Black
Ontology Now —
Dark Matters and Meeting the Lady Gaga Challenge
by GREG TATE
S
o we’re gathered here today to
talk about life, liberty, justice, the
knowledgeable performance of
Negritudes and the knowledge of how
Negritudes became a performance
commodity in the scheme of things
as well as a set of liberatory schemata
devised by what Amiri Baraka has
called ‘a race of madmen and giants’.
6
In The Five Percent Nation they speak of Doing The Knowledge
and Knowing The Ledge — doing the thing and knowing the
thing as an action, not just a theory. Doing the knowledge
means making imaginative leaps in space or falling on one’s
ass. Black identity in America is almost inseparable from black
performance. Black Americans are in fact Black Performance
vessels — whether full or empty is besides the point as the
world has come to cast and project upon the Black American
body the expectation of high performance engineering.
Now we are also here to address what I like to call Meeting
The Lady Gaga Challenge — that question looming before
all female pop singers of How Low Must I Video Ho To Get
Ova Post-Gaga? So we’re also going to discuss the Performing
Black Body as spectacle and as motion picture spectacular.
Looking at how certain Black bodies embrace or confuse the
speculum of spectacularity, this will lead us in turn to address
Alex Weheliye’s notion of Phonographies of Black Music as
embodied sonic spectacle, as the real Black Cinema of a nation
of deferred dreamers. We speak now of a visuality that is
musical, a musicality that has remapped the synapses’ ordering
of visual pleasure. Or at least did so until hiphop music videos
killed the negroes’ tonal investment in widescreen Black
Operatic Pleasure. These options were all perfectly epitomized
in that trio of Stevie Wonder albums — music of my mind,
talking book and inner visions. So today, we’re also
going to talk about this whole question of Black Visions versus
Black Visuality when it comes to The Performance of
Negritudes, commodified or not.
004-greg-tate.indd 6
I am one of those folk with the fundamental belief that the
only accurate intellectual and emotional history of Black
America is the history embedded in Black American Music.
This is because that history is the only one that is the
history of self-determined subjects, not underconceived
objects, victors and not victims, highly fictional persons, not
dysfunctional statistics. If I want to know what ideas about
the world lived inside the mind of a Young Black Man in
Macon, Georgia, in the 1950s, I can’t go to a novel, play or
study. I have to go to the music of Little Richard, James
Brown and Otis Redding. If I want to know what sorts of
beautiful minds were being incubated in Detroit’s Housing
Projects in the 5os and 60s, I can’t go to the naacp files,
I have to listen to the work of the composers Holland Dozier
Holland, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, Marvin
Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Tempting Temptations, Diana
Ross and The Supremes.
In his novel about schizophrenia and black urban
consciousness, Samuel Delany writes that his protagonist Kid,
so howled out for the world to give him a name
The in-dark answered with Wind.
So howled out for the world to give him a name…
‘The in-dark an ??\?Y ?]?[? ??[[?K[?[? NM?JB???'??H\??\?? ?][??[???\?Y H?Y8?&\???????[?ZY[?Y?Z[?????Y?B??]HZY? H?[? ?H [??[[?HX\? ] ?[?\????[??[???\?][ ??HX^H[ ??]?H?[Y]?Y ?\?H??HX\????\?X??]\?? ] \?[? ??YHZ\?Y?? [? ?X?H??[Y[?\?K ]??'H ?]?H\????[YK?H\? ?X\?[?? H?[YH?\?X\?\???'B??H ?]?H\????[YK??H\? ?X\?[?H?[YH??\?X\?\?????'B??????LH LN?NSB??