ linked to a spiritual acceptance of tragedy, absurdity, and pain. Thus the Blues and Jazz epitomized for this generation of writers those values and forms that gave the U.S. whatever real vitality and creative energy it had. These values are: Improvisation (the primacy of spontaneous invention), rhythmic and melodic dynamism, grace and versatility, an existential approach to ‘reality,’ and an aesthetically radical critique of existing Western forms and structures.
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‘The Be-Boppers’ were predominantly young, rebellious black musicians who were determined to take on the deeply entrenched racism and political/social oppression and exploitation of both the music industry and the society at large. Toward that end they banded together in black communities throughout the U.S. to systematically change the prevailing musical ideas and values that had dominated the Jazz world during the 1930s. What had begun as a liberating musical style and conception (SWING) had, by the late ‘30s, deteriorated under the exploitive social and economic weight of vulgar commercialism. As the brilliant poet/playwright/critic Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka pointed out in his seminal study Blues People (1963):
Philosophically, swing sought to involve the black culture in a platonic social blandness that would erase it forever, replacing it with the socio-cultural compromise of the “jazzed-up” popular song. Bebop reestablished blues as the most important Afro-American form in Negro music by its astonishingly contemporary restatement of the basic blues impulse. The boppers (were) reacting against the all but stifling advance artificial melody had made into Jazz during the Swing era. Bop melodies in one sense were merely more fluent extensions of the rhythmic portions of the music...there seem to be an endless changing of direction, stops and starts, variations of impetus, a jaggedness that reached out of the rhythmic bases of the music...
It was against this historical background that the Be-Boppers, led by the mercurial genius of the alto saxophonist/composer Charles ‘Bird’ Parker (1920-1955) consciously sought to challenge the hegemony of traditional Western concepts about melody and harmony (i.e. the common do-re-mi pattern of the diatonic scale). Through intricate mathematical alterations and revisions of these forms, and a blues-based reliance on non-Western, African-derived polyrhythms and tonalities, this generation sought to develop a complex method of playing and composing that, in the laconic phrase of one of the most profound leaders of the movement Thelonious ‘Sphere’ Monk, the “white boys would not be able to steal.”
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Ironically many white American literary artists were able to draw on these valuable techniques and ideas from musical (read: oral) sources as a means of cultivating and developing one’s ear in order to master the rhythms and tonal qualities of speech-like sounds. In turn these writers sought to ‘translate’ these sounds into written language that would accurately reflect and hopefully extend the subtle nuances of cadence, tempo, timbre, and line phrasings that characterize music. In terms of poetry and prose this meant, as it did in Jazz, the self-conscious manipulation and transmutation of the spatial and temporal dynamics of a given “theme.” As in improvised music this was to be achieved through the creative intervention of modal variations of accent, meter, tempo, cadence, and linear phrasing (breath-line). At the same time many young African American writers, suffocating under the intellectual and cultural tyranny of the European and white American literary canon, began to actively call on these oral/musical sources in their own work. Many of these individuals were affiliated with the Beats and significantly provided literary and political leadership to the movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These black writers included such major figures as Bob Kaufman, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, A.B. Spellman, and Amus Mor (David Moore).
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It is also crucial to note that that there were many other black writers during this period who were doing innovative Jazz-based work that was independent of the New York/San Francisco Beat scene. These writers included the brilliant and woefully neglected master from Cleveland, Ohio, Russell Atkins (founder of an important literary magazine called Freelance in 1950), and the Dasein group from Howard University: Walter DeLegall, Percy Johnston, LeRoy Stone, Al Fraser, Joseph White, Oswald Govan and the late Lance Jeffers.
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It was this group that published a groundbreaking book entitled Burning Spear: An Anthology of Afro-Saxon Poetry as an outgrowth of the Dasein Literary Society and Dasein: A Quarterly Journal of the Arts in 1961. Significantly these writers were praised as a “new breed of young poets who are to American poetry what Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis are to American Jazz” All of these poets were extremely active on the reading/lecture circuit of American universities and colleges across the country during the 1960s and ‘70s and were published in many small magazines and anthologies, as well as doing recordings of their poetry for the Library of Congress. Characteristically their poems are intellectually virtuosic displays of subtle rhythmic and emotional power. Their themes are the great modern Jazz musicians themselves (Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Rollins, Mingus, Dolphy, Miles, Coltrane, etc.), as well as the black human rights struggle, Western history, mythology, science, modernity, folklore, and spiritual/erotic lyricism.
II. ALONG CAME UMBRA
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In 1961 the UMBRA Poets Workshop was founded on the Lower East Side of Greenwich Village in New York City by Tom Dent, Calvin Hernton and David Henderson, three African American poets who were destined to become widely acknowledged national forces in the development and growth of the then still very young “small press movement” in the United States (a network that now publishes 95% of all creative literature in the country!). The UMBRA group is justly famous for many things, not the least of which is the incredible body of work to pour out of this group over the past twenty five years. If there is one literary group that deserves a book about their contributions to American letters it is UMBRA. A listing of its initial participants and members reads like a Who’s Who of new African American writing: Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, N.H. Pritchard, Askia Muhammad Toure, Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson in addition to Dent, Hernton, and Henderson. All of these writers are highly influenced by the Jazz Aesthetic, and many of their finest poems and prose contains intricate and rich allusions to, as well as highly imaginative uses of, Jazz structures, history, themes, narratives, values and ideas.
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In 1963 and again in 1964, 1967-68, 1970-71, and 1974-75, the UMBRA group published its classic anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays by black, white and Hispanic writers. Since the early 1970s individuals from UMBRA have gone on to write such Jazz inspired and influenced books as Conjure, Mumbo Jumbo, A Secretary to the Spirits, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Chattanooga, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans and Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed; De Mayor of Harlem, Felix of the Silent Forest, and The Low East by David Henderson; Chances are Few and The Bathers by Lorenzo Thomas; The Matrix and Ecchoes by N.H. Pritchard; Medicine Man and Scarecrow by Calvin Hernton; Magnolia Street and Blue Lights and River Songs by Tom Dent and the underground classic Groove, Bang and Jive Around by Steve Cannon.
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In 1970 Reed, who has become a major force in the publication of small press books through his companies I. Reed Books and Reed and Cannon, Inc., edited a very important anthology of African American writers that has since become a hard-to-find classic called 19 Necromancers from Now (Doubleday). A watershed in innovative/experimental American fiction, the anthology features the work of such important Jazz influenced writers as Clarence Major, John A. Williams, Amiri Baraka, Charles Wright, Al Young, Victor Hernandez Cruz, William Melvin Kelley, and Cecil Brown. There is also a highly informative introductory essay by Reed that places the aesthetic significance of these writers’ work within their proper social, historical and cultural context. It should also be noted that Reed and poet-novelist Al Young have edited and published a series of outstanding literary magazines since 1972 that have featured all of the aforementioned writers as well as such powerful black women writers as Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, Gayl Jones and Carlene Hatcher-Polite. In addition such major innovative white American fiction writers and critics as Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Jerome Klinkovitz have also been featured. Jazz has played a major role in the thought and work of all of these writers as well.
III. JAZZ AND NEW AMERICAN WRITING SINCE 1976
Over the past decade the number of American writers who use the Jazz aesthetic as a technical, stylistic and/or thematic source in their work has skyrocketed. I think a great deal of this has to do with the influence of many of the dynamic young writers who emerged in the period from 1945-1970: Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, A.B. Spellman, Ralph Ellison, Ronald Sukenick, Clarence Major, Robert Creeley, Ted Joans, Charles Olson, Ishmael Reed, etc. There has also been a much deeper awareness among writers since the mid 1960s of how integral chance, change and context (i.e. process) is to our experience of ‘reality.’ As Baraka put it in one of his finest theoretical essays on poetics: “Hunting is Not Those Heads On The Wall.”
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This postmodern consciousness is reflected in much contemporary American literature, music, painting, and performance art. These works are either overt or implied critiques of high modernism’s most cherished beliefs, ideas, and values regarding its own social/cultural/moral identity-in-the-world. The conceptual based art of writers like Clarence Major, Steve Katz, Will Alexander, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, William Gass, Susan Howe and Leslie Scalapino recognizes that writing involves at all times the invention of language patterns that are not determined by their references to any ‘reality’ outside language itself. This insight allows for a particularly playful and improvisational approach to the act of writing which places a premium on the rhythm, tonality, syntax, phrasing and modality of the words themselves. With the aesthetic emphasis shifting to an appreciation and conscious exploration of a multiplicity of meanings in a written text (a reader-oriented poetics) the Jazz aesthetic idea of a decentered transformation of given materials becomes a dominant feature in these texts. Variation, revision, repetition, and discontinuity become the philosophical and technical basis for these writings as the authors seek the same creative freedom in terms of their art as the soloists (improvisors) in a Jazz band. Against the ground of “themes” and “references” one is then able to intervene on the assumed or historically received modes of say, narrative prose or metric verse. Parody, farce, fabulism, and satire are thus widely used and accepted formal modes of contemporary literature since they lend themselves easily to improvisational ‘takeoffs’ and creative revisions of structure and content.
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Since 1960 the increasing radicalization of Jazz form and content (led by the extraordinary playing and composing of such great musicians as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Henry Threadgill, the World Saxophone Quartet, and Muhal Richard Abrams--just to name a few) has had a parallel effect on many poets and fiction writers (and even some playwrights, most notably Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins). Thus the abandonment of formal reliances on chord-based music (i.e. predetermined harmonic patterns), and a concomitant dependence on melody and rhythm as basic shifting signposts for improvisation is a procedural practice that can also be seen in the virtual elimination of fixed (linear) plots and “story-lines” in fiction and drama or strictly “moral” goals in poetry among many writers.
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The Jazz sensibility and technique can also be found in the dynamic “political” poetry of Jayne Cortez and Ntozake Shange as well as the often hilarious and coolly ironic post-surrealist blank verse of such Puerto Rican masters from New York as Pedro Pietri and Victor Hernandez Cruz. In fact, both Cortez and Pietri have released outstanding recordings of their work, with Cortez being featured with Jazz musicians on her own label (Bola Press). Along these same lines it is important to note that the recent death of a highly talented poet named Arthur Brown (author of a posthumously published book entitled A Trumpet in the Morning) is the loss of a lyrical master of the form. The same goes for the resonant and powerful blues-drenched Jazz verse of the late poet/playwright/ critic and activist Larry Neal who died of a heart attack at the age of 43 in 1981.
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Clearly, Jazz continues to permeate our culture in the late 20th century. How it has prevailed to nourish and guide so many different artists in so many diverse mediums despite deeply rooted cultural, political, and economic opposition and exploitation is not so much a ‘miracle’ as it is a great testament to the inspiring dedication and artistic strength and sensitivity of such towering figures as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, and all the many others who laid the groundwork for the Be-bop generation and beyond. As for Jazz and its impact on American writing I leave you with the sobering words of the renowned literary critic and trumpet master Miles Davis, who said: “Write what you know, or write what you don’t know, like everybody else...”
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Detroit
Spring, 1987
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Jazz and American Culture
by Kofi Natambu
The City Sun
Brooklyn, NY
April 5, 1989
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One of the strangest yet most common references that many scholars make when they discuss the question of ‘art’ in the United States is their use of the word “Jazz.” In numerous books, plays, and films, as well as historical and archival texts, there are persistent uses of, and references to, this term (not to mention the pervasive exploitation of the term’s cultural power in such blatantly commercial contexts as television and print advertising). These various uses are usually metaphorical or adjectival in tone, as in “Jazz Age,” “Jazzy structure” or “jazz-like.” The interesting thing about these other descriptive manipulations of the word is that they are generally used in theoretical and popular discourse about a wide range of artistic disciplines, including painting, dance, architecture, cinema, and literature. In fact, many of the finest and internationally recognized artists of the past century have publicly acknowledged their technical, creative and spiritual debt to Jazz. These include such well-known and respected non-musicians as Orson Welles, W.C. Williams, Pablo Picasso, Romare Bearden, Norman Mailer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Andre Breton, Joan Miro, Henri Matisse, Red Grooms, Louis Malle, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Kerouac, T.S. Eliot, Sterling A. Brown, Willem De Kooning, Stuart Davis, Ralph Ellison, Bob Thompson, Bob Kaufman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amiri Baraka, Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Fred Astaire. Not to mention Katherine Dunham, Maya Deren, Twyla Tharp, Lenny Bruce, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen!
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The inescapable irony (contradiction, paradox?) of all this, and that which underlines its strangeness, is the fact that Jazz has simultaneously been viciously and consistently maligned by many so-called “high art” critics and cultural bureaucrats for as long as it has been around in the Western world. The corresponding intellectual neglect that this extraordinary art form has been forced to endure (and survive) is only equaled by the astounding worldwide attention and acclaim it continues to receive from other artists and lovers of art and music throughout the globe. Thus as a music and an aesthetic Jazz has had an impact and profound influence all out of proportion to the truly humble and despised folk origins of its historical genealogy. More than any other singular art form or creative philosophy, Jazz has been the most representative force in this century of not only African American culture, but also American culture in general. The incredible story of how this situation developed is inextricably bound to the historical dynamics of not only art, but also politics, law, science, social class structures, “race”, religious values and philosophy (both metaphysical and materialist) in the West during the 20th century.
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The reasons for this on-going contradiction in American culture are not difficult to understand. This society has always violently opposed the idea that African Americans should be taken seriously as artists or cultural/social theorists even as it openly and rapaciously exploited them and appropriated the lucrative returns from the commercial selling of their art forms. Even more curiously this society has always insisted that any intellectual honor or “cultural prestige” attached to these arts (almost invariably by other societies and cultures) be recognized here as a merely inferior extension of “High Culture” (as defined by, and derived from, bourgeois conceptions of Art--see Theodor Adorno’s derisive writings on the subject). The inherent implication of this interpretation either rules out or attempts to downplay and obscure the actual historical reality of these forms as quintessential “New World” or American folk (read: vernacular) expressions and philosophies. It is this fundamental attitude, coupled of course with the traditional pernicious effects of racism, that has worked overtime to try to cover-up or eliminate from historical memory the massive influence and impact of Jazz and its aesthetic on American culture.
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Despite all attempts to intervene against this influence the would-be elitist arbiters of this culture have failed utterly to convince the rest of the world that either the music or the aesthetic that spawned it is even remotely inferior to traditional ‘high brow’ European ideas and values about art. However “official culture and society” represented primarily by academe and large-scale corporate cultural institutions (from both the private and public sectors of the political economy) have been largely successful in misguiding the public about, or distorting the actual tremendous achievements by Jazz and its artists and theorists. It has done this by brazenly ignoring the art or making certain it remains on the outermost periphery of the institutional network of economic and intellectual support. Thus to this day the vast majority of Americans has absolutely no knowledge of, or respect for, the art nor is it given any major priority by our tax-supported cultural institutions.
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It is in this wildly contradictory and hostile context that Jazz has asserted both its independent right to existence and unique aesthetic sensibility. The singular ability of the music to grow from its essential origins in, and evolution from, oral cultural sources and traditions is reflected in its protean changes in style, structure, and content over the years. Yet the core of the music and aesthetic has remained constant. This is because the art has never been dependent on institutionally academic values or ideas that would imprison the music and its philosophical modes in the stultifying atmosphere of cultural regimentation. Rather, Jazz has flourished as a creative force in distinctly public community environments, nurtured by the social, technical and historical experience and knowledge of the human culture that “invented” it: the African American people.
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The cultural ethos and sensibility that gave particular impetus to Jazz and its underlying aesthetic has historically been bound to the fundamental ‘democratic’ values of American society. Of course, the actual expression of these values have remained largely rhetorical and do not accurately reflect either the prevailing political and economic structure nor the conscious attitudes and behavior of the society. However, it is one of the curious paradoxes of American culture that the most despised and oppressed sectors of the society have fought the most consistently creative and faithful fight for the true inculcation of these democratic forms in American life. Thus we find in all popular artistic forms to emerge in the U.S. during the 20th century (e.g. Blues, Rock ‘n Roll, movies, ‘pop’ music, as well as some forms of performance art and painting--murals, graffiti art, HipHop, etc.) at least a genuine concern for the inclusion of a multiracial, multicultural ideal that would allow for a much broader participation of Americans in what we refer to as “culture.”
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The historical struggle to challenge the political and economic hegemony of the arts that remain under corporate and governmental control and regulation, is an integral part of the ‘Jazz experience.’ It is no coincidence for example, that Jazz musicians have always relied on their own conceptual understanding of music to forge their own involvement in the cultural life of the nation. Rather than accede to the repressive tendencies and demands of the “official culture” to subordinate all ‘other’ forms to the monocultural domination of “classical” music, literature, and art vernacular expressions like Jazz have actively resisted being absorbed by any one ideological structure.
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By focusing on the modal elements that make up and provide a working framework for the art, Jazz musicians have been able to affect the procedural and philosophical methodologies of artists in other seemingly disparate art forms. Like modern and postmodern innovations in film, dance, literature, and painting, Jazz has been able to transcend its origins in the category of “music” and penetrate the consciousness of a much larger “audience.” That is, its impact on the culture is not limited to those who enjoy what the musicians do, but is enhanced by the use of principles, values and “modes of perception” by other artists in different mediums who incorporate their peculiar, idiosyncratic understandings of the Jazz aesthetic in their own work. In this way the mass influence grows and is able to permeate the very processes of American life. It is in this pervasive sense that one can discuss Jazz as an aesthetic philosophy.
When one examines the historical tradition of Jazz in these terms, it becomes much clearer what specific contributions Americans have made to world culture in this century. Because the dissemination of cultural values and ideas have been largely transmitted by art--be it film, dance, music, or literature--other cultures have unavoidably adapted Jazz motifs and “ways of seeing” and acting in their own appropriation of what U.S. culture is. Thus the stylistic and expressive dynamics of the aesthetic have gone a long way toward actually defining what the essence of ‘New World’ living is all about. So in any meaningful discussion of what “America” represents to the rest of the world in the 20th century, it is simply impossible to discount or dismiss what Jazz has accomplished as a major social force in the world. This is no less true in the United States itself though the influence is much more subtle and diffuse as a result of the manipulative encroachments of racial mythology on cultural discourse in this country (a heinous historical condition that continues unabated today).
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It is important to note that the political movement of black artists for cultural recognition and social acceptance throughout this century in all the arts has also accounted for the ongoing awareness that what is usually referred to as the “mainstream” in American culture is no more than a blatant smokescreen for the exclusion of all “nonwhite” and radical white artists who refuse to be mere aesthetic clones of traditional European models of Art. Thus resolutely local expressions of American art in any genre are invariably dismissed as “lacking in standards or craftsmanship.” The cavalier equation of artistic mediocrity with vernacular expression and critical innovation has remained an oppressive constant in virtually every “arts circle” in the country. Unfortunately, this is largely due to the overwhelming influence or control of the university in sanctioning, and remaining the organizational center for much of aesthetic thought and activity in the United States. The hegemony of academia has been especially deleterious for the intellectual and emotional appreciation of Jazz because it creates the patently false impression that it is art that can only be fully grasped and understood in an academic setting. Thus students and potential musicians miss the crucial opportunity to directly experience the nuances of the aesthetic in live performance--still the most important aspect of the Jazz tradition. Without the primacy of improvisation the source of the music dies.
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In the absence of a working knowledge of the motivating cultural and social attitudes, values and experiences that are responsible for the creation of the music, we are left with a crippling myopia and ignorance concerning the actual development of American culture. For it is the dialectical relationship that exists between the African American historical reality and the larger framework of American cultural life/society that is finally responsible for a fully informed vision of the United States. Jazz is central to this vision because it so clearly embodies it: a music and aesthetic that celebrates and actively advocates the principles of improvisation, rhythm, variation, extension, inversion, and individual expression of form within a mutually supportive collectivity. Another important element in this dynamic is the key idea of the transformation of given or received (thematic) materials. As an analogy for the self-creation and ‘pioneering’ myth of the nation’s development, Jazz has served the function of representing the ‘best’ of the spirit of America’s history.
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The acknowledgement of this dialectic is what has led so many American and world artists to embrace the music and aesthetic in their own work. That, and the sheer vitality, drama, passion, energy, grace, virtuosity, eloquence, pathos, intelligence and joy that characterizes the music. The involvement of distinguished writers, painters, dancers, singers and filmmakers in the theoretical and technical aspects of the aesthetic means that Jazz has entered another realm of influence in the culture that resonates in the complex social behavior of ordinary people who are scarcely aware of the expressive force of Jazz on their speech, dress, sexuality, psychology and social imagination. In fact, many European as well as Asian, African and Latin American analysts have made public note of the influential factor of Jazz on the distinctive cultural identity of the average American. Certainly the pervading styles of ‘hip’, ‘cool’, ‘hot’ and ‘jive’ modes of artistic and personal expression in the language, stance, and actions of American youth and young adults since the early 1920s can largely be attributed to the impact of the Jazz aesthetic, since even the vocabulary of description of this phenomenon comes directly from the formerly “underground “ subculture known as the “Jazz world.” Stop to consider where modern (and now postmodern) American language would be without the inventive use of such words or phrases as ‘dig’, ‘man’, ‘gig’, ‘split’, ‘shit’ (as noun, verb and adjective), ‘deal’, ‘slick’, ‘rap’, ‘drag’, ‘junkie’, ‘jam’ (as verb), ‘legit’, ‘out’ (as adjective), or ‘hit on.’ These are just a few of the literally hundreds of expressions that are derived from the continually inventive Jazz (linguistic) tradition. It’s also important to note that the creative use of such language generally comes from the African American population from which the greatest Jazz musicians have always emerged.
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The historical interest that artists and the general public have shown in the independent aspects of the Jazz aesthetic is rooted in their equal fascination with the cultural sensibility that it represents. In a society historically sworn to the institutional subjugation and oppression of black people (e.g. discrimination in employment, education, housing, health care and political representation, as well as economic and legal/civil rights is more rampant now than at any time in the U.S. since the 1950s!), the Jazz aesthetic has swerved as a brilliant symbol of creative resistance that relies heavily on the ‘magic’ of imagination to challenge and transform ‘reality.’ The forms that this challenge to cultural hegemony have taken have particularly emphasized a structural flexibility that results in the mutable ability to adapt quickly to varying contexts. Thus a wide range of artists and theorists have been able to pursue their own vision of what specific uses the Jazz aesthetic could be put to in terms of their own genre.
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The simple fact that the music and aesthetic are useful in a creative sense for other artists is further evidence that it constitutes a cornerstone of American cultural studies. For this reason the legacy that the music has left us is indelible and enduring. The global triumph that has followed quickly upon the spread of the music on a world stage is the ultimate confirmation of its centrality to 20th century art.
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Book Review
Kofi Natambu
April, 2000
Lost Chords: The Contributions of White Musicians to Jazz: 1915-1945
by Richard Sudhalter
Oxford University Press, 1999
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“The white man likes to win everything.”
--Miles Davis
(from his Autobiography)
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Let’s not dawdle or equivocate on this one. Let’s cut straight to the chase: the fundamental premise and shockingly flimsy thesis of this book is not merely misleading, dishonest and simpleminded, it’s FALSE. For example, imagine being told that Antonio Salieri was as “great”, significant and profound a composer as Mozart, or that Shakespeare’s literary contemporaries not only consistently wrote plays that were as good as his but in many instances were often better. Or that white American artists in general during the 1800-1945 period were as creative, interesting and innovative as European painters, sculptors and graphic artists in the history of visual art in the West.
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Worse, imagine the critical response to such obviously absurd nonsense. Who could trust, let alone respect the ‘knowledge’, opinions and taste of people uttering these ludicrous sentiments? This is the silly dilemma one encounters in reading and attempting to seriously “analyze” the straight-faced racial propaganda of Richard Sudhalter’s massive tome of intellectual hubris, deceit and disingenuousness entitled Lost Chords: The Contributions of White Musicians to Jazz, 1915-1945.
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This huge densely written text of nearly a thousand pages dares to raise and answer a series of such crucial and hair-raising questions in Jazz historiography as the following: Is Bix Beiderbecke as important to the musical evolution of Jazz as Louis Armstrong? Are the Casa Loma and Paul Whiteman(!) orchestras as significant as the Duke Ellington and Count Basie Orchestras to the history of Jazz composition, arranging, and orchestration? Are Bud Freeman, Benny Goodman, Frankie Trumbauer, Jack Teagarden, Miff Mole and Pee Wee Russell as consistently creative, innovative, and musically proficient as Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Sid Catlett, Benny Carter and Art Tatum? Are there any white musicians of the period who were as revolutionary in the technical and improvisational approach to their instruments as Charlie Christian and Jimmy Blanton?
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Since the clearly obvious answer to all of these bizarre and utterly idiotic “questions” is a loud and resounding NO! it behooves one to ask why these so-called issues are being raised in the first place at this point in American history. But before we go there I should admit that I have suspected since the mid-1980s that the Oxford University Press series of books on Jazz was eventually going in this direction. Perhaps that all fifteen of the writers in the series have been white (fourteen males) could have something to do with it. All I know is that when I suggested as much to some friends and colleagues who actually read books on or about the music, my white friends called me paranoid and my black friends all readily agreed with me (so much for the old corny ‘perception vs. Reality’ argument that is trotted out whenever African Americans question or criticize whatever is being done to them in the name of “universal values”)
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So the issue for me has never been whether or not Beiderbecke, Teagarden, Goodman, Russell, Whiteman(!), or any of the other white American musicians could play ‘Jazz’ (despite the highly problematic use of the very term itself). The fact that many white musicians could play the music well is not in dispute here. What is however is the racially motivated inflation of the public reputation of these players over and above their black counterparts who are, on the basis of the extraordinary quality of their music alone, generally dominant in terms of both form and content vis-a-vis their white colleagues. This was true from 1915-1945 and it has remained true since then.
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How does one explain the white media crowning Goodman the ‘King of Swing’ and Whiteman a decade earlier, during the momentous rise of Armstrong, Ellington, and Fletcher Henderson, the ‘King of Jazz?’ The answer lies of course in the blatant and vicious racism of American society in the historical period examined in this book that was duplicated in the political economy and social culture of the ‘Jazz world’ of that era. It was in this horrific atmosphere of stark racial terror, political tyranny, rampant social/cultural discrimination and economic peonage that African Americans forged and developed one of the greatest art forms of the 20th century. In fact apart from cinema (a medium in which for the first half century of its existence African Americans were either banned or held up to great public ridicule), Jazz has been the only art form to emerge from the shores of North America.
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Despite this astonishing history Sudhalter attempts to create the impression that the aesthetic and cultural contributions of whites who, after all, were introduced to the art form by African Americans, were on an equal and mutually dependent par with blacks. His “evidence” for this outlandish assertion is the often recorded fact that Lester Young was ‘influenced’ by Trumbauer and that Armstrong respected and enjoyed the work of Beiderbecke and Teagarden. Sudhalter also asserts that black musicians and composers listened to the playing of whites like Goodman, Mole, Russell and Freeman and found “value” in what they did. He even quotes a number of black players like Coleman Hawkins, Armstrong, Doc Cheatham and others who express their varying degrees of appreciation or empathy for what they did.
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As far as it goes of course there is nothing unusual or even noteworthy in any of this. African American artists have generally not been prejudicial in their assessments of the abilities of ‘others.’ However it is a gigantic leap from acknowledging the sincerity or skill of another artist or group of artists to making the assertion that this “proves” that white musicians and composers in Jazz were as important in the larger historical and social context of the music as the pioneering black artists in the field. For example at one point Sudhalter makes a big deal out of the Lester Young/Frankie Trumbauer connection (Young always asserted in interviews that the half white American/Native American saxophone player of the 1920s/early’30s had a big impact on his melodic conception of Jazz tenor saxophone playing). But it is pushing this fundamental fact to incredibly inaccurate extremes to suggest that Trumbauer’s contributions to the history of Jazz saxophone are as profound, innovative and far reaching as those of Young. Aside from the fact that Trumbauer died tragically young in a car accident at the age of 32 in 1934 and thus had his very promising career cut short, Young went on to thoroughly revolutionize Jazz saxophone playing in a nearly mythical thirty year career that ended in 1959. That nearly every major saxophone player, black and white, from 1935 on came directly from ‘Prez’ (Young’s famous nickname), including the great Charles ‘Bird’ Parker, speaks volumes about the links between African American lineage, innovation and ‘influence’ in the history of the art.
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The other major example that Sudhalter emphasizes is that of the aesthetic and cultural relationship between Beiderbecke and arguably the greatest individual Jazz musician of this century, Louis ‘Pops’ Armstrong. It is well known in Jazz history that Armstrong was always generous in his praise of many of his colleagues and it was characteristic of his open and warm character that Pops or ‘Satchmo’, as he was also known, was not adverse to publicly acknowledging Bix Beiderbecke’s considerable abilities on Jazz trumpet and cornet. However Sudhalter’s willful distortion of Armstrong’s personal appreciation for Beiderbecke’s playing (especially in light of the white media’s attempts during the 1920s to elevate Beiderbecke over Armstrong) could be seen as Sudhalter’s subconscious desire to see his musical idol given the same broad international attention and acclaim that Armstrong’s reputation has so deservedly enjoyed (Sudhalter’s previous book from 1979 is a 500 page biography on Beiderbecke). However, the early death of Beiderbecke in 1931 at the age of 28 from alcoholism has ensured that he would never gain the position and status of his black rival since Armstrong went on to play another forty years and become the legendary figure in Jazz that we all know and love. Still it is again wildly inaccurate to say that Beiderbecke even in his prime was as good or accomplished on trumpet or cornet as Louis Armstrong. One merely has to listen to the recordings from the 1923-1930 period alone to hear that the absolutely astounding bravura playing of Armstrong could not be eclipsed by anyone. It is not to disparage or dismiss the beautiful melodic style and singing tone of Beiderbecke to say that as good as he was, he was no Armstrong (no one was). Besides, Armstrong was a much more versatile musician and possessed a broader tonal palette than Beiderbecke did.
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It is dubious reasoning like his take on Beiderbecke that sinks Sudhalter’s thesis and gives his attempt to ‘rescue’ white American musicians from what he considers historical oblivion a hollow and misleading tone. It should also be pointed out that despite Sudhalter’s editorial protests to the contrary white American Jazz musicians enjoyed a major advantage over black musicians in terms of coverage and support in the American mainstream press--musical and otherwise--for nearly five decades. Certainly newspapers like The New York Times and the first major American Jazz magazine Downbeat (founded in 1934) endlessly promoted and championed figures like Whiteman, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Goodman, Casa Loma Orchestra, Bob Crosby (Bing’s bandleader brother), Beiderbecke, Harry James, Freeman, Bunny Berrigan, Teagarden and all the rest over such major black bands and soloists as Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Louis Armstrong, Young, Hawkins, Carter and Count Basie. This went double for radio and (later) television. For further evidence of this highly racial slant check out the hundreds of polls that Downbeat and many other white publications conducted from the mid-thirties to the late 1960s. You would have thought that whites invented the music (and how did white female singers consistently beat the likes of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan etc. in these polls year after year?--not through vocal merit I can assure you...).
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Sadly this book is ultimately a lot like those spurious polls. It fails to account for or even fairly acknowledge the major differences in the actual contributions of the artists being examined. By claiming as Sudhalter does in another transparently deceptive ploy that if a major black musician likes or enjoys what a white player does then it follows that the player can be considered significant, consider this: One of Louis Armstrong’s favorite musicians was the late and not-so-lamented Guy Lombardo (that incredibly schmaltzy Lawrence Welk-like bandleader whose band always played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on New Year’s Eve every year on radio and television during the 1940-1970 era). This idiosyncratic and inexplicable phenomenon provides us with still more evidence of why the cliché phrase “there is no accounting for taste” was invented. Surely this doesn’t mean that Sudhalter is now going to put Lombardo in the Jazz pantheon. But as Fats Waller so eloquently put it: “one never knows, do one?” Personally I think it’s way past time for all of us to admit the obvious: that African Americans enjoy a considerable aesthetic and conceptual hegemony in Jazz in much the same way that black players dominate the National Basketball Association (no racist jokes here, please). Considering that African Americans were not allowed to play in the league until 1955(!) and that Jazz itself was once considered not that long ago (but especially during the period covered in this book) to be a brazen representative of the intellectual, artistic and moral inferiority of “Negroes” in America I think Sudhalter might want to reexamine his absurd and self-serving notion that the idea of black players being “greater” than white players began when “white leftist journalists” began promoting this “insidious line” way back in the mid-1930s (an era when, let’s face it, a lot of actual or potential Jazz fans were lynched or at least couldn’t vote). To put it another way: Larry Bird was a very good basketball player but he was no Michael Jordan. What white sportswriters said, pro or con, for or against Michael, had absolutely nothing to do with it. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Larry...
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Film Review
by Kofi Natambu
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Eve’s Bayou
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
1998
At first glance the singular importance of Eve’s Bayou, a film by black actress, screenwriter, and first time director Kasi Lemmons, is not easily discernible. After all, there is nothing particularly new or even intrinsically interesting about its rather conventional narrative and thematic content. Nor does it seek to break new or fresh ground in terms of cinematic style. In fact, both its filmic and dramatic lineage goes back almost directly to the domestic melodrama plays of such traditionally acclaimed American playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, especially in such well known warhorses as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, Sweet Bird of Youth, Mourning Becomes Electra and Suddenly Last Summer, etc. Certainly we have seen these productions countless times on both stage and screen (film and TV) since the 1940s. They are always presented as the archetypal well-made ‘modern’ American play. Such contemporary directors and writers in this tradition as Sam Shepard, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Elia Kazan, David Mamet, Charles Fuller, and August Wilson have covered much, if not all, of the ground presented in Lemmons’s new film.
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Nor is there anything unusual in Lemmons’s highly polished yet still obviously derivative use of stock characters in the African American dramatic genre since 1950. So why and how does her film still represent a leap forward in her depiction of these images and text in 1998, and how is her work able to make us care about it in spite of its apparent conventionality?
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I think the answer lies in a critical reappraisal of African American film practice since 1986 (The Age of Spike Lee). Perhaps we should even extend our analysis to black independent film production since the appearance of Charles Burnett’s award-winning Killer of Sheep, made in 1977. However, what is most germane to our understanding of African American filmmakers and writers working in the commercial Hollywood studio system is what has occurred since Lee (followed quickly by John Singleton, Bill Duke, Carl Franklin, Reginald Hudlin, Robert Townsend, The Hughes Brothers, etc.), made his path-breaking debut during the height of the Reagan era in American culture.
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What is significant about Lee’s breakthrough (and it is significant despite whatever flaws, shortcomings and weaknesses Lee and the others have in terms of their own practice) is that it gave African Americans the admittedly highly problematic ‘opportunity’ to present their work to a mass American audience for the first time in Hollywood’s truncated cinematic history. This means of course that the very idea of a ‘black film tradition’ in the mainstream (read: white) Hollywood system, was now forced to confront in both aesthetic and political terms what it would finally mean to do ‘black film’ in such an ideologically and aesthetically compromised space, given the deeply rooted and pervasive traditions of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism in commercial American cinema.
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So Lemmons’s challenge was not merely one of exercising ‘free’ aesthetic choices within the traditional crafts of screenwriting and directing, but of transversing the much more thorny and booby-trapped terrain of the cultural politics of American film (not to mention the always extremely difficult problem of dealing with the political economy of the medium). What finally allows Lemmons to, in effect, ‘up the ante’ in defining the aesthetic terms for a viable commercial black cinema is her acute awareness of the need to clearly and unambiguously negotiate her own expressive space within the unavoidably narrow and reductive parameters of a highly commodified and reified art form. What emerges from this precarious and always dangerous dance is a film that makes this on-going struggle an integral part of its filmic representations in terms of both visual imagery and dramatic text. How Lemmons’s film manages to accomplish this constitutes one of the truly rare surprises in ‘mainstream’ American film of the past two decades. A detailed rendering of the plotline can aid us in examining why this is so.
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The film is about the psychosexual and emotional tensions of an upper-middle class black family living in an independent African American community in Louisiana bayou country named after a former slave named Eve, who, along with her white husband, founded the town in the late 19th century. The story focuses on the conflicts, adventures, joys, sorrows and tragedies of the filial descendants of the offspring of the original couple of Eve and her husband. As the story begins we find local family doctor, womanizer, and beloved father (played by Samuel L. Jackson), his beautiful and neglected ‘pedestal’ wife (the stunning Lynn Whitfield), and their three children, ages 6-14, hosting a big party in their sprawling ante-bellum home. While at the party the ten year old daughter and middle child who deeply loves her charming but philandering father is seen being jealous of her older sister whom her father chooses to dance with instead of her. This Freudian sibling rivalry for the father’s patriarchal approval (and subconscious sexual attention) becomes the major subtext of the narrative when the younger daughter leaves the party in a huff over not being chosen to dance with her adored father. She winds up in the carriage house behind their home where she falls asleep. Upon waking she sees her father passionately kissing and making love to his mistress with whom the father has also slipped away from the party.
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Upon discovering the young girl there the father and mistress pretend not to be engaging in sexual activity, and the now clearly confused ten year old daughter leaves after her father hugs her and tells her it’s past her bedtime. When the ten year old then relays the story of her father kissing this other woman to her fourteen-year-old sister, the older sibling convinces the younger girl (and herself) that what really happened was no more than a harmless teasing session where their father accidentally brushed up against the mistress. The younger sister accepts this explanation for awhile (after the older girl insists that they not mention the story to their mother) until it becomes clear on a number of suspicious occasions and the blatant fact that her father is spending increasingly more time away from her mother and the rest of the family, that her father is an adulterer and that what she originally thought she had seen in the carriage house was indeed true.
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Meanwhile we find her father’s sister and the children’s highly colorful, mysterious and sexy aunt (a riveting Debi Morgan) engaging in her part-time job as a local clairvoyant medium who counsels others concerning their problems with loved ones, and who herself has lost three husbands (!) to violence of one kind or another. The aunt’s role in the narrative is pivotal given her close friendship with her sister-in-law and her abiding love for her nieces and nephew as well as her own wayward brother. She too has had a ‘wandering eye’ and extramarital affairs in her life, but is now trying to atone for her past. This makes her critical but not morally judgmental of her brother’s actions. Her sincere hope is that her brother, as she has done, will finally recognize the hurt and family disruption his betrayal has caused and act to resolve the unattended to problems of communication and understanding in his strained relationship with his wife.
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Complicating all this is the children’s mother whose strong yet conflicted love for her husband is another source of dramatic conflict. As the glamorous ‘trophy’ wife of a successful professional man the mother, a highly intelligent but thoroughly bourgeois and perhaps repressed genteel black southern belle type, has nearly lost all hope of reconciling with her bored husband and pours most of her considerable energy into raising the children. However after an accident involving the death of a stranger’s child that the psychic aunt and a local ‘voodoo queen’ (a nice cameo role by Diahann Carroll) have foreseen in their mystic projections, the mother becomes overly protective of her own children and unreasonably demands that they spend the rest of the summer indoors(!) to avoid any ‘outside’ danger. Predictably this leads, in a series of hilarious tableaux scenes, to the children, mother and grandmother all going stir-crazy as the middle child finally goes ballistic by shouting, during a particularly tediously boring period of reading books indoors, that she and her sister had already read all of Shakespeare’s comedies and were now “working on the goddamned tragedies!”
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By now the older sister’s adoration and intense love for her father has reached a new level of intensity as a result of waiting up for her father late at night, who by this time is spending less and less time with his wife and children. His obvious estrangement from his wife, coupled with the older daughter’s pleasure at waiting up for her father to come home at night (which is now one of the few times she can actually see and talk to him), leads to her feeling romantically competitive with her mother for her father’s affections. This inevitably leads to the oldest daughter acting out on her desires by confronting the mother whom she blames for her father avoiding the family. Thus she subconsciously hopes to ‘replace’ the mother by appropriating the mother’s place in the family unit. This is demonstrated in an important scene where, after sneaking out of their now prison-like home, she courts the ‘danger’ that the mother feels by leaving the house to go to the beauty salon in the city, returning with the identical hair and makeup style of her mother. Upon revealing this to the mother and the rest of the family (absent the father, of course) the older sister directly challenges the mother’s authority (and thus familial status) by openly stating that if the mother wasn’t so full of fear and malice for her beloved father he wouldn’t be away from them so much of the time.
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The mother, now furious that her daughter has disobeyed her so openly in front of the family, and subconsciously aware of her daughter’s misplaced romantic and sexual, (and thus incestuous) desire for her husband, and accurately sensing the implied threat to her status in the family, slaps her daughter and demands that she obey her orders as “long as she lives under her roof.” She also points out that her daughter is still a child who despite her youthful arrogance does not fully understand everything that is going on between her father and herself. She also adds that the daughter is not to wait up for her father anymore and that she has some unfinished business to conduct with him regarding his irresponsible behavior. This incenses the girl who, after listening to her parents argue about her father’s infidelities, sneaks back downstairs after the mother goes to bed, and finds her father drinking and sitting alone in the dark. What occurs next is the key to the narrative’s denouement though it is not the direct cause.
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In a flashback scene that the oldest sister is relating to her younger sibling she is told that the father tried to give the older girl a deeply sexual kiss after she sat on his lap trying to console him after his argument with the mother. At this point we are shown the father trying to sexually advance on his daughter and the girl resisting. The father then brutally strikes the daughter for presumably refusing him. Upon being told this, the ten year old daughter vows revenge and states in a rage that she will “kill her father” for hurting her sister.
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At this point the younger girl goes to the voodoo priestess and asks her what she would have to do to kill a member of her family. The voodoo woman, after inquiring why the girl wants to kill someone, asks the girl if she is “absolutely sure” she wants this person to die. The young girl states unequivocally that, yes, she does. Amused and a little wary of the girl’s claims the voodoo queen concocts a ritual to jinx the intended victim. Convinced that she now has the power to kill her once adored father the girl awaits the desired results. After charging a fee for her services the bemused psychic pretends to wait for the child to carry out her devious plan. As it turns out, the old saying “be careful what you wish for--you may get it” applies in this case. There is a tragic scene at a local bar where the father is having a drink with his mistress and is confronted by the woman’s irate and drunken husband. Prior to this encounter the husband of the Doctor’s mistress was completely unaware that his wife was having an affair.
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This confrontation is brought on by the young girl who tells the husband that “someone is messing with your wife” and that the person could be found at a particular bar. Before her plan can go forward however the young girl changes her mind and goes to the bar to try to get her father to leave with her. The father, surprised to see his youngest daughter out so late and in a bar at that, tells her that he will leave with her after “just one more drink with my friend.” Angry with him but also concerned for his safety the girl obeys her father’s command that she wait for him outside the bar. While standing outside the door she sees the husband of her father’s mistress walking uneasily down along the railroad tracks toward the bar (he too has been drinking heavily). When the girl’s father and his mistress emerge outside she begs her father to leave immediately with her. However, her father is told by the angry husband of the mistress (the always effective Roger Smith) that he will kill the girl’s father if the betrayed husband ever catches him with his wife again. He then warns him further that he is not to speak to her again. As he drags his wife away from the girl’s father, the father yells out that he will see the husband’s wife again tomorrow. Enraged, the husband pulls a gun from his waist and kills the doctor right there in front of the bar. The young girl watches all this in horror.
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After the funeral for her father the younger girl is lovingly going through some of her father’s affects in his room. At this point she sees a letter that her father has left for his sister and her aunt stating that from his perspective the older sister had made incestuous sexual advances toward him the night that she sat on his lap, and that he slapped her because he knew it was wrong for his daughter to kiss him in this manner. Shocked and outraged the younger girl runs out to confront her older sister, saying that she has lied to her about their father initiating a sexual encounter. After showing the letter to the older sister the younger sibling demands an explanation. The older girl states once again that from her perspective it seemed that their father was trying to kiss her but this time she is not completely sure if she was slapped for the reasons that she first suspected. The younger sibling then forgives her sister and buries their father’s letter in the bayou swamps, and thus their shared secret. A voiceover by the now adult younger sister states that memory and desire can often play tricks on the carriers of such emotionally and psychologically charged areas of human experience and that individual moral judgments about events and their meaning is not sufficient in themselves to fully understand and appreciate the eternal ambiguity and complexity of human motives and behavior. Thus forgiveness and a sense of redemption are always needed if human compassion and love is to survive and endure.
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What distinguishes the film narrative from both an aesthetic and thematic viewpoint in terms of the short history of African American filmmaking in Hollywood is that Eve’s Bayou contains a much more sexually mature sense of the complex tensions and dynamics ruling relations between men, women and children. Unlike most of the rather adolescent, shallow and sometimes regressive treatment of these issues by other black and white male filmmakers (notable African American exceptions include Charles Burnett and Carl Franklin, as well as the brilliant and virtually unknown black independent director/actor Wendell Harris, writer and director of Chameleon Street [1990]) Lemmons doesn’t merely assume that she knows why a particular character acts as they do. Instead she gives each individual the moral and social space to be themselves without simply imposing her own reductive moral or ethical judgments about what her characters’ motivations and desires are or should be. She allows them and the audience as well the opportunity to make their own assessments of what is transpiring and why. Thus like many other fine directors and writers she is not afraid to get out of the way of her own creations in terms of determining meaning in the film text. Her willingness to allow ambiguity, tension and even confusion to exist without trying to impose her own neat resolutions of human conflict, keeps the film from sinking of its own aesthetic and formal weight as genre and standard cinematic trope. In this way the melodramatic elements are never allowed to swallow the subtext of the film’s insights by doing what so many other mediocre American films do today in telling the viewer at all times and under all visual, acoustic, and textual circumstances exactly what they are “supposed” to be thinking, feeling, seeing and experiencing at any given moment.
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What also makes the film not only different from that of most other American filmmakers, but refreshingly unique, is Lemmons’s critical examination of, and subtle attention to, the specific nuances and twists of individual behavior. Rather than telegraph where a particular character or event is going in a scene she stands dispassionately apart from the actors and has the camera record not merely action, but gesture, visual space and choreographed movement. Obviously this focus comes from her training, and that of many of her actors, in theatre. But the confidence with which Lemmons is not afraid to record and portray the silences between characters and the physical landscape itself is a testament to a well thought out vision of what she wants to accomplish scene by scene instead of always relying on stock devices, responses and visual/scripted props and cues to keep the narrative moving. Sometimes this strategy results in the staging interfering with the rhythmic tempo of a scene, but usually there is a sure sense of how many beats are needed/desired in a particular scene. Lemmons’s direction is especially adroit in the emotionally and psychosexually charged scenes involving adults and children. As a result, the melodramatic elements are put at the service of the overall narrative and thematic structure instead of the reverse which so often mars and distorts films which are largely dependent on dialogue and character.
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It also helps immensely that the acting is uniformly excellent. In fact, outstanding casting decisions have ensured that Lemmons is able to realize her desire to focus on specifically implied and elemental emotions rather than broad overreaching strokes. What results is a cast that functions as a true ensemble, a finely tuned and well rehearsed Jazz orchestra whose members/soloists play the hell out of their individual parts in order to enable the entire band to express the composer’s visual and textural music. Special kudos are due to Samuel L. Jackson, Debi Morgan, Meaghan Good, Lynn Whitfield, Roger Smith, and the extraordinary twelve year newcomer making her film debut, Jurnee Smollet, as the girl “who kills her father” at the age of ten. Hopefully the highly talented director/writer/actor Kasi Lemmons will be heard from again very soon. American cinema, lost in the quagmire of infantilism and misogyny, really needs her voice...
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Whose Music is it, Anyway?: The Oxford University Press Jazz History/Criticism Series, 1980-Present
by Kofi Natambu
The Black Scholar
Vol. 29, No. 4, BLACK ISSUES: 2000 (WINTER 1999), pp. 48-51
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41068839
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“Jazz as a Negro music, existed, up until the time of the big bands, on the same socio-cultural level as the subculture from which it was issued. The music and its sources were secret, as far as the rest of America was concerned, in much the same sense that the actual life of the black man in America was secret to the white American. The first white critics were men who sought, whether consciously or not, to understand this secret, just as the first serious white Jazz musicians sought not only to understand the phenomenon of Negro music but to appropriate it as a means of expression which they themselves might utilize ... Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about they way music is made...Usually the critic's commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude that produced it. This difference meant that the potential critic of Jazz had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and that he did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes which produced it...The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy...”
--Amiri Baraka, "Jazz and the White Critic," (1963)
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS: The very name conjures up visions of austerity, reserved dignity, and grand intellectual tradition. There is also more than a hint of cultural snobbery and elitism associated with its long established reputation. The patricians who manage the Press are not shy about this reputation and have no compunction whatever about reminding anyone who cares to listen that the Oxford University Press (OUP) is, indeed, prestigious.
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So it was in 1980 with great fanfare, a sense of assured purpose and dignified solemnity that one of the most venerable and prestigious publishing houses in the world began commissioning original texts by American and English music critics and historians to write about Jazz. That's right, JAZZ -- apart from cinema the only major art form to emerge out of the United States during the twentieth century. Until very recently (as recently as this very moment many would argue) Jazz was the patronizingly "tolerated" yet still largely ostracized bastard child of the "uptown" white Art world where "the money and the honey" meet. That is, everyone used, abused and ignored it yet in the same breath claimed to love it -- sort of like a John who desperately desires a favorite whore for his personal mistress but doesn't dare suggest the heretical idea for fear of alienating his spouse! In this case, of course, that spouse was (and is) "classical music," which has long been forcibly reduced to a static, hopelessly anemic and academized mode of "good taste" in music (this is what its cultural benefactors mean when they trot out for the umpteenth time that old warhorse phrase "maintaining quality and standards").
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Thus for the last century Jazz, despite producing such extraordinary artistic giants as Scott Joplin, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and on and on (the list is literally endless), has been viewed by the so-called "mainstream" art world in the United States as a brilliantly stubborn delinquent who refuses to simply "accept" the "necessity of assimilation" on the manipulative and oppressive terms set down and imposed by the powerful (white) arbiters of "great art." In fact for over fifty years Jazz artists and many of its fans have been demanding access to the monied institutions of the pristine "classical world" but only on its own creative terms.
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THIS OF COURSE infuriated the stuffy white elitists who control the political and economic infrastructure of this world and who were (and still largely are) outraged by the quaint, yet horrifying, suggestion that what black artists do is as important and profound as what their frozen canonical icons of the "classical tradition" think and do. Though many claim that what Wynton Marsalis and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch have achieved at Lincoln Center in New York has finally ended this kind of aesthetic and cultural tyranny, it can easily be argued that what they have accomplished instead (often at the considerable expense of their artistic colleagues) is merely a Negro-approved reinforcement of the myopic and racist Eurocentricity of the uptown (or is that midtown?) boys. But I digress...
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What the Oxford University Press series of books on Jazz represents is a strange coup of sorts on the part of the classical-minded critics who have merely shifted the traditional notion of classicism from the symphony halls of European and (white) American respectability to the university classrooms and commercial theaters of late twentieth-century America. By insisting on maintaining the original vision of the series in documenting the social, aesthetic and cultural evolution of Jazz since the late nineteenth century, and by blatantly insisting on the "significant" role of white musicians and composers within an admittedly African American musical milieu and tradition, the series has won the almost unanimous support and effusive praise of nearly all the major reviewers from this country's most well-known and honored magazines and newspapers (e.g., the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the L.A. Times, Down Beat, Jazz Times, yadda, yadda, yadda).
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IRONICALLY WHAT IS ALSO DISTINCTIVE about this series is that it is one of the most comprehensive and sustained projects of its kind in American history. In terms of its ongoing commitment to exposing the general reading public to what the Press obviously feels is the "best writing ever" on the art form, it has unavoidably declared its theoretical position on what the music is and means. Not only has just about every so-called "major Jazz critic" written under its famous banner but a number of them have written more than one book in the series (some, like longtime Village Voice music columnist/critic Gary Giddins have written as many as seven books for the Press, including his 1998 magnum opus, Visions of Jazz: The First Century which recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). The list of writers who have written about Jazz for the OUP is a roll call of the most widely published American music critics and historians of the past forty years: Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, John Lincoln Collier, Francis Davis, Gene Santoro, Ted Gioia, Thomas Owens, Mark Tucker, and Gene Lees, among others. Even the veteran Jazz music producer and promoter Orrin Keepnews of Riverside, Fantasy and Milestone Records fame, has written a memoir for them. Earlier last year a musician who previously wrote a biography of the ill-fated Jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke (who died in 1931 of alcoholism at the age of twenty-eight), wrote a rather curious and culturally suspect book of over one thousand pages long, about what this musician, Richard Sudhalter, calls a "seriously neglected" aspect of Jazz history.
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What all of these men have in common (and everyone of the writers in the series have been male except for a Jazz historian named Kathy Ogren) is that they are, without exception, all white Americans. This fact in itself would not be significant if we lived in a society that regularly acknowledged and took seriously, on a social, philosophical and cultural level, the profound intellectual contributions of African American critics, historians, scholars, journalists and artists. But let's not be coy or evasive about this. Amiri Baraka was more than prescient thirty six years ago when the essay that is quoted at the beginning of this piece first appeared in the pages of Down Beat magazine in 1963, and if anything, his incisive remarks are even more resonant and, in some ways, more relevant than ever before.
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This is because the number of African American writers, critics and scholars who were actively involved in writing about music was relatively small in 1963. Baraka says as much in the very first paragraph of his essay (importantly, he also points out that the problem of self hatred that a number of black intellectuals from that period expressed was often the result of their ignorance of, and disdain for, their own ethnically based cultural traditions -- an attitude no doubt heavily influenced by the popular and culturally oppressive notion then widespread in the West that only Europeans and by extension "white" Americans possessed intellectual and philosophical traditions worth preserving and extending in the United States).
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WHAT MAKES THE OUP SERIES so problematic, all 'good intentions" to the contrary, is that far too often African American musicians and the cultural and social context from which they emerge are objects of condescension, myopia, stereotyping, envy, derision, and neglect. The ignorance of what Baraka refers to as the "socio-cultural philosophy" of African American music is not the result of the so-called "racial" identity of white Americans but of an almost willful refusal on their part to seriously engage the intellectual complexity and historical dynamics of African American life in North America. What this ultimately means is that instead of rigorously investigating how and why black cultural attitudes, values and ideas impact the form and content of exactly what African American artists do (and don't do) most white critics ignore or neglect their intellectual responsibility by either playing the omniscient Olympian commentator addressing these issues from the lofty and "objectively transcendental" perch of the "Western philosophical tradition" which begins and ends in the white cultural suburbs of Europe and the Americas (and where presumably all "others" live in continental inner cities), or they opt out altogether on any substantive discussion of the ever-present issues of cultural hybridity, heterogeneity, and miscegenation that inform all aspects of life in this part of the world.
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Unfortunately, both of these stances are represented by critics who seem haunted by, if not filled with nervous anxiety about, the role and position (status?) of white American and European musicians and composers in Jazz history. There is also in the specific cases of Collier, Sudhalter and Lees an almost obsessive preoccupation with determining how well black musicians and composers "stack up" next to their white Jazz and classical music counterparts in terms of technical proficiency, improvisational/compositional skills, and critical acceptance.
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However, to assert that these preoccupations and concerns are merely individual responses to aesthetic matters or signs of racist parochialism misses the larger point that our general critical knowledge and understanding of what constitutes the actual cultural and philosophical traditions, conceptions and values of what is called "Western civilization" is still bound by the pervasive and still dominant mythology of white supremacy in the arts, sciences, politics, etc., which continues to obfuscate and distort our perceptions of what "the West" really is and represents in terms of cultural and social history. As a result African American traditions continue to be largely ignored and misunderstood by the great majority of this nation's scholarly community, let alone the general population who remain notoriously mis/uneducated.
THIS IS WHY JAZZ and the contentious discourse about it remain such a major, indeed, crucial, terrain for the ongoing war over cultural definitions of social reality in the United States. Having slumped past the end of the exhilarating yet terrifying twentieth century, it's clear that in spite of itself, the Oxford University Press series on Jazz knows and articulates what many of us also know and understand: that what the culture tells us about ourselves is in large measure a reflection of what we say our culture is and means in terms of some intelligible and "accepted" language about it. What the OUP series doesn't appear to understand or even accept is that the meaning of Jazz is never divorced from the historical and cultural experiences of the individuals who make the music and the people who listen to and support it. For in Jazz, as in all great art, what we know and how we know it not only comes out of the modal elements that the music is made up of but stems from how we interpret, convey, argue about, define and promote what the music means in terms of our shared (and not-so-shared) history within this uniquely metaphorical and all-too-real place we call "our home."
Or as Baraka's 1963 essay points out:
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“We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it...this is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of Jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some attention to the attitudes which produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. There is, of course, much more to it than that.” (Italics mine.)
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IN TRIBUTE TO AND APPRECIATION OF THE CREATIVE LIFE AND WORK OF PRINCE ROGERS NELSON
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PRINCE ROGERS NELSON
(b. June 7, 1958--d. April 21, 2016)
All,
What follows is part one of a much longer essay that I am currently writing about the creative work and legacy of Prince, one of the undisputed GIANTS of popular music over the past 50 years, and what his prolific singular contributions to American and global culture actually were and really means...Stay tuned...
