Happy Birthday, Ms. Simone

Nina Simone: She Cast a Spell—and Made a Choice
by Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Music Critic

I could do what you do, EASY! Believe me / Frontin' niggaz gives me heebe-geebes / So while you imitatin' Al Capone / I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone— Lauryn Hill, "Ready Or Not"

My skin is Black, My arms are long / My hair is wooly, My back is strong / Strong enough to take the pain / Afflicted again and again / What do they call me?— Nina Simone, "Four Women"

She was the voice of a movement. Deep blues, even darker hues, from the Delta to Dakar. When the old guard (Stokely and Martin and Ralph and dem)—in the days before Aretha—talked about the "voice" of the movement, they always invoked Nina Simone, Ms. Simone to all those who couldn't wrap their minds around this woman, Black woman, protest woman, iconical woman, the one woman whose very voice summoned the spirits of the Middle Passage, of those under the overseer's lash, of that charred fruit hanging from southern trees. — the spirits of blues whisperers, sacred singers, heavenly shouters and insatiable desires. This woman, Black woman, was the voice of a people.

When Nina Simone died quietly in her home in southern France on 21 April 2003, the spiritual essence of three generations of freedom fighters passed on to the otherworld the proverbial crossroads with her. With a voice that embodied the pain and power of the scattered African diaspora and classic West African facial features that suggested a short distance between the Tyron, North Carolina of her birth and Kwame Nkrumuh's Ghana, Nina Simone couldn't help being political. Listening to her sing "My Baby Cares for Me" from her debut recording Little Girl Blue (1959), one has to pause as she utters the line "Liz Taylor is not his style". Coming from the mouth of this woman Black, her invocation of "America's Sweetheart" was indeed a celebratory gesture towards the beauty of Black women. (In an ironic reversal, the song was featured in a 1987 Chanel ad campaign.) Simone's only Top 20 recording, Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy", was drawn from that first album.

By the early 1960s, Simone's music began to more directly echo the tenor of the times. Once the darling of the supper club set, Simone was more and more likely to be found performing at a Civil Rights fundraiser. Simone was brought into the movement at the behest of her good friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). It was because of her experiences with the movement that Simone wrote and recorded her most potent critique of American racism. As she recounts in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You, she was dramatically moved by the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four little Black girls. The attack took place less than three weeks after the March on Washington and marked a turning point in the Civil Rights movement as most of the movement's major figures, notably Martin Luther King, Jr. and SNCC's Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) were pushed closer to radicalism. Simone restrained her own rage — she purportedly wanted to go out in the streets and shoot some White folks — and transformed that rage into the scathing political tome "Mississippi Goddam". The song was recorded live at Carnegie Hall in March of 1964. Simone's career her access to the super club set—would be radically altered by the recording.

At the beginning of the song, she announces "the name of this tune is 'Mississippi Goddamn'. And I mean every word of it," as her largely White audience laughs at her comments. The brilliance of the song lies in the way she initially destabilized the immediate reception of the song, by placing the song's lyrics on top of a swinging show tune beat. It was as if the song was performed to the music of the "Sambo Shuffle" — that moment when Sambo decides to stop "shuckin' and jivin'" and actually starts to speak "truth to power." The audience is still laughing with Simone after she sings the opening chorus ("Alabama's got me so upset / Tennessee makes me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi, Goddam") and states that "this is show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet." But this is where the song, and its reception, changes. Simone rips into America's race policy, simmering as she sings "don't tell me, I tell you / Me and my people just about due / I've been there so I know / You keep on saying go slow," a reference, in part, to the Brown vs. The Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) Supreme Court decision which urged the desegregation of American public schools with the oxymoronic notion of "all deliberate speed". The audience is dead silent after the verse, a fact that Simone acknowledges, when she says to the crowd "bet you thought I was kidding". The moment seemed to only fuel the fury brewing underneath Simone's performance up to that point. When she starts singing "This whole country is full of lies / You all gonna die, die like flies," it is clear that she is in a space, in opposition to the non-violent stance of the mainstream Civil Right Movement, and one that portended the violence in American cities like Los Angeles (Watts), Newark and Detroit in the coming years.

Though contemporary audiences often miss the significance of Simone's rejection of the religiosity of the Civil Right Movement the woman publicly uttered Goddamn and openly questioned the value of prayer or the risk she took at the time with her critique., the reality is that better known and celebrated challenges to power, like NWA's "F*ck the Police" could not have occurred without Simone's brave stance. (the Dixie Chicks must have made her proud in her last days) Literally all of the mainstream protest music recorded by Black artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, like Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)", The Temptations' "Ball of Confusion", Freda Payne's "Bring the Boys Home", Roberta Flack's "Compared to What?," Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, were indebted to "Mississippi Goddamn". Simone would record other Black protest anthems like Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free," which had been a long-time favorite of protest marchers, and "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)," her musical eulogy to Martin Luther King, Jr. But, as a Black woman, Simone also spoke to burgeoning Black feminist and Womanist movements.

