I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street—
gay songs, because you had to be gay or die;
sad songs, because you couldn’t help being sad sometimes.
But, gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going.
Their songs—those of Seventh Street—
had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea 1
What do you hear when we say “Black Radical Tradition”? Do you hear Fela’s sax as it cries after his mother’s murder? The defiant tremolo of Marian Anderson’s mezzo or the callouses on the fingertips of Sister Rosetta? Do you hear the claves of Havana, the tambourines of Rio de Janeiro, and the boom-bap machines of the Bronx in the same song, the same measure? What about the vectors of language—Xhosa, Portuguese, and Patois—sung across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific, in every direction? Do you hear the “accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle”2?
If you knew, you’d listen. The tradition is brilliantly displayed and imagined and practiced anew through sound; Robinson hints at this fact, encouraging readers of Black Marxism to “examine how the tradition insinuated itself … into the blues composed by Rainey and all the women named Smith.”3 Indeed, Ma and Clara, Bessie, Trixie, Laura, and Mamie carried dangerous knowledges with them that altered the course of popular culture and challenged the overdetermined nature of Black social consciousness.4 What follows is a listening party—a preliminary opportunity to hear the long genealogies of the tradition by way of a method that complicates and enlivens its histories, exposing its roots and carrying them forward as sample, metaphor, and trace throughout our shared “changing same.”5 This playlist is a guided meditation from keepers of the tradition who, with horns and machines and keys and voice, assist us in understanding how music creates “a world of pleasure, not just to escape the everyday brutalities of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but to build community, establish fellowship, play and laugh, and plant seeds for a different way of living, a different way of hearing.”6
These are the liner notes for a hypothesis in wax—the inadequate words that trail behind sound’s experiments of desire, hope, and ambition. It is a people’s songbook, a soundtrack to the improvisational life and living of Blackness under the control of white supremacy. This is an effort to pull forward and give a name to what our bodies tell us with every needle drop, to hold tight that which combines individual voice and people’s rebellion, to play together in the porous force field that incubates new knowledge and launches our freedom dreams. Our hope is to relay the diaspora meters that shake and raise the earth to move the feet of millions and expose its historical spine from the drum to the drum machine.
Inspired by the revelations and revolutions of Cedric Robinson’s oeuvre, these songs were mined from the layers of twentieth-century Black thought and practice that animate our relationship to the past, present, and future conjunctures of our living. As the “Vol. I” in the chapter title suggests, this soundscape is not exhaustive. It is, in many respects, speculative in its curation of approaches, voices, local and diasporic conditions and beliefs. It is a repetitive introduction to the sound of a global Seventh Street that trembles with the “pulse beat of the people who keep on going.”
Track List:
Max Roach ft. Abbey Lincoln, “Freedom Day” (1960)
Syl Johnson, “Is It Because I’m Black?” (1967)
Hank Ballard, “Blackenized” (1969)
Derrick Harriott, “Message from a Black Man” (1970)
Miriam Makeba, “KwaZulu (In the Land of the Zulus)” (1965)
Cipher J.E.W.E.L.S, “2000 Years” (2002)
THEESatisfaction, “On What It Means to Be Black” (2010)
OCnotes, “Radio Nat Turner” (2014)
Kendrick Lamar, “Alright” (2015)
Death, “Politicians in My Eyes” (1976)
Dennis Brown, “Revolution” (1983)
Janelle Monáe and Wondaland, “Hell You Talmbout” (2015)
Ray Angry ft. Nadia Washington & Chris Potter, “Celebration of Life Suite: Awareness & Revolution” (2015)
D’Angelo and the Vanguard, “The Charade” (2014)
Thundercat ft. Mono/Poly, “Paris” (2015)
We start with the drum.