Kofi
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"I recognize an individual when I see his contribution, and when I know a man's sound, well to me, that's him, that's the man. That's the way I look at it. Labels I don't bother with"
--John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery"
--Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Prince is from the school of James Brown but Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly [Stone] in him, also, even Little Richard," Davis wrote in his autobiography. "He's a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington. He reminds me, in a way, of Charlie Chaplin, he and Michael Jackson ... I think Prince's music is pointing toward the future...He can be the new Duke Ellington of our time if he just keeps at it,”
—Miles Davis, from his 1989 autobiography
THE QUINTESSENTIALLY BLACK ARTIST KNOWN AS PRINCE; Or How the Extraordinary African American Vernacular Cultural Tradition(s) in Art in General and in Creative Music in Particular Deeply Informed and Guided Every Single Thing that He Did and Accomplished
by Kofi Natambu
February 12, 2017
The Panopticon Review
I. ONLY IN AMERICA
A (not so) strange thing has happened in the endless American media accounts, analyses, homages, critiques, and celebrations of the life and artistic work of Prince Rogers Nelson (1958-2016) since his untimely and painfully tragic death on April 21, 2016 given what kind of society and culture we not only presently live in but have historically always lived in. For starters, far too many of these contemporary journalists, editors, op-ed specialists, self proclaimed pundits, gossip-mongers, academicians, hobbyists, groupies, and scholars have written their articles, tributes, and mini-treatises as though PRINCE one of the most seriously conscientious and self-consciously BLACKEST musicians, composers, singers, songwriters and cultural avatars in American history was primarily a relatively isolated and singularly individual artist-savant whose creatively innovative extensions, variations, subversions, transgressions, and revisionist manipulations of pop, funk, rock, soul, Jazz, blues, and gospel musics were something that sprang already fully formed from the head of Zeus that was Prince’s special uncanny talent alone. Or we are being told that the music he composed and played and the songs that he wrote and sang were utterly unique to his own idiosyncratic genius quite apart from the many musical and aesthetic traditions that clearly shaped and informed it. From the pages of every major so-called “mainstream" national publication (and more than a few from the often equally clueless “alternative independent press” as well), from the New York Times to Slate, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and Time, to the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Variety, and the Atlantic Monthly (to name a few) it is asserted that Prince was simply someone like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Bruce Springsteen (and please notice here that all of these famous and iconic popular music figures are white males) who took American popular music by storm and stubbornly and willfully imposed their own individual stamp on the various genres that make up these traditions and thus personally created a new paradigm of what was possible. But absolutely nothing could be further from the truth--even for an authentically bona fide individual musical genius like Prince. Because in doing so they deny Prince’s highly significant role in the indispensable creative continuum of African American music in all of its many idiomatic genres, styles, permutations, and philosophical/expressive dimensions.
In that light and within the larger historical and thus contemporary parameters of various black popular music forms in the United States where he learned both the craft and art of music making Prince was, like his many creative predecessors, mentors, and peers of the post WW2 period, heavily influenced and guided by both the traditional and innovative aspects and legacies of Jazz, blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues (which never forget is by far not only the major but most important source of all formal and expressive styles of what became popularly known via the media in the 1950s as “rock and roll”) and funk. More specifically the music that Prince studied and played throughout not only his early youth and adolescence but for the his entire adult career was largely created within a cultural milieu and social sensibility that was directly informed by the black vernacular cultural aesthetic. Which is to say in his mastery of various identifiably black singing styles (from deep baritone and smooth tenor sonorities to high falsetto inflections), to extremely fluid and dynamic vernacular dance rhythms and general corporeal movement on stage, to a wide and highly creative range of modes of dress steeped in black vernacular Prince embodied and represented what was most innovative, dynamic, unique, and transformational in African American art.
The reasons why this is so are blatantly obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention at all to the extraordinarily fertile, dynamic, and prolific traditions that have utterly dominated and creatively informed U.S. culture in general, and North American music in particular for well over a century now. That cultural aesthetic—and thus by extension its many varied musical traditions—is the African American Vernacular Cultural Tradition (AAVCT) which has clearly been the dominant structural, technical, and philosophical paradigm as well as creative/expressive model of every major American music genre since at least the 1890s when first Ragtime (a black vernacular piano aesthetic form that was a brilliantly hybrid synthesis of blues, black dance rhythms, classical music, and melodic/harmonic improvisation) and then later what was called ‘jazz’ (a larger musical ensemble and improvisational aesthetic that encompassed not only piano but brass, percussion, string, and reed instruments as well) became the most popular and commercially successful musical genres in the United States. Along with traditional gospel, various local black folk styles and the rapid commercial rise and popularity as well as the dynamic creative expansion of the blues from 1920 onward, the African American vernacular cultural lexicon became the lingua franca of what American popular and avant-garde musics are and have been since music became a major social/cultural force and economic commodity in the early 1900s. For example consider this: What have the following extraordinary shortlist of 110 revolutionary artists WHO ALL HAPPEN TO BE AFRICAN AMERICANS contributed to musical creativity and innovation in the areas of both instrumental and vocal musicianship on a global scale since the late 19th century and what do their contributions have to do more specifically with exactly who and what Prince was (and is) as an artist, as a cultural and artistic innovator, as a citizen of a discrete and very influential national community, and as a human being?:
Robert Johnson
Bessie Smith
Ma Rainey
Ethel Waters
Scott Joplin
Charlie Patton
James P. Johnson
Willie “the Lion” Smith
Don Redman
Jelly Roll Morton
Fats Waller
Charlie Patton
Elmore James
T- Bone Walker
Billie Holiday
Ella Fitzgerald
Duke Ellington
Count Basie
Sarah Vaughan
Mary Lou Williams
Muddy Waters
Howlin’ Wolf
Lightenin’ Hopkins
Lester Young
Coleman Hawkins
Charlie Parker
Dizzy Gillespie
Thelonious Monk
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Bud Powell
Charles Mingus
Max Roach
Kenny ‘Klook’ Clarke
Charlie Christian
Fats Navarro
Dexter Gordon
Sonny Stitt
Wardell Gray
Sonny Rollins
Kenny Dorham
Jackie Wilson
Ray Charles
Sam Cooke
Albert King
B.B. King
Jimi Hendrix
Sly Stone
Curtis Mayfield
George Clinton
Al Green
Blind Tom Wiggins
Blind Boy Blake
Blind Boy Fuller
Blind Willie McTell
Blind Willie Johnson
Blind Lemon Jefferson
The Blind Boys of Alabama
Son House
Buddy Guy
John Lee Hooker
Louis Jordan
Wynonie Harris
Big Joe Turner
Big Boy Crudup
Big Mama Thornton
Big Bill Broonzy
Willie Dixon
Mississippi John Hurt
Chuck Berry
Little Richard
Bo Diddley
Memphis Minnie
Otis Rush
Junior Wells
Little Walter
Hubert Sumlin
Bobby Blue Bland
Dinah Washington
Sonny Boy Williamson
Sister Rosetta Tharp
Mahalia Jackson
Charles Brown
Ruth Brown
Nat King Cole
Earl Hines
Erroll Garner
Betty Carter
Abbey Lincoln
Nina Simone
Nancy Wilson
Aretha Franklin
James Brown
Chaka Khan
Etta James
Stevie Wonder
Herbie Hancock
Wayne Shorter
Joe Henderson
Eric Dolphy
Otis Redding
Donny Hathaway
Marvin Gaye
Michael Jackson
Smokey Robinson
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Ahmad Jamal
Albert Ayler
Cecil Taylor
Anthony Braxton
Roscoe Mitchell
Henry Threadgill
Bill Dixon
Julius Hemphill
Sun Ra
Mary Wells
Maceo Parker
Issac Hayes
Sam and Dave
For the sake of intellectual clarity, honesty, and analytical accuracy in making these assertions about the clearly leading hegemonic role of African American art and artists in music creation and innovation generally I must emphatically emphasize that I am NOT asserting or even remotely suggesting that 'other artists and cultural traditions' from anywhere in the larger United States be they white, Latino, Asian, or Native American or anywhere else on this planet are somehow incapable of understanding, playing, and/or creating and innovating in the same general area of musical and vocal expressions, values, attitudes, and ideas that black artists have historically contributed to and continue to do so. Nor am I even remotely interested in any shallow or corny self serving arguments about anyone’s “identity” be it rooted in anyone’s specific ‘racial', ethnic, gender, or sexual preference definition, status, or individual/psychological “sense of self". So we can immediately dispense with the myopia, ignorance, stupidity, evasions, aporias, denials, and simpleminded HUBRIS that far too often mar, pervert, and distort our knowledge, perception, and insight into what ART actually is and how/why it is created and shared (or not). This stance is particularly germane and significant with respect to determining who and what Prince himself was (and is) as an artist and human being.
HOWEVER, at the same time I also want it to be equally clear that I am also NOT stupidly or reductively asserting or suggesting that music as either art, philosophy, social/political/aesthetic force or science is or can be simply “colorblind” or “universal.” The obvious empirical absurdity, dishonesty, and infantilism of that position is as ultimately mindless and delusional as the idea that one’s personal or group identity (however that is defined) is what determines what the relative quality or importance of someone’s contribution is or means vis-a-vis others. Thus it is especially important to examine Prince and his creative work and legacy from the analytical standpoint of precisely who and what influenced him to be the individual artist that he was (and is).
(TO BE CONTINUED)...
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https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2016/12/some-final-reflections-on-2016.html
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Friday, December 30, 2016
Some Final Reflections On the 2016 Presidential Election
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http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-officially-wins-popular-vote-29-million/story?id=44354341
Some Final Reflections On the 2016 Presidential Election: The Politics of Race, Class, and Gender within the American Electorate
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
Seven weeks ago on November 8, 2016 the national voting public of the United States—some 137 million people—elected Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. To say that this utterly bizarre election was one of the most openly divided, loathsome, and disturbing in American history would be a massive understatement. This election also greatly dramatized and even expanded the already very deep and persistent divisions of the country along racial. class, and gender lines and revealed once again just how dependent the two major political parties are on the electoral and ideological domination of these divisions not only politically and economically but culturally as well. The national electoral data and overall demographic analysis of the final election results (click on the the link at the top of this page to see electoral map charts and graphs for empirical specifics) demonstrates just how distinct and even vastly different these various voting constituencies were and how they remain fiercely divided and at odds ideologically and in terms of social philosophy with regard to every major political, social, and economic issue facing the country. Just as in the 2012 presidential election battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney these various groups also formed specific bloc voting coalitions with like minded constituents who in turn voted for and/or against both the perceived and real agendas of the respective candidates on the basis of these widely differing perspectives and desires. However unlike 2012 a close analytical examination of the statistical breakdown of regional voting patterns along geographic lines in 2016 reveals that Trump even more than Romney commanded an even larger share of the national white vote in a substantial majority of states overall which resulted in Trump winning six more states overall (for a grand total of 30) than Romney who won 24 states in 2012. This resulted in Trump being able to win a whopping 200 more electoral votes than Romney amassed even though technically Romney's and Trump’s share of the white vote was virtually identical at 59%. This national domination of the white vote for Trump was significantly greater this year because contrary to earlier wildly inaccurate reports by the media that the national turnout of voters was down from 2012, it actually turned out that in fact the 137 million votes cast in this year’s election is the highest number in history and that the overall turnout adjusted for aggregate increases in the general voting population was even larger than it was in 2012. By contrast Hillary Clinton only received an abysmal 37% of the national white vote, which was not only two percent lower than the 39% share of this vote that President Obama received in 2012, but was also the lowest percentage that ANY Democratic Party candidate had received for the presidency since 1984!
For example, a close analytical examination of the statistical breakdown of regional voting patterns along geographic lines reveals that not only did Donald Trump win a commanding 14 of the 15 southern states in the country by a very wide and decisive margin (a heinously reactionary region of the country that I still insist on grimly referring to as 'the New Confederacy’). By contrast Clinton only won the single southern state of Virginia. So while Clinton was able to win 19 of the remaining 35 states overall her margin of victory was in the final analysis significantly smaller than Obama’s in 2012 who won 24 of these same 35 states in 2012. The major reason for this difference in national outcomes is that the national white vote across ALL class and gender lines generally (and in every age group as well except millennials from 18-29) and especially in midwestern states where Trump won 8 out of 10 states (in 2012 Obama won 7 out these same 10 states) ensured that Clinton would wind up not only winning 100 fewer electoral college votes (232) than Obama won in 2012 (332) but 74 fewer than Trump (306) did this year.
However in the final analysis Clinton lost the election by LESS THAN ONE PERCENT OF THE VOTE in only three (3) counties from the three states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. This was clearly because Clinton couldn’t manage to win at least one half of this one percent more from white voters who were the great majority of voters in the three counties that Clinton barely lost. So even though Clinton managed to win the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes out of 137 million votes cast and received over 73% of the national black, Latino, and Asian American vote overall (with 88% of the black vote going to Clinton) she was not able to overcome not only the 63% of the national white male vote that went for Trump but even more disturbingly Clinton received only 47% of the national white female vote (by a very stark contrast 94% of black female voters voted for Clinton). The fact that 53% of the voters from the largest share of the national electorate went to Trump--white females comprised 36% of all the voters in the U.S. presidential election this year--not only signified that a very deep political and ideological fissure remains in the U.S. national white feminist community generally (for example a substantial majority of white female voters have, like their white male counterparts, voted for the Republican presidential candidate (who in every single instance has been a wealthy white male) an astonishing thirteen straight times since 1968 (and 16 out of the last 17 presidential elections since 1952!). These harrowing facts are exacerbated by the ongoing reality that the huge racial split in voting between whites and every other racial and ethnic group in the country along not only ideological and class lines but age as well that has always characterized the American electorate generally is now even wider and deeper than ever. The fact that Trump won nearly 90% of his final tally of 63 million votes overall from white American voters and of that number over half were white women voters was not only devastating for Clinton on a symbolic level but was finally a decisive statistical factor in her losing the election to Trump.
MORE COMMENTARY ON THE ELECTION AND WHAT IT MEANS:
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"The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve…"
—David Remnick, “An American Tragedy", The New Yorker, November 9, 2016:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-2
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"...Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of color, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency. What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester in American society for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a long standing series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial…"
----Henry A. Giroux, "Trump’s Second Gilded Age: Overcoming the Rule of Billionaires and Militarists", Counterpunch, December 9, 2016: http://www.counterpunch.org/…/trumps-second-gilded-age-ove…/
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"Donald J. Trump’s election was a national trauma, an epic catastrophe that has left millions in the United States and around the world in a state of utter shock, uncertainty, deep depression, and genuine fear. The fear is palpable and justified, especially for those Trump and his acolytes targeted—the undocumented, Muslims, anyone who “looks” undocumented or Muslim, people of color, Jews, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, women, activists of all kinds (especially Black Lives Matter and allied movements resisting state-sanctioned violence), trade unions. . . . the list is long…
But the outcome should not have surprised us. This election was, among other things, a referendum on whether the United States will be a straight, white nation reminiscent of the mythic “old days” when armed white men ruled, owned their castle, boasted of unvanquished military power, and everyone else knew their place. Henry Giroux’s new book America at War With Itself made this point with clarity and foresight two months before the election. The easy claim that Trump appeals to legitimate working-class populism driven by class anger, Giroux argues, ignores both the historical link between whiteness, citizenship, and humanity, and the American dream of wealth accumulation built on private property. Trump’s followers are not trying to redistribute the wealth, nor are they all “working class”—their annual median income is about $72,000. On the contrary, they are attracted to Trump’s wealth as metonym of an American dream that they, too, can enjoy once America is “great” again—which is to say, once the country returns to being “a white MAN’s country.” What Giroux identifies as “civic illiteracy” keeps them convinced that the descendants of unfree labor or the colonized, or those who are currently unfree, are to blame for America’s decline and for blocking their path to Trump-style success…
Of course, Hilary Clinton did win the popular vote, and some are restoring to the easy lament that, were it not for the arcane Electoral College (itself a relic of slave power), we would not be here. One might add, too, that had it not been for the gutting of the Voting Rights Act opening the door for expanded strategies of voter suppression, or the permanent disfranchisement of some or all convicted felons in ten states, or the fact that virtually all people currently in cages cannot vote at all, or the persistence of misogyny in our culture, we may have had a different outcome. This is all true. But we cannot ignore the fact that the vast majority of white men and a majority of white women, across class lines, voted for a platform and a message of white supremacy, Islamophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-science, anti-Earth, militarism, torture, and policies that blatantly maintain income inequality. The vast majority of people of color voted against Trump, with black women registering the highest voting percentage for Clinton of any other demographic (93 percent). It is an astounding number when we consider that her husband’s administration oversaw the virtual destruction of the social safety net by turning welfare into workfare, cutting food stamps, preventing undocumented workers from receiving benefits, and denying former drug felons and users access to public housing; a dramatic expansion of the border patrol, immigrant detention centers, and the fence on Mexico’s border; a crime bill that escalated the war on drugs and accelerated mass incarceration; as well as NAFTA and legislation deregulating financial institutions.
Still, had Trump received only a third of the votes he did and been defeated, we still would have had ample reason to worry about our future.
...It is not a matter of disaffection versus racism or sexism versus fear. Rather, racism, class anxieties, and prevailing gender ideologies operate together, inseparably, or as Kimberlé Crenshaw would say, intersectionally. White working-class men understand their plight through a racial and gendered lens... White privilege is taken for granted to the point where it need not be named and can’t be named. So, as activist/scholar Bill Fletcher recently observed, even though Trump’s call to deport immigrants, close the borders, and reject free trade policies appealed to working-class whites’ discontent with the effects of globalization, Trump’s plans do not amount to a rejection of neoliberalism. Fletcher writes, “Trump focused on the symptoms inherent in neoliberal globalization, such as job loss, but his was not a critique of neoliberalism. He continues to advance deregulation, tax cuts, anti-unionism, etc. He was making no systemic critique at all, but the examples that he pointed to from wreckage resulting from economic and social dislocation, resonated for many whites who felt, for various reasons, that their world was collapsing.” Yet Fletcher is quick not to reduce white working-class support for Trump to class fears alone, adding, “This segment of the white population was looking in terror at the erosion of the American Dream, but they were looking at it through the prism of race...”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, “After Trump”, The Boston Review, November 15, 2016:
http://bostonreview.net/…/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-ba…
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The Art of John Coltrane vs. The Philosophical Limitations of Jazz Criticism
Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
Coltrane: The story of a sound. By Ben Ratliff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2007
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"We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it...this is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of Jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some attention to the attitudes which produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. There is, of course, much more to it than that...”
---Amiri Baraka, "Jazz and the White Critic" (1963)
“I am not playing “Jazz.” I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people…”
--Duke Ellington (1930)
“I recognize an individual when I see his contribution; and when I know a man’s sound, well, to me that’s him, that’s the man. That’s the way I look at it. Labels I don’t bother with.”
--John Coltrane (1966)
This is a curiously schizophrenic, self-serving, and ultimately shallow book. On the one hand it proposes to provide readers with a broad general outline of the ‘artistic history’ of John Coltrane’s career and on the other critically examine his ongoing impact and influence, musical and extramusical, on both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of musicians since his early death at the age of forty in 1967.
Throughout, the author--Ben Ratliff, Jazz critic for the New York Times—engages in a highly digressive commentary on what he thinks Coltrane’s career as player, composer, and cultural avatar means to the history of Jazz and to our understanding and appreciation of an individual American aesthetic and cultural icon.
However, these otherwise laudable, useful, and intriguing ambitions are seriously marred by Ratliff’s intellectually reductive presumptions about both the music he proposes to critique and examine and the cultural philosophy of the individual creative personality he wants to portray. The major source of Ratliff’s analytical flaws and blind spots (which are considerable) lies with his studied quasi-philosophical over-reliance and even lazy intellectual dependency on an empirical framework that consistently reduces profound and unsettling questions of aesthetic, cultural and expressive identity and philosophy to almost rudimentary descriptions and examinations of the largely academic categories of style, formal structure, method, and technique(s). Thus we are treated to quite a bit of admittedly lucid but predominately expository writing about how and why Coltrane’s music differs in cosmetic terms from that of other musical styles, traditions, forms, and genres in Western music particularly of the United States and Europe. However, the much broader and more specific historical, social, cultural, ideological, economic, and political contexts of Coltrane’s music (and persona) as it was actually created, produced, marketed, distributed and consumed in the society he and his music lived/lives in is either ignored or given very short shrift in Ratliff’s analysis.
Ratliff’s annoying and often condescending tendency to churlishly dismiss or discount the significance of the central historical roles that political economy, racism, and most importantly, competing cultural and aesthetic philosophies have played and continue to play in both the creative and social ecosphere of Jazz is a major weakness in a book that almost coyly demands that we accept, if not embrace, its highly problematic fundamental premises. These premises are the following: That Coltrane was not primarily interested in expressing and supporting creatively provocative ideas and values per se but in obsessively pursuing matters of craft, stylistic expression, and technical prowess; that Coltrane was not really interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of what he was playing or the form and content of the highly varied reactions of audiences to what he was playing and why; that the 1960s ‘black power’ movement had a negative or distorting effect on the study, appreciation, and understanding of what the complex musical evolution known as “late Coltrane” (1965-1967) meant to the artist and black and white American audiences alike. And that to fully grasp what Coltrane finally accomplished or was trying to do in his work one had to surrender to a romantic aesthetic notion rooted in the 19th century and later promulgated in the 20th century by the late modernist poet Robert Lowell (an aesthetic theory Ratliff suggestively paraphrases and appropriates for a historically different artistic and cultural context) that Coltrane and his music represented and embodied the “monotony of the sublime” found in other radical forms of American art making. Further Ratliff asserts that Coltrane was making a music of “his interior cosmos” and was finally consumed by a music of “meditation and chant” in the last years after December 1964 (and the pivotal appearance of Coltrane’s magnum opus composition suite ‘A Love Supreme’) until his death in July, 1967.
What Ratliff also fails to address and seriously investigate is the complex and varied receptions of, and responses to, this music by other musicians and the larger listening audience meant in terms of the history of Jazz up until the late 1960s (and by implication ever afterward). While Ratliff readily acknowledges and broadly surveys the intense chaotic volatility of art, society, and culture of that era (and Coltrane’s important, even mythic, participation in it) what he fails to provide is an informed analytical and theoretical critique of precisely why Coltrane, Jazz in general, and the larger society remained in a dire and fundamental conflict over what role the concept of “art” and its various uses and identities should or could be in the music. At one point Ratliff even mentions that as far as he knew Coltrane had never publicly used or uttered the word ‘art’ to describe what his music was about. I was hoping that Ratliff would subsequently examine what he thought this fact meant to his general analysis of Jazz as a musical aesthetic in the post-WWII period, but he simply chalked it up to Coltrane’s tendency toward verbal reticence in publicly talking about his music in openly intellectual terms and his personal indifference to categorical labeling. The result is a book that manages to raise important and previously neglected questions about the specific nature and identity of Coltrane’s work and his profound contributions to American music, while at the same time almost willfully refusing to take any discernible theoretical or ideological position(s) on what Ratliff himself as critic and historian thought Coltrane’s music and reputation represents.
It is Ratliff’s failure to seriously confront and intellectually engage the previously published critical literature on both Coltrane and Jazz of the 1955-1970 era that is most disapointing. Among this rather extensive body of texts is very important work by a number of African American intellectuals, historians, and critics like Dr. C.O. Simpkins (who wrote a major book on Coltrane as early as 1975—which Ratliff himself even curiously acknowledges as “one of the best Coltrane biographies” and then proceeds to say not one more word about), the late James Stewart who wrote a number of powerful and influential essays on Jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s, Bill Cole, prominent ethnomusicologist and former Professor of Music at Dartmouth College who wrote a seminal musical biography on Coltrane in 1976, the extraordinary poet and cultural historian A.B. Spellman, author of one of the most prescient books ever published on black avant-garde music ‘Four Lives in the BeBop Business’ (later titled ‘Black Music: Four Lives) in 1966, and finally one of the leading Jazz critics and historians in the entire modern canon of 20th century Jazz literature, the legendary poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones). It is especially revealing that when Ratliff does briefly mention Baraka’s work (he quotes part of a poem by him on Coltrane and also a small segment from an essay on Black nationalism in his art) he doesn’t really focus on Baraka as a music critic; rather he summarizes in a couple sentences what Baraka’s fundamental stance was in the late 1960s on the cultural and social uses and function of what black art is or could be. But tellingly Ratliff does not talk about or examine Baraka’s major Jazz criticism of this period (1964-1967) qua criticism. This omission is not merely incidental but goes to the heart of what Ratliff refuses to deal with generally in his text: the larger meaning of the contentious discourse raging then and now over what Coltrane and the so-called ‘Free-Jazz’ players and composers of the 1960s and ‘70s represented (and currently represents) to an understanding of the Jazz tradition and U.S. culture generally over the past century.
This is especially significant with respect to the philosophical acuity and depth of the major book of Jazz criticism that Baraka published in 1967 entitled ‘Black Music.’ Dedicated to ‘John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit’ this book, made up of formerly published magazine essays and articles comprises one of the most important statements ever conceived and written about the specific dynamics, formal and stylistic challenges, cultural theory, and ideological identity of the so-called black musical “avant garde” of the 1959-1967 era. Pivotal to this text’s visionary stance is the first essay from the book, which is quoted at the beginning of this review. “Jazz and the White Critic” published in 1963 and which initially appeared in Down Beat magazine, was a major advance in the history of Jazz criticism because it openly and courageously addressed one of the most important but largely ignored issues in the canonical history of Jazz writing—the contradiction and separation between the major black players of the music and the almost completely exclusive white writers and critics of the music. By raising questions about what this contradiction said and implied about Jazz music and its history as art, science, history, sociology, ideology, and political economy, Baraka revealed that what white critics said about the music, reflected intellectual, cultural, and personal biases that had to be acknowledged and taken serious account of.
Ironically, Ratliff as critic and historian ultimately avoids these and other related issues by insisting that the individual icon in Jazz (like Coltrane) is not only an indispensable touchstone in the music’s evolution but that even more importantly the bands that they and others lead are even more significant. As Ratliff puts it at the end of his study “The truth of Jazz is in its bands.” While this statement seems accurate enough on its surface with its philosophical emphasis on the time honored Western notion of the “artist” as being central to an understanding and appreciation of any cultural or aesthetic expression, it appears that Ratliff winds up failing to notice that Jazz is first and foremost a public, collective, collaborative, and thus social expression whose major focus is not merely on the players and composers involved but on the communities that it engages in any given cultural environment. Thus the role of the individual “genius” in the music’s identity and evolution is not the dominant one. Of course, the marketing and processed packaging of the individual musician (or ensemble) as readily available commodity in the economic context of the capitalist marketplace where commodities are routinely promoted, bought, and sold may give the distinct impression that the individual “great man or woman” is the most important driving force behind the music but that would be an ultimately false and greatly mistaken notion. Even with such astonishingly advanced and gifted players and composers as the late, great John Coltrane it would be far more accurate to suggest that actually “the truth of Jazz lies in its music.” As critic and historian Ratliff misses, neglects, or ignores this crucial point and his book (and his analysis of Coltrane) greatly suffers for it.
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http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/
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The Panopticon Review
Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
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FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on December 1, 2010):
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Jean-Luc Godard
(b. December 3, 1930)
Jean-Luc Godard Vs. Cinema: The Filmmaker as Critic, Activist, and Auteur
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
© December 2010
In many ways the history of cinema is the history of 20th century Western modernism itself as far as theoretical, philosophical, and creative conceptions and representations of the Real are concerned. As such the filmmaker as both director and writer has always been compelled to at least acknowledge if not openly struggle with the corresponding yet often antagonistic challenges of aesthetic and social criticism as an integral part of the very process and realization of the actual experience of making film itself--especially in a genre driven and narrative based medium rooted in the structural and institutional context of monopoly capitalist economics and thus a commercial profit system. As a result the social, ideological, and political dimensions of the art were never really divorced from the consumerist demands, desires, and expectations of its audience(s) or the economic machinations of the system of production that undergirds its existence.
It is in this sense that modernism in film as exemplified by the rise and eventual domination of the industrialized studio system of producing and distributing film as both art object and cultural commodity became synonymous with the aesthetic examination, creative manipulation, and expressive redeployment of social and cultural history. Thus from the very beginning of its emergence as a self consciously cultural and social force after 1915 (via the rise of the American director D.W. Griffith and his aggressively revisionist take on U.S. history in 'The Birth of A Nation' through his simultaneously innovative uses of the moving image and the mise-en-scene as social commentary, populist propaganda, and epic theatre) the imaginative and interpretive power and influence of film as a mass based social and cultural phenomenon and expression shaped our collective perceptions and consciousness of the often contentious relationship of modern art to society via various forms of institutionalized social authority and cultural traditions. It was in this larger historical context that cinema became a fecund and self reflexive source for its creative artists to actively intervene on and transform these given social, cultural, and political traditions and orthodoxies. This intervention took place not only at the level of the composition of the visual image and production design but the expressive dimensions of acting and screen dialogue. With the transformative rise of sound, music, and the human voice as corresponding aspects of the image onscreen the role of the cinematic artist as individual aesthetic force began to assert itself. As a result the commercial rise of the 'star system' for actors found a parallel correspondence in the critical and commercial awareness and celebration of the director-as-auteur (author) in the cinematic marketplace. These developments in the art of filmmaking began to have a profound effect of the mass audience's reception of the work of these artists and also was the impetus for new intellectual and critical discourses to emerge about the purpose, worth, and intentions of film as an artistic medium.
The convergence of these creative, critical, and industrial realities after World War I led to an explosion of film production on a global scale following the technological innovation of sound in movies in 1927. From the 1930s on this convergence of the aesthetic, economic, and cultural/social dimensions of the mass cinematic experience quickly led to a veritable revolution among directors, writers, and critics throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America (and later in Africa) who embraced the film auteur/author template as their own. This international community of writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, technicians, composers, and designers often saw themselves as film artists from other sovereign nation-states sought to position themselves and their work as either localized vernacular extensions of the commercial Hollywood genre film tradition or as stylistically ironic neorealist critics of the U.S. studio system.
Thus from the late 1930s to the late 1950s this international bifircation of institutionalized genre cinema and independent neorealist auteurism led to the precipitous rise of an innovative new generation of filmmakers who influenced by both stylistic tendencies began to emerge after the second World War and followed directly in the footsteps of such major directors and writers of the 1940s and '50s era as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, and Alfred Hitchcock (U.S.), Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, and Luchino Visconti (Italy), Satyajit Ray (India), Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan), Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo (France), among a select number of other filmmakers from Europe, Asia, and South America who also sought a new artistic, critical, and ideological relationship with cinema and its history.
It was this critical historical legacy of the modern cinema as an assertive aesthetic and social force in the expansion of discourses available to the artist as both technician and poet, as well as narrator and documentarian, that attracted the rapt attention of a number of young Parisian cineastes, intellectuals, and social critics in France during the mid and late 1950s to create what became known popularly as the French 'New Wave' (Nouvelle Vague). This movement of young film buffs and aspiring writers and directors who spent many long hours together in the many cineaste club theatres of Paris after the second World War was led by a small but highly dedicated group, many of whom became world famous as a result as producing, writing, and directing their own films from 1959 on. Many of their names are now legion in global film history: Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and perhaps the most influential and famous/infamous of them all, Jean-Luc Godard.
What the 'New Wave' of filmmakers sought was nothing short of an entirely new social, economic, creative, and ideological contract with the technical, industrial, and corporate apparatus that was largely responsible for film's production, distribution, and institutional role in the larger matrix of cultural relations that determined and in many ways overdetermined one's public access to cinema. In seeking both an implicit and explicit critique of this structural and thus philosophical framework of what constituted cinema Godard and his comrades, colleagues, co-conspirators, and fellow artists/critics not only wrote about, sponsored, promoted, investigated, supported, and/or dismissed what they saw as either worthy of their interest or inimical to it. Within that vast sphere of often highly spirited contentious debates and socially engaged activity vis-a-vis the massive commercial apparatus that governed most cinematic production and distribution on a global scale lay the larger contextual reality and creative agenda of what constituted the very form(s) and content of what Godard and his New Wave colleagues (and their often highly personal and aesthetically competitive visions) not only thought cinema was and wasn't but most importantly could be.
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Book Review
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The Melody of History
by Kofi Natambu
African American Review
© December 22, 2000
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A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America
by Craig Werner
Plume/Penguin 1999
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"Werner...has mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotions, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories. This precise attention to historical nuance as well as cross-cultural dynamics and traditions permeates Werner's lucid analysis of the exceedingly rich and hybrid reality of American music in all of its dimensions from Gospel, Jazz, and the Blues to Rock and Roll and Hip Hop. This has allowed Werner's text [A Change is Gonna Come] to enter the elite pantheon of truly great books in the genre.”
—Kofi Natambu, African American Review, Terre Haute: Winter 2000. Vol. 34, Iss. 4; pg 716.
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A narrow fixation on the examination of the individual musical celebrity as cultural icon and economic commodity has dominated most writing on American music for the past two decades. Rarely (and this is especially true since 1980) has the critical or analytical focus been on the social and historical context of the music itself as it reflected or was influenced by the events and cultural circumstances that it emerged from. In fact it is characteristic of a great number of texts to separate and isolate form from content to such a degree that all too often we lose sight of exactly why a certain specific musical style or expression became significant in the first place.
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As a result very few books by music historians and critics wind up saying anything particularly insightful or even interesting about why music matters beyond the academic or strictly commercial concerns of musicologists and music industry executives (and their advertising partners in mass media). This is why it was such a profoundly satisfying pleasure to read a new book by Craig Werner entitled A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America (Plume/Penguin, 1999). Werner, a professor of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he teaches music and cultural history, has mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes and represent ideas as well as emotions but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories.
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This precise attention to historical nuance as well as cross-cultural dynamics and traditions permeates Werner’s lucid analysis of the exceedingly rich and hybrid reality of American music in all of its dimensions from Gospel, Jazz and the Blues to Rock & Roll and Hip Hop. This has allowed Werner’s text to enter the elite pantheon of truly great books in the genre. Seminal texts like Blues People (1963) and Black Music (1968) by the legendary poet, playwright, critic and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones), as well as such major and provocative books as Mystery Train (1975) by music critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986), Nelson George’s acclaimed works Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound (1985), and The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1989) and Shadow & Act (1964), by the late novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison have given us new insights into what makes music such a central force in our lives..
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Just as we find in these texts Werner keeps his laser-like eye focused on what the music means both to the people who play and listen to it. What he discovers is nothing less than the fundamental hopes, desires, fears, dreams, fantasies and aspirations of Americans during the 20th century acting themselves out in great sonic dramas of melodic lyricism, rhythmic intensity and harmonic dynamism, as well as atonality and pure noise elements. And what a grand panorama of musical styles and pageantry it is! Werner reminds us that the 20th century would be completely unintelligible without the monumental contributions of such inspiring artists as Mahalia Jackson, Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Eric Dolphy, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, George Clinton, Bob Marley, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Chuck Berry, (the Artist formerly known as) Prince, Gil Scott-Heron, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Donny Hathaway, Cassandra Wilson, Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Run-DMC, KRS-one, etc, etc. They’re all here plus a multitude of others in a dense yet highly accessible tome of some 400 pages that feverishly examines the endless links between music, politics, history, literature, visual art, philosophy, religion and social/cultural reality over the past five decades.
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What Werner brings to this ever fascinating narrative is a great knowledge and appreciation of precisely how such major historical events as the Civil Rights & Black Power movements, as well as the Vietnam war, the rise of the Feminist and gay/lesbian movements and the endless political assassinations of the 1960s were pivotal to understanding how music played such a significant role in our consciousness of the meaning of these events. He also makes it abundantly clear that this particular legacy of music making history more intelligible, and thus useful for both analysis and cultural/political activism continues down to this very moment where the various musical movements of the past twenty five years (e.g. Disco, Punk, Reggae, New Wave, Funk and Hip Hop) are strictly predicated on, and draws their fundamental strength and energy from, the social-political context of its various cultural origins.
Thus a profound understanding of how the pervasive force and influence/impact of Reaganism played a major role in our collective perceptions of what the stakes were (and are) in late 20th century American culture becomes an essential element in identifying what a widely diverse group of musicians, composers and singers were directly and indirectly responding to in the musical stances and expressions of our time.
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It is this intimate awareness of how and why music informs and shapes our consciousness of history and society in terms of the on-going battles over the meaning of the categories of race, class, and gender that gives Werner’s work an intellectual and emotional depth often missing in contemporary discussions of what American music is as art, science and social/spiritual force. As both readers and lovers of music in all of its dimensions we owe Dr. Werner a great debt for writing about its mysteries and realities with the passion, clarity and knowledge that the music so richly deserves.
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Kofi Natambu
Oakland, California
December 2000
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Record Review
Light Blue: Arthur Blythe Plays the Music of Thelonious Monk
Columbia, 1983
by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Vol. 2, Number 1, Fall 1983
© 1983
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With this recording Arthur Blythe, a very fine alto saxophonist and composer who has consistently made good records, enters the realm of greatness. In fact, what makes Blythe's original interpretations of classic compositions by the late master Thelonious Sphere Monk so distinctive is his highly perceptive understanding of how the Afro-American tradition in music continues to affect the present. It is this appreciation for the fundamental roots in Blythe's experience that allows him to use this extensive background in his current conception. A little historical information about Blythe will clearly reveal why this is so.
Born in 1940 in San Diego, California. Arthur Blythe spent the early part of his life being exposed to a very broad range of Black music. and music from other cultures, especially Latin American musics. Rhythm and blues, blues, spirituals and creative improvisation were all a part of his daily staple. Thus it was in high school, at the relatively "late" age of 16 that Blythe began playing the alto saxophone. Influenced initially by the soft melodic playing of Paul Desmond. Blythe soon became aware of the hard-edged "funky" sound of Julius "Cannonball" Adderly, who during the mid and late 1950s was acquiring legendary status playing with the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. It was the pulsating. blues-drenched post-bop lyricism of Adderly that made Arthur want to pursue music seriously. Soon young Arthur was voraciously collecting records by the masters In the post-WW II tradition-Sonny Rollins, Clifford Broad and Max Roach, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and of course the towering music figure of his generation, the extraordinary Charles "Bird" Parker.
It was Bird who really sent Arthur flying. After hearing him in high school, Blythe knew that music would be his life. An intense period of study, discipline and creative work began upon Blythe's graduation from high school. During the early 1960s, Blythe began playing with the legendary pianist-composer and educator, Horace Tapscott. In Los Angeles. Tapscott was (and is) largely considered the "Sun Ra of the West Coast" because of his seminal educational and creative impact on the young black music community of L.A. (namely the area known as Watts) during the politically and culturally volatile 1960s. As a result of these struggles, Tapscott founded an artistic collective called the Underground Musicians Association in 1964 that was really one of the first major black artists' collectives that flourished nationally during the 1960s. In this respect the UGMA and other groups led him to acquiring the name of "Black" Arthur Blythe. This was because of Blythe's intense interest in all aspects of Black history (a concern that still motivates Blythe's conception). Black Arthur played in hundreds of workshops, concerts, benefits and multi-media productions during the decade he was a part of the UGMA, working very closely with Tapscott's orchestra and his many small ensembles. During this time Blythe began to reveal his considerable compositional abilities and also lead some of his own groups around L.A. and the San Francisco Bay area. It was during this time in the late 1960s that Blythe began to receive a significant "underground" reputation throughout the rest of the U.S. and in Europe. This was before he had appeared on any records anywhere. I remember hearing about Black Arthur for the first time in late 1969 when some friends told me about a growling bear of a saxophonist who was as good or better than anyone else on the scene. These friends had heard him in L.A. and were convinced that he was going to be the next "big thing" in black creative music. This was still before any recorded evidence, mind you.
However, in the spring of 1970 a recording appeared on the Flying Dutchman label entitled The Giant is Awakened that featured Black Arthur with the Horace Tapscott Quintet. Here at the still creatively formative age of 30 were the fullblown talents of Blythe exposed for all the world to hear. What we heard was a mature virtuoso with a gigantic tone, and a very wide technical range on alto that could play high harmonics and gut-level vibrato with ease. Here was a saxophonist who had obviously absorbed the pyrotechnics of the be-bop tradition but had also paid very close attention to such masters of the idiom known as "swing" as Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges. In fact, Blythe had the same rich sensuousness and captivating melodic grace that made Carter, Hodges and Lester Young (to name a few) so warm and compelling. At the same time, Blythe could play scorching uptempo blasters that left even seasoned Bird-watchers gasping. On top of all this Blythe was an original and thought-provoking composer whose works used the lessons taught by Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and, in a later context, Thelonious Sphere Monk. Clearly, Black Arthur had arrived. The fact that he was economically destitute only increased the irony of his exalted status among musicians.
BLACK ARTHUR GOES EAST
(So he can pay the rent)
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The next phase of the Blythe saga begins in New York City in 1972 when Arthur decided to try to make a living in the vicious, competitive environment of NYC, a city world famous for both "making" and "breaking" creative artists. In this amphetamine culture, Arthur experienced what hundreds of black musicians go through every year in the rotten apple, and that is, crushing rejection and isolation caused by the gangster-controlled economics of the nightclub and recording industry. After close to a year of near-starvation in the neon jungle, Arthur decided that his timing was off and returned to the West Coast. However, during this period he did make a hook-up with the famous drummer Chico Hamilton (who was now semi-retired and working on Madison Avenue as an agent). In late 1973, Hamilton returned to active playing and Blythe was recruited in the band as lead soloist. A series of recordings beginning in 1974 by Hamilton again brought Blythe to the forefront as a major force to be reckoned with. Hamilton helped along both popular and critical support for Blythe's efforts by announcing that "Blythe is the finest saxophonist and composer I have played with since the late Eric Dolphy." Very high praise indeed, but by now (1975) Blythe definitely deserved it.
After a very active and fruitful two-year period with Hamilton, Blythe plunged headlong into the extremely creative but largely underground network of lofts and makeshift "clubs" (often people's homes) that became the scene for young (and older) black creative musicians in the mid and late 1970s. In the absence of any real interest or support among conventional club owners or concert promoters, black musicians banded together to ensure their collective survival. In this atmosphere of relaxed and congenial unity and self-determination, Blythe's music really began to flourish and a series of outstanding recordings on small, obscure labels was the result. These records for labels like the then-new India Navigation and Adelphi companies soon became cherished collectors' items, which they remain today. In fact, records like The Grip, Bush Baby and Lenox Avenue Breakdown (which was Blythe's first record for the conglomerate known as Columbia and introduced Blythe to a much wider audience) are viewed as the actual beginning of Arthur's artistic influence on other musicians of this period.
Since his public debut with Columbia in 1978, Blythe has gone on to record such fine performances as In the Tradition, Illusions, Blythe Spirit and Elaborations, which can be construed as state-of-the-art "mainstream modernism." While all of these records feature brilliant playing and composing by Blythe and his long-time cohorts Bob Stewart (tuba), Abdul Wadud (cello), Bobby Battle (drums) and Kelvyn Bell (guitar), they don't quite reach the absolutely stunning quality of this ensemble's latest and most complete effort: Arthur Blythe Plays the Music of Thelonious Monk. It is this breath-taking synthesis of all of Blythe's myriad musical experiences that distinguishes this almost perfect homage to the spirit of Monk's amazing creations and puts Blythe and his ensemble in the upper echelon of Black creative bands over the past 20 years.
BLYTHE MEETS MONK
(And the rest is history ... )
The important thing to remember about Monk's music, like the music and art of all "great masters," is that the forms used are deceptive. That is, one can never be too sure where these structures will lead. In the world of improvisational music, where group communication is essential, the greatest composers establish melodic, harmonic and rhythmic patterns that are a challenge to the players involved. In the singularly innovative world of T. Monk, this means that the improvisor can never rely simply on horizontal (melodic) or vertical (chordal harmonic) material as a sole basis of musical expression. Rather, it is the dynamic cross-rhythms and internal structure of the melodic lines in contrast to the relative independence of the harmonies that set up polyphonic dialogue between players in an ensemble and insure textural and timbral variety in the course of a composition's life. These elements thus create a kind of polytonal antiphony that would allow movement and transmutation of melody and rhythm in both time and space. This command of mathematical principles and emotional values in music is the trademark of Monk's art and the very basis of his majestic legacy. It is Blythe's scientific and intuitive knowledge of these factors that make his own extrapolations on this inheritance so profound.
First, Monk's music is devoid of cliches. That is, the music never falls into predictable structural patterns based on stylistic devices. While Monk was obviously an integral part of the so-called "be-bop" movement among black musicians in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and even on some crucial levels a major architect of its aesthetic, he never allowed his own conception to merely ape or facilely reproduce the elements that went into the development of the style. This attitude of finding a functional and creative purpose for artistic expression is what gives Monk's compositions their characteristic vitality and sense of conceptual unity. Monk is constantly synthesizing, extending and recasting traditional ideas and values in Afro-American creative music and thus redefining them in his own vision of composition and improvisation. That this is the inherent (and difficult) challenge of Black music as an expressive art almost goes without saying. However, because Monk so mastered the philosophical and cultural values of the art, he was able to make the music even more adaptable to change and growth than it had always been (which is saying a great deal after the extraordinary innovations in form and feeling laid down by people like Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie "Yardbird" Parker). It is this aspect of Monk's contribution that Blythe uses in his own extensions and synthetic conception.
Secondly, Monk relies almost exclusively on those independent and distinctive principles developed in the African-American tradition. His entire concept of melodic expression is based on highly original variations of thematic material. These variations are almost invariably rhythmic and "textural." Monk's work, despite the fact that he plays the strictly diatonic instrument known as the piano, is based on the ingenious use of sound combinations voiced percussively. There are wild clusters of notes that are sounded to support a piece's movement and shape rather than the standard harmonic idea of background landscape for linear progressions. By remaining true to the uniquely Afro-American ideas about displaced accents, shifting meters, shaded delays and subtle anticipations (in music the effective use of space, rest and silence), Monk avoids the neo-classical and Debussyan sentimentalities of many other modern pianist-composers in black music. This creative reliance on the blues as both "technical" and inspirational material allows Monk to improvise orchestrations(!) through the structural and emotional continuity of melody and "harmony." In order to play Monk's pieces well one must know how the melody and the harmony fit together and also understand why. Most of Monk's melodies are so strong and important that his bass lines are integrated into the very structure of the piece. This makes it almost impossible for a soloist to merely coast by improvising on Monk's chord structures alone. A player would have to use the theme and its rhythms (both stated and implied) in order to communicate anything musically at all. This is why Monk's music is considered difficult for many musicians. A player would have to be thinking and alert all the time, or as the late, great John Coltrane once stated, one would feel as if "he had fallen down an elevator shaft." Blythe understands this crucial detail about Monk's music and thus avoids the musical traps and dilemmas that plague so many people when they try to play Monk's music. Because Blythe, like Monk, never tries to "fake" his knowledge of anything, he Is able to use that which is essential to his own purposes and implicitly comment on the rest.
As other critics have pointed out, the core of Monk's style is rhythmic virtuosity. Monk recognizes that the inherent balance in creative music is based on the intrinsic unity of harmony, rhythm and melodic line. Innovations in one area would have to be supported by further innovations in the other areas. Since rhythm is fundamental to black music, any innovation in its uses would have to be accompanied by parallel changes in harmonic construction and linear expression. By revoicing or inventing new chordal material, by displacing and shifting or breaking up the rhythms (in terms of tempo and accents) and by constantly reworking and extending basic thematic phrases and ideas (often within the contours of the melodic frame itself), Monk was able to develop his own way of organizing and expressing the small group ensemble. This too is a significant lesson that Blythe has learned well in his own explorations of music.
Finally, in Blythe's thorough reappraisal and use of Monk's methods he has forged his own pathway in the contemporary idiom. For example, the subtlely forceful and discursive interplay of the tuba and cello in Blythe's group eliminates the need for the chordal restrictions of conventional bass and piano. Thus, more rhythmic diversity is assured within the anchoring context of alto saxophone and drums. Meanwhile, the guitar is free to float in between in sympathetic support of the frontline (which, depending on Blythe's striking arrangements, can be the saxophone and cello, the cello and tuba, or even the saxophone and tuba). Polyrhythmic conversations and contrapuntal exchanges are a consistent motif in what are, in effect, improvisatory orchestrations stated by the entire band(!). That Blythe would be confident and daring enough to use salsa and samba rhythms as well as traditional blues elements and R&B dynamics indicates that he recognizes that Monk's music Is adaptable to any "stylistic" form. Thus, as the musicologist Yousef Yancy points out in his erudite liner notes to this recording: "The compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk are ... universal expressions of music ... that are useful for: symphonies, duos, trios, big bands, quartets, piano-less quintets, chamber music and for the soloist, [it offers] infinite possibilities for music exploration—a meaningful and fulfilling achievement for any composer .... "
This is precisely what Blythe reveals in this recording of six Monk originals. The risk-taking virtuosity and emphatic unity of Blythe's quintet mean that we should all pay close attention to this band. The future is NOW.
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Post Aesthetic Black Music From the Occident and the Orient
by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 2 Number 2-3 Winter-Spring, 1984
© 1984
Street Priest Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society
Moers, 1983
Barbecue Dog Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society
Antilles, 1983
"See, it's swing. Swing is the thing, but how do you swing without playing bebop? Instead of making time swing, I'm making rhythm swing ... I don't know what you should call this music. It's not free jazz, it's not fusion music—really it's just Texas blues."1
—Ronald Shannon Jackson
"Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate-our Western legacy-are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."
—Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage" 1967
One of the singularly creative ensembles in American music today is led by an extraordinary 44-year-old composer/drummer named Ronald Shannon Jackson. Of course, not one in a million people in this country has even heard of Jackson or his innovative six-piece ensemble called The Decoding Society, but that only lets you know that the ancient tradition of black creative musicians who-have-astounding-genius-but-remain -almost -totally- obscure is not only intact, but is flourishing in the state-directed catatonia of American culture, 1984. After all. in this society how many "music lovers" had even heard of say Charlie Parker in 1948 or John Coltrane in 1960? Or for that matter James Brown in 1965?
So what is astonishing about Jackson and the Decoding Society is not so much the almost total media whiteout of their prodigious artistic efforts (and we might add that of their estimable colleagues like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, the World Saxophone Quartet, James "Blood" Ulmer, Roscoe Mitchell, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, etc.) but that their music effortlessly communicates what every major so-called "jazz," "rock," "pop" and "classical" critic says is missing from 99.9 percent of all music in the U.S. today: a contemporary, independent and creative vision of a truly synergetic world music with authentic New World roots. This is a monumental task that artists as disparate in taste and sensibility as Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Steve Reich, Albert Ayler and the various emulators (idolators?) of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Ameirca have consciously tried to project and develop.
Without suggesting whether I think these and other previous composers and instrumentalists have succeeded in this endeavor (and there is considerable evidence that many individuals have made major contributions to this quest In the 20th century) none, in my opinion, has done it with more "structural," emotional, intellectual or artistic force and integrity than Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society.
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I play from a melodic/rhythmic concept, but most of the compositions arrive from endeavors to perfect certain numerical rhythmic modulations. Respective playing of certain rhythmic sequences is the cause whose effect is the yield of melodic messages.2
What gives RSJ and the Decoding Society its fundamental power is its profound knowledge, and creative use of, the multidimentional aspects of African-American musics. That is, its complete command of the total black music tradition as it has been expressed since Africans first graced these New World shores eons ago (and, no, I'm not just talking about the period of American slavery). This tradition encompasses an extremely wide spectrum of sounds and musical philosophies from spirituals, worksongs, field hollers and various blues to martial lyrics and cadences, folk songs, and ritual/ceremonial forms. The unifying force that links all of these expressions is, of course, the highly sophisticated and complex concept of spontaneous creativity—the organizational and spiritual principle of improvisation.
In the music of RSJ and the DS this guiding element is merged with the theory of harmelodics created and taught by one of Jacksons musical mentors, the lengendary multi-instrumentalist and composer Ornette Coleman. The role of Coleman's functional methodology for group ensemble playing is to free the individual musician from the traditional formalistic constraints of Western harmony and conventional tonality (diatonicism) by the assertion of the primacy of melody and rhythm. As expressed in the context of contemporary black music, harmelodics relies on the unity of tempo, rhythm and melodic intervals. Essentially, this means that there is a constant modulation of tonalities and rhythms. Literally everyone is free to explore their own concept of the melody. This method not only insures that there is timbral and textural variety, but a broad expressive palette of instrumental colors to work from. The entire ensemble "paints" the aural portrait that reflects how every painter "saw" the canvas.
With Jackson and the ensemble his working idea of music as a continuous conversation between equal participants is given a broader meaning than its implication of collective improvisation. What happens in all of Jackson's composition is a synergy of the aesthetic elements of the blues, R&B, funk and various stylistic forms of creative music. Thematic material is not self-contained units of melodic line, rhythmic and harmonic duration, but rather is used as a springboard for the creative exploration of tonality, rhythm and sound textures. Just as the late scientist and visionary R. Buckminister Fuller explained synergistics as the "behavior of wholes which are not predicted or indicated by the activity of their various parts," the integral components of Jackson's music work in an ongoing dynamic co-operative tension whereby seemingly disparate or even contradictory modes complement each other through the principle of co-existence.
Thus, ideas and procedures gleaned from traditional and modernist frameworks (be they from the Americas or from Africa, Asia and Europe) are used to both support and comment on each other without any artificial attempts at a synthesis of these varying conceptual and spiritual values. There is concomitantly no simple reliance on patische for structural identity or formal content. The resulting effect is of a holistic music that encompasses and extends the many musics it makes use of. In this way function is wedded to expression, which we should never forget is a fundamental philosophical value in black music. The peculiar genius of RSJ and the DS is that this complex aesthetic is expressed with such emotional simplicity and directness in their playing. This quality is what gives the ensemble its utterly distinct innovative ability: its presence puts everyone on notice that the present categories that are used to "define" various musical genres are false and arbitrary. Like Ornette Coleman says: "It should be clear to everyone by now that jazz, rock, pop and classical are all yesterday's titles."3
My approach is basically that the oldest physical instrument is the center, the same as the sun is the solar center of our galaxy. And that exactly as the planets move around the sun, melodies-and those of the Decoding Society where there are as many melodies as there are instruments-concur in the multiple chanting of world cultural rhythms. In other words, at any given point I might begin to play a rhythm pattern that is closest to the vibe or human call, related to what that other person is doing. One sax player, the guitar, or the bass player might be playing a blues figure that carries its own rhythm. Consequently, I might be playing Bulgarian, Hungarian, or African beat-or simply a John Philip Sousa punctuation.4—Ronald Shannon Jackson
A Digression on the Music (For the Adjective Freaks Out There)
"So yeah Kofi we know that the cats is smart and shit, but will the music itself send me and my loved ones into hypnotic states of turquoise ecstasy at the drop of an accent ... in other words, to use an old '60s expression: how do it FREE us?"
Well, all I can say is that Jackson is a master composer and percussionist whose melodies are haunting, angular streams of light that either waft gently above or deftly cut through the dense rhythmic forest of sound. This sound is made up of an oscillating spectrum of polyrhythmic chants, raging vamps, blistering stop-time arabesques, quicksilver interlocking, seductive lyricism, furious call-and-response, and enchanting folk musings. The music in both these recordings are unabashed statements of the coalescence of occidental ("western") and oriental ("eastern") references transmuted through the cultural experience and ideologies of Black America. What emerges from this interface of traditions is a new conception of the link between art and community; an active and evaluative break with the critical and social standards established by the obsessed defenders of the Myth of Western Hegemony. In short, Jackson's music portends that the age of specialization and academic codification in the arts and sciences is over. We have returned to the artist-as-extension-of-community. No longer can the world's musics be reduced to nationalist boundaries imposed by cultural politicians who wish to rule the world through a bureaucratic denial of self-determining art forms communicating imaginative solutions to historical dilemmas (like all forms of ethnocentrism and racism).
What Jackson's music ultimately addresses is the global reality of artists in the post-aesthetic age who use whatever is available to make their art, and whose identity is not tied to any hierarchial system or belief that would denigrate or feel a need to deny other cultures in order to realize its own value. In Jackson's music themes come and go, rhythms state themselves emphatically only to dissolve and immediately reappear in new guises buttressed by the energies that come from environmental media. This is the media through which the Decoding Society deciphers and translates the music and spiritual messages of the New World. It is a "technique" and feeling, but as they come from Life—not from theory alone. This life comes from the entire world, not from isolated zones of ethnic experience. We end this digression with Jackson's words:
We in the Decoding Society. are the inheritors of a musical tradition that is as rich as the topsoil of this land. We are forebearers whose roots are African, whose language is English, whose customs are French and German whose rowdiness is Irish, whose visions are universal. We are steeped in Eastern and Oriental influences planted by the Eastern sages eons ago. These are the spices in the pot, which are boiling with the rich water of suffrage, played with the wisdom acquired between life and death, stirred with old age and sickness, and served with the hand of death. This is the mission of the Decoding Society in music—the blown caps of many mountains.5
Notes
1. From Downbeat magazine (Chicago: August, 1982) Interview.
2. Ibid.
3. Liner notes from recording "Dancing In Your Head," Horizon, 1976.
4. Downbeat magazine, August 1982, (Interview).
5. Ibid.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON
Selected Discography :
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With the Decoding Society
Barbeque Dog, Antilles (1983)
Street Priest, Moers (1983)
Man Dance, Antilles (1982)
Nasty, Moers (1981)
Eye On You, About Time (1981)
With Music Revelation Ensemble
No Wave, Moers (1980)
With James Blood Ulmer
Are You Glad To Be In America? Artists House (1981)
With Ornette Coleman
Body Meta, Artists House (1978)
Dancing In Your Head, Horizon (1976)
With Cecil Taylor
One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, Hat Hut (1980)
Live In The Black Forest, Pausa (1979)
Unit, New World (1978)
3 Phasis, New World (1978)
With Charles Tyler
Charles Tyler, ESP (1967)
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What Is An Aesthetic? Politics, Ideology & Cultural Resistance in the U.S. Today
by Kofi Natambu
PAPER AIR
Volume Four, Number 3
Singing Horse Press
Philadelphia, PA.
© 1990
"Mommy, what is Soul?" ''Soul is a hamhock in your comflakes.'' -
—Funkadelic, 1970
"What is there to say about the instrument? It's my voice — that's all it is."
—Miles Davis, 1987
“In dance, in the innovations in musical instruments, in popular ballad singing unrivaled anywhere in the world, the mass of the people are not seeking a national identity, they are expressing one."
—C.L.R. James (1901-1989), Black Jacobins, 1962 edition
Discourse on the issue of “aesthetics'' in the United States today is severely circumscribed by false and xenophobic notions of what constitutes ''art'' in a multicultural society. Given the hierarchical nature of cultural production in the West, we find a not-at-all-subtle attempt to subjugate all expressive and creative forms to one dominant cultural ideology in the name of a spurious and utterly bankrupt' 'universalism.'' This monocultural domination, masquerading as 'high culture', 'modernism' and 'classical values', has been responsible for the pervasive destructiveness of such culturally retrogressive and homicidal systems as racism and sexism, and the elevation of ruling and petit-bourgeois class ideas, values, and attitudes to (hegemonic) mythological status in society. In response to these historically backward and reactionary theoretical models and practices, a massive "culture of resistance'' has emerged that seeks to create bold and innovative alternatives to a presently corrupt and ethnocentric cultural "community" ('mainstream', 'academic' and 'avant-garde'). These 'Other' forms and conceptual modes are by no means monolithic (or non-problematic), but they do constitute a multiplicity of strategies and ideas that at base attempt to challenge the traditional, and still prevailing, white male paradigm of cultural identity and philosophy. This is what the brilliant and visionary novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, gadfly and (Multi)cultural critic, Ishmael Reed calls the "Western Church", and what has always been the target of the most significant and profound critiques of American society and culture by Afro-Americans in the 20th centuty (e.g. see: Du Bois, Baraka, Malcolm X, Hughes, Hurston, James, Woodson, Toomer, Frazier, Cruse, Baldwin, Wright, Ellison, L. Thomas, Reed, Marable, Cortez, Neal, H. Gates, Houston Baker and Henry Dumas for starters!) .
