Jazz
once identified the sound of
you
“ was be surprised byasanything goingsurprise andinifBlack
want to
on today
American culture, I would tell you to go to the museum
and galleries because that’s where the hard questions about
modern Black consciousness and identity are being posed,
performed, brokered and illuminated.
”
004-greg-tate.indd 13
A people who used the exclusions of their visual humanity
and denial and displacement of the same as a ferocious
incentive to occupy the realm of sound with all the human
presence and complexity they knew was simply not
represented elsewhere.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or does it explode like
Nina singing ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ and ‘The Pirate Jenny’?
Or does it just git low?
The music tradition accomplished the creation of an expanded
universe for dark energies with such ferocity, in fact, that one
might as well ask, Why hasn’t Hollywood achieved what Black
musicians have achieved in the dark? Because Hollywood was
never big enough for Nina Simone or Miles Davis or ParliamentFunkadelic or the culture that produced them. Neither one,
of course, is the viral and vial media landscape of Black popular
culture today, youtube notwithstanding or Erykah Badu when
she decided to meet the Isis and Lady Gaga challenge with her
‘Window Seat’ video.
The kulcha we call black is always a self-perpetuating occasion
for celebration, introspection and extrospection as well.
Black performance is therefore its own talking cure — a
self-medication of action and improvised acting out, always
moving towards a reharmonizing of the most complex
dimensions of one’s inner life with a group ethos and eros.
BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE
Yet, Black popular music, (certainly that with the darkest
energy quotient), suffers from such a level of success today
that it exists in a more rarefied atmosphere than even the
art world. It is therefore subject to more entropic evisceration
at the moment of conception. Not to mention jail time.
At the point at which bling and prison become the definition
of soulfulness in your culture, you may come to expect a
certain spiritual deficit to emerge in the sonics of the thing.
Jazz was once identified as the sound of surprise and if you
want to be surprised by anything going on today in Black
American culture, I would tell you to go to the museum
and galleries because that’s where the hard questions about
modern Black consciousness and identity are being posed,
performed, brokered and illuminated.
There is also the proposition that the history of Black music
is a history of a people rendered invisible or subliminal in
America by Hollywood.
13
For this reason there is not much church or juke joint ambiance
going on in most Black visual art — Ernie Barnes and
Romare Bearden are exceptions. The work of Romare Bearden,
Thornton Dial, David Hammons or Jean Michel Basquiat
also aspired to be the voice(s) of those multitudes, spirits known,
unknown, dead, alive, barely human and even non-human.
Like August Wilson, they took up the task of giving all those
invisible jets of dark energy zooming around outside their
studios a permanent residence in their art. There are many
younger Black artists who, to my mind, are striving to
do the same thing — Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas,
Kehinde Wiley, Sanford Biggers, Noah Davis, Chanel
Abney and our warrior woman of the hour, Torkwase Dyson.
If you were to ask me where all the intellectual and critical
action is in Black culture today, I would say that the Visual
Artists ironically have the floor more so than the musicians.
That’s ironic because who would ever think the most fertile
hotbed of black artistic energy would occur invisibly among
the wine and cheese set?
3/27/11 11:22 AM