MAX ROACH FT. ABBEY LINCOLN, “FREEDOM DAY” (1960)
A single cymbal introduces a grand historical symbol. We enter our sound world in 1960 but it’s really 1863. We start here as a commemoration of emancipation, a remembrance of liberty. The horns signify a grandeur; the drums signal a call to attention. The Emancipation Proclamation, nearly a century old when we lean in to listen, is the ongoing conjecture—an imperfect conclusion grounded by rumor. “Whisper, listen. Whisper, listen. Whispers say we’re free.” Recalling the slow delivery of the news that the Civil War had ended, the caution of the song exists in the space between President Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and Union general Gordon Granger’s declaration on June 19, 1865, of “General Order Number 3,” confirming the total emancipation of enslaved Africans in the United States. Freedom Day is not a lived reality; it is whispered hearsay, barely conceivable or believable. Abbey Lincoln’s steady, stately vocal cadence in “Freedom Day” works against the quick dexterity of Max Roach (drums), James Schenk (bass), Walter Benton (tenor saxophone), Booker Little (trumpet), and Julian Priester (trombone). She slows the listener’s excited gait in pursuit of the other musicians, causing us to drag, ever so slightly. Caution is her order in recognition of the ellipses and question marks that punctuate her narrative: “Can it really be?” This hesitation and inquiry was intended; according to Roach, “[Oscar Brown, Jr. and I] never could finish [the project]. It [still] isn’t finished.” The incompleteness of the Freedom Now Suite was not due to an artistic, or even a personality, dispute; its status—in progress—has to do with the very nature of Black (un)freedom. As Roach argued, “We don’t really understand what it really is to be free.”7 The “dilemma or double bind of freedom,”8 which is so often marked dialectically, was not posed first by the conditions of enslavement but rather by the historical consciousness that Africans brought with them across the Atlantic; “after all it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement.”9
Freedom then, as Nelson Mandela taught, is not an event but a process. Here, again, the ellipses of Lincoln’s vocal fade tapped out on Roach’s hi-hat. The caution of Lincoln’s restrained exaltation gives way to the frantic drums and trumpet of Roach and Little, evoking more urgency than celebration, as if the “shackle ’n chains” have been thrown away but the path towards true liberation dimmed and the way hidden. Icon Frederick Douglass, who himself tested the limits of freedom as policy and practice, made his own fateful advances toward freedom more than once. Freedom Day is not an end point; it is where we begin, a false dawn, an unfulfilled covenant. It would take another four years after the release of the Freedom Now Suite before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would pass employment discrimination law to allow Black Americans a measure of protection in their efforts to “earn [their] pay,” and a further year before the United States Congress would pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, giving greater assurance to being “free to vote.” Lincoln’s repetition—“Slave no longer. Slave no longer. This is Freedom Day”—is the mirror of sound for Douglass’ and others’ countless attempts at flight, and accelerates the declarative sentence from a plea to an assertion of subjectivity. “Freedom Day” is a meditation on the possibility for emancipation that is announced in the rumor of US policy and practice.
SYL JOHNSON, “IS IT BECAUSE I’M BLACK?” (1967)
Questions of political and socioeconomic power are further explored by Syl Johnson. Chicago-based soul producer James L. “Jimmy” Jones and his accompanying band The Pieces of Peace provide a fitting minor-keyed, blues-inspired soul groove to Johnson’s mournful invocation. Johnson begins poetically, embodying his shared pain in his skin, his bones, and his soul: “The dark brown shades of my skin / only add colour to my tears / That splash against my hollow bones / that rocks my soul.” The evidence of a peaceful transition to freedom is troubled and questioned by Johnson, whose “false dreams” never came true. It’s unclear if his/our dreaming was deferred, à la Hughes, or forestalled; survival and death are his options and both appear to carry equal likelihood. Johnson exposes a growing consciousness and recognition that something fundamental was set against the race: “Something is holding me back. Is it because I’m black?” That last question is simple, but reflects a much deeper inquiry into race and its connection to poverty, oppression, identity, and ultimately mortality.
Three decades later and an ocean away, this sorrowful question is made into satire—“is it cos I is black?”—by Cambridge-educated white British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, through his ignorant, wannabe Black, misogynist character Ali G. Here it becomes a comic catchphrase, “one more surreal jingle for the playground,” spoofing racial appropriation fifteen years before Rachel Dolezal was revealed to the world. Here it becomes “a line that bigots use to taunt someone who has complained about racial discrimination.”10 But for Syl Johnson and his kind who know the feel of racial oppression, there is no laughter. It is not a phrase that is carelessly used, only to be equally carelessly tossed aside as an affront to an American ideal that requires pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Rather, in asking “Will I survive, or will I die?” Johnson begs a fundamental, time-worn question of this US democracy. By the second half of the song, listeners are absorbed in the two-step groove and Johnson’s questions give way to assertions that reveal that he’s known the answers all along: “You keep holding me back … Keep on picking on me.” The opposing force to Black advance is white supremacy, which can only be combatted through recognition and collective acts of Black togetherness: “If you have white-like brown skin and a high yeller, / you’re still Black, / so we all got to stick together right now.”
HANK BALLARD, “BLACKENIZED” (1969)
Here the playlist shifts from a Du Boisian sorrow song to a movement ballad, demonstrating the didactic power of Black music. The hidden downbeat, heavy bass, and sharp guitar of Hank Ballard’s funky “Blackenized” is the sound of Detroit, Washington, DC, and Harlem at the transition from nonviolence to armed militancy in Black movement struggle. It should come as no surprise that the song was written and produced by the “Godfather of Soul,” James Brown, in 1969. Brown’s work with Ballard in the late ’60s helped to revitalize the latter’s career and return him to the charts after half a decade of absence. By this point he joined the ranks of musicians such as Nina Simone and Donny Hathaway, who explicitly linked their music to people’s movements and understood the stage as an extension of the streets. No longer “Negroes and colored people,” this vanguard was pushing the aesthetic and political limits of Blackness by drawing attention to internal dynamics within the Black community, pointing out the existent conditions (Hathaway’s “The Ghetto”) as well as the indigenous visions yet unfulfilled (Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”).