It is in this historical context that we must begin to seriously address the role of "alternative aesthetics" or “culltural radicalism" in this crucial transitional period today. For as we careen toward the 21st century nothing less than an all-out assault on the delimiting theories and praxis of most artists and critics in the “Western tradition” (be they liberals, neoconservatives. anarchists, Marxists, surrealists, neobeats or language school writers or for that matter, cultural nationalists and metaphysicians) will suffice. What is needed now is a critical and engaged analysis/practice that begins from the position (cf. Derrida, Foucault AND John Coluane) that we must continually “keep cleaning the mirror so that we may see ourselves more clearly."
One of the most important and potentially "revolutionary" cultural movements in the country along the lines outlined above is known as HIPHOP, a multi-winged post-aesthetic that fuses literature, music, visual media, dance, and social criticism in a 'performance art' context that smashes commonly held notions about the separation between ''high'' and ''low'' culture, literacy and orality, and institutional vs. vernacular modalities in society. As the present generation's version of bebop, black arts, and 'free Jazz' /new music, RAP, the postmodern literary/ music component of this mass-based cultural movement, attacks the most cherished and deeply held social, ideological, 'artistic' and religious values and structures in American life. This aggressively self conscious army of cultural workers eschews conventional ideas of what a 'poet', 'musician', or social/cultural activist-theorist is or should be by directly questioning the assumptions of what a 'writer', 'intellectual' or 'artist' represents to society and his/ her cultural role in educating or transforming that society. This is accomplished by a simple refusal to have their activity ("art" is a much too rarefied term to use in discussing these "artists") defined or in any way dependent upon the white or black intellectual and literary/ music establishment (which includes even so-called "progressive" or "avant-garde" traditions). The RAP community is of course not without its own contradictions and fetters too, but at least it is currently AWARE that to be institutionally sanctioned or supported/sponsored by external economic or political bureaucracies (i.e. the network of governmental and academic agencies that confer power and privilege to the "arts community") is to be compromised as a truly 'radical' force in this culture.
This is not to say that RAP or its parallel expressions in film, video, dance, and political activism is not subject to the contextual problems of commodity reification and corporate absorption that everyone is hemmed in by in a world monopoly capitalist ecosystem, but it is to suggest that its obvious potential as a broad-based and creatively flexible model of radical subversion and intervention is extremely valuable as a dynamic tool in the various struggles for human liberation in the world today.
For if we seriously examine and critically deal with the “aesthetic” contributions of a Public Enemy, a Kool Moc Dee, a M.C. Lyte, a KRS-1 (BOP), an Eric B. & Rakim, an ICE-T or a Stetsasonic, and the Jungle Brothers or even a N.W.A. and L.L. Kool (remember we're still emphasizing the POTENTIAL of these forces) we will go beyond current limitations. The point is that despite the shortcomings, weaknesses or stupidities of these young black men and women, and their legion of supporters, black, Hispanic and white there is a profound new energy making its presence known. If we are patient and supportive, critical and cautious, understanding and skeptical we can help bring on the inevitable arrival of a Charlie Parker or John Coltrane who will kick the next social-cultural cycle into a higher evolutionary mode, and aid all of us in the transformative process of creating and sustaining a truly radical and progressive multiculture that exploits or oppresses no one on the basis of “race” , class, or gender. This is the true legacy of the African-American “aesthetic” and the basis (as is Jazz, Blues, R & B, Rock, and Funk) of what is most valuable, useful and inspiring in American society and culture. It’s a world scene now and the U.S. is (in its multicultural guises) an integral part of that global transformation. As they say in Brooklyn (and many other spots NSE&W): WORD!!
Detroit, Summer, 1989
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NEW DIMENSIONS IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK CREATIVE MUSIC
by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume One Number One
Fall, 1981
© 1981
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In black creative music circles today much of the aesthetic concern is centered on the dynamic uses of musicaI content and its integral functional elements than on questions of idiomatic style. Which is not to say 'style' as a medium of artistic communication in itself is passe, but that the conceptual/spiritual focus of music is becoming even more aware of its independent relationship musical ideas, value,s and traditions throughout the world. Ironically this is occurring at the precise historical moment that creative music is becoming more self-conscious of its connection to its most fundamental aesthetic roots (in this case the Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Olde Funk). This is not surprising. It seems that most "new" developments in 'Art' (at least in the West) are based on just this evolutionary tension. What is of noteworthy interest is the manner in which change has taken place in the musicians' attitude toward this development.
Since the advent of musicians like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, and Charles Mingus (some of the most recognizable influences on contemporary creative musicians during the past 25 years), the idea of what constitutes improvisation and composition has changed at least 180 degrees. Prior to 1955 it was largely considered heretical in so-called "JAZZ" circles to play music without an almost clockwork adherence to "de changes" (parlance for the western harmonic structural system). In fact it was thought that anyone who did not subscribe to this rather popular, but distorted, view of creative music was at best a fraud (in some circles this parochial attitude persists-especially among critics). The notion that there were other ways of making music simply did not occur to these people (despite the living evidence of figures like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Sidney Bechet, and Charles Parker, among many others). Further, if these stalwart examples of musical/cultural innovation were referred to as indications of what could be done with some imagination and a lot of hard work, they were either passed off as "mere geniuses" beyond the pale of human comprehension, or held aloft as icons of what "true" music was all about (thus reaffirming the 'need' to be dependent on the "tradition of the changes"). This view effectively limited any real exploration or creative adventure on the part of many musicians since finding a MASTER musician and declaring your artistic serfdom to him (it?) was considered more "legitimate" than carving out new trails for oneself within the music. This situation resulted in the marketable proliferation of hundreds if not thousands of Duke, Pops, Bird, and Trane imitators etc. who canvassed the creative backwaters of America in search of familiar audiences for (overly) familiar music. This pandering to the so-called "common listener" (whatever that is) was (and is) responsible for an entire industry of record companies. critics, promotors, agents etc. who use this narrow perspective to manipulate the careers of artists, exploit their "product" economically and justify their negative cultural involvement in the music (in terms of defining and implicitly controlling "content"). This is especially true of the major multinational recording outlets.
Thus we have the recurring spectacle of these industry pundits asking or rather demanding new/original artists to intellectually defend what they create and play. What is even more ludicrous is that this happens every time a new voice arrives on the scene to challenge "old" concepts and beliefs about what MUSIC is (especially stylistically). Thus when Ellington, Armstrong, Bird, Trane. Coleman etc. introduced their musics to the world, there was a coterie of 'insiders' (both from the business world and among the musician-skeptics) who maintained that despite whatever technical virtues existed, these artists were not consistent with THE TRADITION (there's that phrase again). This meant that what they attempted to create did not fit someone's a priori conception of what "jazz" was. If an artists' contribution didn't fit some obtuse critics· ideological formula of fine or folk art then that contribution was automatically suspect (that is unless you could sell it on the media market as some kind of hot, bizarre item).
It is no wonder then that since ca. 1955 (i.e. Post-Bird) every deviation from this artificial norm has met, if not outright derision, then faint, wrongheaded praise. The patronizing condescension of critics whose self proclaimed role is that of lending intellectual and historical clarity to understanding and appreciating creative music in all its forms, has done more to isolate and confuse the general public than almost any other factor. This is exacerbated by the electronic media who make sure the music remains "underground" and (largely) unheard. In the absence of any education, public ignorance and indifference reigns supreme. But there is no need to speak in conspiratorial terms. This is simply the way the "system" works. After all isn't this situation the way the industry wants it? Further isn't it both safer and less aesthetically and culturally demanding for certain musicians to support this backward view of things, than be involved in the forefront of a broadbased social/cultural movement to deal with change in a progressive manner? Of course it is. So while the various "factions" of artists continue to fight/ignore and/ or exploit one another in the name of a spurious artistic "integrity" and "purity" the rapacious industry cleans up. Guess who remains in the dark (remember "the people?").
All of which leads us back to the original point. One of the more interesting changes in the past 15 years or so has been a refusal on the part of many young black musicians to get caught up in this absurd dlvide-and-conquer strategy. Many of these artists have even transcended merely idle protest against oppressive conditions, and have become self-reliant creative forces involved in both community education and political/economic independence programs. Admittedly the road has been very bumpy but this healthy change in attitude and activity augers well for the present-future of the music. The artistic and social efforts of organizations and people like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Black Artists Group (BAG). Collective Black Artists (CBA), Creative Arts Collective (CAC), Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Roscoe Mitchell, Horace Tapscott, Arthur Blythe, Farug Z. Bey, Donald Washington, Leonard King, among hundreds of other groups and individuals across the country, has effectively created a real opportunity to move beyond the petty but dangerous politics of "Jazz Roulette."
It's anybody's guess if this necessary beginning will continue to spread and grow. But if these strong examples of dynamic independence/interdependence in the community can survive. then perhaps the MUSIC too can continue to develop and grow. After all isn't this the idea behind "ART" as a functional tool for human expression?
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Cinema As Political Essay: Orson Welles, American Radicalism, and the Cultural Politics of Film Noir, 1940-1960
by Kofi Natambu
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2015/05/in-tribute-to-and-celebration-of_12.html
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FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on May 7, 2015):
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Thursday, May 7, 2015
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IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF ONE OF THE GREATEST, MOST IMPORTANT, AND INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY, ORSON WELLES (b. May 6, 1915)
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ORSON WELLES
(b. May 6, 1915--d. October 10, 1985)
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"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."
--Orson Welles, 1915-1985
UPDATED: JUNE 20, 2022
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All,
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The following critical essay on Orson Welles (1915-1985) and the larger cinematic project of film noir (and its fundamental ideological, social, and aesthetic connections to the rise of a dynamic and independent radical American cinema in the 1940-1960 era) is excerpted from a book of critical and theoretical essays on film, music, politics, cultural history, philosophy, art, critical theory, and literature that I am currently writing entitled "What is An Aesthetic?": Writings on American Culture, 1985-Present. That I consider this essay and its broader implications to be particularly relevant and very germane to the present deeply severe political, economic, and cultural crisis wracking the United States at this very hour is of course not by any means a coincidence...
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Kofi
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I. Directors & Writers
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Orson Welles
Abraham Polonsky
John Huston
Jack Berry
Edgar Ulmer
Sam Fuller
Nicholas Ray
Robert Siodmak
Billy Wilder
Andre De Toth
Jules Dassin
Edward Dmytryk
Jacques Tourneur
Alexander Mackendrick
Fritz Lang
Joseph H. Lewis
Cy Endfield
Phil Karlson
Robert Aldrich
II. Films
Citizen Kane
Body & Soul
Double Indemnity
Try and Get Me
The Maltese Falcon
Pickup on South Street
Murder, My Sweet
Touch of Evil
Detour
Shock Corridor
Crossfire
The Naked Kiss
The Big Heat
Phantom Lady
Ace in the Hole (The Big Carnival)
Night & the City
He Ran All the Way
The Asphalt Jungle
Sweet Smell of Success
Out of the Past
The Big Combo
In a Lonely Place
Force of Evil
Brute Force
While much has been said and written about film noir by writers, filmmakers, critics, academicians and artists, particularly over the past three decades it is my contention that much of what has been written has failed to adequately account for the form’s on-going popularity and resonance with its audience in the United States. The reasons are varied and complex of course but they all essentially go back to a fundamental fact about film noir that most commentators either miss or are simply reluctant (afraid?) to admit: Film noir is, and has always been, a quintessentially political aesthetic. This not only means that it actively foregrounds and engages both ideological thought and expression but also that the creative conception of the form is never far removed from its ever changing social contexts. This concern is especially true of film noir’s origins in the cultural history and politics of the 1930s and 1940s, and its earlier incarnations in the largely pulp/proletarian literary traditions of crime/detective fiction and the mystery narrative as exemplified in the writing of such masters of the tradition as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich and Chester Himes. What all these writers have in common is an almost obsessive concern with how traditionally marginalized social and economic groups in American society (workers, the unemployed poor, women, oppressed national minorities etc.) have experienced the corrosive effects of poverty, racism, misogyny, and class exploitation as well as various forms of moral, ethical, political, and spiritual corruption in a voraciously capitalist atmosphere of greed, lust, hatred, fear and revenge. In the often highly melodramatic and expressionist narratives of these writers we discover how and why these twisted values and attitudes of American society actually encourages violent criminal behavior as a delusionary remedy for the pervasive problems of despair, alienation, disenfranchisement and social dislocation.
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In fact, what remains distinctive about film noir to this day is that it paints a portrait of the United States, its institutions, and its citizens that is profoundly at odds with official representations of what American society is like. This insistence in noir on the perverse, destructive, and oppressive aspects of social reality and conflict in modern America is a transgressive feature of film noir’s ability to disturb and subvert our expectations of, and conditioned demands for, a ‘happy ending’, or an easy and simple resolution of the highly conflicted, complex and ambiguous problems that confront us in a given narrative (and by extension in our own lives). Thus it is no surprise that many of the most dynamic and critically acclaimed filmmakers of film noir in the U.S. were politically radical or conscious artists who were deeply concerned with the issues, problems, and challenges posed by the provocative thematic and aesthetic material suggested in noir.
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For leftist directors and writers like Orson Welles, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Edward Dmytryk, Jack Berry, Cy Endfield, and Joseph Losey, this meant there was a joint concern with both form and content in which the aesthetic aspect of their work would serve to enhance and provide needed structure and nuance for the expression of certain specific ideas, opinions and values that were either stated openly or implied/suggested in the narrative itself. The general objective was for these artists to find an idiosyncratic way of creating a ‘dialectical unity’ of elements within the script, mise-en-scène, montage, and behavior of major protagonists in the narrative that would ideally heighten the audience’s consciousness, understanding and knowledge of what themes, ideas, and values were being represented in both the film’s ‘open’ text and ‘hidden’ subtext. In this respect many of these filmmakers work appeared to echo that of the renowned German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht in intent if not in aesthetic style and philosophy. Brecht’s idea that “to think or write or produce [a play] also means: to transform society, to transform the state, to subject ideologies to close scrutiny” finds its filmic correlative in such film noir classics as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, Abraham Polonsky’s Body & Soul and Force of Evil, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Jules Dassin’s Brute Force and Night and the City, Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, Nick Ray’s They Live by Night, Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, and Cyril Endfield’s Try and Get Me.
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These films and others from the 1940-1960 era like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole (a.k.a. The Big Carnival), Pickup on South Street The Big Heat, Sweet Smell of Success, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and The Big Combo (the latter films directed and written by such avowedly non-leftist or otherwise apolitical filmmakers as Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Alexander Mackendrick, Sam Fuller, Tay Garnett, and Joseph H. Lewis) all shared a concern with a pointed critique and exposure of the greed, duplicity, collusion, exploitation, and corruption of corporate and civil institutions such as banks, insurance companies, financial investment firms, mass media (particularly newspapers and television), the criminal justice system (specifically lawyers, prisons and the police), and the government (local, state and federal).
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It is also no coincidence that much of the narrative content of film noir was derived from American social and political history. Thus major figures of 20th century politics and culture are often alluded to or referenced in metaphorical and allegorical terms within noir narratives: the wealthy and powerful newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane; the radio, TV and newspaper columnist Walter Winchell in Sweet Smell of Success; and notorious gangsters like Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Al Capone, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky in The Big Heat, Force of Evil, and The Big Combo. It is also striking that many of the protagonists in these narratives were individuals who were compelled for reasons of desire or necessity (or both) to take on large powerful institutions in their quest for either social justice or criminal competition with these forces. American filmmakers with a radical or leftist ideological bent were able, in the words of famed director Martin Scorsese (another contemporary master of noir), to ‘smuggle’ in the ideas and values that they wanted to portray, despite Hollywood’s constraints. This was especially true for artists like Welles, Polonsky, Dassin, Losey, Berry etc. who during the 1930s and ’40s were openly involved in radical political activity outside Hollywood and, within four years after the HUAC hearings began in the fall of 1947, were either blacklisted, imprisoned or forced into exile because of their political and cultural affiliations.
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I. Orson Welles: Film Noir as Political Commentary & Social Critique
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In late summer 1947, Orson Welles (1915-1985), the legendary filmmaker, actor, theatre director, radio writer and producer, magician, raconteur and genius enfant terrible of Hollywood left the United States for Rome, Italy after completing the shooting of his original adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, his sixth film in six years (and fifth as director). He was thirty-two years old and would not return to the U.S. for nearly ten years. A true Renaissance figure, no individual in the history of American cinema had even remotely accomplished what Welles had at such an early age. By 1948 three of Welles’ films (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai) were already considered by critics among the finest movies ever made in the history of the medium, and his many theatre and radio productions as director, actor, writer and producer during the 1930s were highly original, inventive and innovative benchmarks in their respective fields as well.
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But what was also distinctive about Welles as artist and citizen was the extraordinary level of his political commitment and activism. A radical social democrat since his adolescence, Welles had directed the very successful stage version of Native Son (1940), the best-selling novel by the African American writer and communist Richard Wright, on Broadway in 1941, and had electrified the theatre world some five years earlier with an all-black version of Macbeth. Welles was also heavily involved in a very wide range of political and cultural causes, including a series of national radio broadcasts on CBS radio scripted, produced and hosted by Welles on his program Orson Welles Commentaries in 1946-47 that brought to national attention the case of Isaac Woodward, a black veteran of WWII who was beaten and blinded by a racist white South Carolina policeman in the summer of 1946. In the words of the famous black political cartoonist and radical Ollie Harrington (who was then public relations director for the NAACP) these “fantastically dramatic and interesting programs” featured Welles himself “playing the role of somebody out hunting these men who had done this.” As a result, they actually discovered the two policemen who were responsible for the act. As Michael Denning points out in his groundbreaking chapter on Welles from his outstanding book, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1996), Welles’ political drama began with a reading of Woodward’s own affidavit, followed by a direct address to the policeman that the blinded veteran had been unable to identify. The policeman, Welles pointed out in his broadcasts “brought the justice of Dachau and Oswiekem to Aiken, South Carolina.” In highly melodramatic tones, Welles’ narrative combined as, Denning states “Shakespearean bombast with echoes of [Welles fictional radio superhero] The Shadow”:
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"Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well...You won’t blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran, nor yet the color of your skin...You’ll never wash away that leperous lack of pigment...the guilty pallor of the white man...What does it cost to be a Negro? In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as “white?” In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his soul... Who am I? A masked avenger from the comic books? No sir. Merely an inquisitive citizen of America."
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As Denning goes on to point out Welles made the search for Officer X a continuing and successful political drama. Eventually an eyewitness was found and it was discovered that Woodward had actually been taken off the Greyhound bus and beaten in the town of Batesburg, a few miles from Aiken, South Carolina. Welles then apologized to the town of Aiken but the controversy led the network ABC to cancel his show. As it turned out the Woodward case marked the end of Welles’ political career in the United States. In October 1947, the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC) formally began its notorious government-sponsored witch hunt for communists and other radicals in the Hollywood film community. Not coincidentally Welles had left just the United States for Europe just two months earlier, thus beginning his exile from the U.S. that lasted until December 1956 when he began work on his final Hollywood studio film, the film noir classic Touch of Evil, which was released in 1958. The exile ensured that while Welles would narrowly escape testifying before HUAC and thus avoid its reactionary prosecutorial wrath, he would still essentially be blacklisted like many of his friends and associates during the entire time he was away, and even afterward--an obvious fact that most of Welles’ biographers and critics have studiously and inexplicably ignored. These writers have pretended that this glaring decade-long gap in Welles’ career is not politically significant, despite the fact that he was forced to work only with European producers and studios on low budget productions of his own, and that from 1948 until his death in 1985, one of the most famous and critically acclaimed filmmakers in American and world cinematic history was allowed to make only one film (Touch of Evil) in the Hollywood studio system! It is also important to note that one of the earliest victims of the ensuing blacklist created by McCarthyism was one of Welles’ closest and most valued colleagues, the Mercury Theatre radio writer, Howard Koch.
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Soon a staggering number of Welles’ friends and fellow artists (actors, writers, directors, technicians and producers) also had their careers and lives ruined by the deadly blacklist, including one of his co-stars in Citizen Kane, and fellow Mercury Theatre actor, Dorothy Comingore (who played Kane’s mistress Susan in the 1941 film). Indeed one of the many other American artists who, like Welles, chose exile rather than be interrogated by the rapacious committee was the radical black novelist Richard Wright who left Brooklyn, NY with his family in 1947 to live in Paris. Wright, who never returned to the United States, died mysteriously in France in 1960 at the age of 52.
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The reason I have chosen to write at some length about Welles’ political background is that except for rare occasions, like those provided by Denning, almost none of Welles’ biographers and critics have investigated or written about this very important aspect of Welles’ life and career and its absolutely crucial role in his work as a film director, writer and actor (especially in terms of his highly creative and dynamic thematic and narrative uses of film noir in Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evil). It is indeed strange and even bizarre that most commentary by critics on Welles choose to ignore this major dimension of Welles’ work as a filmmaker until one begins to consider that one of the many still lingering consequences of McCarthyism and the blacklist in American culture in general (and the Hollywood film industry in particular) is an almost studied reluctance or refusal on the part of many to probe too deeply into the profound legacy and impact that state sponsored censorship and political repression (as well as widespread self censorship practiced by artists themselves) has had, and continues to have, on American cinema.
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However, this tragic reality does not mean that we can blithely ignore the undeniable fact that as a leading Popular Front member, and perhaps as Michael Denning points out, “the single most important Popular Front artist in theater, radio, and film, both politically and aesthetically,” Welles had a major impact on the political direction of American film and theatre during the 1935-1950 period. As Denning notes:
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“Moreover from his first appearance in New York in 1935 to his departure for Europe in 1947, Welles was active in the Popular Front social movement, lending his name, voice, and work to the New Theatre League, the League of American Writers, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense committee, the California Labor School, the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), and the Progressive Citizens of America...”
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But the influence doesn’t end there. Welles was also at the forefront of putting his art where his politics were through his tireless work as cofounder and director of the famed Mercury Theatre group (at the age of 22!) and his subsequent conquering of Hollywood just four short years later in Citizen Kane. Despite these radical breakthroughs Welles is still not often given his due in radical American cultural history. As Denning points out:
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“Curiously, Welles is often overlooked in accounts of Popular Front culture, which usually suggest that Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre were the heart of the radical stage, and that the Communist screenwriters--the Hollywood Ten-- were the center of the film industry left. However none of the other Popular Front theater or film artists, either in New York or Hollywood produced a body of work comparable to that of Welles, neither writers like John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner, Jr., Clifford Odets, or Dalton Trumbo, nor directors like Elia Kazan, Abraham Polonsky, or Joseph Losey. Eugene O’Neill and Charles Chaplin are perhaps Welles’ only equals, and they are both products of an earlier modernist moment.”
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Given these essential facts, it is necessary to examine Welles’ films in a much broader social and cultural context than is customary. This is particularly true of his film noir productions, which were clearly conceived as both political commentary and cultural critique from their inception. For details about how and why Welles saw these films from a radical ideological and social perspective it is important to go directly to Welles himself to find the answers. What we will discover is an artist whose aesthetics were never far removed from his politics, in either form or content, nor his politics from his aesthetic notions about the world. This led Welles to not only developing a new creative approach to the use of drama, melodrama and documentary in his film noir work, but also to being closely monitored by the FBI which had been diligently tracking Welles since 1941. He was even put on the Security Index Card list as one of the intellectuals, activists and artists to be “immediately detained and imprisoned in the event of a national emergency” (i.e. large scale revolutionary activity). No wonder then that Welles was fascinated and horrified by the aesthetic, ideological and political power of fascism--a force that was to exert a definitive influence on all of his work and particularly in film.
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II. Welles vs. Fascism: Film Noir as Aesthetic and Ideological Weapon
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“It is now possible to bewilder and hypnotize an audience to an extent that they believe they are in the most high-priced bedroom ever seen, or that they are listening to the most high-priced foreign actresses available to Mr. Goldwyn. This kind of hypnosis is dangerous, not only politically, but aesthetically and culturally…"
--Orson Welles, “Theatre and the People’s Front”, April 15, 1938, Daily Worker
“Fascism, we know, sells itself by making its appeal to emotions rather than to reason, to the senses rather than the mind. Showmanship is fundamental to the fascist strategy, and the chief fascist argument is the parade...”
--Orson Welles, “The Nature of the Enemy”, January 22, 1945
The seven-year period that frames these public statements Welles made for both print and radio media are representative of many articles and speeches that Welles wrote during the 1930s and ‘40s before the blacklist and his personal exile from the United States. What’s striking about these bold declarations of war against fascism and everything it stood for both in the U.S. and abroad, is that Welles is making them at the very height of his career as an artist, and that they mirror so subtly and openly the form and content of his work as writer, actor and director in radio, theatre and film. The historical role of what became known as “People’s Theatre” was crucial to Welles’ vision as a filmmaker, and it was through his riveting and innovative work in his own radical repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, that Welles found both a viable technique and working method for staging and structuring his narratives. These methods and strategies were brought over and creatively renewed and extended within an entirely new aesthetic context-- the cinema--and then used to frame action and behavior from the different perspective of this other medium.
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This was nowhere more apparent than in Welles’ extraordinary first film Citizen Kane (1941) where everything Welles had learned in a decade-long career in the theatre and radio was put to use in a highly charged and distinctive way in order to accomplish the same goals that Welles and his radical colleagues and friends in the ‘People’s Theatre’ movement had been so fervently fighting for. For Welles this meant, as it did for other active members of the Popular Front, a fierce opposition to the ever-growing fascist threat of a “hypnotized mass public.” Against this powerful political and moral evil Welles offered “the democratic promise of a movement that would openly use the new mass media of radio and film to democratize elite culture and expropriate the cultural wealth of the past for the working classes.” Thus the opportunity to direct, write and act in a film that would directly address the dangers of fascism at home led Welles to take on the highly controversial project of Citizen Kane at a time when a world war was being waged against fascism abroad. As Denning makes clear:
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"The left wing theaters of the depression provided the context for the work of Welles and the Mercury Theatre. Welles was fascinated by fascism, and his great works—Julius Caesar, “The War of the Worlds” [radio broadcast], Citizen Kane, Native Son, the Isaac Woodward radio broad-casts, and Touch of Evil--are allegories of fascism.... Citizen Kane combined the two fundamental elements of Welles’ antifascist aesthetic: the portrait of the great dictator and the reflection on showmanship and propaganda. The wit and tragedy of the story of the yellow journalist Kane are produced by the jokes, fulminations, drunken diatribes, and soapbox rhetoric about the mass media..."
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It is within this social context that the aesthetic decisions about the cinematic portrayal of Charles Foster Kane (a thinly veiled fictional stand-in for the all too real newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst) were made and carried out. In reality Hearst was a highly duplicitous and dictatorial man whose political sympathies and support were reserved for the fascists in Europe, and their supporters in the United States (of whom Hearst, along with the automobile magnate Henry Ford, was the most powerful and publicly visible leader). It is crucial to note that Hearst was seen by Welles and the general Popular Front left as an emblem of American fascism, “a powerful capitalist who was also a visible demagogue.” The Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross wrote that:
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“Hearst, with his twenty-seven newspapers, his thirteen magazines, his broadcasting stations and his film studios is a greater menace to the lovers of American institutions than any other man in the country. In the last three years it has become evident that he has an understanding with European Fascist leaders and is using his vast publicity apparatus to harry and discredit those who stand up for American democracy.”
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Thus Citizen Kane’s depiction of Hearst was deeply indebted to this anti-Hearst sentiment, and in particular to Ferdinand Lundberg’s muckraking biography, Imperial Hearst published in 1936. Additionally, Hearst’s public statements supporting Hitler and Mussolini were notorious, and his newspapers were obsessively anti-labor. This historical background provides the general outlines of, and motivation for, the portrait of Kane but does not provide the focus of Welles’ narrative. Instead of simply making a movie about the rise and fall of a media empire and its impact on the politics and culture of its time (roughly from 1870-1940), Welles uses the modern sound and visual techniques derived from radio and documentary film and photography to juxtapose the conflict and tension between a so-called “objective” interpretation of Kane’s journalistic and political career as a newspaper mogul vs. a “subjective” point –of view that ironically privileges and critically examines Kane’s own sense of the ‘meaning’ of his life. In other words, the film Citizen Kane allows us to ‘see’ and interpret Kane’s life from the jaundiced and highly conflicted perspective of a news reporter named Thompson (who is significantly only viewed by the audience from the back or in deep shadows) who is told by his superiors to go out and find the “true meaning” of Kane’s life by investigating why Kane uttered the cryptic word “Rosebud” on his deathbed.
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What’s doubly important about this narrative gambit for Welles’ complex film about the relationship between meaning and history (or appearances vs. realities) is that Thompson is given this assignment only after he and, of course, we as audience, witnesses the detailed and highly dramatic viewing of Kane’s “life, career, and death” by a “March of Time” documentary (called “News on the March” in the film) that serves as a public obituary for the passing of a very famous, wealthy and controversial man whose politics, morality and eccentric public behavior fascinated, repulsed and inspired his many enemies and supporters during a pivotal period in American history. By using sound and images to tell both the complex life of a fictional protagonist and his ‘real’ alter ego (rendered in stark allegorical terms), we are able to discern in a critical manner the differences and similarities in the way an individual’s life story is told in social and political terms by media, and the contrasting stories told about that person’s life (and its meaning) from the private perspective of the person being examined by the public. In this way Welles attempts to maintain a human connection with his protagonist that does not merely reduce that individual character/person to a social-historical caricature. The aim on Welles part is that by not losing sight of the flawed humanity being portrayed in his narratives-within-narratives approach we, as audience, will also not lose sight of what that character represents and “stands for” (or against) in his social and political life. It is the concept of the individual as seen in the context of his social and cultural milieu that is essential to Welles’ aesthetic.
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The intent of this filmic strategy on Welles’ part is that we are made to think about the open and implied meaning(s) of his characters’ actions, motivations, behavior, ideas and beliefs and then decide for ourselves what our response to the film’s critique and investigation will be (both intellectually and emotionally). It is through this dialectical manipulation of, and engagement with, the ideological elements of his film narrative (both thematically and aesthetically) that Welles is able to interrogate the larger social, economic and political landscape of Kane’s and, by metaphorical extension, Hearst’s reality. This is the “Brechtian connection” in Welles’ film, and the structural device that allows the audience to see and experience what the characters cannot or will not experience for themselves.
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This goal is accomplished in the film text through Welles’ innovative creative and technical use of the then seldom used cinematic methods that together were later to stylistically inform and become heavily identified with film noir: German expressionism, chiaroscuro lighting, deep-focus photography, use of voice-over narration (and for Welles such modern radio techniques as ‘cross-cutting dialogue’) and editing within the compositional frame (i.e. mise-en-scène). The use of severe or unusual camera angles, high contrast lighting that juxtaposed lights and darks in starkly dramatic ways through the manipulation of shadows and very bright light (or pitch darkness), and ironic uses of dialogue to comment on various actions of protagonists in the narrative were all techniques that Welles used to particularly dynamic ends in Kane and that served as almost textbook examples of noir aesthetics for his peers and contemporaries as well as future generations of filmmakers.
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The brilliant application of these techniques and procedures to the structuring of Kane as a film noir is especially telling in Welles’ dramatic framing of Kane’s personal history as well as political rise and decline through the multiple perspectives of individuals who are connected to Kane as either family, friends, political and business associates, allies, enemies, wives and lovers. In this manner these various individuals play a narrative role that is similar in many ways to that of the news reporter Thompson (who is ironically a complete stranger to Kane who becomes connected to him only after his death). For example we first see Kane on the screen in extreme close-up where only his whiskered mouth is seen uttering in a dying whisper the word “Rosebud” as a glass ball containing snow-like flakes is shown falling and rolling away on the floor from Kane’s extended right hand and arm as he literally passes away. Our next shot of Kane is as a young boy of eight playing in the snow outside his home on his sled. This long shot is taken from the perspective of the inside of his home where his mother (Agnes Moorhead) is calling for the boy to come inside. We then see the boy in medium shot as he picks up the sled and strides toward the house where his mother, father and a third rather stern and ‘proper’ figure is standing off to his mother’s right side. Far in the background in the upper right side of the frame is the boy’s father who looks rather forlorn and anxious. At this point we first see the boy in close-up as he eagerly and then with a look of concern looks up at his mother’s now drawn and worried face. The boy is hugging his mother around her legs very tightly. Suddenly we see the tall stern patriarchal figure standing closer to the boy’s mother on the left side of the screen as he moves toward the boy with a wide smile and an outstretched hand seeking to introduce himself. The stranger addresses the now clearly frightened and suspicious boy who looks at his very grave mother with a pleading expression on his face in fear of the stranger. The mother informs the boy that he has nothing to fear from the stranger but the boy moves quickly away from him as the stranger tries to reassure the boy that everything is alright by walking toward the boy and making a friendly gesture while calling him “Charles” as if he were a long lost relative or friend of the boy’s parents. At this point the boy quickly lunges toward the stranger with the metal end of his sled telling the stricken stranger to go away and angrily calls out to his mother.
By now Kane’s father has moved away from his isolated spot deep in the frame and is telling Kane that he is going to be very rich and that the stranger has come to "help" him. Meanwhile Kane’s mother looking just as grave and sad as before manages a small smile and tells Kane that he has nothing to fear, that the man now identified as a “Mr. Thatcher” has come to take Kane away to live with him in another town. Kane, now confused but hopeful that his parents are also coming along asks whether they will be joining him, and the mother tries to explain on the verge of tears that he will going alone but that Mr. Thatcher will take good care of him. Kane clutches his mother tightly and begins to defiantly face down Thatcher as his father continues to cackle over Kane’s shoulder that he is going to be very wealthy and famous. It is suggested through body language and the distinct disapproving looks of Kane’s mother that Kane’s father is a wastrel and perhaps an abusive alcoholic as the mother says that it will be good that “Charlie will be going to a place where you {the father} can’t get at him” (this is in response to the father raising his hand to strike the boy in retaliation for pushing Mr. Thatcher with the sled) as Kane now moves away from his father. Meanwhile the father continues to extol the virtues of Charlie leaving with the stranger as the mother with obvious deep regret and inner pain signs some sort of contract with Mr. Thatcher.
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As it turns out of course the boy’s worst instincts about the stranger are completely confirmed when we discover after a brief flurry of shots of the young Kane responding scornfully to a series of very expensive birthday and New Year presents being given to Kane as he grows older. Then there is a brilliant cut to Kane as a now young man in his mid twenties--Welles' precise age at the time!-- who with his back turned to the audience suddenly swivels in his chair to reveal him talking with a very bemused and ironic smirk on his face to a now withered and rapidly aging Thatcher. It turns out that Kane’s parents (with his mother’s reluctant but finally approving consent) have essentially ‘sold’ their child to a large East Coast based bank of which Thatcher is Chairman of the Board. This development has come about as a result of a former boarder of Kane’s parents’ home leaving them stock in a silver mine as payment for his debt which has turned out to be extremely lucrative, and has unintentionally made Kane and his family very wealthy. It is suggested by the scene of the mother signing the contract with Mr. Thatcher that she is hopeful that her son can now be ‘properly brought up’ in a new environment befitting his new status and to shield him from his father.
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As the now adult Kane points out with a mixture of bitterness, ironic humor, anger and a fatalistic philosophical shrug of his shoulders he has been raised by a bank! In this scene we first see Kane speaking in a deceptively amiable tone that dramatically becomes a rageful and hurt anger while a deeply disturbed and world-weary Thatcher complains about the considerable fortune that Kane has “irresponsibly” squandered away on wine, women, and song throughout the United States and Europe while attending, and then being expelled from, a series of major Ivy League colleges for his rebellious hijinks and complete indifference to institutional learning and authority. The dialogue here (and the visual dynamics of the scene itself) reinforce and finally foreground an underlying sense of catastrophe with regard to the now wealthy and powerful young man who sits resentfully across from a notoriously greedy and manipulative old capitalist-guardian who wonders openly how such a spoiled and ungrateful man could have emerged from his (and the bank’s) ‘wise care.’ Besides, Thatcher views Kane as a very dangerous and ‘unstable’ investment that must be disciplined. Thus what Thatcher now offers Kane is some kind of cynical business compromise that he (vainly) hopes will ensure Kane’s loyalty to his revered capitalist principles.
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Toward this end Thatcher informs Kane that as a new full-fledged member of the capitalist class that he has a responsibility to the stockholders and investors in the many diversified corporate entities that Thatcher and his bank have developed. He formally drafts a letter upon Kane’s 25th birthday informing Kane that this occasion officially marks Kane’s complete independence from the firm of Thatcher & Co. as well as giving Kane full corporate responsibility for the “world’s sixth largest private fortune.” However the young, dynamic (and resentful) Kane has a decidedly different view of both his wealth and what should be done with it:
Thatcher: [who is still dictating the business letter to Kane]
Charles I don’t think you quite realize the full
Importance of the position you are about to
occupy in the world. I’m therefore enclosing
for your consideration a complete list of your
holdings extensively cross-indexed...
[Abrupt cut to Thatcher’s assistant reading Kane’s written
reply to Thatcher as the old man sits looking exasperated]
Assistant: “Dear Mr. Thatcher”...It’s from Mr. Kane...
“Sorry, but I’m not interested in gold mines,
oil wells, shipping, or real estate...” [At this
point Thatcher angrily grabs the letter
and snorts “What? Not interested?” and
reads on]...However one item on your list
intrigues me, the New York Inquirer, a little
newspaper you acquired in a foreclosing. Please
don’t sell it. I’m coming back to America to
take charge. I think it would be fun to run a
newspaper...[At this point Thatcher expresses
his disgust by angrily repeating Kane’s
flippant phrase “I think it would be ‘fun’ to run
a newspaper!” (Thatcher then growls)...
At this point a rapid montage series of newspaper headlines are shown bearing the masthead New York Inquirer. The headlines read: TRACTION TRUST EXPOSED! TRACTION TRUST SMASHED BY THE INQUIRER! LANDLORDS REFUSE TO CLEAR SLUMS! I NQUIRER WINS SLUM FIGHT! COPPER ROBBERS INDICTED! GALLEONS OF SPAIN OFF JERSEY COAST! As a now fulminating Thatcher openly bemoans what Kane is doing as the camera pulls back to reveal Thatcher, holding the “Inquirer” with its headline, standing in front of Kane’s desk. Kane is seated behind the desk as it swivels around to address Thatcher directly. Kane is calmly drinking a cup of coffee as he looks up at Thatcher...
THATCHER: Is this really your idea of how to
run a newspaper?
KANE: I don’t know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher.
I just try everything I can think of.
THATCHER: (Reading the headlines) “Galleons of Spain off
the Jersey coast” You know you haven’t the
slightest proof that this--this armada-- is off the
Jersey coast...
KANE: Can you prove that it isn’t?
(At this point Kane’s friend and accountant for the paper,
Bernstein rushes in, a cable in his hand. He stops when he
sees Thatcher)
KANE: (Genially introduces them) Mr. Bernstein, Mr.
Thatcher
BERNSTEIN: How are you, Mr. Thatcher?
(Thatcher gives him only a very brief nod)
BERNSTEIN: (con’t) We just had a wire from Cuba, Mr.
Kane (he stops embarrassed, eyeing
Thatcher warily)
KANE: That’s all right. We have no secrets from our
readers. Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted
readers, Mr. Bernstein. He knows what’s wrong
with every copy of the “Inquirer” since I took charge
Read the cable.
BERNSTEIN: Food marvelous in Cuba--girls delightful stop
could send you prose poems about scenery.
Don’t feel right spending your money…
Stop… there’s no war in Cuba signed Wheeler.
Any answer?
KANE: Yes. Dear Wheeler--(pauses a moment)--you
provide the prose poems--I’ll provide the war.
BERNSTEIN: That’s very good Mr. Kane. (Thatcher,
now bursting with indignation, sits down)
KANE: (looking rather pleased with himself) I kinda like
it myself. Send it right away, Mr. Bernstein.
BERNSTEIN: Right away.
(Bernstein leaves. After a moment of indecision, Thatcher
decides to make one last try)
THATCHER: Charles. I came to see you about this--cam-
paign of yours...er...the “Inquirer’s” cam-
paign-- against the Metropolitan Transfer
Company.
KANE: Good. You got some material we can use against
them?
THATCHER: You’re still a college boy, aren’t you
Charles?
KANE: Oh, no, I was expelled from college--several
colleges. Don’t you remember? (Thatcher
glares at him)...I remember. I think that’s when
I first lost my belief that you were omnipotent,
Mr. Thatcher--when you told me that the dean’s
decision at Harvard, despite all your efforts was
irrevocable--(He thinks, and looks at Thatcher
inquiringly)--irrevocable--(Thatcher stares at
him angrily, tight-lipped)...I can’t tell you how
often I’ve learned the correct pronunciation of
that word, but I always forget.
THATCHER: (Not interested, coming out with it) I
think I should remind you, Charles, of
a fact you seem to have forgotten. You
are yourself one of the company’s
largest individual stockholders.
KANE: The trouble is, Mr. Thatcher, you don’t realize
you’re talking to two people. As Charles
Foster Kane, who has eighty-two thousand,
six hundred and thirty-one shares of Metropo-
litan Transfer--you see, I do have a rough idea
of my holdings--I sympathize with you. Charles
Foster Kane is a dangerous scoundrel, his
paper should be run out of town and a
committee should be formed to boycott him.
You may, if you can form such a committee,
put me down for a contribution of one thou-
sand dollars.
THATCHER: (Angrily) Charles, my time is too valu-
able for me--
KANE: On the other hand--(His manner becomes very
serious and his voice rises)--I am the pub-
lisher of the “Inquirer.” As such, it is my duty
--I’ll let you in on a little secret, it is also my
pleasure--to see to it that the decent, hard-
working people of this city are not robbed
blind by a group of money-mad pirates be-
cause, God help them, they have no one to
look after their interests! (Thatcher has
risen from his chair. He now puts on his hat
and walks away)--I’ll let you in on another
little secret, Mr. Thatcher (Thatcher stops.
Kane walks up to him)...I think I’m the man
to do it. You see I have money and property.
If I don’t defend the interests of the underpri-
vileged, somebody else will--maybe somebody
without any money or any property--and that
would be too bad.
THATCHER: (Puts on his hat) I happened to see
your consolidated statement this morn-
ing, Charles. Don’t you think it’s rather
unwise to continue this philanthropic
enterprise--this “Inquirer”--that’s cost-
ing you one million dollars a year?
KANE: You’re right. We did lose a million dollars
last year. We expect to lose a million next
year. You know, Mr. Thatcher--at the rate
of a million a year--we’ll have to close this
place--in sixty years (smiles smugly)
Significantly this early scene of a now young adult Kane foreshadows much of what is to happen in both the main narrative of Welles’ film text and in the celluloid life of his main protagonist. For what is brilliantly demonstrated in this tension filled dialogue between the emerging newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane and the wily, aging capitalist/guardian Walter Parks Thatcher is the self serving power, hubris, condescension, ethical hypocrisy and misplaced liberal idealism of the ‘new’ American bourgeois class as represented by Kane vis-à-vis the traditional elitist pragmatism, corporate cynicism, and reactionary conservatism of monopoly capitalists embodied by Thatcher. What is especially striking about all the early scenes between Kane and Thatcher in the film is how they so openly and subtly encapsulate so many of the major themes, ideas, and values that Welles is addressing and expressing in the film text.
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For example, in the above scene the dialogue as well as the mise-en-scène suggests that Kane is so wrapped up in his own personal resentment and ego war with Thatcher (and what he represents) that he has a massive blind spot with respect to his own motivations and actions. The content of the dialogue and the physical juxtapositions of Thatcher and Kane within the compositional frame continually reveal a fundamental contradiction between Kane’s somewhat heroic view of himself (and his stated intentions) and the actual meanings and implications of what he says and does. This is represented visually in the camera’s systematic positioning of Kane figuratively and literally ‘rising’ from beneath the patriarchal and class-based authority of Thatcher’s domination and control [see series of adjoining stills]. This is echoed in the script where Kane constantly undermines, attacks, ridicules and condescends to Thatcher’s blustery, self-righteous presumption of power and counsel over his former ward.
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When Kane sarcastically and with bitter irony tells Bernstein that “Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted readers” and that “He knows what’s wrong with every copy of the “Inquirer” since I took charge” he is both acknowledging the (unwanted) historical role of Thatcher in his life, and serving notice that Thatcher (and people like him) will never again dictate to him or the “hardworking people” (that Kane naively insists he “represents”), what their personal, social, economic and political destinies will or should be. It’s important to note once again that Welles never separates the individual from the social, the personal from the political or the present moment from the historical, in either the narrative and thematic thrust of Citizen Kane, nor in his filmic representations and strategies. The mise-en-scène, montage (as in the rapid series of newspaper headlines that Thatcher and we in the audience reads), music, sound, set design and dialogue are presented as a structural, textual, and ideological unity that provides the viewer with multileveled and complex perspectives on the dialectical interaction of personal/psychological behavior and motivation as seen within the fluid but clearly discernible context of social-political reality. Thus we are able to glimpse what the various class interests, prejudices, actions and motivations are from the cinematic standpoint of their varied and complex positionings within the frame.
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Toward this end Welles continually references, through the innovative and expressionist uses of deep focus and chiaroscuro photography (as taken by the legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland), the conflicts and tensions of various members of the cast as they are portrayed in relationship to Kane. As a result the viewer is able to discern from both the different behavior of individual actors and the dynamic juxtapositions of action and movement within the frame what Welles is attempting to get them to ‘see.’ What the viewer witnesses in the exchanges between Kane and his friends, colleagues, enemies, and acolytes is how his flawed ‘personality’ and behavioral choices and decisions are not merely a reflection of his psychological state at any given time in the narrative, and how these personal aspects of character dovetail with, or serve as distinct contrast to, the political and ideological concerns, attitudes and values of the other ‘personalities’ Kane interacts with.
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Thus we able to see how Welles, like Brecht in his theories of the theatre, sought to use the cinematic techniques and sensibility later associated with film noir to illuminate his larger concerns with what Welles in another context referred to as the ‘poetry’ of his approach to the visual demands of the cinema:
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"With me, the visual is a solution to what the poetic and musical form dictates. I don’t begin with the visual and then try to find a poetry or music to stick in the picture. The picture has to follow it. And again, people tend to think that my first preoccupation is with the simple plastic effects of the cinema. But to me they all come out of an interior rhythm, which is like the shape of music or the shape of poetry. I don’t go around like a collector picking up beautiful images and pasting them together...I believe in the film as a poetic medium. I don’t think it competes with painting, or with ballet--the visual side of films is a key to poetry. There is no picture which justifies itself, no matter how beautiful, striking, horrific, tender...it doesn’t mean anything unless it makes poetry possible. And that suggests something, because poetry should make your hair stand up on your skin, should suggest things, evoke more than you see. The danger of cinema is that you see everything, because it’s a camera. So what you have to do is to manage to evoke, to incant, to raise up things which are not really there...And the interior conception of the author, above all, must have a single shape.” [italics mine]
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What Welles reveals here is a precise concern with the formal demands of the medium that is not reductively tied to an idealist notion of the aesthetic as an end in itself (art for art’s sake). Rather form and content are dialectically linked to the narrative and thematic dynamics of the medium (i.e. its ‘poetry’) that allows it to, in Welles’ vivid language “evoke, incant, to raise up things which are not really there...” Precisely by working to find and express the “interior rhythm” of his poetic and musical shapes, Welles is able to go beyond the self-justifying poses of the image itself (“no matter how beautiful, striking, horrific, tender...”) to an expressive and creative area of activity that “makes poetry possible.” By making this poetry “suggest something” the visual image is compelled to follow the poetic and musical demands of the “author’s” (read filmmaker’s) interior conception or vision. This philosophical concern is dramatically portrayed in the film text and subtext of Citizen Kane, which utilizes the “poetic and musical forms” that dictate how the visual is going to be expressed (“the visual side of films is a key to poetry”). A major representative of Welles’ conviction that “film is a poetic medium” is found in Citizen Kane where film noir is used “ to suggest things, to evoke more than you see.”
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This idea is of course central to Welles’ notion that the individual is not estranged or separate from his/her social or cultural milieu or context. In the words of film critic and Wellesian scholar Joseph McBride this goes for Welles’ structural and textual conceptions of Citizen Kane as well:
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“The image is suspect in Kane; each moment in the musical pattern of the film has significance only in the context of all the other moments, past and to come. What is on screen at a given moment is not definitive but is part of a state of mind shared by the author and his audience.”
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Throughout the entire film Welles is concerned with showing how and why Kane acts as he does, but is careful never to dismiss or underestimate the role that the social dimensions of his experience plays in what might be called the ‘ecology of capitalism.’ This immersion in, and dependence on material things, ownership, and property is a recurring motif in the film in both its expressive and textural dimensions. There are endless references to the power of money and the things it can buy vis-à-vis the necessity of values and attitudes that would go beyond, supercede or critique the tyranny of materialism. This dynamic is represented forcefully in the friendship and subsequent conflict of Kane and Jed Leland (played by Joseph Cotton), whose character not only acts as a metaphorical and actual conscience for Kane, but whose romantic idealism (and eventual disillusionment and cynicism) is linked to his personal integrity, independence and faith in the principles and ideals that Kane blithely uses and discards in his single-minded and selfish quest for power and all the things that Kane thinks it can ‘buy’ (including love and friendship). One of the pivotal scenes in the film is the scene where Leland finally confronts Kane about his hubris and abuse of power. However before that revelatory scene there is an earlier one that bears repeating and serves as a foreshadowing of what Kane later betrays in both his personal and professional life:
KANE: I’ve changed the front page a little, Mr. Bernstein.
That’s not enough--There’s something I’ve got to
get into this paper besides pictures and print--I’ve
got to make the New York “Inquirer” as important
to New York as the gas in that light.
LELAND: What’re you going to do, Charlie?
KANE: My Declaration of Principles--don’t smile, Jed--
(who is getting the idea) Take dictation, Mr.
Bernstein--
BERNSTEIN: I can’t write shorthand, Mr. Kane--
KANE: I’ll write it myself. (Kane grabs a piece of paper
and a crayon. Sitting down on the bed next to
Bernstein, he starts to write)
BERNSTEIN: (Looking over his shoulder) You don’t
wanta make any promises, Mr.Kane, you
don’t wanta keep.
KANE: These will be kept. (Stops and reads what he has written). I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. (Starts to write again; reading as he writes) I will also provide them--
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LELAND: That’s the second sentence you’ve started with “I”--
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KANE: (Looking up) People are going to know who’s responsible. And they’re going to get the news--the true news--quickly and simply and entertainingly. (With real conviction) And no special interests will be allowed to interfere with the truth of that news (Writes again; reading as he writes) I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings--Signed--Charles Foster Kane.
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LELAND: Charlie--(Kane looks up)--Can I have that?
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KANE: I’m going to print it--(Calls) Mike!
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MIKE: Yes, Mr. Kane
KANE: Here’s an editorial. I want to run it in a box on
the front page.
MIKE: (Very wearily) Today’s front page, Mr. Kane?
KANE: That’s right. We’ll have to remake the front
page again--better go down and let them
know.
MIKE: All right, Mr. Kane. (He starts away)
LELAND: Just a minute, Mike. (Mike turns) When
you’re done with that, I’d like to have it
back. (Kane looks at Leland)--I’d just
like to keep that particular piece of paper
myself. I’ve got a hunch it might turn out
to be one of the important papers of our
time(Grins, a little ashamed of his ardor)
A document--like the Declaration of Inde-
pendence--and the Consitution--and my
first report card at school. (Kanes smiles
back at him, but they are both serious)
By examining this and other similar excerpts from the script it is possible to discern how and why Welles chose to emphasize the social and personal relationships of Kane and his various moral and political alter egos, supporters, and detractors in order to structure the film as a recurring series of pivotal dramatic conflicts and indeterminate conversations within the film text. This enables the viewer to experience these dramatic tableaux as an ongoing debate between the characters in the narrative over the central questions of power, authority, history, society, ethics, economics, and the law. It is this almost obsessive motif that Welles comes back to again and again in both the film’s visual text and thematic subtext as he persistently drives home the idea that the individual crises of his main protagonists are not in any way divorced from the larger historical, social, and ideological concerns and dynamics affecting and shaping American life during the seventy year period (1870-1940) that frames the diegetic chronology of the film.
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Thus the ‘poetry’ that is created by Welles and his co-workers through the creative uses of cinematography, direction, acting, and most importantly, editing is used to “evoke and incant” a sense of a society undergoing a massive historical transition from a formerly isolated and constricted xenophobic nationalism to an international engagement with the world that is marked by an underlying irrational fear, exploitation, and cavalier dismissal of other cultures, societies, and peoples. These societal perspectives are of course reflections of the United States’s own domestic pathologies, especially those regarding “race”, class, gender, and cultural identity. It is these attitudes, values, and national traditions that helps usher in the age of American imperialism after 1890 in South American as well as African and Asian diasporic societies and cultures in Cuba, the Phillipines, and Haiti, all of which are invaded by North America and quickly become dependent and semicolonial, hemispheric outposts of the United States by 1915. What Welles asks the viewer to “see” and acknowledge is how these kind of seemingly abstract and prosaic concerns and tensions are embodied and expressed by individual characters in his film seeking to confront, defend, or overcome oppressive systems of domination and control inherited from the past. This struggle requires however that these characters come face to face with the so-called ‘dark side’ of their society and of course themselves. This is where the centrality of film noir aesthetics plays such a crucial role in Citizen Kane. Through the dense prism of the psychological and emotional conflicts that occur between Kane, and his mistress Susan, as well as his parents, colleagues, fellow travelers, partners, and archrivals (e.g. Jed Leland, Mr. Bernstein, Thatcher, ‘Boss’ Gittes, Kane’s wife and son, etc.) one begins to glimpse how noir devices in film take on more than merely a stylistic or generic identity in Welles’ vision as a filmmaker. By paying close attention to Welles’ ideological and aesthetic motivations for making the film Citizen Kane as well as its subsequent major impact on three generations of filmmakers throughout the world one can also determine how and why film noir became a much preferred cinematic medium for radical American directors and writers (as well as actors) seeking to find their own ‘poetic’ solutions to the creative challenges of using film to critically examine and comment upon social and political reality.
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A Live Music Review: Olu Dara & the Okra Orchestra
by Kofi Natambu
KONCH magazine
©July 2000
Olu Dara & the Okra Orchestra
Yoshi's Jazz Club
July 17, 2000
Oakland, California
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OLU DARA
In a riveting display of musicianship and stagecraft the great multi-intrumentalist and consummate storyteller, blues vocalist, and Jazz griot Olu Dara led his astonishing orchestral quintet in a glorious two-set, one night appearance at the exquisite Yoshi's Jazz club in downtown Oakland.
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Weaving a seamless web of African diasporic melodic, rhythmic and sonic musical traditions, Dara and cohorts absolutely mesmerized the packed house with a stunning command of a grand smorgasbord of global black musical styles: West African highlife (both trad & Fela Kuti-inspired) Caribbean reggae, calypso, dance and ska, Mississippi delta blues, fifty years worth of prime-rib Afro-American funky rhythm & blues, and an endless array of Jazz-based and inflected styles from Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington, to Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Art Blakey (and black again).
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What made the event so extraordinary, aside from the incredible versatility of Dara and his band, was Dara's heraldic and bravura tone on cornet (open & muted), guitar, and blues harp, as well as a captivatingly charming, hip and even slick, stage presence. Handsome, sly, witty, sweet, sexy, tough, downhome and vulnerable all at once, Dara looks, acts, and sounds like a great novelist's, poet's or filmmaker's idea of a legendary musician. There is something positively iconic and aesthetically arresting about the way that Dara plays, sings, talks, and moves that bring to mind such adjectives as 'heroic' and 'archetypal.' He and his amazing ensemble (Kwatel Jones-Quartey on guitars and vocals, Coster Massamba on congas, Alonzo Gardner on electric bass, and Larry Johnson, drums) somehow manage to sound like a large orchestra through ingenious instrumental voicings and harmonically deft orchestrated arrangements that conjure up a density of tonalities and quicksilver textures that effortlessly slide from one sonic area of black musical history to the next.
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The really eerie thing about this band is that despite its myriad of inherited forms it never sounds derivative or stuck in any static nostalgia zone (take THAT Wynton & acolytes!). Its resolutely independent sound identity is so fixed and clearly enuciated that it sounds like a series of Romare Bearden, William Johnson, Bill Traylor, Thornton Dial and Jacob Lawrence paintings come to life (with J-M Basquiat dancing fiercely along the edges!). The startlingly lucid execution and collage-like structures within such a thoroughly ROOTED musical conception also reminds me of the famous Roscoe Mitchell quote of "jitterbugging with the artifacts in the sound museum." The other sublime thing about Dara is that he can really sing and play the blues, and he possesses a poet's sensibility on cornet that can be majestic, tender, celebratory, melancholic, poignant or gruffly beautiful in a way that can only be compared to Pops Armstrong & Miles in its precise attention to emotional and expressive nuance (he even played a haunting homage to Ellington's first great soloist, and musical collaborator from the 1920s, Bubber Miley).
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Finally what Dara and his orchestra demonstrate is that the creative key to African American music lies not in lazily imitating or emulating, in a repertory-like fashion, the triumphs of the past, but in fearlessly engaging, and transforming, the present (like all the former greats did). The story this band tells is not of aesthetic glories locked in the glass-case museums of yesteryear, but of the profound and dynamic adventures of this very moment and those yet to come. Our only task (aside from dancing ourselves into a frenzy) is to listen and learn…
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Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and lnnovation in the '80s
by Gary Giddins
Oxford University Press, 1985
(Second edition, 2000)
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Book review by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 3, Number, Spring, 1986
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To paraphrase an old streetcorner expression I had some real problems with this book from the jump. Though Giddins has a media reputation on the east coast that elevates his work to major cultural status (many of his colleagues repeatedly claim that he is the paramount critic of Jazz today). I must admit that I remain thoroughly unconvinced. My gut feeling about Giddins is that if he is the best writer on the music in this country then both the music and the field of 'jazz criticism· is in a real crisis. His latest work, which has been receiving inexplicably rave reviews from the elitist coterie of New York newspapers and magazines is an almost textbook case study of what is fundamentally wrong with most writing about improvisational music in the U.S.
Giddins greatest deficiency as a critical analyst lies in the delicate area of cultural history and philosophy. In this book the problem is expressed in his rather superficial use of cultural categories and definitions derived from the European art tradition (re: what is known as "classical music"). In attempting to impose alien conceptions and values on the music as a means of ·evaluating· it, Giddins ignores by default what is truly unique about the art in terms of its actual historical and cultural dynamics or the independent aspects of its deep philosophical traditions. Nor are we given any real insight into why or how Jazz has had such a major impact on 20th century American society and culture.
For example: in the introduction to this book Giddens makes a big deal out of the relationship between what he calls the "avant-garde" and the general jazz audience's response to the content of the music. Giddins asserts that the "resurgence" of jazz in recent years is due to the re-emergence of "swing, melody and beauty" as well as such vintage jazz qualities as "virtuosity, wit, and structure." It is Giddins' belief that the relative absence of these values during much of what he calls the "contemporary postmodernist jazz of the past 25 years" is responsible in part for the declining interest among listeners, musicians, and critics in musical approaches that are perceived as being too far out of the "mainstream." Thus Giddins calls the period from 1960-1975 "extremist" and "self-indulgent" and alleges that the backlash response of musicians has been to move toward what he calls "neo-classical" jazz. It would be much more accurate to say that many so-called critics (like himself) are openly sponsoring a backlash of reactionary criticIsm! For in Giddins· incredibly myopic view he claims that neo-classicism is the functional synthesis of "musicians weaned on the free jazz of the 1960s who now sift ·20s classicism '30s swing. '40s bop, and ‘50s soul for repertoire and expressive wisdom." but there is nothing new or profoundly significant about this rather banal fact. As a 'historical category for critical examination this information has very little weight, and is almost useless as a basis for theoretical analysis.
The truth is that throughout the music’s history black musicians have always consciously drawn on the formal and technical ideas and values of the past to make their artistic statements. In fact one would be hard pressed to find any authentic innovator in the roughly 100 year history of what is called "Jazz" who is not also a consummate master of the most fundamental, even ancient, traditions governing the historical identity of the music. These widely recognized individuals (e.g. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, etc.) are a veritable who's who of 20th century American music. All of these musicians and composers were considered utterly 'avant-garde' for their time, yet if there is one thing they all have in common, it is a deep love and mastery of the Blues.
But Giddins doesn't stop there. He further muddles what is already a rather incoherent and weak analysis by vainly trying to cover all bets through slyly contradicting himself. For example he says that the "great figures" of the 1960-1975 period: John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and a "few others" were able to bring off the most demanding improvisations, but that these musicians "spawned imitators" who "mistook freedom for license and justified excess with apocalyptic rhetoric." Then after sounding like. Ronald Reagan reprimanding his critics by openly questioning their –gasp!--patriotism, Giddins makes a long list of unfounded charges, allegations, and statements which simply defy historical fact or logical sense. It is then one wishes Giddins hadn't tried to be what too many people say he is: a critic. Throughout this book Giddins confuses the capitalist economic demands of the rapacious music industry for a controlled marketplace of ideas, styles, attitudes, and values with the independent aesthetic developments and changes among musicians. As a result he establishes false and misleading divisions that suggest that the categories that seemingly distinguish the so-called 'avant-garde' from the ‘traditionalists' are indicative of qualitative differences in their "expressive technique" and "formal sophistication." This is nonsense. These categories (like the ones that separate the "serious" value of Bach or Mozart from the "trivial" contributions of a Chuck Berry or Little Richard) are just another example of the ideological tyranny of thoroughly bourgeois notions about what constitutes "real art" in Western society. Needless to say this bankrupt criteria of aesthetic values is not only racist and culturally ethnocentric, but mythmaking of the most spurious kind.
Furthermore Giddins refuses to draw the obvious connections between media control of the public's access to all creative art forms (like music) and the larger intellectual and sociological trends in American culture. It is ludicrous to suggest that the strictly subjective notions of what constitutes "swing, melody and beauty" or the standards for "virtuosity, wit, and structure" can be definitively linked to what any audience will or will not buy. There is also in this book little demonstrated understanding of how the political (read: artistic) climate affects patterns of production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of goods (e.g. records) in a monopolized multinational (capitalist) economy. Musicians don't determine what is of 'value' in the United States (or virtually anywhere else in the world today) but "critics", accountants, industry executives, public relations directors, and mass media (especially TV and Radio) do. To say as Giddins does that the musical developments of the past 25 years have made it 'difficult' for listeners to 'absorb' the music, and that as a result a 'backlash' for more 'traditional' values like "formalism" and "melody" have set in, is to miss the obvious fact that the music itself can't be faulted for how or why any audience reacts to it (the obverse is also true--its acceptance by an audience has nothing to do with its intrinsic artistic merit or value).
The situation might be alleviated somewhat if there was at least a relatively well-informed audience for art in this country but in this media-fixated culture that is an increasingly fading possibility. In any event it is also silly to attach any significant meaning to what 'imitators' do or don't do in any art. Or to take this misplaced concern one giant step further and assert a la Giddins that they are responsible for a change in how the general public perceives the music. After all there are ‘excesses' and 'imitations' in any major artistic or social movement, especially one that is an integral part of a culture. Besides, whose idea of "extremism" is the determining one?
What are we to make of a jazz critic who states that "Jazz modernists rarely investigated the music's past before the avant-garde blew the old jazz truths out of the water?" As I pointed out earlier this contradiction (based on an assumption that is completely false) betrays a fundamental understanding of what the actual musical developments have been or even more to the point, what they have meant. Simply stated what these historical and cultural developments mean to Giddins in his ideological imposition of European criteria (i.e. neo-classicism) is not what they have meant to American music. In the context of U.S. culture jazz in all its forms ans stylistic idioms have played a major role in our musical education. This misunderstanding (misreading?) of the cultural history of the music has also led Giddins to a distorted use of the phrase "avant-garde" since part of the philosophical attitude of black creative musicians is expressed in a "classic" comment by the great French composer Edgar Varese who once said: "There is no such thing as an avant-garde–only people who are a little late."
Giddins' peculiarly Western notion about 'progress' in the arts leads him to posit hierarchical categories in black music where none previously existed. The avant-garde vs. the tradition has no real validity in a context where the verifiable participation of artists in an eclectic cultural tradition that draws on the historical past is an essential part of identity. This is another way of saying that Jazz (and by extension) American culture, never developed in the same way that classical music did in Europe. It is a serious misreading of musical and social history to compare the aesthetics and cultural growth of Jazz with that of European classical music. The completely different historical circumstances and conditions under which these respective musics evolved, not to mention that these forms emerged as artistic responses to two vastly different cultural experiences. means among other things that black improvisational music represents an entirely new conception of what music is in the world. Or even what music conceivably could be. It is in the area of creative possibility that Jazz has captured the imagination of 20th century world culture and is precisely why it has continued, despite widespread and organized political and economic (not to mention cultural) opposition, to grow and expand as an art form. All of this has nothing to do with Giddins' claim that the phenomenon of Wynton Marsalis as a jazz 'celebrity' is due to the relative superiority of "neo-classical" values in the contemporary jazz scene. Even Marsalis knows that "virtuosity" aside, the marketing of a viable commercial image based on non-musical or extramusical criteria (i.e. fashion, corporate identity and promotion, media hype etc.) has more to do with his public "popularity" than anything he plays as a musician (which is not to say that Wynton can't play, only that Omette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, David Murray, World Saxophone Quartet, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Art Ensemble of Chicago and many other outstanding mus1c1ans today are not given any support because of the economics of the same industry that made Wynton possible).
Unfortunately Gary Giddens does have support. As "jazz critic" for the Village Voice who regularly freelances for the likes of the New York Times, Stereo Review, Rolling Stone, and even GO magazine he is one of a dozen or so white jazz critics who live quite well off the struggling, scuffling artists who make the music (the innovators and mainstreamers alike). So I would suggest that instead of buying this book, go buy the recordings of the artists who are reviewed in this book (Arthur Blythe, Murray, AIR, Taylor, Omette etc.). Great music is better than bad theory any day. As Monk says: "Straight, No Chaser ... "
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https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2015/02/kofi-natambu-on-SOS-Poems-Amiri-Baraka.html
Kofi Natambu On SOS: Poems 1961-2013
by Amiri Baraka, Grove Press, 2015
A Critical Review of a "Review”:
The White Supremacist Incompetence of New York Times "literary critic" Dwight Garner vs. the literary and cultural WORK and achievements of Amiri Baraka from 1961-2013
by Kofi Natambu
February 14, 2015
The Panopticon Review
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“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”
―Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1956)
As U.S. History—social, cultural, economic, and political—notoriously and repeatedly reveals to us, the sustained relentless brutality and perversely willful ignorance and self serving arrogance of White Supremacy (forever masked in this country by the always handy and rhetorically vague euphemism called “racism") is simultaneously conscious, subconscious, and unconscious behavior no matter who is engaging in it. Moreover, in the living ideological and empirical context of a society and culture eyebrow deep in the vast and thoroughly rancid ocean of lies, distortions, aporias, evasions and denials intrinsic to the white supremacist intellectual mindset (and practice), the knee-jerk default position that one takes is nearly always one of an insistently dismissive and rank condescension toward the black subject/object/target of one’s middlebrow contempt and patronizing indifference. Thus instead of an intelligently considered and even minimally rational and focused critical analysis of the actual range and scope of the black object’s actual work and contributions we inevitably are subjected instead to an outrageously myopic reductionism and lazy simpleminded a priori rejection of the work in favor of a smugly self satisfied and mindless incompetence buttressed by an utterly defensive witlessness masquerading as “insight.” The result is the idiotic pseudo psychoanalytic bile and corny extraliterary judgment and moral posturing that Mr. Garner has conjured here instead of a mature, even minimally competent critical review of the actual “gift and achievements” of Amiri Baraka’s WORK over a half century. For example as Garner conveniently refuses to even acknowledge, let alone responsibly engage, regardless of what anyone thinks otherwise nearly every major writer or artist in history worth even a modicum of our attention and regard is necessarily and by definition a raft of internal and external contradictions and unresolved tensions that one may like or dislike, understand or are clueless about, identify with or disdain. But what pray tell does any of that have to do with the actual “gift and achievements” of their work? Far more relevant here is what does any of that has to do with a genuine critical assessment and engagement of this work? T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (just to name two of the endless number of famously white “mainstream" canonical examples one could cite) were both notoriously racist, sexist, and fascist minded snobs steeped in religious bigotry and secular hatreds whose highly contentious relationship to a wide array of people and cultures deeply rankles, upsets, offends, and horrifies many to this day (and largely for very good and substantive reasons) but in the FINAL ANALYSIS what does that have to do with determining whether or not Pound and Eliot were great poets and critics whose actual “gifts and achievements” were still extremely important and of immense artistic and intellectual value creatively to the theory and practice of poetry and literary expression whether one “liked” or “identified” with them or not.
In the case of Amiri Baraka my point is that even if Garner foolishly but honestly thought Baraka’s work overall was somehow unworthy of his or our collective attention he would still have to make the intellectual and analytical EFFORT at minimum to seriously and critically investigate and thus intelligently ascertain exactly what he thought Baraka’s work did and didn’t do in his literary career in order to share his opinions and ideas about the relative value (or lack thereof) of Baraka’s work for his criticism to have any kind of useful validity. But Garner does not come anywhere close to that basic level or standard of competency as a literary critic or even disinterested academic observer of Baraka’s fifty year oeurve. The reasons Garner utterly fails to do that is because he’s such a willfully smug, arrogant, condescending, and absurdly patronizing literary policeman who simply pretends he always already “knows” who and what Baraka is and isn’t as a writer and cultural force that he clearly thought/felt it was beneath his station or position (status?) to do what is REQUIRED of him to as a critic. In its place we get instead some silly infantile bullshit about Baraka’s “personality" (or what is absurdly construed by Garner to be Baraka’s personal psychology). Talk about rhetorical dishwater. It sounds to me like Garner has been drinking it! By dismissively reducing Baraka’s poetry to being “full of tantrums and sophistries” and Baraka himself to a mere “malcontent” who wore his “id on his sleeve” and was “tightly wound” and who “wanted to slice up "the white man" (could Garner possibly mean himself?) like a spiral ham” what we decidedly don’t get is a real literary critic capable of explicating and expressing ideas and opinions worth reading and (gasp!) actually thinking seriously about one way or the other. Instead we get the pompous adolescent blurtings of a junior/bush league pop psychologist. Anything else that Baraka has to offer as a major poet and intellectual Garner assures us without a hint of evidentiary information or analysis is nothing but “many, many deficiencies of coherence” that Garner couldn’t or didn’t want to grasp because it’s relatively unimportant or meaningless to him. Further as Baraka embraced a series of differing ideological positions we are told by Garner the presumptuous self proclaimed sage that Baraka's “political voice ran over his poetic one” (a falsely dichotomous theoretical split of political ideology and poetics if there ever was one) and that process in turn introduced some truly bad and contemptible things to emerge in his poetry. What an insufferable intellectual fraud! As Roland Barthes pointed out so eloquently in his early literary and critical theory opus Mythologies (1956) Garner is the very embodiment of that creepy species of narcissistic sophistry known as “blind and dumb criticism.” By way of a concluding sortie on this rampant tendency by far too many white American “critics” like Mr. Garner to blithely and unjustly condescend to, marginalize, and patronize various literary personas and “public personalities" rather than genuinely analyze and critique their actual literary production and output --and especially as these attitudes and values are pervasively and rather routinely applied to black writers in the United States--Barthes strikingly prescient views are still quite germane. For example:
"Why do critics thus periodically proclaim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty: no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about existentialism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than another admitting shamefacedly that he does not have the luck to have been initiated into the philosophy of the Extraordinary; and no one more soldier-like than a third pleading for poetic ineffability. All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind. One mimics silliness in order to make the public protest in one's favour, and thus carry it along advantageously from complicity in helplessness to complicity in intelligence. It is an operation well known to salons like Madame Verdurin's: 'I whose profession it is to be intelligent, understand nothing about it; now you wouldn't understand anything about it either; therefore, it can only be that you are as intelligent as I am…"
"...In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism (for as it happens, it is these two philosophies particularly that one confesses to be unable to understand) is to elevate one’s blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: 'I don’t understand, therefore you are idiots.’ But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn’t it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while 'common sense' and ‘feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don't explain philosophers,but they explain you. You don't want to understand the play by Lefebvre the Marxist, but you can be sure that Lefebvre the Marxist understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (for I believe you to be more wily than lacking in culture) the delightfully 'harmless' confession you make of it.”
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A Critique of Norman Kelley’s book review in The Nation,
December 8, 2003
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A Critical Review of a Review
by Kofi Natambu
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Ready For Revolution: The Life & Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell
Scribner, 2003
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Norman Kelly’s rather confused, immature, and ultimately cynical “analysis” of the role that Stokely Carmichael and many other black radical activists played in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960-1975 period, while perceptive and insightful in some respects, is fundamentally deeply flawed and full of egregious mistakes and distortions with respect to the public historical record. It is also a casebook study of how and why so many post-Civil Rights era historians, theorists, and scholars have curiously missed the point of what ‘Black Power’ actually represented--not so much to the various so-called individual “leaders” of the movement (whom Kelley in a rather obviously shallow and naïve way oddly emphasizes)-- but to its many supporters both within and outside the Civil Rights movement and what it objectively meant, and continues to mean, to millions of ‘ordinary’ African American citizens who recognize that the relative absence of an independent black power base in the U.S. political economy (and I would add, in other broadly intellectual, theoretical, and cultural areas as well) is the basis of their continued marginalization, exploitation, and pervasive exclusion in the U.S capitalist political and economic system given the equally persistent and powerfully brutal force of racism/white supremacy in the general society. As a result, Kelly’s conflicted endorsement of the historically inaccurate and absurd claim made by white and black liberals alike (and some leftists as well) that the enunciation and support of the Black Power slogan by Carmichael and many others (who are usually lumped together in melodramatic and infantilized media accounts as demonic and monolithic “black militants”) was somehow responsible for the disintegration of the hallowed “grand alliance” coalition of labor, progressive clergy, liberals, and “civil rights Negroes” as Kelley puts it is not only seriously wrongheaded but also doesn’t fully identify what actually precipitated this split. This leads Kelley to inexplicably failing to acknowledge that many African Americans within the movement, not to mention the general black population in the northern and western regions of the country had already begun seriously questioning and challenging the ideological positions, ethics, tactical logic, and strategic practicality of this legendary coalition as a direct result of the virulently racist and often opportunist, manipulative, and hypocritical machinations of the Democratic party during the 1960-1965 period. Remember the tyrannical Dixiecrats that Malcolm X so eloquently talked about and critiqued in his pivotal “Ballots or Bullets” speech of April, 1964? That faction was and still is one of the major reactionary forces in the Democratic party which unfortunately also includes politically backward labor unions and racially bigoted white workers and middle-class professionals which makes up this “coalition” (so much for the reductive and accommodationist limitations of Bayard Rustin’s abject capitulation to this party’s leadership after 1964 in both domestic and foreign policy matters).
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The disillusioning and demoralizing spectacle of the MDFP debacle at the 1964 Democratic party convention, not to mention the endless and murderously racist attacks on movement organizers and black people in general throughout the south via beatings, jailings, arson, bombings, and public assassinations (like that of the Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the four young black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing and the heinous murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney by the KKK in 1963-1964) had already thoroughly convinced millions of black folks that perhaps nonviolent resistance and democratic liberal reform strategies were not the only ways to proceed. This was long before Carmichael abandoned a commitment to nonviolent resistance or publicly raised the banner of Black Power. It should be pointed out that by the time of the passage of national civil rights and voting rights legislation in 1964-1965 the CR movement was already in a deep and irreversible crisis. It’s important to note for example that as Carmichael himself acknowledged many times throughout his life and in this book, that by the time he and other SNCC members raised the Black Power slogan publicly on June 6, 1966, the Watts riot had already occurred ten months earlier and the new movement’s most outspoken, dynamic, and articulate champion Malcolm X had been dead for 18 months. Furthermore, by the spring and summer of 1966 Dr. King and SCLC were handed a publicly humiliating political defeat at the hands of Mayor Richard M. Daley the ruthless and wily ‘Boss’ of the Chicago Democratic Party machine as King, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young and others in SCLC and Operation Breadbasket tried rather ineptly to organize black workers and neighborhoods there. Their abject failure made it embarrassingly clear that no one in the Civil rights movement—including Carmichael and SNCC—had a clue of what to do to organize and expand the movement in the far more complex urban cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. By focusing almost exclusively on predominately rural and small and midsize town areas in the southern region of the country for well over a decade, the CR movement had never taken a theoretical, programmatic, strategic, or tactical stance of any consequence in the large northern cities. This is a major and crucial point that the black scholar and theorist Harold Cruse makes over and over again in his landmark study The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual published to both acclaim and controversy in 1967 at the height of the Black Power movement. Thus the masses of urbanized African Americans residing in highly industrialized or finance capital cities like Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had no viable leadership of any kind on a national level and so were left to their own devices. This is what led to the seemingly spontaneous explosion of localized leadership, organizations, and yes, “programs” in these areas that SNCC, Carmichael, King, SCLC, CORE and the NAACP were incapable of reaching in the traditional terms of the CR movement. So the general demand for black power among many African Americans was already a foregone conclusion.
It was in this context that ideological and social tendencies like The Black Panther Party, Congress of African People, the Republic of New Africa, and most importantly (and most advanced of these groups) the League of Revolutionary Black Workers emerged. Ron Karenga’s US formation and various other cultural nationalist groups were also created in this vacuum. That there would inevitably be both “positive” and “negative” dimensions to this social reality is obvious. This leads Kelley to contradicting himself in a number of significant ways in his review.
For example Kelley repeats the old canard that Carmichael and other “Black Power advocates” essentially abandoned the principle of organized struggle by substituting a “soft” cultural nationalist position for the “hard” political organizing and ideological activism that characterized Carmichael’s and SNCC’s earlier inspired efforts from 1960-1968. But the truth is much more complex than Kelley lets on in his pseudohip putdowns. At the same time Kelley points out precisely why black activists shifted gears to include a broader conception of political struggle that encompassed both a radical cultural consciousness and a commitment to advancing an independent black political stance. It’s clear of course as Kelley does manage to point out that many of these positions were themselves flawed not only because of their ideological and political limitations but also because of a serious lack of experience, discipline, and knowledge among these young cadre (the great majority of whom were between 15-30 years of age).
Carmichael’s and SNCC’s contribution to this morass was their blatant failure to actively seek out and attempt to establish a systematic way of helping to harness, educate, and organize this new dynamic energy and potential. But by the time these young veteran activists like Carmichael responded in the late ‘60s they were in many cases both too burnt out and demoralized themselves to tackle the even more complex and challenging demands of urban organizing. As a result this task was left in far too many instances to various opportunists, demagogues, and police agents who insinuated their highly egocentric and destructive attitudes and practices on the larger movement with disastrous results. I agree with Kelley that one of the consequences of the CR movement radicals failure to make this transition to organizing in the cities was an erroneously ‘compensatory’ reliance on flamboyant public rhetoric by Carmichael, H. “Rap” Brown and others in the crucial "urban rebellion years” of 1966-1968 to try to quickly make up for their lack of an established critique, analysis, and program by demonstrating that they were supportive of this grassroots defiance of black youth and working class adults. A classic case of lazy “trailing the masses” behavior. As Kelley also points out the immediate legacy of this activity led in too many instances to “symbolic” or performative politics among nationalists and leftists alike. It should also be noted in this light that, as Kelley makes clear, the hagiographic and idolatrous endorsement and largely unquestioning support and allegiance that the Pan-Africanist Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture gives to his African political mentors Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and President Sekou Toure in Guinea after going into exile in 1968 too often leads to a reductive and myopic ideological and political dead end.
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But what’s strangely missing from this assessment is a more nuanced, complex, and precise understanding of exactly who Stokely Carmichael really was in this movement in terms of his actual strengths and weaknesses alike. For example, Carmichael’s autobiography eloquently demonstrates his deep and profound love and appreciation for a number of individuals whom Kelley incorrectly and irresponsibly assumes Carmichael would have simply disparaged or dismissed as “Uncle Toms” in the 1960s and ’70s. But this is far from the truth. In fact, one of the closest, mutually respectful, and genuinely loving relationships in the entire movement were forged and maintained by Carmichael and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the case when Carmichael formally joined the movement at the age of 19 in 1960, when he openly and publicly disagreed with King on principle, strategy, and tactics within the movement after 1966 and it was still the case when both men died 30 years apart. One of the most profoundly moving and almost comical moments in the acclaimed ‘Eyes On The Prize’ series is the series episode where Dr. King is being interviewed by a TV reporter while marching in support of James Meredith in the summer of 1966 and strongly reaffirms his commitment to nonviolence and passive resistance and the white reporter suddenly turns to his left where Carmichael is marching right alongside Dr. King in the march and is asked if he agrees with his friend’s position. Stokely then just as emphatically states that he does not agree with his good friend and mentor in a number of ways but that it is equally important for them and all black people to unite on behalf of Meredith and against racist terrorism and intimidation in Mississippi. Carmichael is equally eloquent, informative, and respectful in his warm praises and appreciation of such legendary stalwarts of the movement as SNCC’s extraordinary founder Ella Baker, the black pacifist and movement strategist Bayard Rustin, whom Carmichael decisively split from and politically opposed after 1966, and even John Lewis, former SNCC chairman and now Georgia Congressman whom Carmichael replaced as chairman of SNCC in 1967 and whom Lewis himself bitterly and rather truculently put down his former colleague and fellow organizer in his own movement autobiography Walking with the Wind published the year Carmichael died (1998). There are many others from the movement whom Carmichael himself didn’t consider to be radicals or revolutionaries then or now who he nevertheless deeply respected and honored for their contributions in his book and it wasn’t because as Kelley cynically, stupidly, and rather condescendingly suggests because Carmichael was dying. If he had read and/or understood other important published accounts of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as the liberal journalist Jack Newfield’s groundbreaking book on SNCC entitled The Prophetic Minority (1966) or the radical social historian Howard Zinn’s equally informative text SNCC: The New Abolitionists published in 1964 and reprinted in 2002 or the passionate and groundbreaking book The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972) by former colleague and fellow SNCC organizer James Forman, or Freedom Song (1987) by fellow SNCC organizer (and white female) Mary King, Kelley would know that the Carmichael that he sometimes depicts in his piece is far from being merely another actual or contending ‘HNIC’ (‘Head Negro in Charge’) who simply lost his way. It is one of the strange ironies of Kelley’s review that he simultaneously gives Carmichael both far too little credit and far too much credit for his role as a “leader” in the movement—both before and after the declaration of Black Power.
This leads Kelley into the self-inflicted trap of not properly contextualizing the nature, form, and content of this “leadership” within the complex historical realities and boundaries of the larger social movements that he participated in and occasionally “led.” But Kelley’s far too limited, myopic, and jejune dependence on his cliché notion of the ‘HNIC syndrome’ keeps him from recognizing the obvious that individual leaders like Carmichael, King, and Malcolm--and even such fatuous contemporary media-enhanced “leaders” and wannabes as Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Al Sharpton—don’t actually create or sustain large scale social movements, be they revolutionary or reformist. Only the disciplined, informed, and relentless activity of millions of anonymous but absolutely essential citizens can do it—with or without officially recognized or sanctioned leaders. Or as SNCC founder Ella Baker (1903-1986) pointed out so poignantly “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Stokely Carmichael, for all his flaws and shortcomings, truly understood and embodied that understanding and spirit in his life and work, and it is this understanding and sense of ethical responsibility that is duly recorded in his final book. As Carmichael says in the introduction he is only a “witness to history.” It is this understanding, along with his sharp intelligence, humor, wit, graciousness, and warm humanity that makes his autobiography one of the few absolutely indispensable books on the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 20th century and that provides both present and future generations with a fully human and humane vision of what the late Cuban/Argentinean revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara meant when he famously declared in 1966 that the “true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”
Oakland, California
December 10, 2003
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A Critique of “Ken Burns’s Jazz" Series on PBS
Documentary Film Review
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January 8–31, 2001
by Kofi Natambu
© February, 2001
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“I am not playing Jazz. I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people…”
—Duke Ellington, 1930
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
—Duke Ellington, 1947
"There are only two kinds of music. Good music and that other kind."
--Duke Ellington, 1956
The title of the recently broadcast historical documentary on Jazz by critically acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns (“The Civil War”, “Baseball” etc.) is actually a misnomer. This ten episode, nineteen hour long epic should have been called “Wynton Marsalis & Stanley Crouch Presents: The History of Jazz as We Define It.” Certainly this title could have served as an important and necessary caveat about what the viewer was going to be shown, and why. Thus we could have been given the option of being spared the agonizing and annoying intellectual disingenuousness, myopia, dishonesty, arrogance, and hubris of their endless commentary which typically reduces an incredibly complex and dynamic subject to the rhetorical limits of their utterly reductive, egocentric, and self-serving vision. That vision, which is corny, vain, condescending and tedious all at once, is what turns a potentially great and even comprehensive treatment of an outstanding subject into an embarassing and manipulative advertisement for the Lincoln Center Jazz Program (which is of course run by Wynton & Stanley).
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It’s too bad because Burns (who openly admitted before he went to work on this project that he knew virtually nothing about the subject) and his longtime writer-collaborator, Geoffrey C. Ward, often have some absolutely fascinating and profound things to say--via the deft deployment of a cornucopia of stunning images and sometimes powerful writing--about exactly how and why what is called “Jazz” has become one of the most definitive and extraordinary art forms of the past century. However even here there is a regrettable schizophrenia of purpose, design, and content that too often unwittingly undermines, and ultimately sabotages, their valiant yet misguided efforts. Not surprisingly the problem is one of aesthetic interpretation and cultural/social analysis. It’s important to add that they are aided and abetted in this area by the well meaning yet misleading comments of a number of critics and “experts” who wind up skirting or avoiding altogether the truly difficult and crucial questions about what the complex history of the art means in terms of not only the creative aspects of form and content but the larger context of the social, cultural, economic, and political realities that have always had (and continues to have) a major impact on the art’s identity.
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The political and cultural issue of “race” (which should always be properly identified as white supremacy in the United States) is not honestly addressed in this series even though there is curiously a great deal of imagery, talk, and commentary about and around it by everyone who is interviewed on camera (which includes a number of musicians, dancers, and music fans as well as Marsalis, Crouch, and their longtime mentor and intellectual guide, the novelist and Jazz critic Albert Murray). What is strangely left out of this debate in the series is any genuine sense of what actual role racism has played in the evolution of the music and its impact on the working lives of the musicians themselves. While there are a number of allusions in the series to the pervasive presence and negative influence of white gangsters, agents, recording moguls, journalists, police officials, nightclub owners, music publishers, politicians, and corporate executives on the careers of everyone from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to the most lowly and unknown artists in the field, there is a disturbing tendency to soft pedal, avoid, ignore, and deny the huge role that racism played (and continues to play) in the cultural and social sphere of the music’s development.
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As a result the viewer is left with the uneasy and in some instances even self-satisfied feeling that the issue is not really significant despite its overwhelmingly obvious reality in an art that has been aesthetically and culturally dominated by African Americans from its very inception. In that light the inclusion of the narratives of such competent but absurdly over hyped white musicians as Benny Goodman, David Brubeck, Bix Beiderbecke, and Paul Whiteman etc. while such major black progenitors of the art as Sun Ra, Erroll Garner, Nat King Cole, Eric Dolphy, Anthony Braxton, David Murray, Muhal Richard Abrams, Albert Ayler, Henry Threadgill, and James Newton, among many others, are completely ignored is simply outrageous.
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What also rankles in the writing, imagery, and commentary by Ward, Burns, Marsalis, Crouch, and Garry Giddins is the perverse suggestion that the mythology of a so-called “Democratic America” (which is in this series a decidedly uncontested trope of “greatness”) and “Jazz” are fundamentally synonymous. Though this paean to the nation’s alleged virtues is occasionally leavened by a somber recognition that there has always been a deep contradictory conflict between what “America” perceives itself to be and its actual behavior, there is still far too much rhetoric and imagery (much of it taken from World War II footage!) that seeks to uphold an idea of the nation as essentially moving in a conflict ridden but straight line toward “democracy”, “unity”, and “harmony.” While these aims may be laudatory as a long range or even utopian goal, it is highly questionable to suggest that this is what “Jazz” is about, or has sought to be, either in artistic or social terms. In fact a major case can be made that the rebellion, alienation, radicalism, and dissonance (as in dissent) that can often be found throughout the music’s evolution in both form and content is an essential aspect of its on-going reality that is actually more in tune with the starkly alternative visions of “America” embodied by such figures as Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Amiri Baraka, and the men and women of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and various other revolutionary socialist and nationalist-minded aggregations, past and present.
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Finally what the series fails to do despite breathtaking images of, and some insightful commentary about, such great, profound, and inspiring musicians and composers as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charles “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Chick Webb, Art Blakey, etc., etc. is give the viewer a much broader and deeper understanding of how and why the African American cultural ethos (which is finally inseparable from its endlessly creative and aesthetic expressions) has been, and continues to be, the very foundation of what makes the music called “Jazz” such an immense and fecund force in the global world of art. Though in fairness I must say that Burns and his staff were able to come up with much astonishing historical footage and images of African Americans in their own cultural and social milieu. Unfortunately, his work as filmmaker on this project was often marred by the pompous, smug, condescending, and inaccurate definitions of what “Jazz” is or “should be” by Messrs. Marsalis and Crouch who seem to have forgotten that the rich complexity of the music itself can’t possibly be reduced to any one, single definition or even description. Until they learn to be as open, dynamic, flexible (and curious) as the music and its artists have always been they won’t truly understand what the word “swing” really means. As Duke always taught us: It don’t mean a thing otherwise...
Oakland, California
February, 2001
UPDATE: June, 2019
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IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:
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Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music
by Gerald Horne
Monthly Review Press, 2019
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[Publication date: June 18, 2019]
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The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal U.S.—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture.
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Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, who faced the triple jeopardy of racism, sexism, and class exploitation. He also limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots who, because of the peculiarities of Jim Crow laws, were defined as African American. He traces the routes of those musicians forced into exile because of Jim Crow: Dexter Gordon in Copenhagen; Art Farmer in Vienna; Randy Weston in Morocco. Gerald Horne writes of the countless lives of artistry and genius—both known, like Armstrong, Ellington, and Coltrane, and unknown. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.
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REVIEWS:
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Gerald Horne has made an exhaustive examination of archives, oral history interviews, autobiographies, and secondary literature to present a devastating picture of what has been termed ‘cockroach capitalism’—the jazz business that ruthlessly exploits and degrades [not just] African American musicians.
—Douglas Daniels, author, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young
What does it mean for descendants of enslaved people to create a music embraced by the world and still be treated as second-class citizens, exploited, dehumanized, and subject to premature death? By following the money, the managers, the musicians, and the bodies, Gerald Horne gives us enthralling view of jazz history from the underside. An essential contribution to our understanding of how racial capitalism shaped American music.
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
“This book presents a serious look at jazz from one of the country’s premier historians and scholars. There is a 1:1 ratio between the treatment of African American musicians and the treatment of African American music. The central role of African Americans in the history of jazz is perpetually minimized. Gerald Horne does a masterful job of putting the development and history of jazz within its proper context. ¶ A prolific writer and preeminent scholar, Horne’s body of work covers the entirety of the African Diaspora, and will become more and more valuable to future generations. This book is a welcome addition.
—Prince A. Wells, III, Professor, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; trumpeter and composer
Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice is an excellent political history of the popular music form of African descendants in the United States. Horne reconstructs the resistance of Black musicians to structural racism as it manifested in the entertainment industry. This insurgent interpretation of a densely researched manuscript applies an analysis of political economy in explaining the role of monopoly capitalism and organized crime in exploiting the art form of classical Black music. Jazz and Justice meets the standard that students and researchers of the Black experience expect from Professor Horne and continues his reputation as of the most prolific scholars of our time.
—Akinyele Umoja, Professor, African American Studies, Georgia State University; co-editor, Black Power Encyclopedia
This unflinching account of jazz as historically entwined with racism, white supremacy (de facto and dejure), organized crime, and corrupt capitalist labor exploitation takes us to, through, and beyond the mid-century sleight-of-hand of U.S. imperialism in which jazz, integrated bands, and African American musicians are rolled out to symbolize American democracy. Moments of justice for African American musicians and their communities are few and far-between in this book, and seldom take place on U.S. soil.
—Sherrie Tucker, Professor, American Studies, University of Kansas; author, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s
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Jazz and Justice is about the men and women whose imaginative genius created and still creates the music that has come to be called Jazz. About their longings to be heard and be the beneficiaries of their product and their labor. It tells us of the struggles of musicians like Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Charlie Haden to make a social statement. It is the story of the record company owners and producers who in the words of Max Roach, “Have no mercy. No matter how much you’ve done and how much money you have made for them,” they want more. It is about James Reese Europe’s Cleft Club and the AACMs work to control the music they produce. Like Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Horne takes us where we have not yet gone. And he makes us appreciate, even more, this music, its messages and its messengers.
—Maurice Jackson, History and African American Studies Professor, Georgetown University; author, DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC
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STAKES IS HIGH: Art and Politics in the HIP HOP Nation, 1980-present
by Kofi Natambu
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A paper presented at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum
March 29, 1997
(With new postscript from 2007)
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This manuscript was also published as a revised series of essays in The Michigan Citizen newspaper from June–September, 1999. Detroit, Michigan
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© 2022
“Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. And by this I mean the word in all its complex formulations, from the proverb to the novel and stage play, the word with all its subtle power to suggest and foreshadow overt action while magically disguising the moral consequences of that action and providing it with symbolic and psychological justification. For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy. The essence of the word is its ambivalence, and in fiction it is never so effective and revealing as when both potentials are operating simultaneously, as when it mirrors both good and bad, as when it blows both hot and cold in the same breath…”
—Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”
Shadow and Act, 1964
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“Yeah, I guess it is folk art…I never heard a horse sing a song…”
—Louis Armstrong (upon being asked if Jazz was a form of folk art in 1933)
“If the truth hurts, then you’ll be in pain and if the truth drives you crazy, then you’ll just be insane.”
—Sister Souljah
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“It’s AFTER the end of the world…don’t you know that yet?”
—Sun Ra
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“Armageddon is already in effect—go get a late pass!”
—Public Enemy
“All important art is self-taught.”
—Amiri Baraka
“Language is the only homeland.”
—Czeslaw Milosz
“Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival.”
—Mikhail Bakhtin
“Write what you know and write what you don’t know--like everybody else.”
—Miles Davis
I. Pre/Face & Early History: “Mommy, Where Does HIP HOP Come From?
The rise of HIP HOP from the streets and other public spaces in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem, NY in the late l970s was initiated by the generation of African and Latino American youth born and raised during the tumultuous political and cultural upheaval of the l960s and early l970s. In the historical aftermath of the demise of the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent systematic destruction of black revolutionary organizations, student groups and political activists by the U.S. federal government, the FBI, and the CIA (all well documented by the official release of the COINTELPRO files and other surveillance materials as required by the FREEDOM OF INFORMATION legislation passed in l975-76), the black community was left to deal with the ravages of a national white backlash that soon resulted in a rapidly declining emphasis on the economic and social welfare and development of urban centers throughout the United States. The stagnation caused by the Watergate scandal, the so-called Energy Crisis, the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam in l975, and subsequent widespread recession (reaching depression-era levels of unemployment in black communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s), as well as spiraling inflation led to the beginning of massive deindustrialization and downsizing brought on by gigantic corporate mergers and rampant criminal speculation and expansion on Wall Street; this in turn led to a devastating breakdown in social services and economic and technological infrastructure deeply affecting education, housing, health care, labor unionization and political support for major cities.
It was in this wildly chaotic and destructive cultural and social context that the first wave of rappers, graffiti artists, breakdancers and DJs began to emerge during the first term of the notoriously reactionary Republican President Ronald Wilson Reagan in the l980-l984 period. This deeply conservative era of an openly right-wing government and a supine democratic congress, rapidly abandoning any pretense of a commitment to a liberal or progressive social agenda or public policy stance resulted in the generation born during the sixties becoming deeply alienated, and quickly disillusioned by, an increasingly racist society that often expressed open hostility, fear, and contempt for black and Latino youth in major American cities. The cultural and social fallout from this dire situation was an explosive rise in the number of physical, intellectual and verbal attacks on these youth in academia (particularly at predominately white colleges and universities where there were literally thousands of reported violent racial incidents throughout the l980s), the national news media, and in the streets by the police and other official representatives of the criminal justice system. In fact years before riots broke out in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and many other cities during the early l990s rappers had been predicting that the volatile mix of police brutality, intolerable living conditions, poverty, drugs and racist attacks against ordinary African American citizens would lead to the endless tragedies that continue to plague these communities.
All this was augmented by a federal government that made it resoundingly clear that it was adamantly opposed to improving employment, educational, and economic opportunities for black people in general and black youth in particular.
Thus with the inevitably large cutbacks in educational programs of urban public school systems throughout the country, an entire generation of poor, working-class, and lower middle class youth were simply left to their own devices as music and art curriculums were eliminated and declining spaces for creative expression in these communities (disdainfully and rather condescendingly called ‘inner cities’ now that the middle-class white folks—and some black ones—have fled places that were once called Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh etc. when they lived there) compelled these youth to seek and create their own alternatives. It was out of this turmoil and pervasive need for cultural assertion and resistance that HIP HOP was born. This multicultural and soon multinational youth movement incorporated aspects of the traditional arts of music, poetry, dance, painting, theater, and writing but in an entirely new and different (postmodern) aesthetic context that simultaneously includes and appropriates the technology of computers, sampling, and digital programming in order to synthesize and extend, revise and subvert, transgress and recontextualize the form and content of language use and sound projections in any given cultural environment.
The first wave of HIP HOP artists to arrive in a commercial (and thus commodified) context were “rappers” (also known as MCs), DJs, graffiti writers and breakdancers who began to appear on recordings, in film, video, and television and in public art spaces in museums, galleries, clubs, libraries, theaters, and site-specific installations during the l980-l985 period. This was the heady era of the meteoric rise of such soon to be world famous figures as Fred Braithwaite (better known as Fab Five Freddy), Rammelzee, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Run DMC and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Right on the heels of this group came the cultural explosion over the next five years (or King Raygun’s second term and the Bushwacker’s first) from l985-l990, which saw a massive increase in aesthetic participation by youth throughout the country, media fascination, interest, hype (and exploitation), political activism, and widespread economic profiteering and excess (the inevitable capitalist expropriation of recording companies, the Hollywood film industry, and television). Nevertheless this was truly the first ‘golden age’ of the still nascent cultural movement. During this five year period the following artists emerged: LL COOL J, KOOL MOE DEE, DOUG E. FRESH, PUBLIC ENEMY, BIG DADDY KANE, ULTRAMAGNETIC MCs, ERIC B & RAKIM, DE LA SOUL, N.W.A., ICE -T, MC LYTE, SALT ‘N PEPA, KRS-ONE (Boogie Down Productions), QUEEN LATIFAH, EPMD, SLICK RICK, THE JUNGLE BROTHERS, HEAVY D, THE BEASTIE BOYS, ICE CUBE, 3rd BASS, BIZ MARKIE, A TRIBE CALLED QUEST and PARIS. These artists and others arrived to stun and soon dominate American popular culture while selling over l00 million CDs and EPs, which led them to capturing an astonishing 20% of the total music market in the U.S. alone (not to mention the untold millions being generated by underground “bootleg” sales). Even more was distributed and sold abroad where in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, rap groups, graffiti writers, and breakdancers also began to emerge—easily fulfilling Marshall McLuhan’s predictions of the l960s that a new global cultural village would arise, and new movements toward retribalization would assert themselves in the artistic sphere.
Speaking of the always problematic category of ‘aesthetics’ (clearly a culturally and historically specific, even over-determined ideological concept—though many theorists and artists won’t admit it or are simply ignorant), HIP HOP expressed ideas, values, attitudes subject-positions, and identities that refused to be defined by conventional notions of what “art” was or was “supposed to be.” This intense resistance to, and refusal of, so-called high-brow or canonical conceptions has contributed to an increased respect for the self-taught lessons of cultural and intellectual independence, spontaneity, and creative invention. Thus like the extraordinary stylistic forms that have preceded it in the African American tradition—Jazz, Blues, R & B, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Funk, etc.—HIP HOP has always rooted itself in the vernacular styles of language use, music, dance, and visual expression. “Home-grown” is what ‘the folk’ are!
This fact highlights why the vernacular is such a powerful and effective tool in African American culture. In terms of language, the vernacular mode does not separate meaning from form. The manner in which one talks or writes or plays is as important to the structure of what is being written or spoken as the words themselves. This goes a long way toward explaining why rappers today are so aware of , and involved in, consciously synthesizing the elements of music, sound, scientific technology, and semiotics in their raps. What results is a fascinating collage-of-effects that enables the speaker/writer/performer to play against, and comment upon, the juxtapositions of language, sound, rhythm and technology that is ‘framing’ what is being said as it is in the process of being expressed (much as we find in the improvisational principle of Jazz and the best of R & B, Rock, Blues and Funk—see S. Rollins, T. Monk, C. Parker, J. Hendrix, J. Brown, S. Stone, R. Johnson, Sun Ra, and G. Clinton for starters). What the listener/viewer/reader experiences is thus ‘more’ than just the words being said at any given time. That is, the dynamic totality of meanings that are being transmitted is dependent on the whole environment of effects and techniques that the rapper is using.
This explains why RAP as a “form” can’t possibly be reduced to either the historically received or given categories of ‘music’ or ‘poetry.’ It would be more accurate to say that the great majority of raps are neither totally one or the other. Metamusic and metapoetics would be more like it. In fact, like Jazz and blues in the early 1920s, or ‘Rock ‘n Roll’ (or Rhythm and Blues) in the 1940s and ‘50s, RAP represents an entirely new and different conceptual idea about what ‘aesthetics’ mean in terms of the established conventions of what is called “music,” “poetry” or “performance art” (an avant-garde convention since the early 1900s—see DADA). The corresponding fact that RAP is but a subset of a much wider cultural aesthetic called HIP HOP only serves to clarify the reasons for RAP’s ascendancy as a popular and “academic” art form. Since no one can deny its obvious cultural existence or relevancy to the people who created and nurtured its growth, RAP can’t be dismissed on the spurious basis that it is “simply not like what already exists or is considered legitimate.” In the 20th century virtually every major art form to emerge has been at one time or another denounced or attacked as “not like traditional ideas of what is considered art.” Certainly painting, music, literature, dance, and theater have been revolutionized by this century’s innovations; not to mention the unprecedented arrival of such forms as cinema (another highly syncretic and hybrid aesthetic) and radio.
With the advent of television, video, computers, and microchip programming, we now have a richly enhanced environment for the transmission and creative expression of information and desires that simply did not exist before. The notable link between vernacular language and technology (and its profound implications for a clear understanding of what RAP is in American culture) is uncannily stated in one of the most subtle and insightful books ever written in American cultural studies, The Beer Can by the Highway (1961) by the late cultural critic and theorist John A. Kouwenhoven:
“It is my conviction that the society we live in marks a really new epoch, but that it is shaped not by technology and science alone, but by a unique combination of forces, a compound of scientific technology and the spirit of democracy. Some years ago I tried to suggest that these twin forces had been revolutionizing man’s conception of his relations to nature, his fellow man, and his gods, for more than a century, and that the elements of the emergent environments produced by these twin forces were for many years shaped not by our artists but by untutored citizens working without any “artistic” pretensions. It is the patterns and forms these people evolved which the artists of our time must arrange (and have begun to arrange) in patterns and forms satisfactorily expressing the values and attitudes appropriate to the new epoch…” 1 [italics mine]
What distinguished the artists of the 1970s and ‘80s was a precise attention to the specific details of black vernacular conceptions as practiced and experienced in the period since 1945. That is, what the rappers of this time zone were concerned about was bringing back to the national black community, (through such African diasporic forms as rhythm & blues, reggae, ska, and ‘dub’ poetry), what were considered the ‘endangered’ arts of orality and folklore. The ironic fact about all this, however, was that it was now being done through the high technology of the mass media. Thus the most crucial and relevant aspect of Marshall McLuhan’s visionary edict that the “medium was the message” was being realized by those sectors of the national culture in the United States that were perceived as the most marginal, but were actually the most central to its identity. The accomplishment of this by citizens who were not only not “professional artists” but also not classical “intellectuals” only made Kouwenhoven’s analysis seem more prophetic when he states that:
“Vernacular forms, whose elements are the materials and processes of technology and the attitudes and interests of democracy, will continue to be improvised wherever technology and democracy make themselves felt…They will of course be modified in each region by physical and social actualities and by the local cultural heritage which becomes part of the fabric of what we build. But they will share the quality of immediate responsiveness to the driving energies of the new epoch…”2
In the cultural work of such “professional artists” as Public Enemy, KRS-One, MC Lyte, and Eric B and Rakim, we find a conscious attempt to incorporate the observations, ideas, values, attitudes, experiences and perceptions of mass cultural sources like “the folk” in their public performances and aesthetic practice. What emerged from this dialogical engagement with popular culture at the level of materiality and philosophy was a new epistemological approach to the principle of improvisation—one of the most fundamental methods of vernacular expression. For it is in the nature of improvisatory activity to immediately revise, augment and transform whatever it comes into contact with or engages in the world. In this sense RAP fulfills Kouwenhoven’s observation that new or innovative approaches to form and content in art are often generated by the merging of the vernacular process with new technologies. This enables a larger number of people to democratically participate in the creation of art products, and at the same time, make it possible for fresh ideas and values to enter the realm of knowledge production.
Because improvisation sees all life as open-ended possibility and as the indeterminate play of contradictions, oppositions, ruptures, and juxtapositions, it is not interested in identity so much as becoming—the verb rather than the noun. Closure, definition, the fixed (and thus finite) are not the purpose or function of artistic activity or expression. What matters is the endless possibilities that are afforded us by the dynamics and pleasures (and risks) of “playing.” Thus RAP is perceived as just another means of liberating oneself (and one’s community, however that is defined) from the fetters and strictures of one’s own fetishized attachment to an aesthetic “goal” as a site of location. What RAP seeks is the (Kenneth) Burkean state of consciousness that allows “burdens [to become] a basis of insights.” This accounts for the critical emphasis in RAP’s theoretical and practical activity on “negative” information and analysis as a method for tackling controversial or taboo subject matter in the areas of politics, sexuality, morality, and human psychology.
II. 1980 - 1984: “From the Party to the Streets and Back Again”
After a small black recording company out of New Jersey known as Sugar Hill released “Rappers’ Delight” in 1979, the commercial floodgates opened as the record stunned the music industry by selling over 500,000 copies within one year. The HIP HOP community of the early 1980s was thus concerned with consolidating and expanding the perceived gains made in capturing a larger national audience. Within three years rappers Kurtis Blow, Spoonie Gee, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force, Sequence (an all black female crew), Roxanne Shanté, The Treacherous Three, The Fat Boys, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five all had major hits and as they, graffiti artists, and breakdancers alike began appearing in major shows and exhibitions and making national tours, their cultural influence spread rapidly. What clinched their “mainstream,” crossover status and solidified their national credibility however, was the emergence of a trio of rappers from Hollis, Queens, NY known as Run-DMC. It was this group that fused all the various elements of previous aggregations by bringing together the more traditional “party style” with social commentary lyrics that spoke to the realities of the street but without sacrificing humor, wit, folkloric references, or a highly ironic sensibility and use of vernacular language. They also were the first commercial group to bring back the deliberate incorporation and reappropriation of rock and pop sources in their organization of beats that had characterized the first pioneering, legendary DJs like the Jamaican immigrant master Kool Herc, and NY’s own Grandmaster Flash during the 1970s. The result of this activity was not only the first gold album in rap history (for the eponymous Run-DMC in 1984), but more importantly, it demonstrated to a national audience the artistic potential of the verbal and musical end of the HIP HOP spectrum to express a multitude of different and varied stylistic modes as well as contribute to public discourse about a wide range of issues, conditions, and concerns. In subsequent recordings, music videos, and live performances throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, Run-DMC demonstrated a consistent vision of ‘street’ knowledge wedded to a lyrical appreciation of everyday experience. In their best work this was often translated in a wild mixture of b-boy aloofness and posturing, tough love heroics, postmod hipsterism, and a goofy-sincere, almost comical insouciance that always winked at its audience while daring it (and especially others) to wink back! These stylistic qualities, combined with their obvious lyrical and narrative skills and head nodding, body slammin’ beats that held up both rock and funk rhythms endeared them to such historical descendants on the mic and in the studio as Chuck D, Flava-Flav and Terminator X of Public Enemy fame, as well as LL Cool J, KRS-1 (and BDP), Salt ‘n Pepa, Eric B & Rakim, De La Soul, Queen Latifah, and many others who saw what now could be expressed creatively in terms of sound, music, language, and a didactic articulation of one’s own vision. It would not be too much to say that RUN-DMC were the ones most responsible for serving as the artistic foundation of the next stage in (RAP’s) evolution.
The other major force of the early 1980s was the social and cultural unity of all aspects of the HIP HOP community working and appearing together in local shows at neighborhood sites like street and house parties, clubs, schools, and community cultural centers where DJs, MCs, breakdancers, and graffiti writers all playfully and intensely competed for the audience’s and each others’ attention and approval as they demonstrated their skills in order to impress their peers with their abilities. HIP HOP events often featured breakdancers, rappers, and DJs as triple bill entertainment. As HIP HOP scholar, critic, and NYU college professor Tricia Rose points out in her outstanding book Black Noise (Wesleyan University Press, 1994):
“Hip hop culture emerged as a source for youth of alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished along with large sectors of its built environment. Alternative local identities were forged in fashions and language, street names, and most important, in establishing neighborhood crews or posses. Many hip hop fans, artists, musicians, and dancers continue to belong to an elaborate system of crews or posses…stylistic continuities were sustained by internal cross-fertilization between rapping, breakdancing, and graffiti writing.”3
It’s important to note that, for example, some graffiti writers like Phase 2, Jean-Michel Basquiat (known in the early 1980s as SAMO ©), Futura 2000 and Fab Five Freddy also produced rap records just as other writers drew huge murals that celebrated and visualized their favorite rap songs (Futura’s mural “The Breaks” was a whole subway car mural that paid homage to Kurtis Blow’s rap of the same name). Meanwhile breakdancers, DJs, and rappers wore graffiti-painted jackets and T-shirts. DJ Kool Herc was a graffiti writer and dancer first before he began playing records. Quoting Rose again:
“Graffiti writers drew murals for DJ’s stage platforms and designed posters and flyers to advertise hip hop events. Breakdancer Crazy Legs, founding member of the Rock Steady crew (a legendary group), describes the communal atmosphere between writers, rappers, and breakers in the formative years of hip hop: “Summing it up, basically going to a jam back then was (about) watching people drink, (break)dance, compare graffiti art in their black books. These jams were thrown by the DJ…it was about piecing while a jam was going on.”4
Of course, given the highly competitive context of hip hop itself, sharing ideas and styles was not always a peaceful process. However, this condition did indicate that despite the never-ending battles for status, prestige, respect, and approval, there were clear signs that this community, while always contesting, challenging and changing itself, was forged by common and shared experiences of class, gender and racial identities, and similar approaches to the arts of sound, motion, and communication. This accounted for the creative vitality and diversity of the HIP HOP nation at a time when it was just beginning to assert itself in a wider world context beyond the confines of local neighborhoods and national boundaries. Thus the formerly New York-based HIP HOP community was quickly coming into an enriching and expanding contact with a much broader range of cultural experience. As it did, the political and economic demands of its members throughout the U.S. also began to increase, as resistance became connected to an ideological and material awareness of the widespread need for social change. It was this assertion within the HIP HOP nation that began to be heard with even sharper, bolder, and louder expressions of fundamental dissatisfaction with, and defiance of, social constraints. It was a time to fight and a time to rise to the challenge of change and RAP (of all of HIP HOP’s cultural forms) was aching for and prepared to do battle with the Powers-that-think-they-be. The next five years (1985-1990) would be a crucial and absolutely spellbinding time for RAP to come into its own as a major force in (post) modern American culture.
III. 1985-1990: “A Time to Fight, A Time to Rise” (HIP HOP Tells the Truth While America is Forced to Listen)
It started innocently enough. Reagan’s second term began with the governing Republican Party in a right-wing frenzy as a result of its landslide victory over a completely overmatched and politically inept Walter Mondale as Reagan won a plurality of votes in every state in the union except Mondale’s native Minnesota. Smug, cynical, racist, petty and mean, a new emerging consciousness wafted down upon a stupefied media-addicted society of alienated zombies. Dubbed “the yuppies” (for young urban professionals), these recent graduates of business, law, medical, banking, and media schools symbolized a new breed of crass opportunist speculators on Wall Street and in the halls of the executive, legislative, and judicial chambers of government who believed fervently in white male privilege and power. As political and ideological leaders of the fight against black, brown, red, yellow, poor white, and female challenges to their institutional hegemony (domination and control) they served as a well-financed and highly organized force opposing the symbolic and actual representatives of African American cultural and political resistance. As HIP HOP moved to up the ante on all public discourse around social and cultural ideology, as well as political economy and the state, it was inevitable that there would be a major clash. Clearly a new generation of African American artists were intent on openly confronting the larger society on every level of discursive formation—from language use and taboo subject matter to interventionist strategies of transgressive ideas and values and subversive critique.
The opening salvo in this “war of words” was launched by rappers from the cities of the South Bronx (NY), Long Island (NY), and Los Angeles, California who had spent their formative years learning their necessary linguistic skills in either the mean streets or at the university. Named Kris Parker, Tracy Marrow, and Carlton Ridenhour they, like Chester Burnett (Howlin' Wolf), Ellis McDaniel (Bo Diddley), and McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), were all much better known by their public names of KRS-One, Ice-T and Chuck D (of Public Enemy). During this same period, the continuing decline of American cities, on-going news reports of drug wars, racial strife, and pervasive governmental and academic indifference to resolving these problems with anything beyond “blame the victim” rhetoric was taking its toll as apartheid raged on in South Africa and Reagan laid wreaths on the graves of Nazi War Criminals at Bitberg, Germany. For the years 1985 and 1986, the major topic on everyone’s lips was the fairy tale of “trickle down” economics and the gutting of the working class poor through the wealthy ruling class scam of something grossly misnamed “tax reform.” As income and profits soar for the top 5% of the population, real wages rapidly decline for the remaining 95%, especially the lowest 50% who take the biggest hits.
In 1987 the tide literally bursts as the stock market crashes for the first time in almost 60 years (needless to say, the day is referred to in the media as “Black Monday”). It was in this year that both Public Enemy and Ice-T, rose to prominence as their first recordings, Rhyme Pays and Yo! Bum Rush the Show appeared. When KRS-1 and the late DJ Scott La Rock in the ensemble crew called Boogie Down Productions, produced Criminal Minded during the same year (along with major recordings by Eric B and Rakim—Paid in Full, LL Cool J’s Badder and Deffer, and the continued mass appeal of RUN-DMC with their classic RaisingHell), RAP found itself suddenly thrust forward as HIP HOP’s leading commercial and popular expression. It’s important to note that while graffiti writing continued to be a form of great importance to its many artists, the appropriations and general exploitation of the white art world began to take its toll as a number of former writers (Basquiat and Keith Haring chief among them) were absorbed by the canonical art structures governing public reception in galleries and museum spaces in the obscenely profitable and trendy SoHo and midtown NY art scenes of the mid- and late 1980s. As for breakdancing, a series of very bad Hollywood films from 1983-87 and overexposure on television and in advertising helped it quickly fade from public commercial consciousness, though obviously the extraordinary skills displayed in public spaces throughout the country didn’t diminish. However, interest began to wane in many quarters because of the rather severe crackdowns by police, judges, and politicians nationwide on the public expressions of both dancing and graffiti. In fact, legal ordinances in cities in response to black, white, and Latino youth gathering together to engage in these creative activities (a unity perceived as a threat to those in power) had a great deal to do with their decline in visibility and support after 1986.