Ballard’s contribution to this unfolding worldview was a verb—Blackenized—which included beliefs, politics, and style. As if directly answering Syl Johnson, Ballard sings that jive fellas “been leaning on others” and argues that recognition and respect for African-descended people will only come from being Blackenized. Not content with pointing fingers elsewhere, Ballard starts at home, demanding that the (Black) listener “find yourself and do your own thing.” He’s willing to document his own evolution as an example: “Took me a long time to cut my hair. / Reason why? I wasn’t aware.” While it may seem trivial, hair is socialized, as cultural studies scholar Kobena Mercer argues, making it an important act of identification and contestation. Black hairstyles like the Afro and dreadlocks “are a medium of significant statements about self and society and the codes of value that bind them or do not.”11 Blackenization is concerned with the politics of beauty—politics that need first to be articulated, demonstrated, and preserved for us, by us. Ballard displaces the emphasis on reforming the external world in favor of inciting a mental and physical revolution within Blackness. This revolution includes usurping language and fundamentally destabilizing empirical order; “Blackenized ain’t in the dictionary but today it’s so necessary.” These new vocabularies are Soul lessons and internal communiqués, evidence of “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”12
DERRICK HARRIOTT, “MESSAGE FROM A BLACK MAN” (1970)
The relative rapidity of our progress toward “we” through this playlist is intentional. So too is its focus, thus far, on how people who identify with one another work toward unison, even if under tension and across many miles. If the previous songs are messages inside of and accountable to the Black community through their questions, concerns, and methods of identification, then Derrick Harriott’s cover of “Message from a Black Man” represents an external communication to an oppressive global whiteness. From his location in Babylon, he outlines what those throughout the Black Atlantic world have articulated for many generations: that color is not a system of value. Like Johnson, Harriott understands how disadvantage has been linked to racial categorization (“Yes, my skin is Black, / but that’s no reason to hold me back”), however he insists that wider society “think about it” again and again in order to recognize, as he states definitively, “Black is a color, just like white. Tell me how can a color determine whether wrong or right?”
This challenge to white supremacy was first sung by the Temptations. Recorded in 1969 for their album Puzzle People, the original six-minute song is slower paced than the Harriott version, which is a reggae cover indicative of a diasporic transmission of radical thought and camaraderie. Within ten seconds, listeners know that they are hearing the Caribbean. The revision of the production—with stronger rhythm guitar and emphasis on the upbeat—forces us to travel and differently adjust our bodies to what are otherwise familiar conditions and language. In interpolating James Brown’s “say it loud” into the lyrics, Black pride is no longer a whisper, nor is it nationally bound. It is a vocal assertion of self-possession and a diasporic rallying call, even as it is mixed with language that reinforces a liberal rights tradition: “I have wants and desires just like you. / So move aside ‘cause I am comin’ through.” Harriott proved that the African-descended stood on higher moral and ethical ground as the stewards of civilization, and forecasted for those who believed otherwise that they would need to “confront [the] political reality of movement”13: “No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop me now.”
MIRIAM MAKEBA, “KWAZULU (IN THE LAND OF THE ZULUS)” (1965)
“KwaZulu (In the Land of the Zulus)” continues to assert Blackness as a coherent worldview, this time in the Zulu language of Miriam Makeba who, in the South African folk tradition, tells a Xhosa story against the backdrop of contemporary apartheid. By the time of the song’s release in 1965 as part of the collaborative, Grammy-award–winning album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba, with entertainer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte (himself a folk griot of renown), Makeba had long campaigned against her homeland’s apartheid system and, as a result, had her passport revoked in 1960 and her citizenship and right to return revoked in 1963.14 “KwaZulu” operates solidly inside of an African oral tradition in which new meaning is imbued to songs with each performance, translation, and hearing. As Makeba understood, “Folks songs in Africa are a repository of history.”15 It also belongs to an oral tradition of women’s songs that have been used as forms of social discourse and protest.16 In her unique interpretation, Makeba’s call and response invites a collective reclamation of space within Black South African history, which is epistemological, social, and proprietary. She sings, “I won’t go to KwaZulu. / That’s where mom and dad died.”17 Her choice of no return is significant for African diaspora histories: it upends the diaspora fixation with return to a homeland, instead suggesting that there are other ways in which African peoples make a “place” for themselves elsewhere. Especially in the context of the heavily policed apartheid South Africa, in which pass books and curfews ruled state-sanctioned mobility, for Makeba to say that she would not go somewhere is a departure from expectations regarding the dutiful colonial subject. Makeba’s exiled position outside of South Africa, but visible position on the international stage and access to the Western recording industry, adds an invitation to the world to pay attention to her choices and to question why she acts as she does.