As a result, while graffiti writing and various forms and styles of HIP HOP dance and gestural arts have either gone back into the urban underground or simply become (once again) more localized in terms of modes of cultural and social expression, RAP has moved into this void to become the most visible form of HIP HOP culture to affect and influence public consciousness. The advent of music videos and widespread journalistic exposure in magazines and newspapers, as well as books, have also been major factors in its continued popularity—not to mention its influence on American movies with its many soundtracks over the past decade. It’s also important to note that in spite of RAP being consistently denied airtime on almost all radio and TV outlets (outside of cable), it was, and is, less vulnerable to media isolation and control (at least in terms of airplay). As Rose points out:
“Unlike breakdancing and graffiti, rap music had and continues to have a much more expansive institutional context within which to operate. Music is more easily commodified than graffiti, and music can be consumed away from the performance context¼because of rap music’s commercial power, the sanctions against as well as the defenses for rap have been more intense and thus resistance has been more contradictory.”5
As 1987 raged on, with the AIDS, poverty and crack cocaine crises intensifying, HIP HOP shifted gears into a fierce on-going debate within its own ranks over questions of social survival, ideology, and hard-edged political reality. Verbal wars over issues of race, gender relations, class, and sexuality began to assert themselves into the repertoires of rappers’ recorded and live performances. Pointed and didactic analyses and critiques of racism, sexism, the mass media, American history, violence, philosophy, crime, drugs, materialism, and metaphysics were suddenly appearing everywhere and the former “strictly party” atmosphere of the mid- to late 1970s and early ’80s began to fade away. Artists were now openly following the early example of groups like Grandmaster Flash and asking tough, complicated questions about the meaning of existence itself in societies like the United States where so much violence, hatred, turmoil, hypocrisy, hubris, and denial were being stored up and actively promoted. Clearly, a major turning point was being reached. What would be the response of these young artists (most of whom were in their early and mid 20s) to these unavoidable realities, and their attendant responsibilities? The answers came swiftly and unapologetically, full of passion, anxiety, joy, wisdom, pathos, confusion, brilliance, anger, humor, honesty, compassion, insensitivity, and ignorance. The complex and contradictory, even paradoxical nature of these incredibly varied and expansive responses were themselves largely a reflection of the raging battles within the larger society and culture over the exact same phenomena but minus the major difference that ethnicity and the social pathology of racism brought into the mix.
The aesthetics, or rather the conceptual and imaginative strategies and stances that HIP HOP artists like LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, EPMD, MC Lyte, Big Daddy Kane, Kool Moe Dee, KRS-One, Heavy D, Salt ’n Pepa, Ice-T, etc., devised and disseminated, spoke to and fulfilled a deep need among young people (and some older ones too!) to expressively put their individual stamp on the cultural politics of the moment. By 1988 the entire movement was flying on all cylinders turning stage and street corners into roaring semiotic classrooms where as Chuck D intoned one could “Reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard” (see: It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back). Yes, like the mass energy that galvanized the late 1960s (but now sobered by a historical consciousness of the severe state repression and consequent internecine warfare that last collective advance brought), rap was ambitiously seeking, as Chuck D also stated, to become “the CNN of Black America.”
It was desires like these that upset the official guardians of the state, academia, and the canonized “art world” where intellectual curiosity, envy, and disdain often mix. There were endless articles of patronizing, ill-informed venom directed at much of what was being produced in nearly all of the major high and middle brow publications: from Newsweek and Time to Art Forum and October. In fact over 2,500 articles and news reports on HIP HOP appeared in the 1980s alone. Much of the criticism was focused on what was perceived as the decided lack of aesthetic pedigree the form represented. Thus racial and class bias remained the most common journalistic response to HIP HOP’s, and particularly RAP’s incursion on the moneyed territory of so-called “mainstream” sites of art production, criticism, consumption, and scholarship.
In direct opposition to this ideological and cultural dismissal, a rising group of brilliant black, white, Latino, and Asian American writers, critics, journalists, and intellectuals began to not merely praise or condemn these artists, but to do serious, highly informed critiques of the strengths, weaknesses and potentialities of the art. The public emergence of such extraordinary African American writers as Greg Tate, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Armond White, James Bernard, Joan Morgan, Michael Eric Dyson, Dream Hampton, Tricia Rose, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Harry Allen, as well as such important white, Asian and Latino American critics and scholars as David Toop, Steve Hagar, S.H. Fernando, Jr., Ronin Ro, Chairman Mao, Russell Potter, Brian Cross, etc. brought a new depth and profound insight into the complexities and dynamics of the culture. Their attention to, and appreciation of, the full range of the “positive” and “negative” dimensions of HIP HOP made it possible for them to go far beyond the banal and superficial analyses that were masquerading as critical thought in “official discourse” circles.
Thus the critical and theoretical focus of their writing have remained on the social and spiritual aspects of HIP HOP’s evolution within clearly delineated contexts that take into account the total society, as opposed to mere individuals. In demanding that both RAP artists and the HIP HOP nation as well as the larger society live up to its stated principles of freedom, justice, and democracy in the realm of cultural expression, these writers and intellectuals have ensured that a mature, truly transformative vision remains an essential core element of its identity.
So just as earlier mainstream accounts of RAP often missed their mark in trying to account for its continuing and growing popularity, these new works in the form of essays, articles, interviews, and books sought to keep pace with the cultural energy of the art by paying close attention to precisely how, what, and why the rappers, graffiti writers, video artists and dancers said what they said to America and the world.
Thus the late 1980s brought a deeper and more nuanced exploration of themes and meanings that demonstrated an ever greater use of intertextual references and sense of narrative (and non-narrative) complexity. As HIP HOP crews and posses from a wide spectrum of urban centers began expanding their stories to talk about not only local or regional realities and concerns, a national tribal network of rappers began to consciously link their experiences and ideas to other areas which shared common social and cultural ties.
This was particularly important to the emergence of HIP HOP communities in the Midwestern, southern, and western parts of the country. As the New York traditions began to affect and influence the rapid increase of American cities and towns who openly embraced the culture, artists and general citizens alike began to grasp and foreground an awareness of the common political and economic realities of postindustrial breakdown and paralysis brought on by the oppression of late capitalist development. Within two years after 1987, an entire network of rappers had emerged from the West Coast cities of Compton, Watts and Long Beach, California that for the first time in HIP HOP’s then fifteen year history began to seriously challenge the cultural and economic domination of East Coast artists.
Within a year, similar developments had begun in Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Miami, among many other cities. By 1988, still the greatest single year in RAP history with such immediate classics as “Raw” by Big Daddy Kane, “Paid in Full” (7 minutes of madness remix) by Eric B and Rakim, “Bring the Noise,” “Don’t Believe the Hype,” and “Caught, Can We Get A Witness?” (among other gems) by Public Enemy, “Colors” (The Soundtrack), by Ice-T, “I Cram to Understand You Sam,” by MC Lyte, “Go on Girl,” by Roxanne Shanté, and “It Takes Two,” by Rob Base, RAP was growing and expanding at a phenomenal rate. With gold, platinum, and double platinum albums by a record 30 groups and global fame for HIP HOP artists in all creative spheres, 1988 and 1989 were at the same time a major crossroads in the evolution of the culture itself.
The reasons were varied but they ultimately came down to questions of gender, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and gangsterism and its actual or perceived place in the work of some artists. Many critics and rappers (male and female alike) felt that despite the fact that a majority of Rappers did not express these kind of opinions and attitudes, a sizable minority did, and it was serious enough to be addressed. The initial major catalyst for this examination was the decidedly hard-core lyrical and narrative sentiments of N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude), Ice-T and Ice Cube (in some lyrics), 2 Live Crew, and Schooly-D. In response a number of white music critics and journalists began in 1989, to write articles in the “mainstream press” which were often contentious, reductive and accusatory thus setting off a firestorm of debate in many quarters of the HIP HOP Nation among fans and artists alike. Compounding this problem was the always lurking media and governmental demon called CENSORSHIP. As a result, a major question became: How could one rationally confront real issues affecting the public identity of the culture in a genuinely democratic and self-critical manner without at the same time jeopardizing the political, artistic, and ethical integrity of free speech, and the unimpeded dissemination and flow of ideas and opinions?
This was especially a dilemma and source of real conflict for African American artists who, traditionally, because of racist policies and practices have always been an easy target and victim of major repression in these areas. Thus the discourse that emerged had to take into full account the complexities of this historical reality but at the same time be willing to deal with weaknesses, stupidities, blindspots and flaws in an honest and productive way. The response within the HIP HOP Nation was embodied by the appearance and immediate popularity of black women rappers like Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Yo-Yo, and others who, in conjunction with earlier pioneering female artists like MC Lyte, Salt ’n Pepa, and the fiercely lyrical Roxanne Shanté, spoke directly in their work and off the mic to the need to question, attack, and actively resist the oppression of the macho patriarchy among male rappers. Like the larger society itself, sexism within the Nation was an open expression of male insecurity, immaturity, and fear as well as bias, violence, and hatred against women in general. Since the HIP HOP community was not in any way immune to the corrupt values and myths of American culture it was especially vulnerable to the contradictions and idiocies surrounding gender and sexuality. As Tricia Rose also points out:
“Rap music and video have been wrongfully characterized as thoroughly sexist but rightfully lambasted for their sexism. I am thoroughly frustrated but not surprised by the apparent need for some rappers to craft elaborate and creative stories about the abuse and domination of young black women. Perhaps these stories serve to protect young men from the reality of female rejection; maybe, and more likely, tales of sexual domination falsely relieve their lack of self-worth and limited access to economic and social markers for heterosexual masculine power. Certainly, they reflect the deep-seated sexism that pervades the structure of American culture. Still I have grown weary of rappers’ stock retorts to charges of sexism in rap: “There are bitches or golddiggers out there, and that’s who this rap is about,” or “This is just a story, I don’t mean anything by it,”… On the other hand given the selective way in which the subject of sexism occupies public dialogue, I am highly skeptical of the timing and strategic deployment of outrage regarding rap’s sexism. Some responses to sexism in rap music adopt a tone that suggests rappers have infected an otherwise sexism-free society…Few popular analyses of rap’s sexism seem willing to confront the fact that sexual and institutional control over abuse of women is a crucial component of developing a masculine identity. In some instances, the music has become a scapegoat that diverts attention away from the more entrenched problem of redefining the terms of heterosexual masculinity.”6
Further, I would add that the artists’ right to explore taboo subject matter or disturbing topics without fear of outside intervention or control in the areas of sexuality and language is an inviolate one that should not be dismissed or taken lightly, even (or sometimes especially) when others make “moral” claims to the contrary. Walking this fine line between protecting free speech and combating bad ideas and behavior has been a feature of the on-going public battle over these issues in the HIP HOP world since the controversy involving the legal attempts to silence and ban the sexist lyrics of 2 Live Crew in 1990 (while condemned in many quarters for their content, the group did win the necessary legal battle).
The issue of “gangsta rap” is even more complicated, problematic, and contested. Especially in light of the very real, yet often strangely overlooked fact that most images of “gangsterism” are derived from popular culture and not actual “street experience” as a “real” gangster. Which is to say that for all of their posturing, the overwhelming number of rappers who work in this genre are decidedly NOT gangsters or even remotely acquainted with gangster life. Most of what most people know (or rather think they know) about gangsters is the result of a steady consumption of movies, novels, and television programs. This is to say that the “gangster persona” is usually just a metaphorical device—a trope if you will—to express an idea about society. For example James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart alone made over 30 gangster/crime films in their long careers, thus stamping an indelible image in the minds of viewers of what a “gangster” is. Ditto for the performances of Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Paul Muni, Rod Steiger, Richard Widmark, and the literally hundreds of others immortalized in celluloid or embalmed in literary legend. In fact, almost all of what we think we know about such notoriously real, authentic gangsters as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Bumpy Johnson, Meyer Lansky, Frank Nitti, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, John Gotti, Nicky Barnes, etc., (the list is endless) is derived from pop representations only.
So this country’s on-going fascination, even obsession, with gangsterism certainly did not begin with NWA, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., or now incarcerated Marion ‘Suge’ Knight, CEO of Death Row Records. The simple truth is (and this seems to be a much more bitter pill to swallow for some than perhaps it should be) not one of the aforementioned individuals are or were actual GANGSTERS (excepting Mr. Knight of course). Wannabes in some cases perhaps. But it is patently absurd to assert that the HIP HOP community has ever been a refuge for real gangsters or to put it another way: There are more corporate gangsters and racketeers working in the music industry as executives, lawyers, financiers, and promoters than there are individuals in the entire rap community. [See the book Hit Men by Fredric Dannen (Vintage Books 1991)]
That said, it is also important that we not lose sight of what is real, what is mere hype, and what seeks to convince us of its “authenticity” (a very slippery and elusive category if there ever was one). So rather than get caught up and distracted by the banality of the tabloid press or the hysteria of the moral alarmists of the right or left, I think it is imperative that we pursue an analytical position that is sober and direct while refusing the illusory comfort of aimless public speculations about “why certain artists die the way they do.” I suspect our task is much greater and that desperately looking for assurance and certainty will only take us away from what is most important and valuable as we all search for ways of understanding more completely what our collective experience means. What figures like Tupac, Eazy-E, and Notorious B.I.G. “represent” in terms of HIP HOP history and culture is finally not separate from what the untimely and/or seemingly “senseless deaths” of other young black men and women we do not “know” as celebrities, also mean. A real quest for truth in the case of those we love as icons and those we love as peers, friends, siblings, and contemporaries would yield a much more profound insight into what these events truly mean than mere conjecture or gossip about “who shot whom” in what the media cynically calls “the RAP world.” The last section of this talk will attempt to address those questions in relation to the multidimensional “reality” of the HIP HOP culture today. The link between art and politics, as in so many areas of American life today, has never been greater or more illuminating.
IV. 1991-1996: “Where Do You Wanna Go, How Do You Wanna Get There?”
(A Nation in Crisis Faces Itself)
As RAP entered its third decade it, and the culture that spawned it, was being lionized and attacked all over the world as contending aesthetic and political forces within the United States were openly being galvanized in either support or opposition. The HIP HOP Nation was being written about and discussed fervently by every single major newspaper, magazine, news program, and talk show in the country. Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Premeire, Musician, Spin, Playboy, The National Review, The Nation, New York, Variety, Life, Ebony, Essence, US, Jet, Entertainment Weekly, Vibe, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Emerge, Details, Mother Jones, Village Voice, The Washington Post and Vogue, among many others all carried regular reviews, general articles, interviews, and tabloid gossip about a group of artists who were born between 1960 and l975 (with the possible exception of Ice T!). Meanwhile, the 1990s have seen the emergence of such artists as: Ice Cube and Dr. Dre (both formerly of N.W. A.), Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac Shakur, Digital Underground, Paris, Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, Conscious Daughters, Boss, Bone, Thugs & Harmony, Notorious B.IG., Craig Mack, Cypress Hill, The Pharcyde, Naughty by Nature, Black Sheep, DJs Premeire, Shadow and Dr. Octagon, E-40, A Tribe Called Quest, Mobb Deep, Redman, Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Das Efx.
The interesting thing about this short list is that it encompasses a staggering range of different stylistic forms from so-called gangsta, street party, metaphysical, and political genres to complex fusions of rock, pop, gospel, R & B, Jazz, Funk, comic books, television, cinema (film noir, horror, comedy, melodrama), tabloid journalism, social and critical theory, and ancient philosophy. More than ever the intertexuality and broad eclecticism of HIP HOP’s cultural and social forms have permeated the collective unconscious of American culture to reveal the tensions and anxieties just below the ever-simmering surface. The work of the nineties focus on the gaps between stated ideals and desires in the realm of contemporary American life, and the role that hypocrisy, fear, hatred, paranoia, and nihilism plays in society today. It’s also important to note that this period also celebrates the sheer joy of living in its attention to the subtle details and vicissitudes of everyday life.
Another major area of investigation in today’s rap is a direct confrontation with forces that seek to control, oppress, or exploit the struggling protagonists within a particular narrative. It is striking and more than a little disturbing that nearly all of these artists are in their early to mid ‘20s yet already seem world-weary and emotionally jaded. The haunting preoccupation with death and an apocalyptic vision of social relations marks the expressions of a group of artists who are determined at the same time to crack open the facade of casual indifference and hostility that so often characterizes America today.
The aesthetic risks that this work embodies represent an attempt to raise and confront the specters of despair and redemption in both a material and spiritual sense. In spite of the infantile, and at times, destructive energy that is unleashed when these forces are out of balance, the best of this activity challenges its audience to be honest and face the consequences of its commitment to the ideas, values (and behavior) that it embraces. Specifically the most “controversial” and in some circles those considered the most irresponsible artists (Shakur, B.I.G., Snoop, Ice Cube, etc.) are the individuals who have also managed to be the most thought-provoking. This in itself is not surprising given what we know historically about the artistic connections between transgressive or subversive creativity and the impact of such work on independent thinking audiences. However the limitations of these artists can also be traced to their inadequate knowledge and understanding of the full complexity of their experience. Without being able or willing to translate the ever-changing contours of experience into language forms that are dynamic and analytical enough to go beyond the cul-de-sacs of resentment, fatalism, cynicism and disillusionment the artist winds up cheating both him or herself and the audience.
Thus the challenge remains to not only find outlets for dealing with one’s own existential dread or angst but to fight for the opportunity to reach and touch others at both the level of knowledge production and psychological/emotional communication. What HIP HOP has always known throughout its complicated history is that language, music, and sound do matter and that they reflect not merely our most intimate desires but direct public contact with the transformative realities of pleasure, liberation, insight, and the sublime. HIP HOP lives and thrives when we refuse to be only what others wish us to be (and remain). It reminds us of the presence and necessity of our own Voice(s) expressing what we know to be the truth and reveling in, as well as sharing and celebrating that knowledge. This is the knowledge that not only allows us to be free but to acknowledge what that freedom means. What more could anyone ask of art? WORD!
V. Postscript: What is HIP HOP? And How Do We Know It? Spring 1997
What is HIP HOP?
HIP HOP is a culture, which means that it is subject to, and contains, all the strengths, liabilities, fears, anxieties, hatreds, loves, desires, beauty, ugliness, joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, glories, delusions, knowledge, ignorance, clarity, confusion, sadness, unity, divisions, greatness, banality, good, evil, naïve, cynical, heroic and tragic elements and qualities that any other culture anywhere in the world has.
Like all cultures everywhere it is conflicted, contradictory, and in a perpetual state of contestation. This alone keeps it real and viable in spite of (and because of) itself). Besides it wouldn’t be worth paying any attention to at all if it weren’t for its inherent ability to make mistakes and learn something valuable and necessary from them.
HIP HOP is extremely complex because the people who make it and represent it as well as the cultural, social, economic, spiritual, and political traditions that inform it are extremely complex. Thus the various reasons why it appeals to so many people not only in the U.S. but throughout the world is not difficult to figure out nor is it difficult to understand why so many others fear, misunderstand, despise, oppose, or are indifferent to it. HIP HOP contains within its aesthetic, social, and historical identity all of the major issues facing American and world culture today: racism, sexism, poverty, class conflict, gender relations, sexual difference and identity, social and psychological violence, economic and political exploitation, oppression and inequality, media representations, crime, materialism and spiritual alienation, and emptiness. The materiality of this culture lies in its unceasing confrontation with the most fundamental ideological values and conceptions ruling our consciousness of present day structural and institutional realities in the areas of political economy, quotidian existence and aesthetic expression.
As a result, the on-going conflict between those who must embrace the discursive complexities of the rhetorical, gestural, visual, and acoustic innovations of HIP HOP artists, and those who routinely criticize and disdain its most severe limitations, stupidities, reductionisms, weaknesses, and blind spots is a reflection of what both sides see as the culture’s most salient characteristics and sources of identity. However, these dialectical forces are not mutually exclusive nor do they encompass all of what can be said about its uses, dead ends, and potentialities at the level of cultural and intellectual reality or the tensions of the economic and social marketplace.
In fact, any truly dynamic and accurate rendering of HIP HOP’s place in our lives in the late 20th century as we go flying headlong into the next millennium must take full theoretical and critical account of the inseparable relationship between the so-called “positive” and “negative” aspects or poles of the culture’s identity if we are to make any sense of what HIP HOP is and means. Just as a dry cell battery cannot do without either its “positive” or “negative” charges in order to function, one’s critical awareness of HIP HOP’s unavoidable immersion in the totality of contextual conditions and relations that it is also a constituent part of, is absolutely necessary to any worthwhile or accurate analysis of it.
So what is HIP HOP? HIP HOP, like all cultures everywhere, is Life. So HIP HOP Hooray!!
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NEW POSTSCRIPT: 1997–2007
The past decade since I wrote and presented this paper at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum in March 1997 has been one marked by great tragedy and a rather disturbing decline and serious internal crisis in the aesthetic, political, ideological, and cultural identity of the national Hip Hop community (especially among its ‘rap’ contingent). This crisis has affected both form and content. While a small number of ‘first generation’ rappers and rap industry moguls from the mid and late 1980s—as well as a few individuals from the early ‘90s—like Ice-T, Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Will Smith, Russell Simmons, Snoop Dog, and P-Diddy (Sean Combs)—have gone on to even greater ‘mainstream’ fame and fortune since the early legendary years chronicled in this essay (becoming multimillionaires in the process) it is glaringly clear that much of the extraordinarily innovative intellectual and spiritual energy and consciousness (not to mention radical political and cultural vision) of these and many other artists of the earlier two decades has visibly dissipated, disappeared, or been noticeably corrupted in various ways—especially by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Unfortunately the rather avid complicity of a significant number of both older and younger Hip Hop artists in this mutual exploitation and vulgar commercialism has contributed greatly to the current malaise. One of the uglier ‘aesthetic’ downsides of this complicity has been the very troubling appearance of neo-minstrel attitudes and modes of behavior in the performances of these artists in movies and television (see the outlandishly buffoonish and crudely sexist antics of former rapper and Public Enemy member Flavor Flav on his highly rated cable TV program in 2005-6 for starters).
In addition the breaking up of such major artistically progressive and ideologically radical groups as Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul during this period due to declining CD sales has also played an unwanted but conspicuous role in this scenario. As a result the white corporate world that still dominates the music industry these predominately black artists work for has been more than content to settle only for the highly profitable economic bottom line and the least common denominator in terms of artistic content. In real terms this has meant the commercial and social domination of the market by the most backward, and reactionary aspects of what is commonly known as ‘gangsta rap.’ This has resulted in a massive glut of recordings, films, and TV programming that far too often promotes the most rancid and oppressive forms of misogyny, sexual exploitation, homophobia, and self-destructive violence.
In fact, the tragic early deaths by violence of such well-known rappers as Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. had already occurred during the six-month period leading up to the presentation of this essay in early 1997 (Biggie had been murdered a mere two days before my original presentation took place in 1997). Since then, the violent deaths of Jam Master Jay (one of the founding members of the historically pivotal group RUN-DMC) and various other rappers, as well as the rapid rise and equally rapid collapse and dissolution of such formerly highly successful ‘gangsta rap’ labels as Death Row Records (which was run with an iron fist and various other deadly weapons by Hip Hop record mogul and actual gangster Marion ‘Suge’ Knight who was sentenced to nine years in prison for various parole violations following the shooting death of Shakur in September, 1996) has created an aesthetic and cultural environment that is often fraught with an addictive dependence on greed, rampant materialism, commodification,, and an increasingly nihilistic and cynical view of human and social relations. Contributing to these factors has been an easily bored, restless, and thrill seeking audience of predominately adolescent and young adult white males in their 20s and early 30s who now make up over 80% of the national market for this dubious ‘product.’ Sensationalism and voyeurism among consumers is in many ways the economic dimension of, and corollary to, the aimless hedonism and nihilistic alienation of many of the artists of this genre.
Of course, this is not to suggest that all is lost in the U.S. Hip Hop community as yet or that there aren’t other artists on the scene who are consciously challenging and providing much needed and appreciated alternatives to the cultural and social marketplace ‘rule of the gangsta.’ Such important and innovative contemporary Hip Hop figures and groups as Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Lauryn Hill, Common, Outkast, The Roots, and Kanye West, among others are consciously and creatively challenging themselves and their audiences to fight for and advocate progressive change in society and in our personal lives. It’s anybody’s guess where these and other efforts will lead in the future but it does indicate that the struggle for a broader and truly radical vision continues in Hip Hop America in spite of the massive problems, obstacles, and contradictions fostered by a society and world too often burdened and torn asunder by the pervasive forces of racism, sexism, and imperialism. As Hip Hop dramatically demonstrates “art”, as usual, is not at all immune to these pressures and challenges. WORD!
Kofi Natambu
Oakland, California
December 1, 2006
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Footnotes:
1. Kouwenhoven, John A., The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What’s American about America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), p. 131
2. Ibid, p. 135
3. Rose, Tricia, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 34
4. Ibid, p. 35
5. Ibid, p. 52
6. Ibid, p. 15
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The Multicultural Aesthetic: Language, ‘Art’, and Politics in the United States Today
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by Kofi Natambu
Poetics Journal
June 1991
The historical confluence of many different ‘ethnic’ and cultural groupings in the United States, presently co-existing under the political, economic, and social hegemony of an international system of monopoly capitalism, has created the structural context for cross-cultural contact and communication among these various groups. The aesthetic interplay and matrix of social relations that have come from this contact has resulted in the evolution of a distinct hybridization of (multiple) forms of expression within the society. This has created a vast collection of historical “identities” that come from a heterogeneity of cultural elements that are ‘shared’ in common by the mass of nationalities and cultures that presently constitute what is called ‘North America.’
This particular dialectic, known popularly as the multiculture, stems from the obvious fact that nearly every (sub)cultural group in the nation has had a different experience of what the trope ‘AMERICA’ means. That is, while there is an institutional attempt to assimilate and subjugate all other cultural traditions, forms, and values under the monocultural banner of a ‘white’ Anglicized myth (referred to in our schools, corporations, mass media and governmental agencies as ONE NATION) we can clearly see that these absurdly reductive and contrived images of the society do not actually reflect the extraordinary diversity of the many cultures that inhabit ‘our’ borders.
The most obvious example of this diversity can be seen in the creative and popular arts. In music, literature, dance, painting, sculpture, cinema, and theater we have witnessed in this century an explosion of new conceptions of “Art” that draw on an inventive synthesis of electronic and scientific technologies (e.g. TV, radio, video, computers, etc.) with more traditional sources of artistic expression and production. In fact, Pop forms in music, dance, painting, and literature have come directly from the rich mass-based folk traditions, values and ideas/practices of a wide range of (multi)cultural groups from literally all over the globe. As Marshall McLuhan predicted, the “global village” has now made it possible for all of us to learn about the ancient pasts and myths of the entire world as we simultaneously participate in the dynamic innovations of the present.
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The most aesthetically significant and influential of these mass cultural forms in the U.S. have emerged from working-class African American culture. Jazz, Blues, Rhythm & Blues, Rock & Roll, and Funk are specific styles that have clearly dominated our theoretical and expressive conceptions of innovation in music, while the on-going impact of what is called the “oral tradition” has led to completely new uses of narrative structures and conventions in writing and critical theory.
From the maelstrom of these myriad stylistic traditions a massive number of African American artists and thinkers have emerged who rely on a conscious synthesis and extension of traditional, modernist and postmodernist forms that are anchored in the vernacular aspects of social-historical experience. Consider where 20th century American Art would be without the astonishing vision and praxis of such major figures as Scott Joplin, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Don Redman, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, Robert Johnson, Son House, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, James Brown, George Clinton, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Wynonie Harris, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Sarah Vaughan, Big Maybelle, Ella Fitzgerald, and Betty Carter (just for starters) in music. Or, say, Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Melvin B. Tolson, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John A. Williams, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Lorenzo Thomas, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Clarence Major, Al Young, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Samuel Delany in literature. What about Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Bill Traylor, William H. Johnson, Horace Pippen, Bettye Saar, Melvin Edwards, Ed Lewis, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sam Gilliam, Martin Puryear, Robert Colescott, and Richard Hunt, David Hammons, and Adrian Piper in painting, sculpture and conceptual art? Or Alvin Ailey, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Bill T. Jones and Arthur Mitchell in dance? How about Baraka (again), Ed Bullins, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Charles Fuller, Adrienne Kennedy, Paul Carter Harrison and Richard Wesley in theater?
This collection of luminaries constitute much more than a mere laundry list of “great African American artists.” To begin with it is only a few of the extraordinary people from the “black” sector of the U.S. multiculture who have fundamentally changed our very perceptions of what constitutes art in the modern world. In fact, what all of the aforementioned artists have in common is that they (and such nominally “avant-garde” figures as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton) have revolutionized American culture through their broadly imaginative and eclectic uses of a wide spectrum of national and world cultural resources. The syncretic cross-fertilization of ideas, values, attitudes, and conceptual modes that provides the “content” of the forms and structures used by these artists necessarily come from a wildly divergent combination of cultural and aesthetic models. Within the historical context of mass culture in the United States during the present century we are talking about the pervasive impact of Native American, Latino American, Asian American, African American and Euro American traditions on the intellectual thought and creative praxis of what we know as “New World” societies (i.e. the United States, the Caribbean, Central and South America).
The distinctive historical (and thus political and economic) relationship between art and cultural identity that characterizes our epoch is glimpsed in the expansion of these ideological categories of “race”, class, and gender across seemingly divided ‘ethnic’ lines. This means, among other things, that “aesthetics” cannot be the sole province of any one isolated social-cultural grouping in the United States. What we are currently experiencing in the complex array of postmodernist responses to the modern concept of “Art” [what Andy Warhol called “a man’s name] is the social and linguistic acknowledgement of this fact in the face of the denial of this reality by the present epistemological structures that maintain and uphold cultural hegemony in what we call the “Western world.” By attacking the very idea of “universal values” and the corresponding hierarchical notions of superiority and “progress” in the “world of art” postmodernism prepares the stage for a critical investigation and analysis of the semiology of cultural difference.
The implications of all this for language and its uses are profound in light of the myriad ways in which signification (or the creation of meaning in social discourse) plays a major role in our perceptions of ‘reality’ and their underlying ideological/metaphysical assumptions. What the multiculture provides us with is a deep reservoir of technical, methodological and strategic elements to draw on in the development of new language formations. The resulting mix of artistic styles and idioms constitute an open space for the examination of language and its signifying structures as a multiplicity of forms and contents, mediums, and messages. Thus language ranges far beyond mere instrumental reason where signifiers are used to merely ‘stand in’ for what they signify and signs are reduced to what they represent in the way of a single signified meaning. The multiculture allows language to be not only a form of reality but also a way of working through its modalities to find “Other” ways of knowing and being. As the cultural historian and literary critic Berndt Ostendorf points out (in analyzing the modern African American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison):
“Language is in and by itself a creative force and an agency and repository of wisdom. Language is a special form of artistic production and in the words of Karl Marx, “practical consciousness.” Poetry is the performance of language, symbolic action. Its smithy is the on-going vernacular process. Ellison would agree with the great linguist Otto Jespersen, who used to say that grammar and style are the product of generations of illiterate speakers. Ellison is concerned with the American vernacular as just such a working out of an American identity. The American vernacular is involved in an unending fight to achieve a better fit between word and thing, between the promise and the reality of its constitution...” 1 [Italics mine]
This on-going process of using the vernacular to “work out” an “American identity” is precisely the context of the multiculture’s interest in fighting to “achieve a better fit between word and thing...” This is the social and cultural crossroad of the intersecting dimensions of language in the United States, and the fundamental aspect of the underlying signifying structures that constitute our knowledge and use of a multitude of “Other” cultural and aesthetic traditions. That is, given the complexity of American history every “ethnic” and (so-called) “racial” group has had to develop a concept of its “own” identity in both a dialectical and dialogical engagement with every other group. The tremendous conflicts and cataclysmic events that have characterized these encounters (consider the Native American experience of genocide and oppression, and the African American experience of slavery and subsequent discrimination and exploitation for starters) lie at the root of the unavoidable physical, cultural, sexual, and psychological contact and communication between often warring peoples. As a result, the massive influx of European immigrants since the 19th century has only further complicated the structural tensions of these relationships. The incredible mixture of ideological, aesthetic and philosophical conceptions, values, attitudes and structures as expressed in the differences in cultural anthropology (e.g. religion, law, education, political economy, cosmology, mythology, ritual practices, etc.) have been augmented and transformed by the social changes wrought by the history of these encounters. From this historical dynamic have emerged new ideas of what “art” is and means in the world. That these new notions are the direct result of the hybrids created by the clashes and dialogues engendered by the multiculture only serve to point out how the U.S. could not possibly be culturally or linguistically homogeneous, or that America could only be ONE NATION as defined by a single social-cultural group (particularly wealthy white males with power).
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Thus any accurate critical analysis of language, art and politics in the United States today must begin with a deconstructive examination of ideas of hegemony and a simultaneous assessment of the radical and subversive aspects of cultural expression and identity. The formal and epistemological context of this discussion is thus firmly rooted in the vernacular. What I propose to do in the next section of this essay is to write about these ideas from the standpoint of the contemporary African American cultural form known as HIPHOP. My specific purpose will be to focus on RAP as a multicultural aesthetic that illuminates the ways in which the vernacular forms and structures work to challenge and ultimately subvert traditional academic and institutional ideas about the relationship between language, art and cultural politics in the United States.
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HIPHOP: A NEW AFRICAN AMERICAN AESTHETIC
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The present cultural explosion known to its adherents as HIPHOP is the most significant development in American art since the advent of Jazz and Blues in the early part of this century. Since the mid 1970s this eclectic mix of language, music, video, dance, fashion, visual art, and social/ideological analysis and commentary has captured the collective cultural imagination of an entire generation of writers, critics, painters, dancers, performance artists, filmmakers, political activists and musicians, and created the theoretical and practical basis for a new ‘revolutionary’ synthesis of multicultural theorists and activists. Even more importantly it has revealed the mass democratic roots of African American culture in contemporary aesthetic terms. That it has managed to do all this while remaining solidly outside the walls of academia and the so-called (white) ‘avant-garde’ is a testimony to its resolutely independent stance and its innovative position as a major force in radical cultural circles in the United States.
The key to HIPHOP’s distinctive identity lies in its critical and subversive attack on the imposed bourgeois notions of the separation between “high” and “low” culture, literacy and orality, and corporate vs. vernacular conceptions of ‘art’ and ‘culture’ in the Western tradition. RAP, the postmodern literary/music component of this mass-based cultural movement uses language, sound and semiotics to signify on the received and historically sanctioned conventions of what constitutes ‘poetry’, ‘music’, and ‘critical theory’ by parodying and satirically exposing the delimiting assumptions, values, and ideas of conventional modes of expression in the (hegemonic) ‘Western canon.’ Because RAP was not interested in being ‘accepted’ into the pantheon of the mainstream “art world” it remained free to devise its own uniquely individual responses to the current crisis of form and content in American culture.
These strategies and methodologies have from the very beginning deliberately incorporated the seemingly disparate yet curiously complementary elements of state-of-the-art recording technology (e.g. sampling, drum machines, synthesizers, multiple tracking modules, microchip digital programming, etc,) with traditional, even ancient, techniques of using language in an orally-based context (call-and-response, free association/stream-of-consciousness, “signifyin’”, “toasting”, 1 rhythmic phonetics, and lyrical chanting). This creative unity of sound and text is held together by a structurally precise method of organizing rhythmic and melodic materials to carry the thematic content of any line. Thus the modal aspects of music and poetry (timbre, tempo, cadence, phrasing) are an integral part of the “message content” of what the rappers do.
This emphasis on the tonality, syntax, and rhythm of language allows RAP to critique and penetrate the intricate web of cultural significations that serve as the complex epistemological and linguistic infrastructure that supports the political economy and its parallel institutions of culture and education. In this way RAP is able to work both directly and subliminally on the social consciousness of its audience and simultaneously develop independent alternatives to the economic and aesthetic hegemony of “high culture” (in both its “classical” and modernist guises).
As a result of the cultural self-consciousness of the HIPHOP movement we are now witnessing the rise of a veritable army of young, fiery cultural workers who are militantly uncompromising about their public stance as critics of American and international politics. This attitude is reinforced by an equally strong stand on the “politics of culture” that simply refuses to acknowledge, accept, or defend the “superiority” of “mainstream” or academic definitions of “Art.”
Instead HIPHOP brilliantly intervenes on these dominant ideological presuppositions and attitudes by consciously revamping traditional (read: Classical) and Modernist strategies, methodologies, and technologies to create truly new ideas of what the arts signify in social terms. This valorization of what was formerly consigned to marginal status in society (the organizing principle of improvisation and orality applied to aesthetic formalism and activity) has served as the motor force of what is currently the most innovative and dynamic expression of music, language, and performance art in the United States today.
In the work of Public Enemy, KRS-One (and Boogie Down Productions), MC Lyte, Ice-T, Kool Moe Dee, N.W.A., Eric B & Rakim, the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Doug E. Fresh, LL Kool J, Roxanne Shante, RUN-D.M.C., Ice Cube, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and others, as well as their historical precursors (Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa, the Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, DJ Hollywood, etc.), there is a broad synthesis of what is most “original” and artistically profound in the Afro-American tradition that is fused with contemporary ideas about space-time, quantum physics, environmental theatre, acoustic and electronic engineering, semiology, and critical theory.
All this is not to suggest that RAP or its parallel expressions in film, video, dance, cultural criticism, and political activism is not subject to the contextual problems of commodity reification and corporate absorption that everyone is hemmed in by in a world monopoly capitalist ecosystem. Nor is this meant to indicate that these vernacular forms and conceptual modes are monolithic or nonproblematic. As in all historically bound expressions of cultural consciousness contradictions certainly exist and assert themselves. However these vernacular forms and structures do constitute a multiplicity of strategies and expressive ideas that fundamentally attempt to challenge the traditional, and still prevailing, white male paradigms of cultural identity and philosophy (i.e. the monoculture).
As the major African American literary critic and theorist Houston A. Baker put it in a recent talk,1 RAP and the HIPHOP aesthetic “assumes a familiar cast within a history of contestation and contradistinction governing the relationship between poetry and the State.” It would do well for us to consider some of Baker’s comments as a poststructuralist reading of the historical discourse regarding the nature of the philosophical battle between the State (the monoculture) and the Poets (the multicultural critique and response):
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The exclusion of poets from the Republic by Plato is the ur-Western site of this contest. In Egypt it is Thoth and the King; in Afro-America it is the Preacher and the Bluesman...The simplest way to describe it is in terms of a tensional resonance between homogeneity and heterogeneity. Plato establishes the necessity for a homogeneous State Line to withstand the blusiness of poets intent on worrying such a line by signifying and troping irreverently on it and continually setting up conditionals. “What if, this?” and “What if, that?” To have a homogeneous line, Plato (like Allan Bloom) advocates that the philosophers eliminate the poets. If the State is the site of what linguists call the constative, then, poetry is an alternative space of the conditional.
If the State keeps itself in line, as Benedict Anderson suggests, through the linear, empty space of homogeneity, then poetry worries this space or line with heterogeneous performance. If the State is a place of reading the lines correctly, then poetry is the site of audition, of embodied soundings on State wrongs.
In considering the contestation between homogeneity and heterogeneity, I am drawing on the work of the scholars Homi Bhabha and Peter Stallybrass who suggest that nationalist or post-revolutionary discourse is always a discourse of the split subject. In order to construct the nation it is necessary to preserve ahomogeneity of remembrance (such as anthems, waving flags, and unifying slogans in conjunction with an amnesia of heterogeneity. If poetry is disruptive performance or, in Homi Bhabha’s formulation an articulation of the melancholia of the people’s wounding by and before the emergence of the State Line, then poetry can can be defined as an audible space of opposition. RAP is the form of audition in our era that utterly refuses to sing anthems of white male hegemony. (Italics mine)
This challenge to the monoculture is not confined to the realms of philosophy and history but is also a very significant part of rap’s command of vernacular and postmodern ideas in language. Through the continuous refiguration, deconstruction, and extension of the various languages that we “use,” HIPHOP artists make it possible for fresh, new perspectives on knowledge, history, culture, politics, and aesthetics (read: life) to be heard and considered (as both critique and alternative). Furthermore, by insisting on a synthesis of “literate” and music-based sources of communication and statement, RAP seeks a profound intellectual reorganization of American society. By reuniting, through a collaging of a multiplicity of formal sources and structures, the many fragments of intellectual, physical, and “spiritual” activity that make up our cultural traditions, we learn how to bring about a new society through education and the “working out” of a mass revolutionary consciousness. This is accomplished in the area of cultural production through the manipulation of electronic and computer technology, which is used to subvert the political and social status of mass media. The injection into a mass cultural context of interventionist ideas about the nature of the dialectic that exists between language, power, and society in the postindustrial cultures of the West is at the center of RAP’s constant preoccupation with issues of “race”, class, gender, and social transformation. This accounts for the pervasive evidence everywhere in RAP of didacticism, polemical challenge, and ethical/moral caution (as well as taboo-smashing incautiousness). The evolution of folklore in this context allows for a “remix” of conventional master narratives regarding the “his-story” of the State versus a signifying and critical interrogation of these “stories” by we, the people, who have our own stories to tell (notice the plural usage here).
This attitude is reflected in its stance toward commodity production and the political economy of culture in the recording industry itself. As Baker states:
When rap moves into the studio of record production, what is fascinating about its corporal minimalism is that it signifies on, or deconstructs, the very processes of record production and the mechanics of product utilization. Turntables become mere mechanisms for converting already produced and fetishized records into cacophonous “scratchings”; microphones are mere voice-boosters (not Midas converters of the black voice unselfconsciously into white gold) that can be possessed only by the rapper who has proved that he is not a “sucker DJ” in need of “bum rushing.”2
What all of this presages for the future is the further recovery and exposure (hearing) of all those American voices that have been suppressed by conventional, white male definitions of “poetry” and “Art.” By emphasizing in form and content the values and principles of heterogeneity RAP is, as Baker states, “a metonym or an acronym for all the neglected poetries that are surfacing and competing for American audition today.”3 That audition and sounding is by definition a multicultural one because it directly valorizes those vernacular traditions and conceptions that come from a mass social consciousness--what we rhetorically refer to as “the people.” This can be decoded (in Baker’s designation) as R (Recovered) A (Audition) of the P (People). By sampling the past, RAP establishes a space for the studied refiguration and critical affirmation of what is still valuable in our collective heritage while celebrating (again in a critical sense) what social-cultural elements and ideas provide the possibilities of liberation in the present. By going far beyond canonical literary and musical conventions, not to mention philosophical edicts from alienating academic and ideological traditions (like racism, sexism and imperialism), HIPHOP puts everyone on notice in American society that these acts of resistance and rebellion are not conceived as infantile “entertainment” for the middle and ruling classes but are at the forefront of questioning all institutions of power and authority that seek to oppress, exploit, exclude or ignore the larger human community.
Finally what RAP, as a quintessential postmodern form, makes us aware of is that the great project of modernism, despite its undeniable achievements, ultimately failed because it sought to reinscribe cultural and political hegemony in terms of “race”, class, gender and epistemology. By positing itself as a “universal” representation of art for all humanity in the world (with Western Europe as the heavily valorized “center”), this stance ultimately insured that the modernists would perceive and treat all “others” as the exotic (and marginal) periphery. Despite the fundamental elitism and hierarchical nature of the notion of cultural “excellence” and “development” (with themselves and their implicit logocentric ideology of mastery as the standard criterion for everyone else to aspire to), the modernists (radicals and reactionaries alike) found themselves not so paradoxically dependent on the ideas, values, forms, traditions and philosophies of the “outside world” (e.g., Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, China, Japan, Indochina, the Pacific Islands, etc.).
In the United States this was manifested by the avant-garde “borrowing” heavily (and usually without recognition or credit) from the “folk traditions” of African American, Latino American and Native American cultures. This imperialist expropriation characterizes the politics of culture within the monoculture, and it is this notion of superiority that HIPHOP challenges, critiques, and attempts to overturn (along with all its social-political implications). By rejecting any notion of art or culture that excludes one on the basis of their ethnic, class or sexual identity, RAP seeks to raise the basic question of “What kind of world do we wish to live in?” in every area of American life (including most significantly the areas of knowledge, education, and criticism). In this way RAP moves beyond its own parochial concerns in the realms of “race”, class and gender to address social, cultural, economic, and political transformation within the larger society and culture itself.
If the United States can mature as a nation and embrace its tremendous history as a society with many DIFFERENT cultural identities and genealogies then we might just make it past what the great novelist, poet, essayist, gadfly, trickster, and multicultural critic Ishmael Reed calls the “Western Church” and begin to build a society and world that recognizes (as Reed also states) that “Genius is common.” But as the finest RAP group in the world, PUBLIC ENEMY, points out so eloquently, “the choice NOW is “to become HUMAN or Caucasian.” If we are to do that we must not, as PE says, “believe the hype.” It’s a world scene now and the entire globe, in its various multicultural guises, is right here. WORD!
Poetics Journal
Berkeley, California
June 1991
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Miles Styles
Live Music Review
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by Kofi Natambu
September 3, 1986
Detroit Metro Times
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Miles Davis at Ford Auditorium
Detroit, Michigan
Sunday, August 31, 1986
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In a magnificent performance Sunday evening, the master--Miles Davis--proved once again why he is justly considered one of the finest artists of this century. Impeccably attired in a bright gold and black ensemble (with two Valentine hearts embroidered on his back!) and equipped with a flaming red trumpet and mike attachment connected to the bell of his horn, Davis and his young, eight-piece group blazed through nearly two hours of a set that left the standing room-only crowd (and this writer) gasping in joy and appreciation.
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With a sonic mix that included three keyboards (one manned by Davis himself), a trap drummer, rhythm guitar, electric bass, tenor saxophone, various percussion and trumpet, the concert was another profound course in how incredibly elastic and creatively flexible the blues form is. In a masterful weaving of orchestral textures and melodic rhythms, Davis created a rich tapestry of sounds that appeared to merge and synthesize the myriad black musical traditions of the past one hundred years. There were darting fast 4/4 bebop lines, motifs and riffs counterposed to hard driving rhythm and blues vamps, heartstopping lyricism that slid off into ominous lowdown funk interludes that segued into majestic orchestral concertos literally drenched in traditional rural and urban blues tonalities. Then, just when you thought you had figured out the emerging and then receding patterns, Davis would alchemically direct the band into a seamless web of pop and rock rhythms and harmonies which gave way to some brilliant and achingly beautiful ballad improvisations by the leader. There were even translucent blue versions of “Human Nature” (by Michael Jackson), and “Time After Time” (Cyndi Lauper)!
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All this was going on as Davis constantly stalked the length and breadth of the stage, compulsively playing as if searching for a hidden note, curled up and hunched over in that strangely enigmatic and graceful way of his. With the bell of his trumpet sometimes only i inches from the floor, Davis played inspired thematic and counterpoint variations on a synergy of musics culled from a wide array of idioms (like James Brown, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Spanish Flamenco--not to mention John Lee Hooker). Davis was also witty, gracious, playful and openly magnanimous, locking arms to play duets with his tenor saxophonist Bob Berg, or gently walking his guitar player Robben Ford to the very front edge of the stage to play wickedly precise takes on the great B.B. King.
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As Davis played soaring open-toned bravura phrases or tight, muted riffs and the virtuoso polyrhythmic drumming of his percussionists engulfed the rocking auditorium. I couldn’t help but think that there is still, at age sixty, more musical intelligence, passion, sensitivity, taste and toughness in Davis than in 90% of all the musicians I hear today (in any idiom). I think it has something to do with an ineffable sense of style and sheer elegance. The man is all music. We are fortunate that he chose to share with us his great art and humanity.
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Poetry Under Fire
“The best and most promising of these contemporary poets have given their lives to the liberation of their people. The names read like an honor roll of the finest intellects of Central America... Many fought in guerrilla movements, suffered torture and jail. And most of the poets in this collection have known exile. They are a true testimony to the power of poetry in Central America and to the danger of being a poet in our time...”.
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—From the introduction to Volcan
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Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
April 11, 1984
Detroit Metro Times
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Volcan: Poems from Central America
(El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua)
Bilingual anthology. Edited by Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Paschke. City Lights Books. San Francisco, CA. 1984
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Let’s begin with a horrifying yet more than plausible series of questions about the relationship between poetry and society in our time. Suppose you lived in a culture where murder, fear and repression were as commonplace as the sun rising every morning? Where torture, exile and intimidation are banal expressions of communication, and atrocity just another name for politics?
Suppose you lived in a country where 50,000 people were shot, hanged, mutilated, stabbed, kidnapped and buried alive in just three years, and “Death Squads” backed and paid for by a “gigantic foreign power” were directly responsible for the deaths of your mother, or father, or brothers, sisters, extended family and friends? What kind of poetry would you write then? Would poetry even enter the ravaged corners of your mind? Would you care about the paperweight status of being a poet lowrate or acquiring a grant to write about why your lover left you for the 900th time? What place would literary discourse, gossip and motives have in an area where writing a poem can, and very often does, get you killed?
These are not genteel academic questions about some far off bleak vision of the future presented at some hopelessly careerist literary symposium, but the everyday reality of life at this very moment in that region of the planet called Central America. In an extraordinary new poetry anthology entitled Volcan (as in “a volcano ready to erupt”) we get some lucid and powerful answers to our questions from 39 poets whose courage, love, strength and commitment give a whole new meaning to that much abused word: poetry. What we are blessed to receive is the profoundly liberating message that language is not dead and useless after all; that cynicism, despair and infantile solipsism (the major diseases eating the heart of American poetry) are not the fetid waves of the future, but merely the last warning signs that this culture is dying and in its wake a New World culture is being born that respects and defends all humanity. What we also learn is that despite organized barbarism on a scale virtually unprecedented in human history, art and the creative impulse can still help free us from the most vicious tyranny and despotism.
The fact that these poems come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua only serve to remind us that being a poet can still be a dangerous and subversive activity where words are taken seriously, and the sanctity of human life is upheld as a supreme value against oppression.
How they putrify a man alive, sketch in a flash
the ample pallor of the murdered
and lock him up in infinity.
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And so
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sweetly
fatally
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I have decided to construct
with all my songs an endless bridge to dignity so that one by one the humiliated of the earth
may pass
—“Freehand Sketch” Roberto Sosa (Honduras)
Then there is the absolute certainty that if you tell the truth about what the oppressors do, you and your work will be banned—like Mercedes Durand, now exiled in Mexico by the government of El Salvador:
River Sumpul
Do you remember the many times we cleansed your sands and kissed your shore when we were children? But now your waters are different.
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Your bed harbors skulls, femurs, skeletons, and buzzards dig mountains of rotting flesh
and flocks of vultures gorge on intestines...
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...and on that gruesome day
women’s heads fell on your breast,
mangled men thundered in your waves,
and massacred children rolled in your bed!
Those were six hundred lives you shrouded,
Those were six hundred souls you devoured,
Those were six hundred dead worth a day’s labor,
Those were six hundred decent people dying in your waters..
—“Requiem for the Sumpul” Mercedes Durand (El Salvador)
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But none of these terrors can destroy or frighten away the magnificent spiritual force that nourishes and sustains even in the face of mass destruction. Read and listen to the inspired/inspiring words of the great guerrilla poet Otto-Rene Castillo who was killed in Guatemala in 1967:
yes, I am always singing, always struggling, so that
the world may exchange its sadness for a simple cascade of joy,
for a spark of love
for a rose of sweet
words and sweet eyes:
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But know,
know well that no one laughs
in the furrowed fields of flowers
know well that no one
will share his joy with the plants,
know well that no one affirms
the birds’ singing
or the ice blue gaze of the ocean fog...
Know well that no one
carves the centuries in hard stone
nor counts the phases of the moon,
know well that no one now speaks with volcanos and stones
because their temples
are crumbling on their souls
without the heavens knowing it,
without it being known by the mountains
or the blue gesture of the bays.
Let us love, nevertheless,
the sweet shoulders of the earth, put our ancient nest
to the chlorophyll breast of the jungle
and learn the language of trees,
let us retrace our steps
to the first cultivated seed
and leave our song embossed on its sonorous cotelydon.
Let us love, nevertheless,
silent campesinos of my country,
gods multiplied by hunger,
true examples of the Mayan fire,
let us love in spite of everything the full emotion of our clay...
—“Prayer for the Soul of My Country” Otto-Rene Castillo (Guatemala)
As the editors of this anthology point out, it is indeed astonishing that out of a combined population of just 15 million people from the four countries represented here (where over half the people are illiterate), there are so many world-class poets. Consider Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas brought about a revolution in June 1979. It is no coincidence that both the Minister of Culture (the legendary Ernesto Cardenal) and the Secretary-General of the Association of Sandinista Cultural Workers (Rosario Murillo) are internationally recognized poets of great depth, vision, and energy. This is the power that animates and directs the new humanity that is Nicaragua. The revolution made possible for poetry to be freely published there for the first time in this century by ending the barbaric rule of the U.S. backed Somoza regime. Thus what was once clandestine is now a major source of national pride. The obligations of living in the face of death are not separate from the obligations of poetry. Giaconda Belli (recipient of the famed Casa de las Americas prize for poetry for 1978) reminds us:
Never consider yourself
a privileged intellectual, a book-filled head repeating
the same conversation
a withered doleful thinker.
You were born to thresh stars
and discover in the trees the laughter of the crowd,
you were born brandishing the future,
seeing through eyes, hands, feet breast, mouth,
foreteller of things to come...
Your legacy was unbounded love,
confidence, unaffected simplicity,
the shadow of chilamate trees, the trill of black mockingbirds.
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Now the depths of the earth give forth electricity to charge your song,
poems spill from sweaty faces
and eager hands holding primers and pencils;
now you have only to sing of what surrounds you,
the soft pitch
of the fervent voices of the multitude.
—“Obligations of the Poet” Giaconda Belli (Nicaragua)
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In Volcan there are no empty form freaks or posturing rhetoricians. These New World artists understand what the unity of idea, vision, craft and imagery is all about. They know that as the famed African American surrealist poet Ted Joans says, “You have nothing to fear from the poet but the truth.” We North American poets all owe our “southern brothers and sisters” a great debt. Volcan shows us what it is.
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Jazz & American Writing in the 20th Century
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A Meditation On & Review Of The Jazz Poetry Anthology
Edited by Sascha Feinstein & Yusef Komunyakaa
Indiana University Press, 1991
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Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
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The history of American poetics in the 20th century, like most areas of intellectual inquiry and scholarship in the West, has been largely distorted and obscured by the reductionism of racism and cultural xenophobia. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the blatant ignorance displayed by most academics of the aesthetic ideas and traditions of the most profound manifestations of American vernacular forms and practices. One of the most obvious areas of stupidity and confusion are the categories of music and literature, or more specifically the formal and cultural relationship between them.
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What is most astonishing about this massive blindspot in American cultural studies is that it ignores precisely what the rest of the world most deeply knows and appreciates about the United States—namely Jazz, Blues, Rock, Funk and Rap music. Everyone realizes this except the pea-brained white cultural elite (both “mainstream” and “avant-garde”) who keep insisting that Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass. Laurie Anderson, George Gershwin, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are more important than say, Duke Ellington, Charles Parker, Thelonious Monk, B. B. King, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin. The sheer absurdity of this position is responsible for the idiotic curriculums of the great majority of American high schools and universities where these pathetic notions are taught (along with the ridiculous myth that “classical music” is inherently more “serious” and “informed” than American popular and vernacular forms). Roll over Chuck Berry and tell Little Richard the News!
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As a result many students are deprived of learning how and why just about every major writer in the world over the past 100 years has been deeply affected by the extraordinary innovations of African-American musical artists. How else does one rationally explain the Jazz and Blues inspired work of the following writers: W.C. Williams, Amiri Baraka, Sterling A. Brown, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Clark Coolidge, Bob Kaufman, James Baldwin, Jayne Cortez, Robert Hayden, Leopold Senghor; Carl Sandburg, Lawson Inada, Nathaniel Mackey, lshmael Reed, Kenneth Rexroth, Sonia Sanchez, Kazuko Shiraishi, Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, Wallace Stevens, Melvin B. Tolson, Quincy Troupe, Al Young, Paul Blackburn, William Matthews, Gregory Corso, Michael S. Harper, Kenneth Koch, Clarence Major, Frank O’Hara, Clayton Eshelman, and Ted Joans? (all of whom are in this amazing book)...
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The answer is that you CAN’T EXPLAIN IT without reference to Duke, Count, Pops. Billie, Sarah, Bird, Miles, Monk, Mingus, Sonny (Rollins, Stitt, Criss, Clark, and Williamson!), Ornette, Ayler, Cecil, Dolphy, Bud, Shepp and Coltrane. I’ve left out about 500 more names that you should know if you really care about the subject at hand. But why don’t you find out for yourself? Never has there been a closer link between knowledge and pleasure.
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If you don’t believe me ASK YOUR MAMA (a classic and essential Jazz/Poetry text by the legendary Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1961). Oo-Bop-ShaBam-a-Klook-A-Mop Y-E-A-H...
Eye to the Ground
Detroit
Summer, 1991
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Time for a Blood Transfusion
Record Review
by Kofi Natambu
James Blood Ulmer
BLACK ROCK
Columbia, 1982
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Timing has always been a major factor in the emergence of seminal artistic figures in black creative music. In fact, one of the most consistent features in the history of the music has been the appearance of innovative individual artists (or ensembles) at a crucial period in the art's development. Examples include Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk etc. Everyone has their favorite list. The point is that as rich, fertile, and diverse as the tradition has been, there has always remained those singular forces that have played a pivotal role in the ascension of the music as a major international artform. These individuals quickly become known as archetypes in Afro-American culture and serve as guides to the artistic future of American society. Rank hyperbole? Don't look now: HERE COMES BLOOD! Talk about timing. Just when it seemed that Jimi Hendrix would be the last truly creative guitar player _that America would ever produce (with all due respects to your favorite fret'n mash strum~r out there) James Blood comes roaring out of the loft underground in New York city in 1979, playing a riveting 'pump and drive' foil to the fiery byzantine lyricism of Ornette Coleman. Harmolodics meets whiplash guitar. The recording from this mighty union was entitled "The Tales of Captain Black" (on the small Artists House label), which introduced most listeners to the jagged quicksilver melodies that are now a Blood trademark. There was also a tortuous, aching (post?) romanticism that managed to sound ominously tough and unsentimental, yet intimate, warm, and compassionate all at once. This aspect of Blood's multifaceted persona sounded like a brand new approach to the "ballad form." Only the music is much more captivating than that academic phrase would suggest. Anyway it was at this point that I became a flat-out Blood fanatic, endlessly playing the record for my musician-friends and setting some sort of record for playing it on my radio program. The release of Blood's 1981 recording entitled Freelancing (this time for the huge conglomerate called CBS, INC.) confirmed his greatness for me. What I mean is that I played the music even more than before. Now you might legitimately ask what does all of this have to do with Blood's new record? Wei I, it is now a year later and Blood still has the same hypnotic effect that he always had. He does this simply by playing the hell out of the guitar and composing some of the most subtly rich and witty music I have ever ahd the privilege to hear.
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What Blood does is not easily translatable in words. The music does not lend itself to flippant categorizing or easy analysis. To say that he uses the harmolodic method of instant modulation and orchestration that al lows all members of an ensemble to play melodic lines at the same time does not really indicate the startling originality of the the sound that is created. This distinctive sound resists standard definitio·ns of genre, style, and idiom. It does not pander to fashionable trends nor does it play the listener cheap. It is a music of strength, grace, and eloquence that refuses to sacrifice humor, bravura, or even goodtime histrionics. No matter how ''technical'' and complex the music gets (and the forest gets plenty thick, indeed) it remains emotionally direct and powerful. In the ole days we would have said that the music "has a whole lotta heart and soul." It is this sublime unity of virtuosity and feeling that gives Blood's music its transformative powers. Now for the evidence: consider the slashing and searing syncopations of the tune "Open House" or the faster-than-the-speed-of-sound precision of bass, drums, and guitar on "Overnight." Juxtapose the manic out of tempo careening of the harmolodic trio of Blood, Amin Ali (electric bass), and Grant Calvin Weston (drums) on "More Blood" to the almost pastoral funk sensualness on "Love Have Two Faces." Listen to the throaty, hard-edged singing of Blood as he shouts, growls, moans, and croons on "Family Affair." In fact whenever the rich melisma of Blood's bluesvoice mingles with the liquid gospelisms of vocalist Irene Datcher on this tune and "Love Have ... " the impact Is mesmenzing The sound is so rna1est1c. noble, and passionate that ,t makes a beautiful, heartfelt mockery of what passes for the 0tovesong" genre today. Datcher and Blood bnlliantly redefine the form and make you believe that REAL LOVE between Man and Woman is not on,y possible. but evident. A definite coup in '82, On top of all this the .. supporting cast" ,s astonishing. For starters one writer once described Amin Ali as "b1on1c .. That's close. Frankly to hear a man play electric bottom with this much power and ease at the demonic tempos that this band routinely sets, is scary. Need convincing'? Listen to "Moon Beam'' "Fun House" and "Black Rock:' Or for blistering post-bop hysterics check out "We Bop." Who says science, art, and the bootyshake don't mix? Another taboo bites de dust As for the rhythmic hummingbird that is Grant Calvin Weston: Where does a 22 year old get off playing drums wtth the energy, drive, and dextenty of Elvln Jones and the tonal sensitivity and finesse of the young Tony Williams? Not that I'm cornplaining, ya understand ..
As for other major contributions to th is Hoodoo stew let's not forget Sam Sanders. Thass right, Detroit's own of S.S. and Visions. I am happy to note that the long-time "local" saxophone wizard plays like a man possessed on tenor and alto. Dig "Moon Beam", "We Bop", and "Overnight." Burning and thrashing. And as for the Bloodbrother/vessel himself? He cuts, flails, strokes, rips, and rumbles his way through the liberated harmolodic jungle with an awe-inspiring HEROISM and CLARITY that gives one a lot more than mere hope. It gives you the tools and weapons to forge a New World with. If you listen you will hear that the truth is delight. As Blood says: "Love don't mean a thing/if you don't love somebody ... "
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The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Long Live Great Black Music!
by Kofi Natambu
September 12, 1984
Detroit Metro Times
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One of the more absurd comments made about contemporary black creative music of late is a ridiculous assertion made by someone who should know better, a certain Mr. Wynton Marsalis—trumpet wunderkind and current Jazz celebrity darling. In an astounding statement even for the usually outspoken and highly opinionated 22-year-old, Marsalis says in the July, 1984 edition of Downbeat magazine that “nothing got established in the Jazz tradition in the 1970s.” This is such an outlandishly false statement on the given evidence that it almost doesn’t deserve a reply. But we can’t simply allow such an obviously silly and inaccurate remark to slide by without a severe challenge, even if it was made by an overzealous young media “star.”
C’mon Wynton, Give-us-a-break brother! You mean to tell me that you never heard of the Art Ensemble of Chicago? It’s sad, but true, that unfortunately there are still too many musicians who out of ignorance, pettiness or bias try to deny that necessary and often profound changes are taking place. Of course no one says that Marsalis or anyone else has “to like it” but please, a little credit where credit is due!
Speaking of credit, let’s all take a few precious moments to humbly acknowledge and thank Ptah (the God who protects and nurtures the Artist) that we have the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Talk about IRONY. Where else but in American music would one find five black virtuoso musician-composers who between them have mastered over one hundred instruments, including nearly every single member of the reed and woodwind families, as well as trumpet, bugle, and a bewildering array of percussion, string, and traditional acoustic instruments from various ethnic cultures around the world? The AEC is a virtual sonic encyclopedia of forms, styles, and traditions in the long history of African-American, and other world musics. After all, we are talking about the very best contemporary representatives of that endlessly creative tradition called “Jazz” though it should be stated up front that the AEC is much too dynamic, versatile, and broad-minded in concept and method to be easily fitted into any single category of musical expression.
It is equally important to realize that despite expressing a very wide spectrum of musical tastes and interests that range from the blues to swing, ragtime, ballads, spirituals, bebop, rock ‘n roll, ancestral folk songs, and various so-called “avant-garde” and ethnic musics, the Art Ensemble is not merely an eccentric band of eclectics. There is always at the core of their musical performances an utterly independent and quite original vision of what the AEC has always simply called “Great Black Music.” It is this boundless visionary spirit, and a stunning extension and subtle re-evaluation of the totality of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ music (and by artistic implication, their cultural philosophies) that characterizes the AEC and makes them, in my view, the most important musical ensemble to emerge in the U.S. since the John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman Quartets put everyone on notice some 25 years ago.
It is necessary then to ask two rather obvious questions: Where did such a band come from, and who are these guys anyway? For an answer to both questions you have to start in Chicago. It was there that four of these five dapper young men met and played together. It began as early as 1961 when the pianist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams put together the Experimental Band, a workshop and rehearsal outlet for young innovative musician-composers. It was also in this big band that the great Roscoe Mitchell met and began to collaborate with another extraordinary multi-instrumentalist and composer, Joseph Jarman. It was in this ensemble that Mitchell first met and worked with one of the finest bassists in the world, the regal Malachi Favors Maghostut.
It was also in Shytown in March, 1965, that a visionary group of black creative musicians led by young veteran musician-composers Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran organized the now world famous musicians’ collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). It was in this nurturing context of on-going creative activity that the wise and whimsical Mr. Lester Bowie, trumpet master and composer joined the then Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, after arriving from St. Louis. It was this group (Mitchell, Favors, and Bowie, along with drummer Phillip Wilson) that first began to gain considerable attention in improvisational music circles. In 1966 Mitchell’s group, augmented with other outstanding young musicians from the AACM record Sound for the local based label, Delmark Records. This record quickly became a cherished collector’s item and is a landmark in the development of ‘new music’ worldwide.
In l968 Joseph Jarman, who had been leading his own highly innovative groups, joined with Mitchell, Favors, and Bowie to officially form the first edition of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It was this group that gained legendary status by leaving the U.S. for France in 1969, where they remained for two years recording some fifteen albums while also composing music for three films and touring throughout Europe. It was during this whirlwind tour that they met the outstanding drummer/composer Famoudou Don Moye who had been playing with the Detroit Free Jazz ensemble in Italy. Moye joined the band permanently in 1970.
The Art Ensemble features incredible versatility along with dazzling theatrics, a high sense of drama and great wit and humor, not to mention lyrical and explosive poetry and a dadaist sense of reality. Don’t walk, RUN to the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wednesday, September 19 at 8p.m. You will hear one of the true wonders in all of music today.
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Staying Warm: A Literary Review
by Kofi Natambu
Quilt I
Ishmael Reed and Al Young (Editors)
QUILT PUBLICATIONS
Berkeley, California
1984, $4.95
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 1, Number 2, Winter/Spring 1982
PHOTO (L-R): Al Young and Ishmael Reed. Cover of QUILT 1 magazine, 1981
The past twenty years in American cultural life has brought about a massive revolution in the arts that is unprecedented in the history of the Republic. The explosion of intellectual and spiritual energy in this period is matched only by the mind-boggling level of physical activity and extremely broad range of creative expression. Innovation in Music, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts has taken place so often and in so many different areas, that the fever pitch pace has left critical and public opinion dragging behind, gasping for breath. This development is no where more pronounced than in Literature, where a startling new generation of novelists, poets, essayists, and critics have overturned the stale and antiquated "standards" of Anglo-American cultural elitism. As in Music, where black instrumentalists and. composers redefined the very parameters of creativity in the realm of Sound, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American writers have brought . a new, fresh and thoroughly radical sensibility and vitality to American letters. This is manifested in particularly striking fashion within the huge "small press movement," which now publishes 98% (!) of all literature being printed and distributed in the United States. With the widespread corporate centralization and monopolization of "major" American publishing firms (the process of colossal multinational conglomerates swallowing up these institutions and systematically ridding itself of all books that don't turn a big profit through bottom-line accounting), the small presses have become absolutely invaluable sources of alternative creativity. Two individuals who epitomize the move to both independent publishing and truly radical aesthetic expression in the U.S. are Ishmael Reed and Al Young.
The emergence of the writing, editing, and publishing team of Reed and Young is one of the most extraordinary stories in the annals of 20th century American literary history. In their work and artistic vision lies a brilliant synthesis and extension of ideas that were pursued and then abandoned by American artists during the period from 1900-1940. This idea: the notion that American creative artists from a wide range of disciplines and racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural groups could co-operate and even positively affect one another, is the social motivation and spiritual "incentive" behind the life and careers of Reed and Young. However, the particular beauty of these co-conspirators' activity and thought is that it is not marred/constrained/ restricted by divisive ideological conceits and polemics, as was the last historical attempt at artistic-political-racial unity during the 1930's. This social trap of hair-splitting factionalism and petty rhetorical dogma is not so much sidestepped as transcended. In the social cosmology of Reed and Young, the final criteria for the publication and dissemination of ideas (even ones they themselves "disagree" with) is their clarity, depth, and creative strength. The governing idea is that many diverse perspectives are not only healthy and informative, but socially necessary. It is this credo that has served both of -these prolific writers well over the past fifteen. years. In fact, their sheer productivity since the mid-1960s is astounding. Since 1967, this duo has managed between them to write and publish nine novels, seven volumes of poetry, one book of essays, one volume of autobiography, co-edit three seminal literary anthologies of poetry, prose, and nonfiction, and write for, co-edit, and publish three different literary magazines (Yardbird Reader, Y'Bird, and Quilt). If this record wasn't dazzling enough, these two Afro-American wunderkinds also help found a multi-cultural literary organization dedicated to promoting and distributing the "best writers and publications currently available from literary small presses" (The Before Columbus Foundation), written screenplays, established two small presses (I. Reed Books and Reed and Cannon Publications) and were instrumental in the conception of the American Book Awards as an alternative to the racist National Book Awards organization. This is not meant to give the impression, however, that these individuals have a fetish for quantity. The outstanding quality of their work has been duly recognized and acclaimed in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
But this, after all, is not a review of Ishmael's and Al's personal literacy successes. It is to introduce you to their latest creation: a warm, funr:iy, heavy, ass-kicking, irreverent, headbusting, eye-opening, and BEAUTIFUL publication called QUILT I. That's right, QUILT. Just like the kind your grandmother made, that richly colorful and intricate mosaic of cloth, needles, and disciplined craftsmanship. The intricate weaving and shaping of seemingly disparate patches and pieces strewn together to invent a mandala of dreams, desires, myths, and memories. This is the thematic center of this new literary magazine of prose, poetry, journalism, and graphics (including cartoons), and the basis of its brilliant variations on this illuminating metaphor for human communication and expression. I am happy to report that these outlaws have done it again!
QUILT I features a wide array of literary "patches and pieces" that are stunning in their structural and literary cont~nt and overall aesthetic design. There is a wonderful short story by the renowned Black female novelist Kristen Hunter that is a wimer in "how to write about people so well that you want to re-read the story over and over again." There is a tour de force essay by Ben Tong, who demolishes, in a hilarious and intellectually creative way, the pretensions, delusions, and narcissistic guru ravings of the now multi-million dollar "Self-Realization" industry and their pseudo-hip followers (e.g. EST, Esalen retreats, and "holistic" conferences complete with quasi-Oriental psychobabble). Tong also derides the often naive racism of these white Taoist-Shaman-Zen-African Elder groupies, and their subsequent abuse and misuse of "Eastern" religions, philosophies, and sacred rituals. The name of this essential piece is Alan Watts Was Sure One Strange Kinda Chinaman! Touché.
Those two pieces alone are worth the price of admission, but there's MORE. The poetry is uniformly excellent, from a witty and sharp translation of a famous poem by an even more famous poet (Hiccup, by the "Father of Negritude", Mr. Leon Damas), to the haunting and crystalline blues poetry of Lance Jeffers, Yusef Komunyakaa (who writes in the keys of Eb and F#), and Fae Myenne Ng. These writers put most contemporary American poets to shame as they demonstrate what the unity of idea, vision, craft, and imagery is all about (no empty form freaks here, or solipsistic rhetoricians either!). There is a very well-written and informative essay by the brilliant improvisational pianist/composer Randy Weston on Black American Music ("Jazz") that was originally a report" from the FESTAC cultural festival in Nigeria. There are devastating satiric prose pieces by James Houston on TV political assassinations, and corporate demonology (see: The Fifth Day Robert Kennedy is Shot a hallucinatory story about American violence, media manipulation, and "fear as idiology"; and Consumer Report, which is a too-good-to-be-true account of how corporate executives all view their business in the exact same way. They even say the exact same things: "It is very easy to criticize this business looking at it from the outside .... " The three "executives," by the way, are in NETWORK TV, DEFENSE WEAPONRY and HEROIN).
There are still more outstanding features of this 190-page opus, including a fantastic section of poems, prose pieces, and cartoon drawings called TELEVISION AND OTHER VISIONS. This 45-page section begins with A Poetry Reading on the Tonight Show, by poet Paul F.. Fericano, that reminds me of some of the deliriously funny and ironic blank verse of the Puerto Rican master Pedro Pietro. The section ends in a blaze of Native American funk prose by the brilliant Standing Rock Sioux writer/attorney Vine Deloria, Jr. His piece, entitled Why Me Tonto, is a slashing and uproariously funny critique of white, ''enlightened" filmmakers who try to make an artistic killing by trying to gently rope Native American people into supporting their "Redploitation" flicks. Sorta Iike Shaft on the Reservation or Coffy Was a Squaw. Needless to say, Deloria ''massacres'' these latter day bohemian Custers.
Throughout this publication is a deep and sensitive concern with the Third World artist devising his/her own political and cultural solutions to uniquely '''individual'' social dilemmas. Thus, the lucid and exciting essays by Andrew Hope, Geary Hobson, Chinweizu, and Dr. Louis Price Mars (who are respectively Eskimo, Native American, African, and Haitian writers) speak directly and eloquently to the themes each has chosen to educate the ''rest of us'' with. In each case, we get a scholarly, "inside" look at various dimensions of the multifaceted "Third World" experience. For example, Andrew Hope systematically takes apart the neo-misslonary white poets and politicians like Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, the Federal Government's various environmental agencies, and.their arch-nemesis — the pro-environmentalist lobbies, who all think they know best" what the Native Alaskan people . . . . need most. (Snyder calls them "a rootless population who are moving from place to place" and remarks that "most of us are twentieth century waifs, rootless and as attached to liberat white values as anyone else.") Snyder goes on to say that the concept of imperialism (which he claims is nothing but the invocation of ''tiberal white values'') doesn't apply to poetry and literature, because "we all know we are free to take anything we want" in the arts. The interesting thing about all this is that these new-not-sobenevolent-imperialists think that they are doing the Native people a "spiritual favor" by bringing these "primitive nomads" their philosophies. Well, Snyder and his literary cronies may "know" that, but it's NEWS to us "non-Anglo" folks sez Hope (and I add a hearty amen!). Besides, this whole notion of "taking anything we want" is what caused this problem in the first place. Hope calls his piece Rootless Primitives Need Land Masters. Get it? As my grandmother often says, "White folks got a lotta nerve."
Finally, in a magazine crammed to the brim with fantastic and mind-bending surprises, I offer you the piece de resistance and the biggest coup in American letters in many years: a full-length interview with Truman Capote(!) of all people, who, in a wide-ranging and extremely candid discussion with black novelist and screenwriter Cecil Brown, says that about 60% of everything in America originated with black culture and that "black people have been ripped off by practically everybody in America." l'm not going to spoil the surprise by revealing any more of this extraordinary interview (wait until you see what else Capote has to say!), nor am I going to mention the content of the amazing cartoons and graphics by. artists lezley Saar and Futzig Nutzle (you won't believe me, anyway). Just go out and get QUILT. It will definitely restore your faith in literature. There is a tremendous amount of Love, Intelligence, and Passion in this multicolored garment & it's one surefire way to keep warm this winter.
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ISHMAEL REED: THE HOODOO TEXT
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by Kofi Natambu
Detroit Metro Times
December 6, 1984
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“A novel can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons...”
—The Loop Garoo Kid from: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 1968
“We welcome a time in history when ‘American’ is no longer interchangeable with rudeness, grossness and provincialism, but has begun to stand for a society where all of the cultures of the world may co-exist, and in which cultural exchange is allowed to thrive.”
—Ishmael Reed, Before Columbus Foundation, 1978
Writing is strictly a “put up or shut up” game. In any group of thinking people even the most brilliant talker can’t get by on oral skills alone. You know at some point that some seriously wisecracking observer is going to say “Yeah that sounds good, but where is the evidence?” If a stuttering silence ensues then everyone will grab their drinks and slide onto the dance floor. Talk about case closed?!?
One of the best things about being a truly great writer like Ishmael Reed is that you never have to worry about being embarrassed in this way. You see, the text is the evidence and as long as the text is being written (and read) the case is never closed. Language is like that and in the hands of a genuine master like Reed we experience the extraordinary power of words to create, shape, and change what we so blithely call “reality.” It is from this angle of vision that we gain liberating insights into what the art of writing is really all about.
In the case of Reed we also discover the endlessly creative capacity of language to eclipse even the mighty force of public personality. You see, Ishmael Reed is not by any stretch of the imagination your run-of-the-mill scribe or human being. Born on February 22, 1938, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Reed is one of the most prolific writers in all of American letters over the past 17 years. His record in terms of sheer literary productivity alone is simply amazing-- as the author of six highly acclaimed novels, four volumes of poetry, three books of essays, two plays, editor of three major literary anthologies and three legendary literary magazines (Yardbird Reader; Y’Bird, and Quilt), Reed is a veritable one man writing and publishing industry.
Not too shabby for a young black man of working-class origins who dropped out of the University of Buffalo in his junior year in 1960, yet went on to teach at Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley, and who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and twice for the National Book Award in poetry and fiction. In spite of this grudging recognition by this country’s literary establishment, Reed was the prime mover behind the founding of the American Book Awards organization to combat the racism and cultural discrimination of these other virtually lily-white institutions. In addition, Reed runs his own publishing firm (wryly called I. Reed Books) and is widely considered one of the major leaders of the now gigantic small press movement in the U.S. over the past 20 years.
So you can see why it is absolutely necessary to talk about a number of Ishmael Reeds. One of them is the writing dynamo whose wildly creative use of what Reed refers to as the Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic is an uproarious and brilliantly satirical take-off on the historical and present-day foibles, fears, dreams, ideas, values, and stupidities that rule Western culture and society. The eternal target of Reed’s critical and parodic assault on what Reed derisively calls the “Western Church” is the received forms and styles of writing from both the (ancient and modern) Western and Afro-American literary traditions. Upon this edifice Reed attacks and deconstructs (demystifies) the metaphysical presuppositions, assumptions, and attitudes inherent in the philosophical structure of Western cultures whose blind and crippling ignorance has led to one-dimensional and oppressive ideas about ‘race,’ ‘sex,’ ‘politics,’ ‘art,’ ‘law,’ ‘morality,’ ‘economics,’ etc., that allows for and creates destructive and exploitive ways of life.
Thus the emblems that Reed satirizes and engages in complex polemics with are Christianity, the hypocrisy and distortion of democratic ideals, the deeply embedded lies concerning American and world history, the absurdly reductive and finally schizophrenic mind-set of the Greco-Roman rationalist tradition, and the resultant horrific attempts to institutionalize/rationalize various forms of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Lest anyone get the mistaken notion that Reed’s writing is in any way lectern-sleepy it would be wise to guess again. There are very few writers in the world today who could match the brash, sizzling vitality of Reed at his howling, driving best. His is an utterly unique and visionary style that draws on a very wide spectrum of American vernacular forms. In such hilarious and densely complex books as Mumbo Jumbo, The Freelance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Conjure, A Secretary to the Spirits, Flight to Canada, and The Terrible Twos (dig these titles!!), Reed consciously uses the artistic legacy of TV, vaudeville, comic strips, minstrelsy, Jazz, film, painting, journalism, folklore, religious iconography, burlesque, etc., to create and develop his own ‘fictions.’ All techniques are put in the service of a scholarly yet outrageously adventurous mind/spirit intent upon getting us to see/hear/feel/conceive “accepted realities” in completely fresh and new ways. By signifying on what we say is real (about humanity, culture, and art) Reed shows us through the revelatory act of writing that Magic and Science are not, nor have they ever been, mutually exclusive categories. Reed is after no less than a “revolution of the imagination” where the active power of art will not only release us from stale conventions and monolithic experience but give us the intellectual and spiritual energy to transform our lives.
Finally, Reed reminds that any text is open to a multitude of interpretations or “readings” and that all human experience, like art, is open-ended and made intelligible through the processes of creativity and communication. America is not one culture, but multi-cultural. We are what we create (and recreate).
In these days of national amnesia and mindless cynicism where dangerously shallow mythmakers like Reagan rule vicariously through our willful ignorance, meanest fears and smug hatreds, it is crucial to have thinking and compassionate artists like Ishmael Reed around. Great writing not only teaches us to rigorously question what we are “led to believe” but to explore with vigorous honesty and humor the very foundations of our existence. As always, Reed is at the literary cutting edge of what is truly radical and imaginative in American writing today. To paraphrase one of his reviewers, to miss him is to miss out on “one of the great creations of this era.”
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[UPDATE: Reed was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1998. In 2000, a 500-page anthology of his collected work entitled The Reed Reader was published by Basic Books.]
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The Rise (And Systematic Misuse) of the Black Actor in American Film Since 1980, Parts I and II
by Kofi Natambu
September 1999
For the past two decades a series of performances by African American actors—male and female—have made a major creative contribution to cinema in the United States despite the fact that they have been consistently denied, and shut out of, almost all leading roles in mainstream Hollywood productions. The existence of these and other obvious limitations and restrictions imposed by Hollywood have of necessity created a situation where African American actors are compelled to work with significantly different economic, aesthetic and social/political conditions than their average white counterparts.
In fact, the emergence of such talented individuals as Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Don Cheadle, Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, Larenz Tate, Alfre Woodard, Forest Whitaker, Isaiah Washington, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy, and Delroy Lindo, among others have created an unprecedented situation in that each of these figures have managed to develop a ‘career.’ It’s important to point out that prior to the late 1980s (and the significant rise of African American directors like Spike Lee) this was impossible. The one glaring and sometimes problematic exception to this exclusion was Sidney Poitier. What this means of course is that there is now for the first time in American cinematic history an identifiably new ‘range of sensibilities’ in the specific acting styles of African Americans which differ in some important and culturally specific ways from their white colleagues of the post-1980 generation.
For unlike their white contemporaries—those born between 1945-1970—in most instances not only have black actors been forced to begin their careers a lot later (of the African Americans listed above only half of them are under the age of 40 while 90% of the white actors from this age group are), but they work on projects that too often don’t get the aesthetic, critical and economic support that the white actors receive. This is not only the result of a pervasive racism in the American film industry but of a major reluctance on the part of audiences to accept and support African American actors in a wide range of different roles that don’t always require the black performer to play the nominal sidekick, generic violent criminal villain, or self-sacrificing noble savage/martyr/savior foil to the self-assertive white male/female hero/heroine.
It is this last perennial barrier that stands in the way of the black actor today to achieve the kind of artistic independence and recognition that his white counterparts take for granted. It is also this general cultural myopia that further exacerbates an already perilous situation for the African American actor who must contend with the imposition of lowered expectations on the part of white producers, directors, and writers alike who often have their own reductive and racist notions about what a black actor can or can’t, should or shouldn’t do in terms of their art. These limitations, which are usually in place on any given project that a black actor might get involved in (since 99% of all scripts are written “for” white actors only), serve to reinforce traditional racial stereotypes that have plagued African Americans onscreen for the entire history of American cinema (see Bogle, 1973, 1994).
Not surprisingly then, the analyses rendered by African American film and cultural historians, scholars and critics Donald Bogle, Edward Guerrero, Armond White, Manthia Diawara, Nelson George, Jesse Rhines and the late James A. Snead all emphasize the larger contextual problems of political economy, cultural exclusion, and social class that affect the form and content of what black actors are given an opportunity to play. Unlike white actors African Americans are almost required to meet the audiences’ expectations in fulfilling various racial fantasies in their depictions of social reality. That this often goes for both the general white audience and the black audience alike (not to mention the prejudicial assumptions of Asian and Latino American audiences who are also taught by the media and the larger society that African Americans can only “represent” and embody ‘certain types of behavior’) serve to put an additional burden on the already sorely taxed identity of the black actor in Hollywood. What’s surprising is that given these tremendous constraints and restrictions the black actor, through sheer force of talent, command of craft and individual determination, will occasionally break through these severe barriers and traps to reveal something wholly original and insightful about the complexities and ambiguities of African American life in the United States.
When this happens a new kind of ‘movie magic’ occurs. Examples include the dynamic and powerful work of Fishburne and Bassett in the otherwise mediocre, indifferently directed and written melodrama “about” Ike and Tina Turner, What’s Love Got To Do With It?; the electrifying, riveting portrayal of Malcolm X by Denzel Washington in the film directed by Washington’s frequent collaborator, Spike Lee and his classic leading man turn in the small but delightful Mississippi Masala directed by Mira Nair; Samuel L. Jackson’s sly and virtuosic performances in two films directed by Lee and Quentin Tarentino, Jungle Fever and Pulp Fiction; the great, vastly underrated Alfre Woodard in just about anything but especially in John Sayles’s Passion Fish, Lee’s Crooklyn, the late Martin Ritt’s Cross Creek, and the otherwise well-intentioned (?) yet offensively racist and “gliberal” melodrama directed by Lawrence Kasdan, Grand Canyon; an intense and haunting performance by Laurence Fishburne in director Bill Duke’s small noir masterpiece Deep Cover; Don Cheadle’s “should have been star-making role” in his mesmerizing, “slick, sly and wicked” portrayal of ‘Mouse’ in another unjustly underrated noir masterpiece directed by Carl Franklin and written by Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, as well as Cheadle’s role as a heroic community leader in director John Singleton’s best film Rosewood; the terrifying yet nuanced portrayal of psychopathic killer ‘O-Dog’ by the subtle and versatile young actor Larenz Tate in the Hughes Brothers’s black answer to Cagney’s “White Heat”, Menace II Society, as well as Tate’s underwritten yet charismatic performance as a young black urban intellectual in the well intentioned, periodically entertaining and uneven Love Jones; Isaiah Washington’s intelligently drawn and quietly poignant characterizations in Lee’s Clockers, Girl 6, and Get On the Bus; Morgan Freeman’s utterly masterful command of a complex range of distinctly different roles in both good films (Seven, Unforgiven, Clean and Sober, The Shawshank Redemption), and bad (Street Smart, Lean On Me, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves); the subtle, private and multilayered intensity of Delroy Lindo’s work in Lee’s Malcolm X, Clockers, and Crooklyn; the dignified inner strength and traces of sweet melancholia in Whoopi Goldberg’s best portrayals in The Long Walk Home, Boys on the Side, and The Associate; the brilliantly understated yet always compelling sensitivity and broad intelligence of one of this country’s most underappreciated actors, Forest Whitaker, in everything from a scene-stealing cameo in the legendary Martin Scorsese’s weakest film The Color of Money to larger ensemble (and scene stealing) character roles in Neal Jordan’s The Crying Game, Abel Ferrara’s little seen but sometimes interesting Body Snatchers, and Bill Duke’s excellent adaptation of a Chester Himes novel A Rage in Harlem where Whitaker also shows off a very droll and hilarious comic side of his boundless talent to great effect; and finally the best work of Wesley Snipes in Sugar Hill, The Waterdance, Jungle Fever and New Jack City shows an actor capable of emotional depth and shrewd insight when challenged by the right material and/or director (without it he is often self indulgent and missing-in-action).
Ironically the stunning range of the best work of African American actors, while often overlooked, is demonstrably better than that of their more commercially successful white counterparts who much more consistently are able to obtain the better scripts and directors. The fallout from this significant advantage is that their films play in many more theatres and receive much more advertising and publicity support by the studios, which ensures a much larger audience share. Thus major white actors are considered bankable while almost all major black stars are not (the big exception to this is the relatively brief career to date of rapper and former TV star Will Smith whose five films have all been huge ‘cross-over’ hits since 1995). The result is that very rarely do African American actors receive name above the title credits (of the sixteen black actors mentioned in this article only Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, and Morgan Freeman have ever received this coveted position, and of the six times they have done so five of them were for black directors’ films). In every other case the very few times that these actors have held down leading roles in white directors’ films they have always shared co-star billing with white stars like Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, Woody Harrelson, Meg Ryan, Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt.
However, despite the ever present and eroding effects of this cultural racism and industry exploitation it is clear that the generation of black actors born from 1945-1970 are more than competitive with white actors from the same age group. In fact I would argue that of this group only Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Diane Keaton, Nicholas Cage, Jodie Foster, Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep, and Susan Sarandon are even in the same league with such African American stalwarts as Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker, Alfre Woodard, Roger Guenveur Smith, Delroy Lindo, Don Cheadle, and Larenz Tate as far as consistent quality of performance goes. When African American as well as Latino, Asian and Native American actors begin to get much better scripts, more competent criticism and higher quality direction than at present I predict an exciting new era in the history of American cinema will have begun, one where the genuine emotional and psychological, as well as social, reality of American life can be creatively expressed and examined without the crippling effects of racism, xenophobia and cultural parochialism. The real history of American acting as art and culture lie in its future. As African American artists know so well from experience the struggle for a new art is the struggle for a new world.
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Part II: What About the Black Woman?
The greatest and certainly most disturbing evidence of Hollywood’s exclusionary practices lie in its blatantly racist and sexist treatment of African American female actors who are even more isolated and marginalized than black male actors. What accounts for this perennial dismissal and how has it affected the form and content of what African American women are able to do in U.S. cinema? For answers to these endlessly vexing questions, one must critically examine the historical record of the black woman’s “role” in Hollywood film and the relationship of this past to current developments in American cinema.
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First, it is no surprise that the black woman has been treated so shabbily when one considers the absolutely shameful way in which Hollywood has depicted African Americans generally for the entire century of the cinema’s existence. As a number of film historians, critics and scholars have pointed out (most notably Donald Bogle, Thomas Cripps, Ed Guerrero, Armond White, Manthia Diawara, Daniel Loeb, and the late James A. Snead) the African American actor has always, in the words of Donald Bogle, “had to direct themselves”; rather than playing characters, they have had to play “against their roles, digging deep within themselves to come up with unexpected and provocative points of view.” This is especially the case with black women actors who as Bogle also points out are often ignored by filmmakers or “...the (film) industry on occasion has been dazzled by their talents yet has not been ready to create roles to showcase them and enable them to have sustained movie careers.” The fact that Bogle made these remarks in the first edition of his important book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (1973, 1989, 1994, 1996) is further indication of just how relevant these remarks remain for the black female actor a quarter century later.
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As far as the contemporary scene goes it is nothing short of criminal that such extraordinarily talented and accomplished actors as Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, Loretta Devine, Tyra Ferrell, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Theresa Randle, Pam Grier, Cicely Tyson, Gloria Foster, Jada Pinkett, Lynn Whitfield, Debi Morgan, Sanaa Lathan, and Gabrielle Union are constantly left struggling for a paucity of roles in mostly inferior films that remain at a decidedly ‘B’ or even ‘C’ level while their white female counterparts (e.g. Roberts, Ryan, Pfieffer, Paltrow, Ryder, Winslet, Theron, Thurman, etc.) work all the time and receive all the limelight (not to mention a great deal of money). Even in those strictly commercial mainstream films where shallow and escapist material and aesthetic values reign it is incredible that the stunning, breathtaking beauty and sexual power of black women actors is largely ignored in Hollywood. Talk about the massive, irrational power of racism!
So given these deeply disturbing facts it is no wonder that the history of black women actors in American film is such an appalling story of abuse, indifference, cruelty and neglect. Consider the truncated and aborted “careers” of such justly legendary figures as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Freddi Washington, Nina Mae McKinney, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll, Pearl Bailey, and Diana Ross, who from the period 1930-1980 lit up the screen on those very few occasions when they appeared despite the marginal nature of the great majority of their roles. However, during those rare moments when these and other black women actors were featured in films ranging from Hallelujah (1929) to Imitation of Life (1934), Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather (both from 1943), Carmen (1954), Anna Lucasta and St. Louis Blues (1958), A Raisin in the Sun and Paris Blues (1961) The Landlord (1970), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Claudine (1974) and Mahogany (1975), these actors routinely soared above and beyond the limited and limiting reach of their often inane scripts and clueless white directors to literally reinvent or develop viable characters out of mere fragments and shards of material that, as Bogle points out, barely suggests what these women were about or fully capable of.
It is this legacy of disciplined craft wedded to improvisational acuity that remains in full force today where most screenwriters and directors alike have not been either able or willing to plumb the profound depths of emotional and psychological nuance and complexity that characterizes modern/postmodern African American female identity. What we find instead in the contemporary performances of the past fifteen years is a personal and professional resilience on the part of black women actors that far outstrips the support, understanding or commitment of either their white colleagues/peers or the general American audience which continues to be manipulated by the relentless commercial hype surrounding the sexual commodification of white females in this culture. However, it is important to note that this historical condition has begun to show definite signs of change as the black women actors of this era begin to impact and mesmerize us with their unique and highly independent qualities of intelligence, shrewdness, open sensuality, toughness and strength of spirit, ribald wit, melancholic tenderness, relaxed compassion and deep sense of Joy.
This combination of traits wedded to an obvious respect for craft and study manifest themselves in nearly all of the work where black women actors are given the opportunity to do much more than merely serve as ‘gender sidekick’ to ‘their men.’ Even in hopelessly derivative and empty melodramatic fluff like Waiting to Exhale (1997), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and Soul Food (1997) (all curiously enough written and directed by African Americans), we find black women actors resisting and attempting to dramatically transform (within obvious limits) the tired genre-driven schtick and caricatured characters they are forced to play. What often results in this tension between material and artist is a glimpse into the true talents of these performers whose insight into the human potential of their stereotyped characters is clearly beyond either the interest or ability of the writers and directors they serve. Thus we have yet to see or experience the complete range of ideas, emotions and insights that this generation of black women actors are capable of bringing to the screen.
For example, it is highly frustrating to witness the inadequate and quite wasteful use of actors of the caliber of Bassett, Woodard and Ralph year after year while their generational white female counterparts (Pfieffer, Lange, Streep, Keaton, Sarandon etc.) at least receive decent scripts and competent directors from time to time (not to mention critical and commercial success and attention). In the cases of Bassett and Woodard we find these major actors being forced to work on projects that their counterparts wouldn’t even consider, just to continue working. In the even more egregious case of the obscenely underrated and neglected Sheryl Lee Ralph (who has been around now for two decades in both TV and film--she currently plays the popstar Brandy’s mother on television’s Moesha), we find a great and highly versatile talent, who also happens to look like an ebony Sophia Loren, unable to find any film roles in an industry that insists (despite all evidence to the contrary) that any white flavor-of-the-month ingenue is “sexy.”
Meanwhile such elegant, beautiful and sophisticated actors as Lynn Whitfield, Debi Morgan, Nia Long, Jada Pinkett, Lela Rochon, Lonette McGee, N’bushe Wright and Theresa Randle remain largely obscure to most audiences because they work so seldom in film, and when they do a much smaller percentage of people see them. I believe that their relative absence from the screen compared to, say, Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow is not only because Roberts and Paltrow can and do generate much more money for the studios than the heavily under-promoted black women actor, but also because of the element of racial jealousy and envy that we all know exists in Hollywood (as it does in the rest of the country) that begins to rear its ugly head when it comes to determining who will be chosen to “represent American womanhood” onscreen when casting decisions are made. We find the same bias in effect when it involves the intelligent use of elegant, beautiful and talented Latin American and Asian American women actors (can anyone out there say Lucy Liu and Ming Na-Wen?).
Furthermore, the lack of creative alternatives that exist for these actors can be attributed to the absence of an independent black filmmakers production and distribution consortium that would be primarily concerned with the radical evolution of aesthetic and social values over strictly commercial ones. Until this kind of organized cultural, economic and political activity occurs it is certain that Hollywood will continue to turn its racist and sexist back on the African American female actor. In the meantime, one current alternate outlet for many of these women appears to be cable television (particularly HBO and SHOWTIME) where at least actors like Alfre Woodard (Miss Evers Boys), and Lynn Whitfield (The Josephine Baker Story) can work in leading roles where the screenwriters and directors must consider their aesthetic needs and desires for once.
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Life Beyond the Signified: The Black Male as Trope in American Literature
by Kofi Natambu
Lecture presented at an African American History Panel Discussion
Museum of African American History
Detroit, Michigan
April 22, 1990
“You can’t build a great literature with plaster-of-Paris saints.”
—Sterling A. Brown
“Myth is a type of speech.
—Roland Barthes
“The dilemma of the black writer lies not so much in what he must reveal, but in the reactions of his audience, in the intellectual limitations of the reader which so often confine men to habit and
withhold from them the nobler instruments of reason and conscience. There should be
no indictment of the writer who reveals this truth, but of the conditions that have produced it...”
—Chester Himes
“Literature is that which gets taught.”
—Roland Barthes
Any realistic discussion of the literary portrayal of the black male character by American writers, which includes (we should never forget) writing by African Americans, must begin with a critical analysis and cultural assessment of the ever-present trope of the black male figure in American popular culture. In fact, any accurate appraisal of this largely distorted and criminally misunderstood figure must immediately confront the pervasive social and historical imagery/imaginary of the black male as a compendium of utterly reductive, one-dimensional stereotypes whose cultural presence (which is often confused/conflated with his “identity”) is controlled and manipulated by the reified conceptions of this figure in monolithic, which is to say, racist terms. This language teems with the grotesque mythology of race in American culture which constitutes the ‘aesthetic’ and thus “literary” basis of our perceptions of this figure as a living symbol of this society’s deepest fears, desires, anxieties, and pathologies.
In other words, it is precisely what the black male represents in the collective unconscious of the culture as a whole that largely determines, if not over-determines, what our artists (writers included) concentrate on in rendering their portraits of what the black male figure signifies in the realm of language and meaning in Western literature, philosophy, and metaphysics. Without investigating the historically specific ways in which this dialectic has been created one can’t possibly begin to understand who or what the so-called black man is in terms of social and cultural reality within the United States.
The most common linguistic categories and descriptions of the black male are of course so well known and recognized by most Americans that it seems almost too banal to even list them. But the mere fact that these brutally obvious signs remain largely unexamined and taken for granted indicates why we must pay very close attention to their implications for any study of how they have been used in our language (as signifier and sign). The categories are as follows:
1. The Phallic (Sexual totem/pimp/stud/athlete)
2. The Gangster (Criminal/Bully/thief-rapist-killer)
3. The Menace (“Militant”/Uppity/”Troublemaker”/‘crazy nigga’)
4. The Clown/Buffoon (Uncle Tom/entertainer/childish idiot)
What’s significant about these age-old racial stereotypes/white supremacist archtypes is that they are socially rooted in the way many of us THINK about these figures. Thus we find in our literature, mass media and popular culture that black male figures are either demonized or sanitized for the same reason: both strategies effectively deny any individual black male his HUMANITY. As a result, the broad range of options for acting as an independent agent of one’s own ontology is eliminated in favor of imposing a contained niche for the expression of one’s personality. The decided lack of human complexity that characterizes the great majority of written portraits of the black male figure in American literature is largely the result of not allowing him the intellectual, emotional, and psychological capacity to express moral, social, sexual or philosophical ambiguity, paradox, complexity or contradiction. So the question is not whether any individual black male character is depicted as ‘heroic,’ or ‘anti heroic,’ ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ but simply whether it is possible for him to have access to a multiplicity of ideas, values, attitudes, desires, needs and insights. In the absence of this wide gradation of elements the black male figure is rendered essentially mute, and thus, unintelligible.
It is this centuries-long attempt to contain and silence the black male that is the most salient feature of his oppression. What is most extraordinary about the historical response of iconic black male figures (in every realm of human activity from politics, art, and sexuality, to scholarship and sports) is that they absolutely REFUSE to simply shut up and accept their so-called social fate (that of mindless and quiescent victims of political, economic and cultural tyranny). For this, they (and their so-called more ‘common’.counterparts in the factories, offices, streets, and various social institutions) are simultaneously despised, envied, lionized and attacked. You don’t believe me? Think for a moment what the historical meaning of the lives of such representative figures as Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, James Brown, Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Carter G. Woodson, William Monroe Trotter, W.E.B. DuBois, C.LR. James, A. Philip Randolph, Bob Moses, James Foreman, Sterling A. Brown, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Miles Davis, Richard Wright, Willie Mays, Arthur Ashe, Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Robert Hayden, etc. etc. actually demonstrates. Who are these men and where do they come from? And weren’t they all at one point in this social purgatory just some more little nappy-headed colored boys? And what does that mean in terms of the massive network of fathers, brothers, male cousins, uncles, homeboys. street mentors, guardians and protectors who were forced to do the most back-breaking labor and/or navigate the most vicious labyrinth of racist bureaucratic obstacles and exploitation this side of South Africa itself?
What I’m trying to say is that there are some tremendous STORIES that are screaming to be heard and told, and that for the most part we—male and female alike—ain’t been telling them. Even the most backward, destitute and depraved among us have something complex and fantastic to tell us. What we need to do is listen more, observe, and record it. What is absolutely certain is that this won’t be an easy task and that it will take much more than mere name-calling and finger-pointing to do it. But dig: TRUTH, in fiction, or anywhere else, is like that...
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RAP Since 1960: From Political Ideology To Popular Culture
by Kofi Natambu
St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter
April–May, 1992
What’s truly significant about RAP as a form of public discourse in the United States over the past three decades is the fact of its transition from a pop culture context (e.g. radio broadcasting, novelty recording and vernacular communication within the community) to a more formal and intellectualized political format during the mid and late 1960s, and its even more complex evolution into a form that today encompasses both social ideology and popular culture. From Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and H. ‘Rap’ Brown to Richard Pryor, Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets in little over a decade (ca. 1963-1976) is quite a leap even for the extraordinary pace of most black cultural change in the U.S. during the 20th century. That these major innovations in the form and content of language use have taken place in a social context that has been as strained and tension-filled as the explosive cultural terrain of American life since the 1950s only highlights the intense aesthetic seriousness and commitment of RAP to social and cultural transformation. This examination of the “modernist” roots of RAP in the period before the seemingly “unprecedented” appearance of the New Wave of rappers since 1980 also helps to clarify just how integral and profoundly influential these pioneers from the 1960s and 1970s have been.
A good place to begin this investigation would be the political styles and behavior of the leading advocates of ‘Black Power’ thinking and activity during the volatile 1960s. What is distinctive about the public rhetoric of such important political figures and activists as Malcolm X, H. ‘Rap’ Brown (dig the nick-name!), Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale (as just four representative examples) is that they all consciously used and included in their public speech and writings, phrasings, cadences, tropes, rhythms and stances that come directly out of the RAP tradition. These particular techniques and values also characterized the cultural aesthetics and politics of such leading African-American writers and intellectuals as Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones), Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Don L. Lee, Etheridge Knight, David Henderson, Quincy Troupe, and lshmael Reed.
A very good case can be made that the widespread public appeal of these political and cultural figures in the black community was precisely their perceived ability to communicate in the vernacular mode as well as use the “King’s English.” This double-voiced quality of black verbal and cultural expression is characteristic of rappers who rely heavily on innuendo, irony, satire, inversion of tropes and what is known as the “put-on” (and “put-down”) to subvert and manipulate conventional significations. This highly creative and innovative approach to language allows these speakers and writers to connect with their audiences on a visceral level that often enhances and gives deeper social-cultural resonance to what they say.
As Henry Gates points out in The Signifying Monkey, this double-voiced discourse is designed to critically examine and question the mainstream as it simultaneously celebrates (again in a critical or “negative” sense) an alternative vision. Much of the so-called “boasting” done by black male and female rappers alike is derived from ancient African rituals of verbal expression that invokes a playful yet highly serious response to the complexities of human behavior. In this way parody, ridicule, in-jokes, punning and double-entendre serve to create and sustain an independent universe of social and linguistic communication. The act of refiguration in language leads to a fundamental revision and transformation of what is received or given. Thus black vernacular modes like RAP actively seek to intervene on and thereby revise previous texts or modes of expression. The very idea of sampling is concerned with just this kind of implied celebration and critique of the past since as a method it consciously “brings back” the past while commenting ironically on its presence in the present. This is accomplished through using melodic and rhythmic material from earlier songs as an integral part of the rap’s structure. Through the textual manipulation and restructuring of the sound-text we encounter an understanding of the actual root meaning of the word “text” which is derived from the ancient Latin root-word textus and the past participle texere which means “to weave.” In a major study by the distinguished linguist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong, entitled Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982), we get a definition of the significance of this etymology:
‘Text’ from a root meaning ‘to weave’ is, in absolute terms, more compatible etymologically with oral utterance than is ‘literature,’ which refers to letters etymologically/ (literae) of the alphabet. Oral discourse has commonly been thought of even in oral milieus as weaving or stitching rhapsodien, ‘to rhapsodize,’ basically means in Greek to “stitch songs together.”1
In any event, it is the intersecting dimensions of orality and literacy that constitutes the real form and content of all rapping regardless of context. This is what characterizes the speech and writing styles of African American cultural and political figures who are compelled to be fluent in both areas because of their heavy involvement in public media. But what is fascinating in this synthesis of writing and oral expression is that they are used to not only “communicate” certain ideas and feelings, but to involve the listener (or reader) in a total experience that allows them to respond in a direct, visceral way to the information being presented to them. This transmitter/receiver relationship in black cultural settings is crucial to any examination of these language modes as both expression and critique. For the fundamental purpose of most black discourse in this context of social media is precisely to engage in critical theory about what (and how) meaning is conveyed. In fact, much of the often vociferous white academic and media response to the use of these methods of black “signifyin (g)” is a result of them not understanding or liking what is being said/written. This is important to acknowledge in as much as one of the major codes of the ideology of racism is that blacks are intellectually incapable of just this kind of subtle parody, satire, and critical analysis, especially of the sacred philosophical and aesthetic cows of the (white) Western tradition.
Masters of this (re)codifying strategy include the RAP group PUBLIC ENEMY and their extraordinary wordsmiths CHUCK D and FLAVOR-FLAV, as well as LL COOLJ, KRS-One, ICE-T, A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, ERIC B & RAKIM, QUEEN LATIFAH, DE LA SOUL, MC LYTE, ICE CUBE, and RUN DMC, all of whom have emerged as leading cultural figures in the past five to seven years(!). In a later chapter, we will examine just why they are so important to this development.
But suffice it to say, for now, that these “new” rappers (as distinct from the previous generation of the 1960s and ‘70s) represent a decided leap forward in the complex semiology of figuration and (re) figuration that characterizes innovation in language use during this epoch. In the 1960s the black cultural nationalist and revolutionary nationalist movements as represented say, by the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa; the Nation of Islam and SNCC, as well as such fundamentally black Marxist groups as Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers, all used rapping strategies to translate and express complex political ideas and philosophies about the dialectics of “race,” class, gender and political economy to a popular audience of blacks (and even some radical whites) who were well-versed in the signifying traditions of Afro-America where meaning is derived from historical experience and the myriad ways in which this experience is inscribed (figured, translated, interpreted, expressed) in language. The importance of italicizing this idea is that much too often critics and theorists mistake or substitute sociology and (pseudo) psychology for linguistic and cultural phenomena when dealing with black cultural reality. This is the result of venal racial mythology that attempts to reduce the “identity” of African-American culture to extremely narrow, predetermined essences of authenticity and ‘naturalism.’ What this acknowledgment foregrounds is the awareness of the signifier as being integral to any ongoing, indeterminate conception of the signified in black culture. This is accomplished of course at the level of a creative and signifying challenge to the sign of meaning itself as encoded in the conventional English word signification. In other words, the black use of the word “signifyin (g) signifies on (that is, revises and transforms) the very term signification (i.e. meaning) itself.
Thus in the rapping tradition we find a different conception of how and why any particular meaning is conveyed through language. In the context of black political and cultural activists like Carmichael, Brown, Huey Newton, Kenny Cockrel, Baraka, Cortez and Scott-Heron, we encounter the continually creative (re) appropriation of conventional English words and phrases that are consciously revised, transformed and redefined to construct an entirely new or fresh approach to projecting meaning in society. The classic model for this kind of quick-witted revision and dynamic use of language was the great Malcolm X whose speeches, writings, and public statements are suffused with copious references to, and modern take-offs on, traditional folk expressions, tales, tropes and values. The highly personalized ‘spin’ that Malcolm would put on these modal elements was the adaptation of the urban hipster persona who through inside knowledge (the very definition of the word ‘hip’) and a razor-sharp manipulation of irony, paradox, and innuendo laced with a wicked sense of humor could slyly redefine and frame the terms of discourse in any given situation.
As a past master at the subtle and sometimes brutal art of signifying, Malcolm X excelled at the droll practice of what the English call “one-up-manship.” One of his favorite ploys was asking a seemingly innocent question, then when the person he was addressing couldn’t come up with an answer (and of course any response that they gave would be the ‘wrong’ one) he would delight in what in African-American culture is called “smacking someone upside the head” by giving the devastating ‘right’ answer to his own question. One question that he often asked of stuffy, pretentious black intellectuals (or any black authority figure) he was debating in a public forum would be the following:
Malcolm: Sir, what do they call a black man with a Ph.D.?
Respondent: I don’t know (or some other response)
Malcolm: A Nigger!
The point of this exchange would be to frame the very terms of the discourse by establishing immediately that racism was an ideological and social force that didn’t go away or become less destructive merely because an individual black person had ‘succeeded’ at something in the general society. Malcolm’s discursive strategy here was to foreground his critique of American society by including even the person(s) he was debating as an example of that which he was indicting. The fact that he did this equally with black and white men and women (either to make a negative or positive point) meant that he was highly conscious of, and adept at, using the power of language to tell complex truths about the society and culture. That this was largely accomplished through the practice of signifying only made Malcolm’s ideas and perspective more accessible to the largely young audience that he was trying to reach.
The rapping aspects of Malcolm’s oratorical style were most clearly demonstrated in the syncopated cadences and staccato phrasings that he often used. Alternating with a sly, sometimes sinister sounding chuckle and highly dramatic, almost ominous silent pauses, Malcolm would often keep an audience spellbound by deftly weaving a pastiche of historical allusions, folk proverbs and admonitions, ironic jokes, satirical puns, the inversions of tropes and indirect discourse (a prime element as we’ve noted in the art of signifying). He was also a brilliant storyteller whose allegorical tales epitomized the innovative use of the rapping tradition. As the linguist Mitchell-Kernan points out: “Signifying does not always have negative valuations attached to it; it is clearly thought of as a kind of art—a clever way of conveying messages.”2
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In Malcolm’s most famous collection of speeches MALCOLM X SPEAKS (Grove Press, 1965), we find many examples of just this sort of artful “cleverness.” In fact, this book and the world famous AUTOBIOGRAPHY published in 1965 after his death by assassination, (and now in its 40th printing!), are classic texts that clarify exactly why Malcolm is revered as a major sampling source for the current generation of rappers. A few examples of his singularly innovative style follows (all taken from Malcolm X Speaks and his Autobiography):
“I’m the man you think you are... If you want to know what I’ll do, figure out what you’ll do. I’ll do the same thing—only more of it”
I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner...Being here in America doesn’t make you an American.”
“I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”8
“Shorty would take me to groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks’ and cats’ pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.’4
“You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom, then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it.”
What is impossible to convey with these written examples is the subtle nuances of inflection, tone, cadence and phrasing that characterized Malcolm’s speaking style and how it directly affects his ability to signify in the terms we have already outlined. What most impresses the current generation of RAP artists is precisely Malcolm’s ability to transgress cultural and political sacred cows through his mastery of the verbal modes of parody, satire, circumlocution and mockery. Many of Malcolm’s speeches consciously set out to revise and transform conventional ideas about the nature and meaning of American history through the art of troping. By (re)figuring standard notions of what constitutes historical and social reality in the United States we get a critical narrative of the content of race relations, cultural expression, political philosophy and economic theory through a withering investigation into the mythology of these structures within the institutional parameters of the larger society. Malcolm was extremely adept at using indirect discourse and the implied or highly suggestive statement or phrase in lieu of literal-minded posturing. The emphasis would always be on foregrounding the actual reality of conflict and contradiction in American culture vis-à-vis the given or received myth of how things “should be.” The result was often provocative and insightful.
The inspiring example of Malcolm X in the glaringly public arena of national and world politics led the next generation of African-American activists to base their oratorical and writing styles in the tradition of the vernacular. The bold, brash and scathing verbal expressions of such well-known figures as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale and the great boxer/poet Muhammad Ali were the very epitome of the rapping tradition in that humor, irony, parody, troping, and ingenious turns-of-phrase were the very content of their “messages.” The fact that rhyming, repetition, riffing, and indirect discourse (as well as scatology, insults, and folklore) were so integral to their cultural speech put them and others (like the comedian/philosophers Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and Bill Cosby and the legendary singer/musician/dancer James Brown) right into the ‘mainstream’ of the signifying styles so widely used and expressed in the general black community.
In the cultural work of Richard Pryor for example, one finds a particularly ingenious use of the official mythology of African-American identity in the United States as it confronts or contradicts the historical reality of actual cultural experience. Most of Pryor’s brilliant routines of the period from 1973-1983 (his era of greatest influence as an artist and as a cultural icon) concern themselves with signifying on or about America’s most treasured and insidious myths and lies about racial relations as they were connected to matters of political economy, sex, social consciousness, sports and everyday life. In his stand-up monologues, Pryor spent a great deal of time having a discourse with his various characters as they related to the mass audience. These characters were drawn largely from the black working and lower middle class who were struggling to maintain a tenuous connection to their society despite the brutalizing and patronizing aspects of economic exploitation, political corruption, racial discrimination and street crime. The role of rapping in this context was to allow the audience to perceive, as in a Brechtian drama, just how and why their real lives served as a social counterpoint to the personas being “acted out” by Pryor in often tragicomic terms.
In all of these performances on records, concert stages, television, and film, Pryor was able to bring pathos and humor to the utterly idiosyncratic languages that his characters would use to engage the audience in an ongoing psychodrama with the dilemmas of being human in a context that tried to deny cultural difference through crudely reductive appeals to “racial” myths that obscured how relations between people were grounded in the material conditions of their lives. The RAP aesthetic served to arm Pryor with the linguistic tools of signifying and vernacular expression necessary to cut through official lies (or ignorance) advanced by the general culture. Once again it is impossible to convey the incredible range of verbal signifiers encoded in a dazzling collection of voices, inflections, accents, cadences, and phrasings. A great place to begin an investigation into the hilarious and poignant world of Pryor’s imagination would be his award-winning recordings That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), Is It Something I Said? (1975), and Bicentennial Nigger (1976), three of the truly radical masterpieces in modern comedic history.
What the RAP tradition has learned from Pryor is that linear narrative styles can be used to tell cautionary tales in the folkloric tradition or that it can be seen as a structural foundation for highly improvisational strategies of critique or celebration. Thus specific methods of signifying can be revised, inverted or extended to make a point or deliver a message while using humor and laughter as a “weapon” in the war against racial ideology. Allusive language, allegory, scatological imagery, and cultural analysis/criticism can all be included in the density of effects (or “mix) that make up the environmental theater that is contemporary RAP. The seminal role of sound in this particular process can’t be underestimated since it is an element that so closely corresponds to the role of inflection, accent, and phrasing in the RAP-oriented poetic styles of such ‘70s figures as Ali, the Last Poets, and Scott-Heron (who was also a singer and musician). Many of the finest, most creative rappers today have mastered this synthetic/syncretic unity of persona, voice, and sonic mix, particularly the PUBLIC ENEMY crew (Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Terminator X), as well as LL Cool J (and his DJ, the amazing ‘Cut Creator’), Eric B & Rakim, Paris, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah (and her extremely versatile posse called ‘The Flavor Unit’), and the political activist/philosopher/poet/storyteller KRS-One.