Makeba’s heart is also a terrain of struggle in “KwaZulu.” While the male chorus backs her voice, she establishes her independence, boldly asserting that she will determine who, if anyone, will share her intimate life. “I won’t find a lover among the Zulus,” she sings. “No, I’ll find one among the Bhacas.” The song could be read as a protest against Zulu domination, but, in the context of apartheid South Africa, its tone and usability are adjusted, taking on new power and meaning. The land of the Zulus of 1825 was a dominant force and one of the most powerful kingdoms in southern Africa. The land of the Zulus of 1965 was a Bantustan, one of ten Black “independent” South African territories forcibly segregated along ethnic lines, stripped of rights to citizenship, and populated by masses of displaced Black South Africans, many of whom had never resided in their identified “homeland.”18 Established under the apartheid system by then prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd—who was also beautifully exposed by Makeba on Evening—the policy of “separate development” was justified as “not a policy of discrimination on the grounds of race or color, but a policy of differentiation on the ground of nationhood, of different nations, granting to each self-determination within the borders of their homelands.”19 “I’ll never go to the land of the Zulus,” then, is more than a response to intertribal histories; it is a meta-argument in a native tongue for the right to live and love without fear or coercion, sung in an ebullient tone that disguises its sharp analysis and condemnation of the settler state as a strategy of dissemination and protection. It is a song from a woman and world citizen who refuses to be silenced, even in exile.
CIPHER J.E.W.E.L.S, “2000 YEARS” (2002)
“2000 Years” (2002) is a historical genealogy and recovery project that eschews linear temporalities in favor of compelling juxtapositions by Afro-British emcee Cipher J.E.W.E.L.S. The somber jazz horn leads us to the drum machine break and the provocation, “How would you feel if everything around you came from something that you made? From pyramids to projects … you the father of all?” Cipher’s queries continue in the thematic unearthing and reclamation of historical truths and speak to the “love and theft” of Eric Lott’s description, in which Europeans literally play in their fears of Blackness. Cipher details how cultural appropriation by Europeans and their descendents swallows Black culture but spits at Blackness, summing it up with: “The father of all turned into the footstool of the world.” Descendancy and kinship claims are prominent within Black theologies and philosophies, including the Five Percent Nation, which began as an offshoot of the Nation of Islam and believes that they (the 5 percent) are the keepers and translators of a supreme, liberatory truth. The Five Percenter ideology espoused in Cipher’s lyrics again speaks to the power of the diaspora to carry trace histories of Black radicalism. More than anything, though, and akin to Robinson’s scholarship, “2000 Years” revolts, reclaims, and recenters Black history as critical to human civilization. “Without me there would be no you,” states Cipher, fundamentally reorienting the “Western” historical compass and refusing liberal incorporative models.
In Cipher’s narrative, there is no disconnect between the ancient world and the one that contemporary listeners have inherited. The violence remains, as does the collective consciousness of what Africa and its descendents have brought to the evolution of world culture. Cipher reminds us that Black bodies imagined and built world architecture and that the great gods of Egypt are carried with us in some of hip-hop’s most revered emcees, including Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu Tang Clan and the legendary Rakim. He reminds us that 2,000 years ago, Jesus was educated in Kushite philosophy and that “Newton was new when Imhotep was old.” The sample of Erykah Badu’s voice on loop in the background singing, “On and on and on and on” (from 1997’s “On and On”) binds these histories of exclusion and excellence that are untethered to historical orthodoxy.
THEESATISFACTION, “ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE BLACK” (2010)
Stasia “Stas” Irons and Catherine “Cat” Harris-White fuse avant-garde stream of consciousness hip-hop and neo-soul to form a futuristic soundscape that affirms Blackness as intoxicating and transcendent, embodying “earth, winds, and fires,” as well as “Afro-Sheen and cornrow, dread I, tambourines and handclaps and cries.” Soaring heights—“I’m so high on what it means to be Black”—and later descent toward the “golden path” is the choreography of THEESatisfaction’s “On What It Means to Be Black,” which briefly models the myth-power that underwrites Black radical histories. It is through culture that the significance of the mystical in Black communities is best understood. In his canonical study of slave culture, historian Lawrence Levine investigates spirituals and other folktales of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In them one hears the histories and hopes of the enslaved but, according to Levine, they remain of a certain variety and style. “Frequently told stories” of flying Africans had a didactic quality in excess of pure fantasy; in some tales, the Africans “delayed their escape until they could teach their American-born relatives and friends the power of flight as well.”20 This lesson suggests that the difference between African-born and American-born African-descended people was not a respected truth or condition of division, as all shared in the strategies of fugitivity that made for fantastic tales and even more fantastic realities.
Variations of flying and flight, higher and height—“I am flier than fly can fly. / My flag is higher than high”—mark THEESatisfaction’s elevation and perspective, which is a project of constant consciousness-raising that Robinson argues was of central significance to Richard Wright. Alternative sight lines made possible other ways of living and understanding Blackness. In “Carrying the Run-Aways”—a story in the appropriately titled collection of Black folktales The People Could Fly—the narrator describes his panicked late-night trips across the river to Ripley, where he would deliver enslaved people to their freedom. The fateful initial trip exposed how penetrating the psychological hold of captivity could be: “Now, I had heard about the other side of the river from the other slaves. But I thought it was just like the side where we lived on the plantation. I thought there were slaves and masters over there, too, and overseers and rawhide whips they used on us. That’s why I was so scared.”21 The peculiar institution worked to stunt the imaginations of the enslaved, to “keep the body [but] take the mind,”22 to ensure that any flight, however physically possible, would always be compromised and prone to being second-guessed by the fugitive property. THEESatisfaction, however, rises above the plantation and works against any circumstantial evidence that “Blacks became slaves” at all, ever,23 announcing through their wordplay and from their height above our daily terrain (“I heard that I could out-higher a bird, a bee, a fly/ I am highered ‘cause I’m so high”) that another vantage point was always in view and operable for the task of freedom.