It’s no coincidence then that this generation of RAP artists have listened so closely and carefully to the great ‘70s artists. The pervasive influence of Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, Pryor, and Ali can be heard very clearly in nearly every major (and minor) RAP album, CD and cassette tape since the first recordings began to appear on the open market in 1977. However, the most important and seminal influence on the present generation, and a man whose entire career since the early 1950s embodies a highly sophisticated synthesis of music, language, performance, and social activism is the one and only “Mr. Please, Please, Please, the Godfather of Soul, The Inventor of funk, and the hardest working man in show business, Mr. Dynamite Jaaaammmess Brown!”
What makes James Brown (1933- ) so important is his profound understanding and use of the myriad African-American folk traditions in music (e.g. Blues, Gospel and Jazz), language (e.g. rapping, signifying, melisma, narrative, metanarrative), performance art (e.g. historical rituals of dress, stagecraft, public rites of communion and testimony, confession and mass participation); as well as a commitment to the principles of social justice, political and personal freedom, economic self-determination and independent cultural expression). What Brown represents so deeply and embodies so clearly in his very life is an elegant embrace of his own “blackness.” This is a blackness not of a contrived or fake essentialism but a cultural identity and philosophy forged out of an agonizing and joyous struggle with the vicissitudes of living. The idea of what the writer/poet/playwright/ critic Amiri Baraka calls “the verb force”8 dominates Brown’s aesthetic. The recurring preoccupation with history that permeates Brown’s massive collection of songs and performance (e.g. “There was a Time,” “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Money Won’t Change You,” “Think”); the fearless political statement (“I Don’t Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing—Open Up the Door and I’ll Get Myself,” “Soul Power,” “It’s A New Day,” “Get Up, Get Into It and Get Involved,” “New Breed”); the fervent celebrations of sex (“Cold Sweat,” “I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me,” “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” “Sex Machine,” “Sexy, Sexy, Sexy”); the brash, bold (so-called) ‘boasting’ songs that celebrate the sheer art of living (“Superbad,: “Ain’t It Funky Now,” “Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn,” “You Got To Have a Mother For Me,” Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “I Got the Feelin’,” “Mother Popcorn”); and his overtly educational or “message’ songs which provide the major transitional link between current RAP and the Rhythm and Blues tradition that Brown pioneered (“King Heroin,” “Brother Rapp,” “Don’t Be A Drop Out,” “Get On the Good Foot,” “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothin,” ‘The Payback,” “There It Is,” “Ain’t That a Groove”); not to mention the hard driving rhythmic dance music that revolutionized what could be done with Beats in popular music (“Get It Together,” “Funky Drummer,” ‘The Popcorn,” “Let Yourself Go,” “Licking Stick,” “Cold Sweat,” “There Was A Time,” “Make it Funky,” “I Got Ants in My Pants,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Papa Don’t Take No Mess”). All these monster hits and many, many more (Brown has over 50 platinum records to his credit!) have established Brown as the biggest single influence on the new rappers whose age group (largely 21-30) were only small children or pre-adolescents when Brown was in his glorious prime (1965-1975).
What’s fascinating about Brown’s impact, however, is how every aspect of his act from singing to dancing to his tireless community activism off the stage has been lionized, emulated, copied and incorporated into the form and content of contemporary RAP. His influence has been so great that he is the only artist whom all sectors and factions of today’s rappers readily agree on. This particular fact accounts for the legendary status that his music, language (from lyrics to oral sounds), performance sensibility, and fidelity to certain political and moral stances regarding his social and personal identity continues to have among the leading aesthetic and political forces in the RAP world. As a result, Brown provides an excellent point of departure for clarifying our understanding of the history of RAP in the 20th century.
Bibliography:
The Death of Rhythm and Blues. Nelson George. Pantheon Books, 1988.
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Oxford University Press, 1988
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Walter J. Ong. Methuen, 1962.
Malcolm X Speaks. Malcolm X (Edited by George Brietman). Grove Press, 1965.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Grove Press, 1965.
The Beer Can By The Highway. John Kouwenhoven. Doubleday, 1961.
“Repetition As A Figure of Black Culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. James Snead Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Methuen, 1984.
Fresh: Hiphop Don’t Stop. Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker and Patty Romanowski. Random House, 1985.
Black Music. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). William Morrow, 1968.
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace. Ecco Press, 1990.
Mikhail Bahktin. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Harvard University Press, 1984.
The Dialogic Imagination. Mikhail Bahktin. Edited by Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981.
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NOTES
1 Gates, Page 45
2 Ibid.
3 Malcolm, Page 56
4 Autobiography of Malcolm, Page 57
5 FRESH, Page 81
6 Kouwenhoven, Page 142
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
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A Survey of Afro-American Literature: 1900-1940
by Kofi Natambu
It is impossible to talk clearly or intelligently about the aesthetic or historical developments in Afro-American literature without a thorough critical and theoretical investigation of its integral relationship to the broader social and cultural dimensions of American history, sociology, ‘anthropology,’ and political economy. It is only in this wider and more comprehensive analytical context that we can begin to perceive the myriad formal concerns, strategies, and modalities used by Afro-American writers in the 20th century. For it was (and is) the content of this writing that distinguishes it as one of the most vital and innovative literary expressions of our time.
By content I mean not only subject matter or thematic material, but the particularly idiosyncratic and creative uses of language. The largely idiomatic, oral and vernacular traditions that characterize the most significant work by Afro-American literary artists is intimately tied to their philosophical and social vision(s) which inform their various ‘technical’ and aesthetic conceptions. It is no accident for example, that the most productive and consistently interesting writers of the historical period from 1900-1940 (e.g. Dunbar, Johnson, DuBois, McKay, Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Hurston, Fisher, Thurman, and Wright) are also the most obviously conscious of the specific realities of Afro-American life as lived and experienced by the so-called ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’ black man and woman. In fact this involvement with, and deep awareness of, the “masses” in their everyday environment is clearly the artistic and thematic basis of these writers’ best work. Certainly what we remember most about both the ‘New Negro’ movement and the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ period (circa 1919-1930), and later the ‘Depression writers’ (1930-1945) is the preoccupation of its artists, activists, and theorists with folk traditions, values, attitudes, and sensibilities.
The most important of these pre-World War II era writers were undoubtedly Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. DuBois, Sterling A. Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay (who while quite staid, conventional and ‘Eurocentric’ in his poetic technique, was almost the exact opposite in his vernacular and idiomatic approach to the novel) -
What makes these writers particularly distinctive is their innovative ability to effectively synthesize, revise, and extend the traditions of both the Afro-American literary and oral/speech forms, as well as the European modernist literary heritage. What is also essential to the work of these singular artists is the presence everywhere of MUSIC, specifically the Blues, Jazz, Spirituals and balladic song. It is this modal aspect of the Afro-American ‘cultural canon’ that is responsible for what is most important in the formal structures of this literature.
The degree to which these and other writers were concerned with and actively using vernacular modes from not only literature, but other forms like music, folklore, oratory, and lyrical song and dance, was often the foundation of whatever literary contributions they were able to make to New World art. Furthermore, the work of such seminal forces in Afro-American poetry, fiction, and cultural/literary criticism as Hughes, Brown, DuBois, Hurston, Johnson, McKay, Toomer and Wright is characterized by a profoundly insightful and prescient understanding of the intellectual and imaginative power and depth of Afro-American culture. That is, their writing is suffused with a historically grounded theoretical conception of what is intrinsic to this culture and its larger impact on American life, (and by extension), world culture.
More than many of their peers, these writers understood that what is truly ‘BLACK’ about their experience as the diasporan descendants of Africans brought to the New World was not the superficial aspects of their identity (i.e. skin color, ‘dialect,’ clothing, hairstyle, cuisine, or even ideological affiliations) but the dynamic evocation of cultural and social expressions rooted deeply in the quotidian life of “the Folk.” It was here that the extraordinary development of the cultural reality that informs Afro-American art began to assert itself. The relationship of vernacular form to aesthetic content remains the expressive fuel for Afro-American literature.
I. W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Spirit: The Soul of Art
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Historian, sociologist, critic, political theorist, activist, essayist, journalist, teacher, editor, scholar, and poet, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) remains the single greatest intellectual figure in the history of Afro-American letters. The author of over 30 books of literature, sociology, history, cultural criticism and political analysis; founder/editor of the legendary Crisis magazine for over twenty-five years for the NAACP (which he co-founded in 1909), DuBois wrote many of the seminal books of this century, including The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Negro (1915), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Black Reconstruction (1935), Dusk of Dawn (1940), and The World and Africa (1947). His role as advisor and mentor to the new generation of young black writers to emerge in the early 1920s is considered to be indispensable to the public recognition of such stalwarts as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke (Rhodes scholar and leading cultural archivist of the period), and Countee Cullen.
What makes DuBois’ work so important is that it provides us with a conceptual framework for understanding what the underlying aesthetic and philosophical values and concerns of this generation (known as the ‘New Negroes’) were. What emerges from an inquiry into the historical sources of their ideas and strategies is an affirmative articulation of what is independent, precious, and of human value within the cultural forms and structures of Afro-American life and art. No longer is the black artist only concerned with the defensive posture of protesting the interpretation and definition of his/her experience by white American society, but with fully revealing the beauty and strengths of one’s own legacy and present creative power. DuBois is at the forefront of this bold, new climate of self-assertion over and against the oppressive limitations of racism and imperialism. He accomplishes this in a stunning series of essays that he writes as an extended examination of “art, culture, politics, philosophy and education” within the national Afro-American community at the turn of the twentieth century. The result was the classic entitled The Souls of Black Folk, published to widespread acclaim and controversy in 1903.
In this major work DuBois delineates in loving detail many of the major themes and concerns that would be taken up directly and forcefully by the ‘New Negro’ generation some twenty years later: 1) The use of ancestral knowledge and communal wisdom passed down through the ages by oral means (e.g. folklore, proverbs, colloquialisms, tales, legends and myths); 2) An insistence on the right to a critical perspective that stems from one’s own cultural/social experience and reality; 3) An active commitment to the liberation of oppressed and colonized peoples through art and politics; 4) The revelation and exposure of the power and depth of Afro-American culture through the creative use of the imagination and the innovative expression of form and content; 5) Recognizing and using the techniques and methodologies that have been devised and created in the Afro-American cultural tradition to enhance one’s own art; 6) Emphasizing the transformative qualities of art through attention to both spiritual values and uncensored secular activity.
Kofi Natambu
Guest Lecturer
Brooklyn College (NY)
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Graduate Seminar in 20th Century American Literature
Taught by Professor Allen Ginsberg
May 1989
SEMINAL TEXTS: 1900-1940
The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. DuBois 1903
The Negro W.E.B. DuBois 1915
The Weary Blues Langston Hughes 1926
Cane Jean Toomer 1923
Black Manhattan James Weldon Johnson 1930
Home to Harlem Claude McKay 1928
The New Negro Alain Locke (editor) 1925
NEGRO: An Anthology Nancy Cunard (editor) 1934
Southern Road Sterling A. Brown 1932
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937
Uncle Tom’s Children Richard Wright 1938
The Ways of White Folks Langston Hughes 1934
The Conjure Man Dies Rudolph Fisher 1932
Banjo Claude McKay 1929
The Blacker the Berry Wallace Thurman 1929
A New Song Langston Hughes 1932
God’s Trombones James Weldon Johnson 1927
The Book of American Negro Poetry James Weldon Johnson 1922
Along This Way James Weldon Johnson 1933
The Gift of Black Folk W.E.B. DuBois 1924
Black Reconstruction W.E.B. DuBois 1935
Infants of the Spring Wallace Thurman 1932
Fine Clothes to the Jew Langston Hughes 1927
Color Countee Cullen 1925
Black No More George Schuyler 1931
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Love Is a Dangerous Necessity
Book Review
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by Kofi Natambu
Godzilla West
Oakland, California
Fall, 1996
The Gangster of Love
by Jessica Hagedorn
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996
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Since the startling appearance in 1975 of the underground literary classic Dangerous Music (Momo’s Press, San Francisco), an electrifying poetry volume that truly lives up to its evocative title, Jessica Hagedorn has been one of the most important writers in this country. As a poet, playwright, “performance artist”, lyricist, bandleader, actress, singer and novelist, she is blessed with a voice, ear, and heart that turns the raw material of language into sparkling jewels of insight, passion, grace, and ultimately, wisdom.
Her new work, The Gangster of Love, is a powerful and creatively eclectic novel that reveals her singular control and mastery of a wide range of formal literary styles, devices, structures, strategies, genres, and motifs. These conceptual modes are used in the service of a rambling, perpetually shifting narrative that evolves into a linguistic and spiritual panorama of the intense social and cultural dynamics of American life over the past twenty-five years. Hagedorn’s beautifully lyrical command of a huge smorgasbord of multicultural accents, behaviors, attitudes, values, and traditions allows the reader to not merely identify, but to savor and investigate the awe-inspiring (and nerve-wracking) complexity of an adolescent nation that really does contain citizens from all of the world’s population, yet denies, through the hegemonic tyrannies of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, its striking heterogeneity in the name of a debilitating and utterly reductive/repressive notion of “unity”. Hagedorn routinely explodes and deconstructs this false, banalized conception of ‘America’ through a detailed attention to the subtle, yet undeniably vernacular expressions of cultural difference that are always shot through with the peculiar nuances of what the U.S. experience has made all of us—native born and immigrant alike—heir to.
The structure of Hagedorn’s novel moves rapidly from conventional linear narrative, laced with wicked repartee, signifying banter, and expository dialogue to abrupt poetic reveries, floating ‘surreal’ dream sequences (however rooted in discernible social, historical, and cultural contexts), and what can only be described as on-going cinematic episodes teeming with rich imagery and wild juxtapositions of action and consciousness. Montage. Dissolves. Jump cuts. These subtextual interludes are often used to both challenge and support the broader narrative dimensions of the various stories working their way through and around the seemingly ‘central’ themes and activities of the large ensemble of characters.
This self-consciously flexible narrative structure features the alternately hilarious, sad and poignant (mis)adventures, conflicts, and experiences of a woman named Raquel “Rocky” Rivera, who is a member of a first-generation immigrant family from the Philippines. Rocky, as she prefers to be known, her haughty and cynically manipulative Diva-like mother Milagros, schizoid brother Voltaire (!), and numerous aunts and uncles all settle in San Francisco (her father, who has remarried, and her older sister Luz remain back on the island in Manila). Arriving in the fall of 1970 as the novel opens we find the fourteen-year-old Rocky, and her seventeen-year-old brother Voltaire, devastated by the tragic news of the untimely death of legendary twenty-seven-year-old black rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, whom they both idolized. Hendrix, the archetypal embodiment of the impact of multicultural consciousness on American artists in the 20th century, serves as a kind of individual ‘Greek chorus’ in the novel whom Rocky and her artist-friends engage in conversation during “crises” in their lives. And what incredible lives they lead!
In a rollicking and harrowing ride through the 1970s and ‘80s in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, Rocky becomes a musician, lyricist and bandleader for a group called (you guessed it) “The Gangster of Love” who finds and hangs out with a large entourage of ambitious freaks, phonies, geniuses, thieves, hustlers, visionaries, superstars, saints and sinners who educate her, and us, about the alternately inspiring and notoriously destructive patterns in American culture. This is expressed in a bewildering number of illuminating encounters with relatives, friends, lovers, enemies, competitors, and strangers who are all American, yet come from a highly syncretic mix of many different cultures.
One of the recurring jokes of Hagedorn’s novel is the endless number of American immigrants-of-color whose names are taken from American movies and pop musical figures (among them Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and Sly Stone, etc.). Some of these main characters are worth mentioning in passing: Elvis Chang, psychedelic guitarist, Rocky’s first major boyfriend and lover, and cultural escapee from the Chinese American middle class; Marlon Rivera, Rocky’s gay uncle from Los Angeles, a former dancer, actor, and original cast member of both the stage and film versions of West Side Story; the great former actress Isabel L’Ange, contemporary of Dorothy Dandridge and Anna May Wong, who is part black, Mexican and Filipino, seventy and still beautiful, living alone with her beloved cats next door to Marlon; Keiko Van Heller, avant-garde photographer, dilettante, fashion trendsetter, raconteur, opportunist, and best and worst friend of Rocky’s, whose numerous nationalities keep changing with the endless fictional-or-is-it-factual stories that she tells (according to her magnificent imagination she is of Asian, European, African, and Indian descent).. All that is known for sure (?) is that she is “hapa” (which like “mulatto” means “half-breed”).
Finally, there is the character of Sly Washington, African American drummer, brazen womanizer, coke dealer, and sarcastic, vulgar asshole who comes off that way to everyone he encounters, except his French hustler girlfriend and lover Severine (who’s ultimately deported). Though I am an avowed enemy of all “Positive Images” thought police in multicultural art circles and society at large, I must confess that I found this characterization highly problematic, cliché-ridden and annoyingly one-dimensional (a fate that escapes Hagedorn’s many other fascinating characters). My one major criticism of the novel is that Sly comes perilously close to outright racial caricature, and a modern minstrel figure whose facile “charm” and “hipness” too often serves as a cover for a curiously underwritten and poorly developed character. It struck me as the one wrong, false note in Hagedorn’s otherwise nearly flawless effort. However, this is as bad as it gets. The rest is Hagedorn at her scintillating, witty, passionate best. What I mean is: you don’t read this book, it reads you.
Hagedorn’s work continues to show us that the mundane multicultural reality that is called “America” is, and has always been, much more profound and valuable than the infantile advertising copy of Mega-Corporations who still attempt to sell cheap ‘diversity’ coupons (or is that tokens?) to a mythically homogeneous group of “real Americans”. By deftly reminding us that we’re all real/surreal/hyperreal Americans caught up in this historical madness, we discover once again that the voices we sing in are our voices and that we don’t have to sing the same old songs in the same old ways in order to be heard, acknowledged, and respected.
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Reading, Writing, and Signifyin(g)
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Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
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The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Oxford University Press 1988
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The City Sun
Brooklyn, NY
April 12, 1988
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The history of Afro-American literature is, like any literature throughout the world, inextricably bound to the cultural traditions and social/political identities of the people who write and critically comment upon that literature. Furthermore, it is not possible to properly understand or seriously examine any literature’s aesthetic, philosophical or ‘technical’ dimensions without a thorough grounding in its specific formal modes and methods of literary expression. One of the major problems in Western literature has always been its unwillingness to recognize the powerful innovations that distinguish the Afro-American cultural style as expressed in language. In fact very few men and women have been intellectually equipped or passionately engaged enough to teach us something of lasting value about the profound contributions of this rich and complex tradition. That is why it is especially gratifying to find that one of the truly gifted scholars of our time is more than up to this monumental task. His name is Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Mr. Gates, known to his many friends (and some detractors as well) as ‘Skip,’ is a 38-year-old Afro-American literary critic and theorist who is currently W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature at Cornell University. A former teacher at Yale, he is the author of one other seminal book of literary criticism and analysis (Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self Oxford University Press, 1987), as well as editor of four major anthologies of literary theory, critical essays, and narratives. He was also one of the first recipients of the prestigious (and lucrative) MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Grants back in 1981. His many writings and lectures on the theoretical aspects of Afro-American and African literature and culture have made him something of a ‘rising star’ in academic circles, and he is editor of the landmark 30-volume series sponsored by Oxford University Press entitled The Schomberg’s Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers.
In Gates’ new book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism we find a razor-sharp intellect and subtle, piercing wit dedicated to excavating the complex origins and development of disparate cultural and aesthetic traditions in the New World. As a result, we get some brilliant insights into how the historical contacts and conflicts of these traditions have led to a truly cross-cultural literary theory that takes into account the multiple complexities of the NewWorld experience. By pulling together the diasporic threads and fragments of a global Pan-African consciousness regarding the analytical and creative uses of language in terms of both writing and speech, Gates demonstrates with startling clarity and erudition how and why Afro-American literary forms have evolved in the myriad ways they have.
The focus of this ground-breaking study is the black vernacular tradition as it has developed in the figurative languages (both oral and written) of Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. As Gates points out, despite the historical ravages of the Middle Passage and the institution of slavery itself, the cultural strength, resistance, and resiliency of these traditions served to sustain the internal continuity of the sacred and secular structures and belief systems that provided context and meaning for the descendants of Africans brought to the New World. What is also crucial to note is that in the process they helped revolutionize language use for everyone else in the Western hemisphere.
In establishing a theoretical framework for analyzing how these systems were expressed in language, Gates elaborates a critical approach that examines how certain principles of interpretation and signification emerged from this powerful vernacular tradition. The aim of this line of inquiry is to demonstrate how this tradition informs and “becomes the foundation for a formal black literature.” Drawing on a deep knowledge of the procedures and critical processes of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought and modalities (but with the crucial difference of an independent cultural tradition of reading and writing signs) Gates exposes the ‘double-voiced’ nature of Afro-American discourse as it seeks to both theorize about itself in the vernacular, and to consciously subvert and disrupt the hegemonic structures and significations of so-called ‘standard Eurocentric languages (English among them). Gates further asserts that his goal in positing his theories is not to “mystify black literature, or to obscure its several delightful modes of creating meaning, but to begin to suggest how richly textured and layered that black literary artistry indeed is.” In doing so Gates seeks to demystify the strange (and racist) notion that theory is the sole “province of the Western tradition.”
Gates pursues this perspective through first examining the mythical origins of iconic cultural figures in whose myths are embodied fundamental principles of formal language use and their underlying hermeneutical structures. He begins with an intricate study of two major trickster figures in that history: Esu Elegbara, who is prominently featured in the mythologies of Yoruba cultures found in Nigeria, Benin, Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti, and the Signifying Monkey who is distinctly Afro-American. Both of these figures are metaphorical tropes for the articulation of self-aware language traditions that “exemplify their own history, patterns of development and revision, and internal principles of organization” and methodology. Beyond these concerns Gates exposes how these trickster figures represent the critical and analytical tendency to reflect on the rhetorical uses of formal language, and how a theory of Signifyin(g) can be gleaned from these self-reflexive tendencies. What all this amounts to is Gates’ profound demonstration that Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal revision or intertextuality in the Afro-American literary tradition.
Esu (also know as Exu in Brazil, Echu-Elegua in Cuba, Papa Legba in the ba of Vaudou of Haiti, and Papa La Basin the ba of Hoodoo in the U.S.) and the Signifying Monkey are both forms of meta-discourse that pursue vernacular language forms of creative expression at the same time it engages itself and Other languages (like ‘standard’ English) in theoretical and critical discourse about reference and representation, connotation and denotation, truth and understanding. By showing how the oral traditions within these cultures have merged with forms of writing Gates reveals in what specific ways the idea of signification (meaning) is tied to the implications of rhetoric, rather than direct statement. In this way, of course, troping (through metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche), characterizes language use and communicative style in much Afro-American discourse. This is what is known as Signifyin(g).
In order to make a clear distinction between the different uses of the same word (signification) Gates capitalizes the s when referring to Afro-American uses (Signification) and brackets the letter g in the use of the same word as verb (thus Signifyin (g). In this way, Gates maintains the oral sound of the word as spoken in vernacular black speech, and at the same time clarifies how the intriguing homonymic link works between them. In a sly inversion of the ‘standard’ English word Gates retains the small case letter s as a means of demonstrating the critical difference in the “meaning” of the “two” words, and at the same time Signifies on the supposed hegemony of ‘standard’ language usage over that of vernacular uses. As a result we are able to see that Signifyin(g) is an extremely complex and varied term that takes on a multiplicity of meanings and uses given certain contexts and situations.
Thus Gates liberally quotes from, analyzes, includes, celebrates and/or discards a multitude of linguistic references and concepts about what Signifyin(g) is or means. What comes under the very broad umbrella of the cultural and academic “definitions” of the term are mind-boggling, and simply point out how extensive the range of creative modes available to it really are. What emerges from all this is the critical insight that the Afro-American uses of language are ‘double-voiced’ precisely because it is repetition with a signal difference. As Gates points out:
In the extraordinarily complex relationship between the two homonyms we both enact and recapitulate the received, classic confrontation between Afro-American culture and American culture. This confrontation is both political and metaphysical. We might profit somewhat by thinking of the curiously ironic relationship between these signifiers as a confrontation defined by the politics of semantics, semantics here defined as the study of the classification of changes in the signification of words and more especially the relationships between theories of denotation and naming, as well as connotation and ambiguity. The relationship that black “Signification” bears to the English “signification” is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed within a relation of identity.
In the realm of cultural difference (derived from profoundly different experiences of social, economic, political and psychological reality) lies the theoretical key to a comprehensive understanding of how particular language uses are the result of tremendously complex historical forces that directly impinge upon our very perceptions of what constitutes meaning in society. The great value of Gates’ analysis is that it compels us to see language, and by implication, writing, speech, and criticism itself as working tropes of a culture’s very consciousness of its own existence in the world. This powerful idea goes a long way beyond any self-serving metaphysic of transcendence, and toward a comprehensive realization of the multidimensional cultural context of all human discourse. The World is not just the West after all.
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Steve Lacy Loves Monk
Music Review
by Kofi Natambu
October 17, 1984
The Metro Times
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Detroit
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Reflections: Steve Lacy Plays Thelonious Monk
Fantasy Records, 1984
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Over the past two years, Fantasy Records has been distributing many of the finest recordings ever made in America. These records, originally produced by small recording companies during the 1950s and ‘60s, have since taken on almost mythic status, and no wonder. These vinyl gems for the Prestige, Riverside, Debut, Jazz Workshop, Jazzland, and Fantasy labels feature such musical legends as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tadd Dameron, Wardell Gray, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, George Russell, Milt Jackson, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk and...and...oh well, I’m sure you get the picture.
With such a magnificent treasure trove of sonic joys to choose from it was an impossible task to single out any particular artist and tritely say that this is the one. So I’ll just say that Steve Lacy is definitely one of the many giants to hear among the now 90-plus albums reissued in the Original Jazz Classics (OJC) series put together by Fantasy records out of Berkeley, California.
And what a great choice I’ve made! I mean there ain’t no point in wallowing in false modesty when the musician up for discussion is the indefatigable Lacy. Here is a musician’s musician. A soprano saxophonist who began playing the instrument some ten years before the great Coltrane took it up in 1960, Lacy is truly one of the most creative figures in black creative music over the past twenty-five years. That he is a white American artist only increases the irony of Lacy’s greatly undeserved obscurity in American music. For not since the legendary Sidney Bechet has anyone played the soprano saxophone with such consummate skill, energy, love, and insight. There is a deep-rooted, blues-based wisdom, humor, sensitivity, and power that Lacy and his outstanding cohorts on this recording bring to Monk’s majestic music that very few musicians have even attempted.
The rewards for us as listeners are almost unlimited. There is the glorious trilling and rhythmic dancing of Lacy, Buell Neidlinger (bass) and Mal Waldron (piano) on the sprite, but difficult melody of Monk’s “Four in One”, a tune that usually terrorizes lesser musicians; a simply awesome display of brilliant pyrotechnics that manages to sound equally warm and witty on “Skippy”; a searching, romantic spirituality on the ballad title track, “Reflections”; a lilting Latinish vivacity and roaring humanity on “Bye Ya”; a spinning, ingenious variation and extension of bebop’s best and most expressive musical elements on the hip, funny “Hornin’ In”; and fascinating contrapuntal and cross-rhythmic interplay on both “Let’s Call This” and “Ask Me Now.” On every composition, Lacy plays his ass off, and breezes through the mind-boggling repertoire of Monk’s creations with a clarity and sheer perfection of form and feeling that is frightening and exhilarating.
The one other amazing fact about this record is that it was made in 1959 when Lacy was all of 25 years old. Damn. This record puts most of the recent tributes to Monk in the deep shade. I still don’t know how he did it. But’s that how it always is when a master is at work.
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The Writer as Seer and Modern Oracle
Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
Reckless Eyeballing
by Ishmael Reed
St. Martin’s Press, 1986
City Arts Quarterly
Detroit Council of the Arts
Winter, 1987
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The innovative strength of Ishmael Reed’s writing has always been his masterful use of language anchored to a critically dynamic aesthetic that is based firmly on ancient and modern ‘New World’ vernacular sources of knowledge and values. This aesthetic (known as Neo-HooDoo) allows Reed the creative and analytical latitude to probe and comment upon the historical and present-day ideas, values, fears, foibles, dreams, myths, and stupidities that rule Western culture and society. In the context of the United States this means a profound awareness and critique of the matrix of social significations and cultural myths and contradictions that allow for and create oppressive ideas and belief systems.
In his new book Reed’s international literary reputation as an extremely perceptive and penetrating observer and critic of the dominant attitudes and values ruling contemporary American life is solidly upheld and extended. In this book (Reed’s seventh novel and 17th book in 19 years), the focus is once again the historical identity of that motley multicultural group of human beings called “Americans” and how they clumsily and violently “respond” to their experience with/of one another. In Reckless Eyeballing we get a bristling and often darkly hilarious account of how these concerns/issues affect blacks and whites, men and women, Jews and Christians, artists and politicians, straights and gays, writers and criminals in the late 20th century (read: NOW).
Using his patented and deadly accurate satirical blade to cut through the pervasive hypocrisies, distortions, and lies of contemporary American “reality” Reed confronts us with a scathing narrative that fearlessly takes on and exposes the corruption and brutality of such ancient oppressions as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and caste and class exploitation as they play themselves out in the frenzied artistic and political worlds of today’s society.
But as a writer this is far from Ishmael’s only concern. For the characters in this book are not merely quasi-allegorical archetypes who ‘represent’ various points-of-view in the course of the story, but literary tropes signifying active states of consciousness. In this way Reed is able to thoroughly examine and critique the effects of ignorance and bigotry as they manifest themselves within the formal context of the novel.
What results is a withering and wickedly funny portrayal of how ‘Americans’ use their various inherited oppressions to manipulate, exploit, and destroy each other, all the while justifying their vicious, self-serving behavior by hiding behind the socially sanctioned categories of race, sex, class, caste and religion. What Reed also reveals is that alternatives that rely on shallow and dogmatic uses of ideological formulas lead to even more comprehensive forms of oppression and misery. In this book it is the smug self-righteousness of characters who perceive themselves as “politically conscious” and “avant-garde” who are almost uniformly paranoid, manipulative, and opportunist individuals. It is these cynical hipsters who use their public and professional status as “Feminists,” “Nationalists,” “Liberals,” and “Marxists” as well as “writers,” “musicians,” “police officers,” and “critics,” as an excuse to inflict severe psychic and physical pain on others. In this way they all avoid taking personal and social responsibility for their own complicity in maintaining society’s oppressions and repressions.
In this utterly self-destructive universe nearly everyone—male and female alike—are con-artists, shysters, bullies, fools, jackals, and backstabbers because they allow their hatreds, frustrations, fears and ‘ambitions’ to tyrannize them and lend a false credibility to their predatory actions. Reed asserts that the price of ignorance, fear, cynicism, and bigotry is always oppression and slavery and that it doesn’t matter what racial, gender, sexual, economic, political, or religious identity one happens to have. In the absence of real knowledge, compassion, understanding, faith, respect, and insight (i.e. Wisdom), being “correct” and “angry” only translates into another form of fascism.
The “plotline” of this book concerns the (mis)adventures of a talented but weak-willed southern black male playwright named Ian Ball who lives in New York and wants to be a big ‘American Dream’ success on Broadway. However, he has had his work “sex-listed” by theater feminists for the sexism of an earlier play he has written and now he wishes to “redeem himself’ (and thereby get back in the good graces of a powerful lobby of white and black feminists who control, through censorship, what is being produced). He opportunistically decides to write a play in which only women get all the good parts. The name of the play is (you guessed it) Reckless Eyeballing. Ball is backed and supported by a powerful Jewish producer named Jim Minsk and a preeminent, black playwright named Jack Brashford who has gotten famous and wealthy on the strength of only one play. But Minsk is murdered by an anti-semitic mob of white Southerners and Ball finds himself and his faltering career at the mercy of Tremonisha Smarts, a famous black feminist playwright and Becky French, a feared white feminist producer who supports all of Ms. Smarts literary efforts (she even handles her bookings). What happens to Ball and his white and black, male and female friends and enemies in this postmodern farce is a frightening and perversely uproarious portrait of the current literary ‘scene.’
In this brilliant 148-page text, Reed spares no one as he uses an illuminating synthesis of verbal rifling, linguistic word-play, puns, neologisms, historical scholarship, jazz-inspired prose and conventional narrative techniques and strategies to make all of us face up to, and deal with, the pain of our common experience as human beings trapped in a racist and sexist society that values cant and lies over the truth. It is also a powerful and welcome antidote to the pervasive bad writing that characterizes so much of the fictional literature that attempts to explore the theme of ‘modern life’ in the United States today. As always, Reed is at the literary cutting edge of what is truly radical and imaginative in American writing. Reckless Eyeballing is further evidence that Ishmael is still hard at work pursuing new creative possibilities for the novel as a literary form of expression. To miss his inspiring work is to miss out on one of the major literary voices of our time.
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Open Letter to Barry Michael Cooper
by Kofi Natambu
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Letter to the Editor
The Village Voice
December 1, 1987
The inability of Barry Michael Cooper to put anything in its proper historical, political, economic, or cultural context in his incredibly shallow and simple-minded “analysis” of Detroit (“New Jack City,” Village Voice, December 1, 1987) makes a mockery of any intelligent perspective on the dire social crisis facing not only that industrial village, but every major city in this country. There are so many half-baked assertions, distortions, and outright reductionist misrepresentations of fact in his article that he manages to utterly trivialize the real problems and issues through a fit of bad journalism. His bungling of the serious realities that he raises only obscures the actual development of the city over the past two decades. By employing a smug; insolent tone that tries (and fails) to be “down,” “street,” and “hip” Cooper (despite what I assume to be his ‘good intentions’) winds up only further confusing an already complex situation by completely missing the point.
That point is the ultimate responsibility of major governmental and corporate institutions, policies, and social-economic programs for the present massive breakdown of the traditionally black (and white) working class community that still comprises 65% of the population. My knowledge of all this comes first hand. As a former assembly line laborer in that city, and the 37-year-old son of a black man who retired in December, 1986 (after 37 years working on the line for Chrysler). I, too, (like Dr. Carl Taylor) grew up, attended school, and worked in Detroit nearly all my life before moving to New York earlier this year. I, too, was a 16-year-old witness to the rebellion of 1967 (my most vivid memories of adolescence are National Guard army tanks and soldiers cruising and patrolling my neighborhood not three blocks away from West Grand Boulevard and Warren Avenues where a great deal of the damage on the west side of the city took place). It is because my parents, my brothers and sisters, as well as all my friends, relatives, and neighbors were also right in the midst of the “action” that I feel I have a special “right” to critically question some of the absolutely misleading notions and omissions of important data and details concerning the events of the last 20 years. The only way I can do that is take specific aspects of Cooper’s story and counter each one in succession. Here’s hoping that Cooper and others who think they “know all there is to know” about the so-called “murder city” learn something new:
1) It is greatly misleading to suggest that the rise in unemployment in Detroit, or any other industrial city for that matter, was “caused” by the “riot” of 1967. The economic collapse of Detroit had been prophesized for years prior to the 1960s by respected economists and political analysts who recognized the obvious: that the dependence of the city on the one-dimensional economy of the automobile industry would inevitably lead to large-scale, and fundamental, systemic dislocations in the city’s already fragile and eroding tax base. “White flight,” as Cooper points out in his article, had already began to take a major toll on the city’s resources by the late 1950s. After all hundreds of thousands of whites were fleeing the central city for the suburbs in large part because of the economic and political competition of the rapidly growing and fiercely independent and savvy black working and middle class (a process brought about in great part by both the huge labor movement in Detroit that led to the rise of the CIO in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the organized strength of the black nationalist organizations that had always been strong in the city). However the economic recession of 1957-1961 put a severe dent in the social aspirations of the black community, and eventually led to the replacement of the traditional Italian-American machine that had a notorious reputation for corruption and racism, by the Irish-American ‘Kennedy liberals’ led by the young politician Jerome Cavanaugh who became mayor in 1961.
2) Dr. Carl Taylor’s feeble idea that “Detroit was an absolute paradise before the riot” is ridiculous, and would be laughable it if were not so seriously off the mark. The large black working and middle class who were trying to recover from the recession of the late fifties, early sixties period was already in a general political uproar over the historical persistence of some of the worse racism and patterns of institutional segregation of any major urban center in the entire country. Political and economic discrimination was so widespread, and the black community so outraged about it, that Cavanaugh had to run on a platform that openly campaigned against the corrupt Democratic machine. This is despite the fact that during this entire period the black population was never larger than 34% of the city’s total. As an indication of one of the major reasons why blacks, liberals, and radical activists were fighting so hard to change these festering conditions, consider this: the Detroit Police Department (which remained 95% white as late as 1972) had a national reputation for racist brutality and collaboration with the mob that was legendary, even among such well known law enforcement gangsters as those in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and (you guessed it) New York City. This was what the city was like prior to 1967 and I doubt that any of my uncles or my father would call it “paradise.” There must be a better and more accurate way of phrasing what it was really like...
3) Read any study done on or about Detroit written/published from 1960-1980 (a quick survey will reveal at least 10 major books). All these studies, written incidentally by liberals, conservatives, and radicals, agree on one thing: the riot of 1967 was not based on race but on class (unlike the physical rampaging of white mobs through black neighborhoods in 1943). If you examine any of the news footage from the riot or seriously analyze the police and government records of those who were arrested for looting and disorderly conduct (among other more serious charges) you will find that they were not primarily from what we today would call the “underclass.” The totally alienated members of the economy were much more passive as a group. The “rioters” were mostly from the black and white working/lower middle class who were dissatisfied with the pace of political and economic “progress” they had allegedly made. Even the quoted memory of Dr. Taylor about what he saw from his porch steps contradicts his rather flippant remark that the rebellion was “the revenge of the (black) underclass.” Oh no, that’s MUCH too easy. That event can’t be blithely passed off as merely the frustrated cries of a forgotten bunch of “losers” who wouldn’t or couldn’t enjoy the “paradise.” That is just a silly delusion on Dr. Taylor’s part. Which leads me directly to point #4...
4) It is one of the ongoing infantile fantasies of a politically weak, defensive, and largely inept black middle class (especially in the Reaganite ‘80s) that the major problems currently destroying the mass Afro-American population (unemployment, poverty, wholly inadequate education and health care, political powerlessness, drugs, etc.) are somehow the responsibility of black male teenaged criminals who fail to dress in what Cooper and Taylor would probably call “appropriate attire.” In fact the transparent and inane attempt to link the cultural presence of rap music and the so-called “gangster aesthetics” and wardrobe of people like LL COOL J, RUN-DMC, and others to the multi-billion dollar crack industry and the existence of millions of easily attainable handguns (not to mention submachine guns and other Pentagon-inspired weaponry) is not only a great injustice to black youth culture and art, but is too absurd and pathetic to even consider seriously. Since when does the wardrobe and musical taste of criminals determine the content of their behavior? We may as well have called for the elimination of pinstriped silk suits and big fedora hats during the notorious reign of such sartorially splendid thugs and murderers as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky. Is this what Cooper calls investigative journalism? Rice Krispies! Can’t we do better than that?
5) By focusing on the horrific activities of an isolated group of black youth, Cooper inadvertently winds up scapegoating a whole subcultural group (black males between the ages of 12 and 25). This whole approach is dangerous and largely irrelevant to discovering the most important reasons why Detroit (and Chicago and St. Louis, and LA., and Baltimore and Atlanta and New York, et. al.) continues to deteriorate while the rest of us so-called “responsible” and “educated” adult citizens (not to mention our elected representatives) persist in pointing fingers, making loud accusations, and insisting on “public morality.” All this is embarrassingly hypocritical in view of the fact that some of the social models for these young hoodlums are yuppie politicians, corporate managers, white-collar hustlers, media moguls, and professional pimps and shysters of the criminal justice system. Ever heard of bankrolled judges, policemen, and presidents Mr. Cooper? I betcha the board of directors of Young Boys Inc. have.
6) Now obviously the existence of these factors do not in any way justify, condone, support or EXCUSE any criminal act by anyone, youth or adult, black or white. I want to make that “perfectly clear” before I proceed. But (and this is a big and crucial point) it is absolutely necessary that we all have a clear idea of what social forces are truly responsible for the widespread cynicism, disillusionment, fatalism, and self-destructiveness of American youth. And by the way. we don’t have to look at just “inner-city” youth, but the aimless hedonism and jaded corruption of the children of the rich (what do you think the alienated novels of such creatively indifferent but media celebrated writers as Bret Easton Ellis, Jay Mclnerney, Jill Eisenstadt, and Tama “Jama” Janowitz are all about anyway?) Young people watch the news too (Question: Do the “New Jacks” play the market? Answer: Ask their brokers...).
7) It’s positively ludicrous to suggest that the wholesale demise of the fifth (or is it sixth) largest city in the country is being CAUSED by the Uzi-wielding high school dropouts from Detroit’s absolutely abysmal school system. C’mon. Get real! Does Cooper REALLY think that the combined power of GM, FORD, CHRYSLER, BURROUGHS, The National Bank of Detroit, Detroit Edison, the FBI, Max Fisher and Al Taubman (two of the wealthiest and most powerful real estate developers in the world), not to mention the scores of international financiers, mob-controlled high-rolling “service capitalists” and police agencies who really do run this country CANNOT stop or put an end to adolescent and athletically dressed street hoods with death wish violence on their minds? Part of Cooper’s report makes it sound as if he’s never heard of Big Business as practiced in this country since...well...slavery. I’m wondering how he can be as naive as he makes himself appear in his myopic discourse on “moral values,” the role of the current mayor and the so-called “mystery” surrounding the city’s inability to recover from the economic catastrophes of the 1970s and ‘80s. The wasteland that Cooper describes didn’t come about as a result of 1967, but developed in spite of it. The “slide,” as Cooper refers to it, was not accidental or “just happened,” but was skillfully engineered. In the U.S., drugs are no different from automobiles or toothpaste—you create a market and you’ve got a thriving business. Heroin didn’t come into Detroit because of the mythical powers of a single corrupt black cop (Henry Marzette) and he certainly didn’t “take over” the trade from the Mafia (Law of Capitalism: little entrepreneurs don’t take over huge corporate institutions). Even in selling drugs there is no such thing as “black capitalism” (Need evidence: ask Berry Gordy who runs Motown. And if you say “his family,” then I’ll know you don’t know ZIP about the REALITY of what you’re talking about).
8) As for the Young Boys Inc (YBI), Cooper needs to ask himself the following question: Where do young black street hoods, most of whom are not even old enough to drive, get the support protection, legal and business knowledge, and sophisticated technical infrastructure to regulate, control and direct a $400 million operation? No matter how bright, clever, and motivated the top leadership happens to be at any given time, street gangs don’t survive and grow without big-time muscle and juice behind them. The attempt to separate factors like racism, corporate economics, political corruption, and media exploitation from the banal day-to-day attitudes and values (let alone behavior) of black youth just won’t wash. You CAN’T have one without the other(s). After all, “Gettin’ paid,” “buying panache and aristocracy,” “murdering business rivals,” and “getting over” are what The American Dream is all about. That’s what’s WRONG with it. These kids are not stupid: they know that. So in the complete absence of values, ideas, and behavior by anyone in “authority” that would demonstrate something different I don’t see how Dr. Fleming (psychologist at Southwest Detroit Hospital) can possibly talk about “spiritual and moral values within the black family” or that these values only shifted towards materialism “in the last 30 years.” Nah, it’s all too pat. The black middle class (like the white one) has always been materialistic (read Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier for starters) and there’s always been young black male victims and criminals who allowed their despair, ignorance, and bitterness at being oppressed to consume them. That is part of what the great tragedy of being black in America has always meant (hasn’t anyone out there read and understood what Richard Wright was trying to say with Bigger Thomas in Native Son or Malcolm X in the first two-thirds of his great Autobiography?) No, I’m afraid that all these references to the wish for a Cosby Show dynamic in the contemporary black urban family is just a way of denying and not facing up to the true challenge before us in this society. If we keep pretending that it’s all a matter of just “saying no,” “going to church” or “wearing proper clothing” and “listening to the right music” then we’ll never be able to change anything. One of the major weaknesses of Cooper’s piece is that he doesn’t seem to realize that 99% of the youth and adults in Detroit, and other cities don’t rape, murder, pillage or otherwise work to destroy themselves or the community, yet there is STILL widespread unemployment, illiteracy, racial discrimination, poverty, homelessness, bad health, and political/economic disenfranchisement among not only blacks, but Latinos, and millions of WHITE PEOPLE (one of the greatest kept secrets of American life in the 20th century!). Under these conditions it makes little sense to talk about what in the final analysis are merely peripheral issues. As bad and ugly and homicidal as the street war in Detroit is, it’s NOTHING compared to the massive organized criminality and viciousness of the gangsters who currently run our political, economic, and cultural institutions. The real story about “what happened to Detroit” since 1967 would talk about who and what really runs the show (and it ain’t no “New Jacks” Cooper). Who are their bosses? I think an investigation into that would take us a lot further than the Mayor’s office (who at this point in history is also just another puppet).
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9) Why can’t Dr. Taylor understand the suicidal kid at the end of the article is what interests me. In 1967 people rebelled against what they perceived to be killing them. OK, the means they used to do that were nowhere close to an ultimate solution for what oppressed them, but it was also more than “a painful mistake,” as Cooper puts it. The linking of that event in 1967 (which took place during a general period of political rebellion and upheaval (after all there were over 250 “riots” throughout the U.S. in 1967-68) to the death wish violence of 1987 is clearly irresponsible and horribly inaccurate. The street kids in 1987 wanna die and kill because they don’t perceive that there’s any solution possible to the despair of their lives. Now granted, that’s not a huge difference from youth throwing molotov cocktails at police or sniping from city rooftops but it is a SIGNIFICANT difference. Think about it!
10) Riddle: What’s black and white and red all over?
Answer: America bleeding itself to death.
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How to Lynch a (Black) Painter
Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
by Phoebe Hoban
Viking, 1999
Konch
Oakland, California
May 2000
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It never fails. Become a well-known or respected pioneering African American male artist and watch the deluge of racist fear, envy, spite, condescension, and hostility rain down upon you. Become everyone’s favorite or most feared pinup/mascot/strawman. Have everyone else’s unexamined and reductive banalities and stereotypes dumped on your nappy head: wild child, primitive, paranoid, naif, stud, freak. When no one can figure you out or you ‘appear’ to be much-too-complex- to-be-true watch the frustrated and envious ones accuse you of being inexplicably both “white” (as in witty, urbane, sophisticated, perceptive, intelligent and “modern/postmodern”) and “black” (as in cunning, childlike, violent, paranoid, gauche, sullen and dumb) at the same time. Then be told that these “racial” differences are the result of (gasp) CULTURE. Watch in astonishment and horror as you and your work are reduced to an unknowing and unknowable essence/cipher while your ‘intriguing’ and charismatic, yet transparent, ‘personality’ is deciphered “Rorschach style” by any silly dilettante who comes along and deigns to project onto you their own inane “dollar book Freudianisms” (as the legendary Orson Welles once deemed such behavior in another context).
No brothers and sisters you can’t win and what’s worse no one wants you to try. Persist and excel anyway and watch your legacy and great achievements patronized, ignored, neglected, and derided by nearly all the so-called experts (more judgmental white people of course). Yes, it’s true. This is the real cost of “greatness” if you happen to be an African American male innovator and it ain’t got nothing to do with whether you agree or believe it or not. It’s called history.
Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest it should be obvious that I did not enjoy reading a new outlandish travesty of a biography about the late black painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose in August, 1988 at the age of 27. This book entitled Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art by a former New York Times journalist named Phoebe Hoban should actually be called Nigger Artist: A Quick Killing in Biography, crammed as it is with relentlessly racist gossip, analytical shallowness and predictably tabloid-stained sensationalism. In fact, Hoban is so far out of her depth here that it almost makes one wonder why this manuscript even saw the light of day. Unfortunately part of the cost of becoming a pioneering African American male figure in the United States is to be endlessly slandered and held up to public ridicule if not violent attack. In this book we find that Basquiat is no exception.
After all, what does one say about a biographer of an innovative black artist who knows next to nothing about modern painting, cultural history, aesthetic theory or the byzantine politics and endlessly cruel absurdities of being “black in America”? How does one take seriously a biography in which three times as much space is allotted to that artist’s sexual affairs and activity as it is to that individual’s aesthetic production? Or where nearly one-fourth of the entire book is spent talking about the artist’s various drug deals, addictions and escapades? How about a book where whole chapters are devoted to various girlfriends of the artist? Well, you get the picture...
What’s even stranger is that Hoban seems to know a great deal more about both the public and clandestine machinations of international art dealers, collectors, Wall Street and Soho-based economic investors, patrons and jet-set groupies/hustlers during the 1980s. Frankly, if she had pursued this angle of investigation as the major theme of her book she could have spared us the cynical, exploitive, and manipulative airing of Basquiat’s dirty laundry, and thus left the still necessary task of doing a serious and critical examination of what made Basquiat such an important painter and cultural figure to a real art critic/cultural historian/biographer. As it is, Hoban (despite her transparent attempts at being simultaneously condescending and hyperbolic in her ‘assessment’ of Basquiat’s oeuvre) winds up doing a disservice to both her general and individual areas of interest by focusing on the superfluous and melodramatic aspects of Basquiat’s public fame and subsequent demise. In so doing Hoban is able to skirt any personal or intellectual responsibility for her ‘Vanity Fair meets the National Enquirer’ prose style by pretending that ‘the life’ (however buried and distorted by the routinely tawdry and gossipy testimony of Basquiat’s “friends”, enemies, and competitors in the art world) is ‘more important’ than the art. In this way Hoban doesn’t have to explore the complex narrative of a very talented and conflicted man who was forced to deal with fierce inner and outer demons in his everyday existence, yet still found enough energy, discipline, intelligence, love, courage and dedication to leave a profound legacy of hundreds of extraordinary paintings. Needless to say a great book could have been written about the real Basquiat contending with the neurotically competitive New York art world in all of its frenzy, decadence, greed, jealousy, racism and fear. But then Hoban would have had to deal with the fact that, despite whatever personal problems Basquiat had, he was a serious artist who worked for, and deserved, respect for his work. But that would have required Hoban to acknowledge Basquiat’s humanity. Clearly that acknowledgment is a tricky thing for many white journalists and critics when the subject is an African American male who absolutely refuses to kowtow to anyone’s either ‘liberal’ or ‘reactionary’ expectations of him.
However one day someone will be both perceptive and knowledgeable enough to do justice to who Basquiat was and wasn’t in terms of the historical and creative universe of Western art. Unfortunately that day is still not here a decade after his death. But if Basquiat can wait (something he found impossible to do while still alive) we all can. In the meantime we still have his paintings rather than this execrable book to remind us all why he was so worthy of a biography in the first place. Jean-Michel would have appreciated and celebrated the difference.
Ishmael Reed's Konch magazine
Oakland, California
May, 2000
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What’s Wrong with the ‘New’ Black Intellectual?
by Kofi Natambu
October 1999
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I. Humanism, Politics & the Contemporary African American Intellectual
Since the volatile 1960s many black intellectuals have been at war with each other and the general society over defining and interpreting the meaning of the African American experience in the United States. There is of course nothing new about this. For over two centuries now this public battle has been taking place. However what is distinctive about our recent history is that various media productions and an endless parade of books devoted to the now mythical subject called ‘the sixties’ have far too often wound up missing the true significance of one of the most important periods in American history and its continued relevance to our present situation. Clearly the objective of these ‘official’ versions of history is to trivialize this fact and thus distort our understanding of the profound struggle for a radically new society that for all of the era’s shortcomings, limitations, stupidities and blind spots, did characterize the period.
Nowhere was this struggle more significant and historically pivotal than in the mass movements for liberation from all forms of racial and class exploitation, injustice and oppression during the Civil Rights and Black Power era (1955-1975). One of the major sites of organized and sustained resistance and opposition to American racism (and sometimes capitalism) was the African American “public intellectual” community. Among this then relatively small national group of writers, social and cultural critics, political activists, musicians, scientists, visual artists, scholars, teachers and academicians were many men and women who did not hesitate to actively join and participate in the furious and insistent demands for self-determination and radical alternatives being made by African Americans nationwide.
However, since 1980 (and the not coincidental rise of Ronald Reagan and his right-wing supporters, colleagues and acolytes) a rapid series of loudly public changes have taken place in this community of black intellectuals. These often highly dramatic shifts in attitude, values, behavior and ideological positions within this community have mostly centered on an openly expressed hostility toward, and repudiation of, the popular and theoretical positions of the ’60s generation of political and cultural activist-organizers by a self-proclaimed ‘new’ group of black intellectuals. In other words the “black power” movement in both its cultural nationalist and quasi-Marxist guises has been held up to general disdain and even ridicule. Thus the era’s black arts movement as well as the radical political activity of such grassroots organizations as SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Republic of New Africa, Congress of African People, and the Black Panther Party (as well as various leftist and nationalist black student union groups on college campuses) have been largely attacked and severely criticized for their limited, myopic , and often chauvinist views of women, class politics and social theory.
But what this so-called ‘new breed’ of African American intellectuals have attempted to substitute for these past limitations and contradictions (and without taking seriously the other profoundly important and useful contributions of this previous group) is a new myopia which seeks to disguise its own intellectual and cultural limitations by weakly claiming to be “above” or “beyond” politics and ideology. What is particularly suspect and dishonest about this attitude is that these intellectuals are making these transparent claims in the name of a clearly traditional ideological and political position that is all too familiar to the rest of us. That position, of course, is “universal aesthetic values” and “Western liberalism” (you know--that old Judeo-Christian philosophy with a thin layer of ‘black icing’ on top).
II. Ideology, Censorship & Social Critique
What’s also conventional about this largely neoconservative group is their fierce attachment to, and intellectual dependency on, what they consider the “deep” and “heroic” canonical traditions of ‘Western Civilization’ as they are still largely taught in American colleges and universities today, albeit with the now token ‘inclusion’ of African Americans (a position that continues to be a lightening rod of criticism and furious debate in African American intellectual circles). What is also worth noting is that a significant number of these ‘new’ intellectuals (e.g. Stanley Crouch, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Charles Johnson, Shelby Steele, etc.) are also members of the 1960s generation who often participated in, and supported, the black nationalism and ‘revolutionary politics’ of that earlier period. As a result, much of their current rhetoric is tinged with a churlishly expressed bitterness and sense of betrayal about that earlier period as being hopelessly lightweight and fundamentally inferior to the views they currently espouse.
Thus part of the fallout from these individuals’ post-1980 values and positions has been a general dismissal of the intellectual, cultural, ideological and political descendants of the ‘60s radicals as well as their mentors and predecessors. One outcome of this rancor has been what many consider to be unwarranted personal attacks by individuals from this ‘new’ group on such major contemporary black intellectuals as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka (who is often mocked by his adversaries in the same infantile way that Muhammad Ali was once dismissed--through their stubborn refusal to publicly address him by anything but his former name of Leroi Jones), Angela Davis and Toni Morrison. What is also clear is that, despite their strenuous denials, a number of these ‘new’ black neoconservative and liberal figures are being used by rightwing dominated intellectual institutions in the media, academia, and cultural/political worlds of literature, music, social criticism, history, economics, labor and art to push aside and categorically dismiss the stated concerns and stances of this earlier radical group and their contemporary counterparts.
As a result, this situation has had a profoundly negative impact on the general public reception of the ideas, values and positions of black intellectuals who seek and advocate radical alternatives to the current smug celebration of the cliché and tattered notions of individualism and ‘free market’ capitalism, as well as the trumpeted American ideals (and largely absent realities) of ‘democracy’, ‘equality’ and ‘justice.’ Ironically these highly conformist positions are being promoted as exemplary evidence of the “free marketplace of ideas” that allegedly characterizes American society.
Under these media-controlled conditions black intellectuals who offer a consistent critique of so-called ‘mainstream views’ of political economy, cultural values and social history are seen as unwelcome and troublemaking interlopers who merely seek to create chaos and participate in “irresponsible” attacks on those who are depicted as gallantly developing a “balanced and reasonable” response to social crisis and cultural conflict. This condescending and dismissive attitude has led liberals and neocons alike to actively or unwittingly support the virtual exclusion from general public discourse of the contributions of such major black intellectuals as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, June Jordan, Angela Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, Quincy Troupe, John A. Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Clarence Lusane, Cynthia Hamilton, Jayne Cortez, Adolph Reed, Jr., Robert Allen, James Jennings, Clyde R. Taylor, Lewis Gordon, Gerald Horne, Tommy L. Lott, Joy James and Manning Marable. The obvious marginalization of the important work, views, and stances of these and many other black intellectuals is an outrage for two major reasons: It deprives the larger society of general access to many of the most incisive critics and analysts of our time, and it effectively removes from public consideration a truly visionary perspective on our collective social future.
III. The Good Negro/Bad Negro Syndrome
One of the inevitable consequences of this highly orchestrated exclusion of views is that the white media has openly designated some African American writers, critics and activists as being more “representative” and “mature” than others. So just as the national African American population is often routinely ‘asked’ to make the “proper” choice between the “Good Negro” and the “Bad Negro” in everything from sports (Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods vs. Allen Iverson and Latrell Sprewell), to entertainment (Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby and Will Smith vs. “most rappers”), and politics (Colin Powell vs. you-name-it), we now find officially approved figureheads like Henry “Skip” Gates, Jr., Cornel West, Hilton Als, Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, William Julius Wilson, Randall Kennedy and neo-classical Jazz musician-turned-faux cultural/social critic Wynton Marsalis (!) given top priority and pride of place in the pages of every mainstream rag from the New York Times and The New Republic to the Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice. In this paternalist atmosphere it appears that nearly every other African American intellectual is being banished to some social or cultural equivalent of ‘Tysonville.’
What has happened in the wake of this intraracial political coup (so much for multiculturalism!) is that the very notion of “intellectual diversity” has been co-opted and undermined by a ‘new wave’ of highly paid and recognized “official black spokesmen” (with not a black woman in sight) who, we are constantly being told on ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ and in the pages of Esquire, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Emerge, Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker, are the “genuine” and “leading” representatives of black political, cultural and social thought in the U.S. today. In fact this idea has been so deeply ingrained in American intellectual circles since the early 1980s that it’s almost difficult to even remember when such highly independent and diverse black literary and political intellectuals as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Angela Davis, Charles Wright, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Quincy Troupe, Huey P. Newton, Larry Neal, David Henderson, John A. Williams, Lorenzo Thomas, George Jackson, Ed Bullins, Sherley Anne Williams, Ben Caldwell, Gil Scott-Heron, Cecil Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, William Melvin Kelley, James Stewart, Calvin Hernton, James Foreman, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Harold Cruse, A.B. Spellman, Robert Allen, Clarence Major, Audre Lorde, Gayl Jones, Michele Wallace, Adrienne Kennedy, Addison Gayle, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Charles Fuller, Al Young, John A. Williams and Henry Dumas (among a highly vocal supporting cast of tens of thousands) were not only writing their artistically provocative books of poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, plays, journalism and speeches (whether they believed in the ‘black aesthetic’ or not), but were also openly attacking American racism, imperialism, sexism and class oppression during the 1960-1980 period.
Under these circumstances, it’s even difficult to notice that a number of these people are still writing and publishing today since much of the white publishing world have closed their doors to them since those legendary days. But despite the intense opposition to their work (and if you think that assessment is too harsh visit your local bookstore and magazine/newspaper rack and count the number of texts and articles that are still readily available by these authors--it won’t equal, say, OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB or even most bestseller lists) these intellectuals continue to do some very important work. It’s no coincidence that the aforementioned individuals have written nearly three hundred books (!) between them. It’s also important to point out that one of the most significant developments in black intellectual life over the past two decades is the exciting emergence of individuals whose work has been directly and indirectly influenced by the radical artists and activists of the 1960s/’70s generation. This group includes the cultural and social critics bell hooks, Gerald Early, Greg Tate, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia J. Williams, Armond White, Tricia Rose, Joan Morgan, and Nelson George; poets and novelists Nathaniel Mackey, Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Beatty, Thulani Davis, Saul Williams, Ruth Forman, Kevin Young, and Jessica Care Moore; and the playwrights and performance artists August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, Carl Hancock Rux and Tracie Morris. That these intellectuals range in age from 25-55 speaks volumes about the aesthetic and cultural strength of the much maligned but still vital legacy of what was once called ‘the black arts.’
But don’t mind me. I am, according to the unholy wisdom of the Crouches, Gates, Steeles and Johnsons of this “brave new world” of the black intelligentsia, just another anachronism from the “strident and unsophisticated” wing of the late and not so lamented “black power niggerati.” It’s too bad that in a society where African American youth and adults alike are relentlessly attacked and misrepresented as ‘nihilists’, ‘incompetents’, and ‘malcontents’ (all the while being racially profiled, brutalized and even murdered by those who claim to “protect and serve” us) my peers and contemporaries can’t be a member of the neo-Negro club “just trying to save America” as Crouch, Murray and Marsalis so delicately put it. Nor are we part of the well-endowed “Dream Team” led by “Skip” Gates and colleagues at that bastion of black intellectual activity and mass movement, Harvard University. O well. Maybe the rest of us plebeians will get our chance in the new millennium. Who knows? Maybe rank careerism among black intellectuals will simply go out of style. As Jesse Jackson is so fond of saying we can always “keep hope alive...”
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Article commissioned by CODE magazine
(never published)
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Language as Figure, Sound as Ground
Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
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Whatsaid Serif
by Nathaniel Mackey
City Lights Books, 1999
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Konch
June, 2000
Oakland, California
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As we know from both ancient and contemporary lore the gift of song is our greatest link to the massive force field we call music. Its material agent is sound and its expressive/structural foundation is language--that always powerful and redemptive reminder of the human capacity for the transformation as well as transmutation of existential being. Intimately aligned with language is the medium of poetry which derives its energy and sense of identity from the frontiers of language itself bringing those who read and listen to it heavily encoded messages from the frontlines of consciousness. It is this consciousness that extraordinary poets evoke when they literally and figuratively weave and interweave their markings with that of past-encrypted forms and symbols. A consciousness not of origins but of memories and desires tracing and tracking their myriad narratives thru the broken and spiraling corridors of time. These poets provide us with tangible histories of that which cannot be eclipsed but often remains both tantalizingly elusive and mundane. At this intersection of the quotidian and the sublime lies the concrete magic of poetry.
One of our most useful and profound guides to this consciousness that seeks and speaks the language of philosophical possibility as melodic song and rhythmic grace is Nathaniel Mackey, a writer of astonishing clarity and precision who never sacrifices the visceral yet subtle emotion that the struggle for the minute “nuances of truth” always brings. Mackey, a critically acclaimed and much respected literary editor (Hambone) as well as writer of poetry and prose fiction forms, is a veteran professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has for the past two decades been engaged in an epic, painstaking and exhilarating quest for a simultaneously mythic, gnostic and historical understanding of how we, “a rough draft of human being” as Mackey puts it, are inextricably linked to the Andoumboulou, a failed earlier form of human being in Dogon (West African) cosmology. In Mackey’s view of this mythology we are in fact the Andoumboulou or rough draft.
Through the textural renderings of this experience as inscribed and encoded in words transformed by short line positionings and rhythmic displacements, Mackey works to return language ‘back’ to the rasps and outpourings of tonality found in Dogon funeral rituals where rebirth, renewal and thus the eternal possibilities of redemption and reconciliation can flower and assert themselves. In Mackey’s creative and imaginative ruminations this ongoing quest contains the seeds of fulfillment, a quenching of the thirst for existential awareness and social community--but not without recognizing the historically informed, hard-won and blues based nature of this struggle. This is where harmony attempts to enter the musical and linguistic universe (omniverse?) for Mackey. Consider this section from ‘Song of the Andoumboulou: 20’:
I was the what-sayer.
Whatever he said I would
say so what.
Boated whether
we came by train or by
bus, green light
loomed on the horizon.
Where we were might’ve
been the moon...
Bleak
survival egged us on, a
bird made of tin
pressing its beak
to the smalls of our
backs. Spectral
advance,
peripatetic
spur...
This while on our
way to Ouadada,
vowed we’d
let nobody turn us
around, thought we
saw Dadaoua. To the outer
principalities of Onem we were
brought, bought,
sold
on blocks, auctioned
off.
It was a train we were on,
peripatetic tavern we
were in, mind unremittingly
elsewhere, words meaning
more
than the world they
pointed at, asymptotic
tangent, Atht it was called...
Sophic rail we
stood at listening.
Expression
was on the jukebox, “To Be”
Spooked flutes hollowed
us out,
sophic not-ness...South, more
news of slaughter. Something
we saw we hoped we only
imagined we saw. “They
kill us,”
Mbizo yelled...
It is precisely in such stark and spectral circumstances that narratives, narrators and metaphysical wanderings become linked to a much broader and panoramic perception and even understanding(s) of the ‘meaning of experience.’ What Mackey provides is a linguistic and graphic mapping of the journey across the interior and exterior terrains of history as consciousness. In the spaces between utterance and ‘communication’ lies one’s own rendezvous with destiny -- a destiny that we make as it is shaping and transforming us. Through this portal of reality, language allows us to glimpse how and why passages of time and space are both created and accessed. What the poet does is to speak and write that which remains unspoken and unwritten but is nevertheless alive. In this way gnosis, semiosis, and mythos meet and cross-fertilize each other in order that humanity (the Andoumboulou) can make itself heard, seen and known. This is the crossroads that the blues singers and Jazz musicians speak of and express thru the languages of their particular mediums. Mackey’s epistemology is steeped in this notion of tradition-as-contemporary function. As a result, what comes through in his work are intensely lyrical evocations of this epistemological approach in motion:
Song of the Andoumboulou: 23
--rail band--
Another cut was on
the box as we pulled
in. Fall back though we
did once it ended,
“Wings
of a Dove” sung so
sweetly we flew...
The Station Hotel came
into view. we were in
Bamako. The same scene
glimpsed again and
again said to be a
sign...
As of a life sought
beyond the letter,
preached of among those
who knew nothing but,
at yet
another “Not yet” Cerno
Bokar came aboard, the
elevens and the twelves locked
in jihad at each other’s
throats, bracketed light
lately revealed, otherwise
out...
Ultimately these poetic holographs of life culled from markings and inscribed gestures found in the signage of Time are ongoing intertextual evidence of our collective existence on the shores of memory and desire. From this centered space the Andoumboulou re-discover that earth which they have been told about many times in the past. It is Mackey’s musical rendering of language that allows them (us?) to be both seen and heard. So sayeth the eternal practice of the poet as what-sayer.
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“Jazz, Rock, Pop & Classical are all yesterday’s titles.” —Ornette Coleman
Music Review
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by Kofi Natambu
December 10, 1981
Detroit Metro Times
P’nk J’zz
Charles “Bobo” Shaw and the Human Arts Ensemble featuring Joseph Bowie
Muse Records, 1981
Now is the time to throw away all that weak stuff “Jazz journalists” keep trying to sell us as “criticism.” The music we call “improvisational” never fitted into any of these quasi-rational straitjackets we like to think are so definitive: “Jazz”, “Rock”, “R & B”, “Funk” blahblahblah. Listen closely to 1928 Ellington or 1939 Prez or 1947 Bird or 1958 Miles or 1964 Trane or 1975 Braxton. I mean from a “purely artistic” point of view, WHAT is it? Can IT and Otis, Jimi, Sly, Stevie, B.B., Muddy, John Lee, Pops and the Temptations possibly be the same music? And if not, then what was/is Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Louis Jordan doing? How ‘bout Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Jimmy Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday, and Clifford Brown?
Think about it—these are not idle questions. What does Sun Ra do? If AIR plays Jelly Roll, Joplin and Cecil Taylor, what does that tell us about black creative music’s history and values? If Sun Ra plays 1932 Ellington tunes and 2012 multimedia explosions, then what are we really talking about in terms of the concept and spirit of creative values in the world today? It is my contention that if we begin to examine these questions seriously, we will make some much-needed inroads into understanding (and appreciating) the tremendous contributions of black creative music to world culture. It’s better than sticking dried-out stars on the backs of dead artifacts like some magazines I know (Blindfold Test, indeed!).
All this rambling leads me to a discussion of the latest artifact by Messr. Shaw & Co. This is a band that In its various disguises has been recording since 1970. For example, Shaw, Bowie, and the saxophonist with this band (Julius Hemphill) were all founding members of the legendary Black Artists Group (BAG) that emerged in St. Louis during the 1960s and included poets, actors, painters and dancers, as well as musicians. This is important to note because a major stylistic feature of this ensemble is a highly developed sense of multimedia theatre and performance art. This concern is reflected in their attitude toward group expression, which was highly influenced by these particular artists’ active involvement in the self-determination movement among black artists during the past two decades.
In P’nk J’zz we encounter the omnidirectional musics of an ensemble that is compulsively dedicated to completely destroying all traces of categorical divisions in their art. No style, idiom or idea in black music goes unplayed. Tricky Sam Nanton meets Bo Diddley and bumps into Johnny Hodges looking over Roscoe Mitchell’s shoulder. But what is Wes Montgomery doing here? Why dueting with James “Blood” Ulmer, of course. And could that be Dr. Funkenstein (Mr. Rittim ‘n Bitness himself) dancing to the popping polyrhythms of Art Blakey? Meanwhile, Jackie McLean is playing cards with Sidney Bechet. Wait a minute, how did this African percussion choir get in the act?
Oh well, if this stuff keeps up then none of us will have anything to write about. Sounds dangerous, doesn’t it? Only if your vested interest is in the maintenance of things-as-they-are that is. If not, relax. This music will permit you to laugh again. Which is quite rare and valuable in the absurdly jaded and cynical 1980s. Who says Dancing, Listening and Laughing are mutually exclusive? Not anything in this band, that’s for sure...
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VENUS RISES AND TAKES TENNIS WITH HER: A Report on the 2000 U.S. Open (August 28–September 10)
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PHOTO (L-R): Venus and Serena Williams. Damon Winter/The New York Times
The spectacular ascension of Venus and Serena Williams to virtual dominance of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) over the past calendar year is one of the greatest stories in contemporary American sports rivaling, in cultural impact and general public fascination, the already legendary exploits of black golf phenom Tiger Woods. However, just as in the case of Tiger, not everyone is pleased with this development. For despite an astonishing record of athletic and monetary success, critical acclaim, and the fierce adulation of thousands of fans, the Williams Sisters remain the targets of vitriolic racial abuse, envy, and condescension from their detractors. This open public disdain of the sisters among sports journalists, tennis fans, and standard issue racists alike even extends to their father, coach, and mentor, Richard Williams, whose genius at teaching his daughters a game that he himself learned in his late 30s(!) from reading books and watching videos of tennis matches continues to rankle those who think that a former black Louisiana sharecropper shouldn’t be a major force in the overwhelmingly white and wealthy tennis world.
Of course, none of this rancor has stopped or even slowed down the roaring Williams family locomotive. Since turning pro in 1994 at the age of fourteen right here in Oakland, CA at the ‘Bank of the West’ classic, the now 20-year-old Venus and her sister Serena, 19 (a professional since 1997), have captivated modern tennis by introducing to the game a highly innovative and dynamic blend of speed, power, intelligence, discipline and fierce determination to win and excel. The results of their intensity and hard work have been nothing short of astonishing: back-to-back Grand Slam victories at the U.S. Open for both sisters in 1999 and 2000, three grand slam victories at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the French Open as doubles partners over the past two years, a combined total of thirty singles and doubles tournament victories, and joint selection to the 2000 U.S. Olympic team in tennis in singles (Venus) and doubles (Venus & Serena). As amazing as those accomplishments are for them together however, Venus has in the past three months alone amassed an even more phenomenal record; winner of 26 straight matches, five straight tournaments, and two grand slam victories at Wimbledon in July in Great Britain, and the recent U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, New York, the older sister has put everyone on notice that despite the official computer rankings of the WTA (which are based on the cumulative record of the past 52 weeks) that she is the number one women’s player in the world (officially she is ranked number three, largely because she missed the first five months of the 2000 season due to injury).
However, even her biggest competitors (the number one and two ranked players, Martina Hingis and Lindsay Davenport, respectively) openly admit that she is the best player in women’s tennis this year. Despite these admissions and Venus’s sterling record there continues to be considerable hostility, jealousy and racial animus directed at her and her family. This year’s U.S. Open is a major case in point. The basis of much of this racist venom was the media speculation about a possible All-Williams final matchup between Venus and Serena at the Open. Of course this kind of speculation, and even anticipation on the part of many tennis fans and journalists alike, has been going on since the sisters first began to play together on the tour, but the fact that the sisters had won every single tournament on the women’s tour since June except one only added fuel to the distinct possibility of it finally happening at the U.S. Open.
As a result the national print and electronic media had a field day making endless projections about the sisters fulfilling their father’s uncanny prophecy (that Mr. Williams initially made when Venus was only ten years old!) that both his daughters would be the first sisters in history to ever play each other in the finals of a grand slam event, and that they would eventually be ranked number one and two in the world. Needless to say these Ali-like public predictions that their father was so fond of making absolutely infuriated many white American fans and journalists who were not accustomed to being openly ‘signified on’ by black folks in the country club ambiance of national tennis tournaments. The fallout from the tension created by these factors was that this year’s U.S. Open became a hotbed for a massive war of words over the Internet, in the stadium arena, and in the general media over the ‘place’ of the Williams sisters in the game, and especially as leading figures in American sports.
In addition the often biased reporting of some tennis commentators on both television and in newspapers have created an atmosphere where the Williams sisters are subjected to such traditional racist mythology as the “powerful” black athlete who survives merely on “raw talent” and “intimidation”, but never on strategic thought, finesse, or general intelligence. In fact all during the Open there were endless references to the “superior” intellectual abilities and analytical prowess of Martina Hingis over that of the “natural physical strength” and “intuitive” powers of Venus and Serena. These absurd ‘Bell Curve’ and neo-fascist like comparisons were continually made despite the fact that Hingis is in reality a high school dropout whose only real interest since turning pro at age thirteen has been professional tennis, while both Venus and Serena are enrolled college students whose high school academic GPAs were in the 3.5-4.0 range, and who excelled in literature, science, history, math, and languages (both sisters are multilingual and fluent in French and Italian, much to the delight of their many European fans).
In fact, part of Richard Williams’s genius has been his constant insistence from the beginning that education was far more important than sports for his daughters. This insistence on Venus and Serena being well-rounded individuals who were much more than mere jocks was so strong that Mr. Williams took Venus and Serena off the junior tennis circuit for four years when they were ten and eight respectively so that they could seriously pursue their education. This was after Venus had amassed a phenomenal 63-0 mark on the junior tour. He did it because he “didn’t want his kids to wind up like many of the other children on the tour who are dumb and don’t know anything except tennis.” Ironically, Mr. Williams was excoriated in a number of circles for allegedly stunting the athletic growth of his daughters, and is amazingly still criticized today by some for “holding his daughters back” from acquiring the same tennis skills at the same pace as the other players (even Tiger Woods’s father Earl has made this ludicrous charge!).
But the proof of the ultimate wisdom of Williams “unorthodox” style of coaching was now plain for all to see as the Williams sisters continued to mow down their opposition. By the time the U.S. Open rolled around this year little sister Serena was already the defending champion from 1999 of one of the most significant and prestigious titles in all of tennis, and big sister Venus was on the verge of giving the Williams family the trophy for the second year in a row. This unprecedented achievement did not come easily however as Serena was upset by the second-ranked Lindsay Davenport in the quarterfinals, and Venus was faced with the unenviable task of having to beat the top two players in the world on successive days to claim the title.
What made this task even more pressure-packed and tension-filled were the endless public and backstage machinations going on among some journalists and fans to diminish, dismiss or otherwise discredit the Williams sisters revolutionary accomplishments. Among other things Davenport revealed after her winning match against Serena that she and her friend, the Swiss-born Martina Hingis had met and resolved among themselves that there would be no All-Williams final in the tournament. Much was made of this alleged ‘alliance’ between Davenport and Hingis, with many even suggesting that an American (Davenport) “conspiring” with a “foreigner” (Hingis) against two other Americans (the sisters) was not only in bad taste and vaguely ‘unpatriotic’ but that there were distinct racial overtones to the alliance considering that Davenport and Hingis were white, and the sisters black. While I do not share this particular view (my personal take on Davenport in this instance was that she was only maintaining an appropriate competitive stance vis-à-vis the Williams sisters and was not doing it for racist reasons--after all as a former champion of the U.S. Open in 1998 she wanted to be in the finals herself, and could only do so by defeating at least one of them). Having said that (and not being a mind reader of Davenport’s or Hingis’s personal intentions) the timing and context of Davenport’s remarks, which she insisted that the media and the public were making far more of than she intended, could not have been worse. For there was already a firestorm of vicious and/or patronizing racially motivated statements flooding cyberspace, talk radio and various newspapers calling for a ‘great white hope’ candidate to come forward and prevent an all-Williams final.
In the press conference following Serena’s defeat to Davenport, Serena said it was clear that many people were against an all-Williams final in a Grand Slam tournament like the U.S. Open, but she pointed out that such an event was “inevitable” and “that she would do everything in her power to help it come about.” When she also stated that many players on the tour did not like the Williams sisters Serena was rudely asked why by reporters. At this point an obviously disgusted Serena simply said, “I don’t know” and abruptly left the room.
Despite these and other negative incidents involving envious and reactionary media types the persistently brilliant play of Venus Williams against Hingis and Davenport in the semifinals and finals of the tournament not only avenged her sister’s bitter loss to Davenport, but also confirmed in strikingly dramatic terms why Venus is the number one player in a sport where many of the fans are openly rooting for her white opponents, a situation that made the U.S. Open and tennis generally still another example of the ongoing historical difficulties and obstacles facing great black athletes. For like such extraordinary African American sports pioneers and legends as Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe and the now 72 year old former tennis champion Althea Gibson (who until the Williams Sisters came along was the only African American woman in tennis history to win Wimbledon and U.S. Open championships in 1957 and ‘58), Venus and Serena have elevated the game through their grace, style, skill and dignity. That so many of our fellow citizens can’t see past their own racial psychosis is of course their loss. As Ms. Gibson made clear in her congratulatory letters and telegrams to Venus following her victory, she and her sister (and other family members) are winners. For this the African American community and all others of goodwill and appreciation of true greatness and beauty can take immense pride. The sisters embody the best we have to offer. They will continue to inspire and provide leadership no matter what our enemies say or do. This is the final meaning of Venus Williams’s victory at the U.S. Open this year. Besides, like Richard Williams once said, the WTA might well become known as the Williams Tennis Association...
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Kofi Natambu is a writer and cultural critic who lives and works in Oakland, California. He saw Venus and Serena play in tournaments at Stanford University and Manhattan Beach, CA this summer (yes, they both won!). He has been an avid tennis fan since 1970. He would like to thank the late, great Arthur Ashe (1943-1993) for this gift.
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Sam Rivers: A Compelling Force
by Kofi Natambu
August 29, 1984
Detroit Metro Times
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“You don’t pin me down. I am as general as a musician can be, general and open. I have the scope of the whole thing and I really try to do it that way with every composition.
—Sam Rivers
Everything about Samuel Carthorne Rivers defies traditional attempts to blithely categorize or pigeonhole. In fact, his entire life history as a black creative musician suggests there is something seriously wrong with most general notions about what “jazz” is (or is supposed to be). A brilliant multi-instrumentalist and composer who excels with world-class proficiency on tenor and soprano saxophones, flute and piano, Rivers is a musician for whom the extraordinary is quite commonplace. It is Rivers’s extensive background in all the major styles and concepts of Afro-American music (which is the mainstream of all American music), that allows him to create freely in a multitude of settings.
Rivers was born September 25, 1930 in El Reno, Oklahoma. The other significant fact about his birth is that it literally took place on the road. You see, Rivers comes from a family of very talented musicians. His grandfather, the Rev. Marshall W. Taylor, is famous for the publication of a volume of slave folk songs and gospel tunes. Sam’s very early years were spent in Chicago until his father died and the family moved to Arkansas when he was seven.
Sam’s extremely varied training in music began then. He studied and learned how to play several instruments, beginning with piano and then violin and alto saxophone. He also sang with his brother and two cousins in a group called—and you won’t believe this—the “Tiny Tims.”
After a stint in the Navy, Sam enrolled at the Boston Conservatory of Music. While there, Sam studied composition and viola, in addition to violin. At night Sam played tenor saxophone in an improvisational music setting at a small bar and grill. This was in Boston during the early 1950s, and it was jumping with great music and musicians—Jaki Byard, Charlie Mariano, Nat Pierce, Quincy Jones (then a trumpet player), Joe Gordon, Gigi Gryce and, of course, Cecil Taylor were a few notables on the scene. As Rivers described it: “There were three or four bands a night—never a dull moment. They’d start at noon and go to midnight. Two bands during the day and two at night. I was lucky—we played from seven to ten, but it was seven days a week.”
During this period Rivers was also a regular member of a big band called ‘The Beboppers” that played the bop classics (Bird, Dizzy, Dameron et al). Despite this, Rivers’ main influences were, as he says: “Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. Lester Young was my first influence, later Hawkins, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, people like that.” Even then Rivers, always an original and innovative stylist, did not imitate the styles of those he admired. He also consciously made a point of playing in a bebop vein without playing too many bop tunes.
The early 1960s marked a change in Rivers’ style and a turning point in his long career. He was still playing classical music and holding down a regular gig with blues groups and a Basie-like big band, but at the same time he was working with a new, more advanced group that included the then 16-year-old prodigy of the drums, the great Tony Williams. Hal Galper was on piano and Rivers on various reeds, Rivers took a never-look-back plunge into the so-called “avant-garde” of black creative music. Rivers states: “We were listening to Cecil Taylor’s music and Ornette Coleman’s music. So that opened the music up. It was a natural evolution for me.” Rivers had already been playing compositions without a preset chord structure before he heard Coleman and Taylor. Their bold innovations only confirmed the validity of his own experiments. Rivers considers this development in the music to be the most radical innovation in music in the last fifty years.
It was in 1964 after playing on the road with the legendary blues singer and guitarist T-Bone Walker that Rivers was first brought to the attention of a national audience when he was asked to play with the Miles Davis group. Though Rivers only played with Miles for six months, he made an indelible impression by playing some very fiery and wildly original tenor saxophone on a now-classic recording called Miles Davis Live in Tokyo (recently reissued by Columbia on a 1983 two-fer called Heard ‘Round the World). This recording identified Rivers as a major force to be reckoned with and put him in the upper echelon of saxophonists with the likes of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Rivers’ replacement with the Davis band, Wayne Shorter. Later, in 1970, Rivers opened what became a very famous and successful musicians’ loft Studio Rivbea. Named after Sam and his artist wife of thirty years, Bea Rivers, this studio became the spot to hear the new generation of innovative black creative musicians such as then unknowns Arthur Blythe, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Olu Dara, Frank Lowe, and the dynamos from Chicago’s AACM: Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins and others.
The loft and Rivers became central figures in what the media dubbed “Loft Jazz” as many similar sites. for playing contemporary black creative music began to spring up. In 1976 many of the major artists in the movement were documented on record in a five-album series for Douglas Records that Rivers co-produced called Wildflowers. Now out of print, this series is a real collector’s item. As a concert and rehearsal space, Studio Rivbea was a fantastic place to hear live music without any distractions whatever. Its absence (Rivers closed it in 1980) is sorely felt.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and into this decade. Rivers has recorded some amazing music. In the mid-1960s, he did a series of classic recordings for Blue Note that featured a very fluid and dynamic style on tenor and a characteristically varied compositional approach. He also appeared as a sideman giving great performances on records led by Tony Williams, Larry Young and Andrew Hill. Rivers also performed and recorded with Cecil Taylor in the late 1960s, culminating in an exhilarating three-record set for wealthy European patron that was released in the U.S. as The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor, Rivers continued to play on and off with Taylor until 1973. After another brief stint with McCoy Tyner, Rivers really came into his own in the early 1970s.
It was during this phase that Rivers finally got an opportunity to record his orchestral music. Utilizing groups of between 10-25 pieces, Rivers extends the traditional big band concept through a distinctly melodic and rhythmic approach that relies on tonal density and textural richness to convey sound colors. There is a broad canvas of sounds to choose from in exploring the multidirectional movement of lines and rhythms. The first recorded evidence of this creative approach appears on a brilliant Rivers date for Impulse called Crystals from 1974. Since then Rivers has led outstanding large ensemble groups in various music festivals in the U.S., Europe, and Japan as well as continuing his unique uses of the small group idiom.
Ironically, despite the consistent high quality of Rivers’ work, he has only been able to make five recordings in America in the past eight years. Another glaring example of the music industry’s neglect of creative music. All of Rivers’ recent records (Duets 1 & 2 with the great bassist David Holland, Waves, Contrasts and his latest 1983 masterpiece for the Italian Black Saint label entitled Colours), are leading forces in contemporary creative music in the world today.
As Rivers says: “This music has developed at a very rapid pace over the last sixty years and has come to dominate the world music scene. The fine art music is jazz, now at its highest state, which we prefer to call creative music. We would like to change the name but the writers won’t allow it, they just keep saying ‘jazz.” I just let it go. It’s a category for me that covers all. I’ve played in symphony orchestras, blues bands, experimental groups, avant-garde groups, bebop groups, show bands; you name the music and I’ve pretty much done it. Saying that I’m a jazz musician means I play all kinds of music.”
On Friday, Aug. 31 at 8p.m., you will hear more than versatility, exquisite technical control and prowess, or even creative values at work. You will hear passion, strength, tenderness and love. What else can you expect from music?
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The Fight For Free Speech
by Kofi Natambu
Commissioned by The Metro Times
Detroit, Michigan
July, 1990
[Never Published]
“The social climate is suddenly less tolerant of free expression across a wide range of issues. One theme in all these cases is that we can adjust our concept of free speech, slice off a few tiny corners and leave the core intact. But that’s the argument that’s always been used to justify restricting speech.”
—Geoffrey Stone, Dean, University of Chicago Law School
“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
—Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. U.S. Supreme Court
“Our freedom of speech is freedom or death/We got to fight the powers that be/Lemme hear ya say/Fight the Power...”
—Public Enemy, “Fight the Power”
On June 6, 1990, a United States District Court Judge declared that an album by the rap group 2 Live Crew, “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” was obscene. The ruling marked the first time in American history that a recording was declared obscene by a Federal Court. In the next few days two members of the rap group (including its leader Luther Campbell) were arrested for performing one of the album’s songs before an adults-only audience. In addition, the group has been banned from live performance under the threat of arrest in a number of other cities. As a result a new storm of controversy has emerged over issues of artistic expression, freedom of speech and censorship that runs directly parallel to the present public conflicts surrounding the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions at art galleries in Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati, Ohio, and the on-going coercive attempts by a number of right-wing groups (and such powerful reactionaries as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina) to invoke new controls on the funding practices of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) through acts of selective censorship.
What is at stake in the current national furor over these and other events is nothing less than the continued integrity and strength of the first amendment to the Constitution and the fundamental protection of our rights as citizens to a truly free access to ideas, practices and expressions that cannot be censored by any outside agency (especially the government). What the current war over these issues indicates is that there is a major public debate raging over whether free speech is going to survive for everyone, as opposed to those individuals or groups we find acceptable—for our own moral, aesthetic, or political reasons.
For despite the lofty intentions of self-proclaimed moralists of every color who think that it’s alright if we sacrifice certain artists like 2 Live Crew to the wolves because “they too” think they are obscene, it is clear that there is a much larger question that must be addressed. And that is: Who has the right to impose their idea of ‘morality’ or ideologically “correct thinking” on anyone else? Furthermore, how does one determine what should be censored in a society where presumably we have the right to freely express ourselves without external interference? No matter how you slice it, political oppression is nearly always the byproduct of artistic censorship. If we examine the pernicious ways in which these measures are used, we find that they often have much more to do with social control than with protecting an innocent public” from the ravages of “the evil artist.” This is especially the case in the 2 Live Crew situation, who, as a black rap group, are obviously being singled out as an example of “perverse sexuality” when the legal authorities could have just as easily chosen any number of white rock and heavy metal groups as well. Thus racism is, as always in this society, a major factor.
But ultimately, the current conflict even goes beyond the exploitive mythology of race in this culture. This is because even though no other group has been officially brought up on federal charges, the action taken against 2 Live Crew can be viewed as an important legal salvo being launched by a widely diverse coalition of groups who all have their own particular reasons for advocating constraints on free speech. Often these groups cut across ideological and political lines in a wild crazy-quilt of contending social views: racists, neoconservatives, feminists, televangelists, civil rights organizations, religious fundamentalists and government bureaucrats. Mixed in with the demagogic machinations of opportunist politicians and yellow journalists we have all the ingredients for a volatile political battle that promises to be one of the most important conflicts of our time.
One essential point that can’t be denied is that it doesn’t matter if one loves or hates, agrees or disagrees with the sexual or cultural politics of any one particular individual or group. Nor is it a question of whether one thinks certain ideas or practices are less ‘progressive’ or ‘positive’ than others. What is and must remain inviolate in the struggle over free speech vs. censorship is the right of anyone to have their rights protected—even if standards of conventional morality or official behavior condemn what is being said.
In a highly charged atmosphere like the present where we find some radical feminists ironically aligning themselves with such traditionally sexist Neanderthals as certain elements of the religious far right against pornography; or the well-intentioned proposals of various civil libertarians and academics calling for legal strictures against the myriad forms of “hate speech” (i.e. racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynist epithets) on college campuses, none of this will be an easy or pleasurable task. But unless we seriously concern ourselves with a strong and clearly unambiguous defense of the overall principle of freedom of speech and ideas against all forms of state-supported censorship then the alternative will be determined by social forces who will try to dictate to the rest of us what we should think, accept and endorse. And that, to paraphrase Public Enemy, would be deadly to us all.
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Decoding Is an Act of Revelation
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Music Review
by Kofi Natambu
July 9, 1981
Detroit Metro Times
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Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society
Eye on You
About Time Records, 1981
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Ronald Shannon Jackson is the only man to play and record with both Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, two of the major innovators in the history of black creative music. For many people this fact alone would be sufficient information about this artist. However, it is important to note that Jackson has emerged as a highly creative musician and composer in his own right. He is also a man with a clear vision of his aesthetic identity. It is this clarity of purpose and visionary perspective that distinguishes his music and marks his ensemble as a major contemporary force in world music today.
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For over 20 years now many black musicians have been involved in developing a functional unity of the essential elements of the Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Funk and various stylistic forms of improvisational music. There has also been considerable interest in, and use of, traditional folk musics around the world. It is this “tradition” that continues in the multi-directional music(s) of Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society.
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Jackson, originally from Forth Worth, Texas, (a city that has spawned such outstanding musicians as King Curtis, Julius Hemphill, John Carter and Ornette Coleman), has been playing and recording in New York since 1966. Born in 1940, Jackson has performed or recorded with everyone from Albert Ayler and James “Blood” Ulmer to Betty Carter and Stanley Turrentine. This wide spectrum of musical experience has had a profound impact on Jackson’s aesthetic philosophy.
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In Eye On You, Jackson’s first album as a leader, he presents an intricate and emotionally compelling series of miniature sound portraits. It appears that Jackson, as a drummer and composer, has mastered the musical system of harmolodics created and taught by Ornette Coleman. This system allows all instruments in the band the structural freedom to create their own concept of the melody.
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In Jackson’s music, all melodic and rhythmic structures are seen as dynamic interactions between notated and improvised material. The ensemble emphasis is on collective improvisation and communication. This method insures constant textural and tempo changes and a broad expressive palette of instrumental colors. The result is not a mindless hodge podge of musical styles and aesthetic idioms, but a dynamic synthesis and extension of the philosophical and spiritual values in contemporary music.
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Lest the reader get the mistaken idea that Jackson’s music is purely cerebral in content, it would be wise to guess again.
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This band “swings” like mad! The ensemble sound is kinetic and explosive, warm and majestic. The music roars, caresses, teases and burns fiercely. Fiery and passionate, it is dance music for the soul. It is also this time zone’s interface of New Orleans martial cadences (dig the pronounced two-beat booty licks), Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix rock riffs, hardcore African delta blues, stomp-down R&B, enchanting Indian/Chinese ballads and a fascinating crossbreeding of the stylistic innovations of Coleman, Dolphy, Ayler, Taylor and Coltrane.
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The outstanding quality of this music destroys the facile and parochial categories of critics. This music’s references and sources are at once Western and non-Western, urban and rural, blues based and spatial, traditional and postmodern, notated and improvised. Jackson defines the Decoding Society as “an organization that interprets and translates the musical and spiritual messages of the New World.” To paraphrase the name of the small independent label that Jackson records for, it’s About Time.
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The Cecil Taylor Trio Live at Sweet Basil’s
by Kofi Natambu
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The City Sun
February 15, 1989
Brooklyn, NY
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All photos of Cecil Taylor are by Anthony Barboza, 1989. Getty images.
In one of his all-too-rare New York appearances, the legendary Cecil Taylor proved once again why he is one of the most important figures in the Afro-American improvisational music tradition.
In last week’s exhilarating performance at Sweet Basil that left this reviewer and a packed house of very attentive music lovers in awe, Taylor led a stunning trio ensemble. The set projected the sonic range, power and instrumental virtuosity of a large orchestra without ever once sounding bombastic, pretentious or cloying.
With a compositional precision and telepathic interplay that suggested inspired alchemy as much as great technical proficiency, Taylor and cohorts gracefully segued from one melodic/rhythmic tonal episode to the next. In an endless multilayered suite of haunting thematic motifs, riffs, sound clusters and harmonic intervals, the ensemble presented a mesmerizing ritual of interlocking rhythms and mercurial chordal movements, full of detail and passionately played. Crashing waves of sound from Taylor’s piano were deftly complemented by the masterful rippling strokes of Tony Oxley, a drummer and percussionist from Sheffield, England, Oxley’s architectonic pyramids of rhythms served as a perfect foil for Taylor’s intense jabbing, slashing and conga-beat stylistics on piano. The sonorous orchestral tapestry was held together by the insistent buzzing big beat of the extraordinary bassist, William Parker.
Taylor, who is justly famous for possessing one of the most explosive piano techniques in the world, is much more than a mere virtuoso. He is also one of the finest organizers of sound in the world today. This profound ability was demonstrated throughout the set where he played continuously at demonic, white-heat tempos that spread out into achingly romantic arpeggios of love-talk, but without dumb sentiment gumming up the works. From there Taylor slipped rapidly into blistering multi-noted runs, leaping into liquid fire displays of lovely melodic shapes that conjured elegant images of Ellington and a richly abstract Tadd Dameron.
As Taylor tore off huge shards of melody, implying a broad canvas of harmonic colors with his delicate filigreed piano musings, Oxley pounded heavy bass drums and rode a gigantic cymbal hovering just above Taylor’s head. Parker, meanwhile, dived and swayed on his bass, as if rocking to a cosmic metronome that only he could hear.
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Suddenly a torrent of notes flew from Taylor’s keyboard, cascading quickly onto a typhoon of crackling snares, rumbling bass ostinatos. A rainbow tide of tonal colors filled the air. This was the noble, magisterial Taylor using disciplined fury to display his virtuosic range. Taylor could be heard rising out of the collective storm playing a moaning blues. Stabbing, inquisitorial notes were punctuated by ominous silences. Then, just as mysteriously and defiantly as the set began, it ended with a shattering, yet, open-ended chord. Then a resounding silence. Taylor shot up from the piano bench and strolled into the back of the club. As he disappeared like a ghost, I remembered his famous quote: “to feel is the most terrifying thing one can do in this country.” Tell the truth, C.T. I just hope we’re listening…
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DISQUISITION(S) ON WHAT WE’RE HERE FOR
“Language and the Uses of Power”
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BUYKOFINATAMBUBUYKOFINATAMBUBUYKOFINATAMBUBUYKOFINATAMBUBUYKOFINATAMBU
What is language but the endlessly myriad and imaginative ways we use to speak and thus shape the mercurial dimensions of the world, a means of thinking/ writing (and thereby) defining and giving form and meaning to that world? Where mind-force and social environment (conditioning, “understandings”) are articulated and determined. The use of language reveals how and why we learn and create “ideas” of WHAT that world is (and is becoming...
Since language is inextricably bound to the form/content of what we think and do, is in fact the very instrument for thought and action, it cannot possibly be an independent “transcendental” force that is somehow divorced from or not connected to the historical accretion of values, beliefs, ‘concepts,’ and [mis] information that constitutes the living legacy and active extension of what we call Society.
IT IS IN THIS WAY THAT WE MAKE
AND ARE MADE BY OUR “PERCEPTIONS”
OF THE WORLD. THUS IDEOLOGY NECESSARILY BECOMES THE PRISM THRU WHICH WE GLIMPSE THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL STRUCTURE(S) THAT WE HAVE ‘CONSTRUCTED.’
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what we call culture is that complex matrix of institutional technological and philosophical/emotional practices that become SOCIAL RELATIONS OF POWER which in their multiple range of actions and discourses are used to structure & ‘express’ what we refer to as REALITY
language is the cultural and social tool that we have to build and extend the realities that we ‘refer to’ as such it is simultaneously the methodological framework for organizing and containing discourse AND the raw material of its substance thus any theoretical or critical investigations into or discussions about what specific uses language has for providing insight significations and ideas for ‘liberating’ thought society and culture is automatically fraught with profound political dilemmas (questions of/about TRUTH and POWER) that simply cannot be ignored
TWO
THIS is WHY it IS crucial IN publicly ADDRESSING the
important THEME of how POETICS can be INSTRUMENTAL in
the TRANSFORMATION of these HISTORICAL categories that WE, as WRITERS, not LOSE sight of the “larger” CONTEXTUAL questions, ISSUES, conflicts, STRUGGLES, and PROBLEMS (as well as STRATEGIES) that COLLECTIVELY constitute a very broad NETWORK of “battles over the terrain of truth and power” (to loosely paraphrase M. Foucault) in modern society
For what we are positing here is not merely a refined or exclusive “intellectual” dialogue about the intricate aesthetic and formal dynamics of this or that “conception of poetics,” but forging a deeper social awareness of the massive multi-dimensional aspects of the economic, administrative, juridicial, academic, military and ‘legitimation’ structures (disciplinary, media, and regulatory agencies) that control/ direct how we live. This huge infrastructure’s power and authority is reinforced by the analytical and interpretive praxis of the ‘intellectual and professional class’ who are responsible for providing the ideological moral and psychological justification for maintaining the hegemonic status quo.
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This is what is meant by the phrase “political economy of truth” (or as Foucault puts ie “regimes of truth”). It is in this context that any discourse about language, thought, and society resides
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So when we take up the immense task of investigating meaning and modality in poetics we are essentially talking about in what
particular ways writing can affect our knowledge of what
language can do to influence or direct cultural activity
in historically specific period.
Within the parameters of the social/political reality of the United States
this automatically means a confrontation with the reigning mythologies and systemic rituals of “race,” class, gender, and imperialism (both economic and cultural).
In more specific poetic terms this means that we will have to seriously question the dominant role of the“transcendental signified” figure in most discourse referring to social relations among disparate cultural and physical groupings within the body politic of this nation.
THREE
Living in the land of the great transcendental signified where signifiers and signs are taken to be identical to the signified or where meaning and truth aresaid to be “represented” by the signified substituting for the Sign (as in all advertising), we are accustomed to pretending that our ideological and mythological biases and fetishes about the “world we live in” are omniscient signs of our UNIVERSAL significance for all human cultures throughout this lovely logocentric universe we’ve created. Only, in our self-proclaimed and gloriously “moral” view we haven’t merely created it, but have ORDAINED it, with the social and historical approbation of the ART gods that we pay to defend and protect our sacrosanct (sic) traditions and forms. It is in this way (we repeatedly tell ourselves) that we protect our “civilization” from the ravages of those who, because of “race,” class, gender, or aesthetic/idiosyncratic bent, are seen as unfit to join the hierarchy of canons (‘academic’ & ‘avant-garde’) that have determined the ‘natural order’ of art productions in. the now cosmic sphere of all that is HUMAN. This particularly reductive concept of the epistemology of art is then projected into the programming of our cultural and educational institutions, and from these political strongholds spread like viruses through the impressionable minds of people throughout society where they begin to take on the force and character of Icons
This activity is then legislated by
the official guardians of the political economy
of culture. It is in this context that we witness the
instantaneous transformation of the art-object into commodity and
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exchange-value. Here where the market, and only the market, rules we glimpse the real philosophical reasons why certain: ideas and values (e.g. societies, cultures, artists, histories, ideologies, peoples, etc.) are considered more important and HUMAN than Others. It is at this point in the on-going process of producing and reproducing literature, music, painting, film, architecture etc. that we experience what is MEANT by previously “mysterious and “metaphysical terms like HUMANITY and ART. IT is also at this crossroad that we meet up with what we have been taught is REALITY
thus our methodological and technical uses of - language always move in the direction of the (already made and codified) referent We are told by our priest-teachers and policeman-icons that we only: have to learn how to find the “proper representations” of this Golden Mean Reality and express our mimetic desires/powers to enhance its already glowing omnipotence
Thus
Shakespeare
Bach
Picasso
FOUR
CAMUS
SARTRE
MANN
BECKETT
BARTHES
FOUCAULT
WRIGHT
HIMES
UPDIKE
VALEJO
NERUDA
NABOKOV
MILLER
[FILL IN YOUR OWN ICONS IN THIS SPACE...
BARAKA
ELIOT
JOYCE
POUND
CAGE
KEROUAC
GINSBERG
BLAKE
WHITMAN
BALDWIN
WOOLF
ELLISON
BRETON
MARQUEZ
POE
O’HARA
REED
DICKERSON
SANDBURG
FROST
WORDSWORTH
STEIN
HEMINGWAY
FAULKNER
HURSTON
MAILER
CESAIRE
ARTAUD
BORGES
CELINE
ASHBERY
MORRISON
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come to us already prepackaged and
labeled “critics choice” and “primetime writer”
by the ever-present Siskels & Eberts
of our cathode-ray induced dreams
P.S. “Did you know that Burger King in their blackhistorymonth commercials used the famous reflective pose of Dr. Martin Luther King next to their logo while a magisterial whitemale voice intoned “The Dream still lives at Burger King...”
So what is poetics and who is Liberation is the question we somehow must pursue this time around After that: who needs Cindy Sherman? or Dada or “new & better poetries”
A paper presented for the panel: “Poetry for the Next Society”
St. Mark’s Poetry Project
New York
April 8, 1988
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THE TRUE GENIUS OF MALCOLM X
by Kofi Natambu
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Preface
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska and was assassinated at the age of 39 on February 21, 1965 in New York's Harlem. In between those two events Malcolm lived one of the most complex, profound, dynamic, and iconic lives of the 20th century and had--as he continues to have--a tremendous impact and influence on millions of people throughout not only the United States but the entire globe. How he managed to accomplish this massive feat despite the severe and pervasive racist oppression and exploitation inflicted upon all African Americans of his generation-- and the decided lack of official social, economic, and cultural status especially accorded those like Malcolm who fiercely organized masses of people to oppose and resist such treatment--is one of the major accomplishments of modern African American history and marks Malcolm's revolutionary contributions to global political, spiritual, social, and cultural thought and activism as one of the most important and powerful legacies of any individual in the world during the 20th century.
In my view Malcolm remains the most intellectually and socially significant, advanced, and innovative African American political leader since W.E.B. DuBois because he represented and embodied not only a deep, analytical understanding and insight into the myriad dialectical complexities and contradictions of African American life and culture, but he also understood and expressed in a particularly nuanced and organic manner just how the specific ideological and cultural dynamics of race and class in the United States affected the tone and identity of national liberation struggles both here and abroad. In addition Malcolm's deeply rooted disaporic connections to international Third World and Pan African movements in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of European and American hegemony over Africa, Latin America, and Asia--and the pervasive revolutionary anticolonial struggles against such domination and control in these societies--played a major role in also making Malcolm one of the leading global activists on behalf of anti- imperialist movements. In 2002 I published a historical and political biography on Malcolm entitled 'The Life and Work of Malcolm X.' What follows below is the introduction to that text. Further information and texts by and about Malcolm as well as videos of him speaking will also be featured. It is in the spirit of great love and solidarity that we make these gestures in celebration of Malcolm's 85th birthday. May his extraordinary work and stellar personal example continue to lead and inspire us all.
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THE TRUE GENIUS OF MALCOLM X
by Kofi Natambu
“I know that societies have often killed the people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America--then, all the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine."
--The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), 1965
“It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”
--Malcolm X, Barnard College, February 18, 1965
We live in an age of profound dishonesty, fear, hatred and timid equivocation. A dangerously facile cynicism, coupled with a soul-numbing infantilism has infected our society, rendering us seemingly powerless to productively affect or direct our lives. Too often ignorance and a smug reliance on easy orthodoxies of all kinds lend an illusory quality to our collective despair, lost as we often are on the beaches of loneliness and indecision. What’s worse is that so many of our so-called “leaders” lack any genuine intellectual, political, or moral energy to propose directions, methods, and ideas that require much more than adolescent posturing or punitive edicts. Opportunism and careerism rule the day, informed as they are by the insipid “pay me” principle, which ensures that ‘incidental’ things like integrity, discipline, compassion, generosity, and intelligence--the kind that gives one the opportunity to think, reflect, and act instead of foreclosing those possibilities—won’t inform and provide ballast for our insights and desires.Which brings me to Malcolm X, also known as Malcolm Little, ‘Detroit Red’, ‘Satan’ and finally, El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. The black man with many names, green eyes and red hair who didn’t live to see the age of forty but who lived a multitude of lives anyway. The black man from Omaha, Lansing, Detroit, Boston, and New York who lived to befriend, work with, inspire, confound, educate, learn from, and transform people and cultures and political and economic and cultural and religious systems and values on three continents, and who lived to tell his/their/our stories. The black man who spoke a bewildering number of languages from African American swing, bebop, and blues tonalities, in all of their ultra hip vernacular modes and dimensions to the mellifluously flowing nuances & inflections of Arabic, Creole, Yoruba, and Chinese stews fermenting with the ancient elixirs of their myriad linguistic, spiritual, and cultural traditions.You see, Malcolm sought at all times and under every conceivable circumstance to know, and so knowledge returned the favor. Knowledge, whose handmaiden is faith, is something Malcolm “knew” well because experience was valuable to him, and he never took what it could reveal to him for granted. Even in the ugly basement of his own temporary confusions and stupidities, frustrations and disappointments, Malcolm always sought to know, to “truly understand and examine” that which he had been told was (or was not) “real.” He wasn’t content to find an easy niche and lie there, swatting flies and muttering everyday homilies. He understood, which is to say, appreciated the effort, time, and commitment that it took to “know” and “understand” anything, anyone, anywhere. He wanted always, to know more, and think more, and express more, and give more, and create more and expect more, and feel more, and experience more. It wasn’t enough for him to merely embrace an idea, action, or stance. He “knew” better. He had been taught by everyone and everything he had ever encountered to always critically question what he was “being told.” Not in order to checkmate some hapless opponent ‘Homer Simpson’ style, but to ask, endlessly and creatively, and forcefully, and quietly and loudly and gently and brusquely ASK not merely who, what, when, where, and how, but the “heavy duty” WHY(?)Malcolm realized it would always take more than he was able or willing to give but he freely gave anyway, knowing that his ego or his pain or his ignorance or his fear would be inadequate. But because he gave, and believed in giving, and knew the limitations of fame, money, “suckcess,” and “identity” he was able, always, to supplant his former achievements and establish, build, work for, and embody still higher and different accomplishments. Malcolm wasn’t ‘hemmed in’ by politics or religion or ideology. He understood that in order to “live what you teach” and aspire to learning more required that one become a student of life.
What made Malcolm so important is that he never lost faith in his ability to change, and be changed by, the world. But not merely the world we inherit but the world(s) we make and change and know and then (re)make again and again. Malcolm represented what Amilcar Cabral, the West African revolutionary meant when he said “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” He also knew why Frantz Fanon added “Every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” And oh yeah, this one: “To whom much is given, much is expected.” Malcolm also knew that what is “true” is not necessarily “real” or vice versa. No “virtual realities” for him. No ‘Survivor’-induced lies from the jungles of corporate gangsters & advertising executive suites for him. Only the “true” and the “real” in an exquisitely dialectical and yes yall, dialogical dance would ever suffice for Malcolm X, the known, but unknown one. As Miles Davis once said “Hate is like Love--they both build momentum.” The ‘X’ in Malcolm’s life was the algebra of possibilities to know and then gradually, inevitably “not know” so that knowledge and activity could find some new and fresh ways to connect and reconnect, combine and recombine in finally more useful and interesting ways. The ‘X’ is the African American in the diaspora finding his/her way “back home” to the selves that were always already “black” and will be again and again no matter what ‘colors’ we’re compelled to be. That, for Malcolm and his ‘X’ is what made it possible for him to insist on the eternally real and true core of the matter, which was and is and always will be our ‘Human Rights’, our Human Being Hood. He didn’t mean this in any pollyanna, namby-pamby, let’s-all hold-hands-and pretend-we’re-all-the-same-suckers-singing-songs-together manner either. No. His aim was simultaneously much higher and deeper than that. ‘Freedom is for the Free’. Which is to say, for those willing to pay the price. The price is always our very lives as in “You know the stakes is high.” Malcolm told us over and over again. And no man or woman can possibly give or take that freedom--unless we “allow” them to.That is the TRUE genius of Malcolm X. He realized the sheer simplicity, which is to say, bone-crushing difficulty of what it means to be a “genius” and share that great capacity for love, thought, and action with the world/whirl. Malcolm looked & saw that genius is not something we are but something we do. That is his profound legacy to “his people” which is finally anyone who “really & truly” wants to be free & is more than willing to “pay the price.” The last words of his Autobiography quoted at the start of this soliloquy remind us so eloquently of his actual legacy to those of us who are not afraid to make a contribution to not merely the ‘concept’ of liberation, but the living, breathing necessity of it. That’s real & true...like Malcolm himself. This book is an attempt to recognize and express that fact.
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May 23, 2001
Oakland, California
On April 12, 1964, one month after splitting with the NOI, Malcolm X gave his "Ballot or the Bullet" speech at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit:
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/8zLQLUpNGsc
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Neither Enigma Nor Nationalist
Clarence Thomas Is A Black Minstrel Theocrat, Raging Misogynist and Rightwing Advocate of White Supremacy ...and Always Was...
BOOK REVIEW
by Kofi Natambu
June 25, 2022
The Panopticon Review
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The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
by Corey Robin
Metropolitan Books, 2019
PHOTO: President George H.W. Bush and Clarence Thomas at the White House following Thomas's confirmation as a newly selected justice to the Supreme Court in 1991. President George H.W. Bush met with Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas on October 9, 1991 in the White House. Bush reaffirmed his "total confidence" in Thomas. J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images
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Corey Robin’s incredibly superficial, myopic, condescending, self serving, distorted, and utterly reductive “analysis” of the so-called “enigma” of Clarence Thomas--one of the most transparently reactionary and thoroughly far rightwing justices in the entire history of the Supreme Court--is an intellectual and ideological cautionary tale in exactly how and why so many otherwise reasonably well informed and intellectually honest white American liberals and leftists have such an arrogantly boneheaded, patronizing, infantilized and wildly jejune perception/‘understanding’ of what the actual dynamics and complexities of the politics of ‘race and class’ (as well as gender) are in the United States. What’s even worse in Robin’s case is that a mind numbingly cross-section of major white liberal/leftist publications and reactions by a disturbing number of individual pundits/public intellectuals are singing Robin’s praises as if he really knows what he’s talking about or has triumphantly unearthed some heretofore ‘hidden' deep and dirty secret about who and what Clarence Thomas “really is” beneath his bitter contempt for, pompous dismissal of and lazy indifference to not merely the masses of black people’s actual desires, needs, and expectations but I would strongly argue that of most white poor, working and even lower middle class Americans as well who in fact for example don’t make anywhere near the salaries say of the great majority of Trump voters and supporters whose median income nationally is $72,500. Even more significantly within the larger context of Thomas’s own ideological, philosophical, and doctrinal positions on law and its various relationships to political economy, labor, education, religion, and social status anyone who is paying serious attention to what Justice Thomas really thinks, believes, and thus acts on behalf of in his jurisprudence would notice that he is NOT an ideological or politically committed black nationalist of any kind whatsoever, conservative or progressive, and that he was ALWAYS a very carefully chosen, vetted, weaned, and rigorously trained figure who was clearly foisted upon the American public by the 41st President George H.W. Bush (known as 'Bushwhacker One’ to me and many others) to serve as a deeply committed rightwing reactionary replacement and ideological/juridical ‘alternative’ to the legendary black liberal and progressive justice Thurgood Marshall whom Bush’s White House and the entire GOP congressional caucus in the House and especially the Senate as well as conservative/reactionary justices like William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Alito absolutely loathed. Besides who in their right mind actually believes the ludicrous and absolutely absurd LIE that Clarence Thomas, a thoroughly rightwing HACK and groveling GOP apparatchik was in Robin’s words. a “conservative black nationalist”. HOW UTTERLY MINDLESS AND FALSE CAN ANY POSITION BE?
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Does Robin really think that Bush or any other American president would actually nominate a “black nationalist” to the Supreme Court? How idiotic! FOR THE RECORD: Louis Farrakhan is a “conservative black nationalist”, Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam was a “conservative black nationalist.” Hell, even MALCOLM X whom Robin and far too many other clueless white liberals and moderates stupidly claim that Thomas is the way he is on the Supreme Court because he “admired Malcolm’s attitude toward white folks" in college, was actually a “conservative black nationalist” before he actively broke all ideological and political ties with Muhammad and the NOI and his own acolyte/protégé Farrakhan in 1963 and formed his own independent organization in March, 1964 known as the OAAU (Organization of Afro-American Unity) which in fact openly repudiated the views, positions, and stances of his former colleagues, as well as that of his own black nationalist conservatism in the name of a new revolutionary anticapitalist and anti-imperialist position.
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Now THINK!: Would ANY of these individuals or any other “black nationalists" with a formal legal education and background be even remotely considered for a position as a Supreme Court justice by a man who was not only President but had also served in his 40 year political career as Vice President, Senator, Congressman, and head of the CIA? The same man who gave us the vile Willie Horton debacle and whose leading domestic policy advisor was the late despicable Lee Atwater, and who actively recruited, cultivated, and worked with such moral and political reprobates as Roger Stone and Paul Manafort?
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And finally: Who has ever heard of a black nationalist--conservative or otherwise!--who would have married a white woman who also happened to be a dangerous and maniacal far rightwing extremist and Trump cultist like Thomas’s wife of 34 years, Virginia (“Ginni”) Lamp?. The entire thesis of Robin’s book is not merely wrongheaded and wildly distorted but ultimately moronic.
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Furthermore, Robin’s entire dumbass argument in this book (and I would strongly suggest elsewhere as well) is in fact deeply racist itself because its ludicrous and intellectually insulting as well as deeply patronizing assumptions and pseudo analytical assertions about not only Thomas himself but black Americans generally blinds Robin to actually examining who and what Thomas really is and has always been both ideologically and politically and the major guiding role that religion—in his case and that of a number of his fellow rightwing colleagues in the Supreme Court as well is a deeply conservative and openly reactionary Catholic conservatism--has always played in Thomas life and jurisprudence. Thus this explains to a great and disturbing degree not only the fundamental white supremacist roots of Thomas’s juridicial and social philosophy but its deeply misogynist and patriarchal attitudes, values, and behavior as well. In this ugly historical context does the real meaning of the agonizing public ordeal and humiliation suffered by Anita Hill finally ring a bell at this very late date Mr. Robin?
Finally: GET REAL Corey Robin and please take at least a few postgraduate courses in AFRICAN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 20th CENTURY AMERICAN POLITICS and CRITICAL THEORY writ large because on the basis of this absurdly ill-informed, deeply dishonest, bizarrely argued, and brazenly shallow book it appears that regardless of your vaunted Ivy League Princeton education YOU REALLY NEED IT…
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