OCNOTES, “RADIO NAT TURNER” (2014)
Now that we’ve reached an appropriate altitude, let’s check our devices. Is the radio tuned? Is the clock right? The electro-funk of OCnotes returns us to the nineteenth century and to the rebellion—“Blacker than your midnight”—that so frightened white Southerners that Black captives in neighboring states were executed under suspicion of collusion. Nat Turner, who was described by members of his community as a prophet, led his 1831 uprising after seeing visions and signs in the skies, forests, and crops. This icon of slavery historiography is reimagined by conceptual musician OCnotes as a vibration that organizes our relationship to techno-history over the airwaves. “Radio Nat Turner” thinks of rural Virginia but sounds like Chicago. The deep house composition lands heavy in the middle ear and infuses the song with other rebellious elements from the original queer, urban undergrounds that gave birth to the form. As a part of Black Weirdo—a cultural and musical movement created by THEESatisfaction—Otis Calvin III (aka OCnotes) says of his work, “I get to stir people’s souls up with my tunes and get people free for a minute.” Calvin’s “free” is reflected in the lore of the song’s namesake, whose rebellion against slavery—though lasting only a few days—involved dozens of captives and was one of the few instances of mass violence under enslavement. Turner’s knowledge of signs and mystical systems allowed him to join those who “lived on their terms, they died on their terms, they obtained freedom on their terms. These were the terms that these African peasants and farmers had brought with them to their captivity. They were also the only terms in which their freedom could be acquired.”24
“Owning your identity and representing your own truth”25 is the motivation for OCnotes’s rejection of society’s ambition and rules of respectability. He is aware of the structures that circumscribe his energies and dreams—he simply refuses to be defined by them or to accord to those at the top of the pyramid the power that they request: “I don’t need your pity. / I don’t want your life. / I see you got privilege. / I’m doin’ alright.” He follows in a long tradition of disruption to and critical denial of a “Western” culturo-intellectual project: “Radio Nat Turner” mobilizes music as a historical register that rejects outside definition and continues the long movement away from expressing humanity in terms of a consolidated whiteness. The character of a musical Nat Turner is steeped in vision, sacrifice, and rebellion, and it is in this space of possibility that the radio and developing technologies provide an increasingly digital diaspora with a laboratory for cultural experimentation. OCnotes exhibits an Afrofuturism grounded by musical composition that, according to an online profiler, “places us closer to our ancestors and our future selves.”26 Eventually the vocal fades into the beat and nothing else is heard but unintelligible chanting as the notes of a discordant synthesizer play, widening our listening horizons and leading us back to the heavy bass pulse, back to rhythm.
KENDRICK LAMAR, “ALRIGHT” (2015)
The indefatigable nature of Blackness—as identity and project—touches down and finds fertile ground in Compton, California, where we hear the play-byplay of the city streets hot with energy and exchange. With his doo-wop and jazz horns to guide him, the oracle of hip-hop Kendrick Lamar opens his anthem “Alright” by extending the sounds of Sofia from The Color Purple, saying: “Alls my life I has to fight, nigga.” Like OCnotes, Lamar is cool—“alright,” as they both state—demonstrating not acquiescence but resolve even as his conditions have led him to “the preacher’s door.” This search for both answers and peace has encouraged African-descended peoples to travel abroad and the same is true for Lamar. His approach to “Alright” was deeply influenced by a trip to South Africa, during which he witnessed conditions that put his own in perspective. This is not to say that he was willing to sacrifice his reality for those abroad. The arresting optics of “Alright,” shot in both Los Angeles and Oakland, are gritty in their depiction of Black life in 2015 and pay particularly rapt attention to the overwhelming police presence in Black communities. Within one minute of the six minutes and fifty-four seconds of the production, we see the public surveillance arm of the state—the police—as a backdrop to the unfolding events. It is the sound of a discharged police-issued gun that officially launches the song’s prelude, which samples an alternative production and shows Lamar in a car with three other young Black men, rhyming to a head-nodding beat. After six bars the camera pulls back to reveal that the car has no wheels and is being carried and moved forward by four police officers, one at each wheel well. They carry him as obedient servants would carry a king, stepping heavy with each burdened advance, eyes straight ahead. From there the squealing tires of a donut-spinning muscle car introduce us to the anticipated track and the fact that Lamar too can fly.
The video’s representation of police violence—including Lamar’s shooting at the very end—concretizes the “real” in the mystical realism of “Alright” and ensures that his insistence (“we gon’ be alright”) is measured not against pure fantasy but in a complex field of power relations. The assurance that we’ll be “alright” is based not on a faith in things unseen, nor in the mediated democracy that Fred Moten reminds us is fraught (for “every element that intervenes between the commons and authority carries with it a danger for the democracy to come; every idea and procedure that limits or circumscribes common participation is, similarly, a danger”27) but rather in a collective sensibility and knowledge of the world as it currently exists: “When you know we been hurt been down before, nigga. / When our pride was low, lookin’ at the world like ‘Where do we go?,’ nigga. / And we hate po-po, when they kill us dead in the streets fa sho, nigga. / I’m at the preacher’s door, my knees gettin’ weak and my gun might blow but we gon’ be alright.” Lamar’s song is described by critics as “an ebulliently simple five-syllable refrain [that has] soundtracked a movement … [a] holistic sentiment as a siren against innumerable injustices.”28 His documentation is active and archival; contrary to the opinions of critics, a song that references Alice Walker in its first lines is not about forgetting reality. A song that has come to resonate with a broad Black Lives Matter coalition and is used as a modern anthem against police brutality and systematic oppression is not about forgetting reality.29 The hope that Lamar conveys in this song is not a means of overlooking; rather it is a verb—an action—requiring that one recognize injustice and wilfully declare it inferior. His speech to his listeners—“Do you hear me? / Do you feel me? / We gon’ be alright”—is the call-and-response tradition that prophetically but insistently affirms the futures ahead.
DEATH, “POLITICIANS IN MY EYES” (1976)
The dangerous democracy that Moten describes and Lamar shows is given a spectacular hearing in “Politicians in My Eyes” by the metal band Death. Emerging from Detroit, the music and the band’s name would prove to be prophetic. Indeed, “Scrappy, snarly, epic in scope, and burnt with intensity, Death sounded like nothing else on the planet in 1973 and ’74,” a moment that predated the punk icons the Ramones and the Clash.30 In the 1960s and ’70s their birthplace was a thriving metropolis, a top-ten largest city, and known as “The Arsenal of Democracy,” but its rapid infrastructural atrophy in the decades to follow is legendary.31 The song “Politicians in My Eyes” is a fitting and necessary indictment of political mismanagement and corruption, whether set against the backdrop of the mid-70s or the modern 2000s.32 The music fluctuates between frenetic anger and anguished imploring, and is both accusatory and questioning. It lays the blame for the unfulfilled promises of the state squarely on the shoulders of power’s representatives, who are happy to reach out and shake hands, “wearing false smiles,” all while stepping on the people. “They could care less about you, they could care less about me,” the band sings, “as long as they are to end the place that they want to be.” The song ends with an extended instrumental section that is equal parts funereal and fierce, perfectly meshing rock and blues, to accent the final lyric: “Politicians tell me why can’t you hear the people cry?”
The Hackney brothers—David, Bobby, and Dannis—are now considered visionaries, but in 1975, when the three self-taught musicians recorded a seven-song session at United Sound Studios for Columbia Records president Clive Davis, they were asked to change precisely that which made them unprecedented. Though originally called Rock Fire Funk Express and known for playing traditional rhythm and blues, guitarist David—moved by the musical influences of Alice Cooper and the Who, as well as by the spirit of their preacher father’s Baptist teachings—persuaded his brothers to change the band’s musical direction to rock. The DIY band who used to play gigs in their garage and disturb their neighbors with their “white boy music” also took on the provocative moniker Death—a term that David hoped to spin “from the negative to the positive.”33 Failing to understand—unlike so many Afro-diasporic cultures—that death is not final, Davis deemed the name commercially unviable and when David refused to compromise his vision, Davis withdrew his support. As a result, the music of this pioneering band went unreleased for over three decades. Like so much of Black music, however, it would gain another life as inspiration for new musicians and new sounds.
DENNIS BROWN, “REVOLUTION” (1983)
Though no stranger to socially conscious music (1977’s cover of Earl 16’s “Malcolm X” being a notable example), Dennis Brown—dubbed by Bob Marley as the “Crown Prince of Reggae”—is noted more for his contributions to the Lovers Rock genre of reggae and his Rastafari-influenced content than for politically charged messages. But his 1983 hit “Revolution” finds him at his most radical, asking his audience, “Are you ready to stand up and fight the right revolution?” It is a battle cry, summed up by the absence of a chorus, instead replaced by a continued wailing chant, as if summoning ancestral strength to embolden a revolutionary spirit to fight “against downpression.”34 Without the mooring of a chorus to return to, we can only move forward, creating new sounds and strategies in our quest to “live forever.” War metaphors continue in both the lyrics and the music. Brown asks, “Are you ready to stand up and fight it just like soldiers?” while the bass of Robert “Robbie” Shakespeare—one half of legendary Jamaican production team Sly and Robbie—keeps time like a march to battle in which “many are called [but] few are chosen.”
Rasta traditions ground Brown’s politics. De Albuquerque35 and Chevannes36 both argue for Rastafari as a revolutionary, millenarian movement, rooted in the fundamental belief that a major transformation of society is necessary and imminent. As Walter Rodney would state, “The only great men among the unfree and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor.”37 “Revolution” marks Brown’s contribution to that struggle. His marching orders are simple: fight (for the right), live (forever), love (each other). Here love is revolutionary and Brown shares in that belief with comrades all over the world—surrealists and utopianists alike. Indeed, Robin Kelley argues that “freedom and love may be the most revolutionary ideas available to us”38 and the placement of love at the end of Brown’s cue suggests that it may be the pinnacle of liberation action. This emphasis is not a surprise given Brown’s prominence within Lovers Rock; that the form is heard in a song organized around the idea and practice of revolution, which is so often attached to violence and bloodshed, however, offers a significant revision to the masculinist historiographies of war and empire in Western societies. The history of marronage in Jamaica—with a cast of characters inclusive of the Obeah mystics who later influenced the Rastafarians—plays a crucial role in New World resistance. It is that radical practice of intimacy and sacrifice for the good of the whole that allows for the dream and possibility of revolution.
JANELLE MONáE AND WONDALAND, “HELL YOU TALMBOUT” (2015)
There are few sounds as distinctive as a drum line. Though often associated with the military, the form is best represented in the United States by historically black colleges and universities whose formations are fantastically displayed at sporting events and rallies. The snaps of the snare and boom of the bass represent the US South, home of Civil War and civil rights battles. These histories are inside of “Hell You Talmbout,” a standout political track by the Wondaland Records collective and its resident android-leader, Janelle Monáe. In its original form, “Hell You Talmbout” was a bonus track on the deluxe edition of The Electric Lady album released in 2013. On it Monáe sings about the everyday struggles of living in the inner city. Two years later the song was reborn as a protest anthem, with Monáe and members of the Wondaland collective each crying out the name of a Black person felled by the many manifestations of institutional racism and imploring the audience to say their names. Fusing the “heavy, intense martial drums” of the marching band tradition with the call-and-response motif adopted by the gospel tradition of the Black church, the composition is as simple as it is devastatingly powerful, making it tailor-made for organized movement.39
Though she previously claimed to “not [be] into politics actually,” Monáe has since maintained that the job of an artist “is to be the voice, your job is to bring awareness, your job is to be a rebel, your job is to start a revolution.”40 “Hell You Talmbout” has started to do that work in the streets, from marches to demonstrations at presidential campaign fundraisers. It is a grounded, material intervention from an artist otherwise known for her Afrofuturist psychedelia. Steeped in history and violence, the song is also affirming of life and humanity, even in death, by allowing the names of the deceased to be spoken and remembered. The inventory of lives lost takes form in a roll call that connects seemingly disparate acts of anti-Black violence; through that, it conjoins the long histories of racism that continue to make African-descended peoples more vulnerable than others to disadvantage and death. According to Monáe:
This song is a vessel. It carries the unbearable anguish of millions. We recorded it to channel the pain, fear, and trauma caused by the ongoing slaughter of our brothers and sisters. We recorded it to challenge the indifference, disregard, and negligence of all who remain quiet about this issue. Silence is our enemy. Sound is our weapon. They say a question lives forever until it gets the answer it deserves … Won’t you say their names?41
Weaponized thus, Monáe and others raise the names of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Freddie Gray, Aiyana Jones, Sandra Bland, Kimani Gray, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Miriam Carey, Emmett Till, Amadou Diallo, and others as a way to honor them and the collectives online and off who, through social media and in-person protests, bring attention to the scale of violence facing Black women and men. Wondaland’s contribution, however, is an intervention in that it takes the written word and transforms it into something altogether different, turning communication into communion by again displaying Black music as a unique, nonliterate (though not uneducated), and mobile platform with powers well beyond 140 characters.
RAY ANGRY FT. NADIA WASHINGTON & CHRIS POTTER, “CELEBRATION OF LIFE SUITE: AWARENESS & REVOLUTION” (2015)
The soundscape of this incomplete listening party suggests the arc of movement cultures, from quiet and inquisitive to raucous and spectacular, back to introspection and those moments in which we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to feel, to re-center our energies and ambitions. Though it reorients the anger behind “Hell You Talmbout,” “Celebration of Life: Awareness & Revolution” is no less passionate in its articulations of subjecthood and purpose. “It’s basically about the evolution of life,” composer and pianist Ray Angry explains. In “Awareness & Revolution”—the first movement of the two-part suite—Angry’s solo piano builds to incorporate the sounds of Nadia Washington’s soulful vocal line, which vacillates between the piano keys and Chris Potter’s saxophone, calling the listener to recognize “the light from deep within” those most marginalized and violated. We raise our glasses to them, to us; “Here is to life,” she sings in defiant celebration. Then an escalation toward the explosion of Potter’s sax solo springs and leaps to center stage in a joyous choreography of Black experience. Potter then retreats, leaving Angry and Washington who return the piece to a sense of serenity, as if beginning again—charting the seasons of revolution and regeneration, blossoming anew like Tupac Shakur’s rose that grew from a crack in the concrete, learning to breathe fresh air.
A moment of celebration, not just for good times but also for those that aren’t. To hold and cherish what we know and feel at the moment in which we know and feel it is also on our spectrum of freedom.
Here is to life in the wake of nine murders in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. Here is to life for each unarmed citizen brave enough to risk life to look riot police in the eye. Here is to life for little children, all of whom deserve the chance to see life’s milestones, tell their stories, and touch the world without having their promise interrupted by a bullet—intentional or errant. Here is to life, as each musician sees fit to breathe it back into the populace. Here is to every revolution—in the streets and on wax, thick with the brutal honesty and abiding love necessary to break down walls, reveal the light and heal the world from within.42
Add this to the dictionary of Black liberation: celebration, a strategy of remembrance and joy that holds within it the opportunity to be in the moment and to know, without fear, that one is there.
D’ANGELO AND THE VANGUARD, “THE CHARADE” (2014)
The critical need for enjoyment is reinforced in the turn to D’Angelo, whose return to the stage in 2015 included new musicians (known as the Vanguard) and a powerful single, “The Charade.” Channeling Prince and Sly Stone, the production—replete with walking bass line, simultaneous backup harmonies, and sonic interplay between the boom of the drum and punctuated clapping—quickly ushers listeners into a fast-paced accounting of contemporary Black life. Performed in the wake of an eruption of political demonstrations and organizing in Ferguson, Missouri, “The Charade” recounts the dispossession of post–civil rights generations and challenges the approaches used to respond to it. The dynamics of (Black) petition and (white) response are shown by D’Angelo as a failed equation of advance: “All we wanted was a chance to talk. / ‘Stead we only got outlined in chalk.” Despite the “many miles we’ve walked,” there remains a fundamental distance between the dream and its realization. D’Angelo hints at histories of uplift and the iconography of Booker T. Washington when he mentions the veil that has been lifted from our eyes. It is with this sightedness that the truth of the nation’s charade is revealed (“at the end of the day”).
Sounding like a funk-driven dirge, D’Angelo’s often obscured vocals, along with his play on guitar and piano, ?uestlove on drums, and Pino Palladino on bass create a harmonious collage of noise that in its complexity adds a rich texture to Black experience. Fifteen years prior, on “Devil’s Pie,” D’Angelo would sing, “Ain’t no justice / It’s just us / Ashes to ashes / Dust to dust,” lamenting the economic injustice that feeds impoverished materialism. Fifteen years later, social inequities conjured “The Charade” for the world, having hinted at existence in Internet leaks and sporadic live performances. Fifteen years later, 400 years later, there’s still no justice, it’s still just us, and dust to dust is ritually enforced upon Black bodies by policing and vigilantism, the prison industrial complex, health disparities, and poisoned Flint, Michigan, water. With these lingering oppressions still in view, we might consider the past tense of the repeated ending of “The Charade” (“All we wanted was a chance to talk”) as a provocation to leave that tactic there—in the past—and imagine something new.
THUNDERCAT FT. MONO/POLY, “PARIS” (2015)
Imaginaries are a fitting place to pause—not end—our excursions of the ear and mind. The progeny of bassist and composer Thundercat and collaborating producer Mono/Poly, “Paris” is an experimental expatriation. Like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, and James Baldwin before him, Thundercat traveled across the Atlantic in search of … a sound? Sentience? Both are embedded in “Paris,” which speaks to the listener even in the absence of words. Experimental and computer-generated musical forms “represent the particular ideas of their creators,” according to scholar-musician George Lewis.43 As he argues, “‘Sound’ becomes identifiable, not with timbre alone, but with the expression of personality, the assertion of agency, the assumption of responsibility and an encounter with history, memory and identity.”44 The identifiable quality of Black music-making, then, is about literacy not in language or composition, but in its aesthetic and affective qualities, as well as its use. These are the metrics of discernable value that exist outside of the marketplace and the formalism of Western knowledge, and this is where Black music makes its greatest interventions and becomes a tool for liberation.
Thundercat’s work as a solo artist as well as a collaborator with Terrace Martin, Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, and others produces a compelling matrix of feeling. Composed as a response to the November 2015 attacks in the City of Light, “Paris” is an offering and a moment of recognition from a uniquely Black musical perspective. It is a digital vigil and a memorial not only to current tragedy, but to the former glories of lived freedom. As expat Baldwin believed, “African-Americans discover in Paris the terms by which they can define themselves. It’s the freedom to work beyond the assumptions of what we can and can’t do as African-Americans. It’s a different rhythm and pace. We can imagine ourselves in new ways in that space.”45 Thundercat imagines and composes Blackness differently and uses music as the method of its exploration and exposition. To Baldwin’s freedom, “Paris” offers a prayer bell and an ethereal murmur that “rises up and mellows almost instantly as a lyrical bass melody says its piece and fades away.”46 Yet even in silence it is not gone. It remains as a faint vibration that we carry into the next encounter, the next challenge, the next dream. All these notes we keep and consolidate as evidence of our knowing and as a resource in the composition of our next magnificent song.