Well before theorists discussed the realities of Black postmodern identities, Simone presented a portrait of Black femininity that spoke to various intersections of race, color, caste, sexuality and gender. I have little doubt that Nina Simone's "Four Women" was somewhere in the consciousnesses of Hortense Spillers and Kimberle Crenshaw, when they wrote their ground-breaking critical essays "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987) and "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989), respectively. In the song, Simone discusses the different though linked realities of Aunt Sarah ("my skin is black…my hair is wooly, my back is strong"), Saphronia ("my skin is yellow, my hair is long. Between two worlds I do belong"), Sweet Thing ("My skin is tan, my hair in fine, my hips invite you . . ."), and Peaches ("My skin is brown, my manner is tough, I'll kill the first mother I see"). The four women, represented what Patricia Hill-Collins would later describe in her book Black Feminist Thought (1990), as the "controlling images" of Black womanhood. Specifically mentioning Aunt Sarah, Saphronia, and Sweet Thing, Hill-Collins writes, "Simone explores Black women's objectification as the Other by invoking the pain these women actually feel."

Hip-hop artists Talib Kweli Greene (with Hi-Tek) paid tribute to Nina Simone's feminist vision on his recording Reflection Eternal (2000). Talib Kweli's "For Woman" updates the legacies of Aunt Sarah, Saphronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches, taking into account the affects of Reaganism, crack cocaine addictions and the rampant spread of HIV infections. Michael Eric Dyson notes in his new book Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion that Kweli's version of the song "is a study in the narrative reconstruction of the fragmented elements of Black survival and a cautionary tale against the racial amnesia that destroys the fabric of Black collective memory." Dyson adds that "By baptizing Simone's sentiments in a hip-hop rhetorical form, Kweli raises new questions about the relation between history and contemporary social practice, and fuses the generational ambitions of two gifted artists."

The fact that a figure like Talib Kweli would be inclined to recover Simone's art was lost in much of the mainstream commentary about her death. In his obituary about Simone, Peter Keepnews, suggest that "In the 1970s her music fell out of fashion in the United States." (New York Times, 22 April 2003) But his comments disregard the whole generation of Black youth who were introduced to Simone via her classic "Young Gifted and Black" (1969). For many folks in the post-soul and hip-hop generation, their introduction to Simone music and songwriting came via hearing "Young, Gifted and Black", which became a mantra for the first generations to come of age after the Civil Rights era. As post-soul standard bearer Meshell Ndegeocello asserted in the Los Angeles Times, "Nina Simone was a messenger to our heart and conscience… No telling how many lives she touched with the simple affirmation of the beauty of being 'Young, Gifted and Black'."

The song, co-written with her musical director the late Weldon Irvine (a mentor to hip-hop artists like Talib Kweli and Mos Def), was meant as a tribute to her late friend Lorraine Hansberry who died of cancer in the mid-1960s. But the simple message of the song was so powerful, that is was immediately given tribute via the musical visions of Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway. Franklin's version anchors her 1972 recording Young, Gifted and Black, her most explicit political recording and Donny Hathaway's live version of the song, which appears on the posthumously released In Performance ranks among his best performances. (He also recorded a studio version on his debut Everything is Everything, 1969).

Ndegeocello's observations about Simone finds resonance in the music of some hip-hop generation artists. Besides his "deconstruction" of "Four Woman," Talib Kweli's "Get By" (from his current Quality) Simone's sampled voice (from her rendition of "Sinnerman", which at once references the West-African subtext of much of Simone's music and notions of Afro-religiosity ("Get By" is definitely on the "way out of no way" spiritual tip). In another example, Lauryn Hill consciously invoked Nina Simone's name on The Fugee's "Ready or Not" (The Score, 1996) in an effort to distinguish her womanist musings from the gangsterization of mainstream hip-hop In yet another example the famed reconstitutionists, MAW (Masters at Work's "Little" Louie Vega and Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez), re-mixed Simone's "See-Line Woman" last year (for the Verve//Remixed project, giving Simone a club hit in the process.

The interests in Simone's music by a generation of artists, largely born after her recording of "Mississippi Goddam" is just further evidence of the potency of her spirit. The title of Simone's autobiography, I Put a Spell on You paid tribute to her rendition of the Screaming Jay Hawkins composition. In Hawkins' hand the song was an uncomfortable (at least to Whites) acknowledgement of the "dark" powers of Black masculinity in a society where young White women, had been largely denied access to that masculinity. But in the hands of Simone, the song was transformed into a moment of high catharsis. Nina Simone put her own spell on us, one that serves those from the Delta to Dakar, and beyond, well into the future.

— June 4, 2003 (SeeingBlack.com)

A Black Feminist Anthem

Kelly Price, Marsha Ambrosius, Jill Scott & Ledisi sing "Four Women" @ Black Girls Rock! 2010. Hat-tip to Salamishah Tillet.

Grooves of Consciousness?: The ‘Myths’ of Political Music

Grooves of Consciousness?: The ‘Myths’ of Political Music
by Mark Anthony Neal

The recent debate between critic Mychal Smith and rapper Talib Kweli, brought into focus long-standing contentions about the responsibilities of artists who have been marked as political. Among this generation of so-called conscious rappers, Kweli has been among the most honest about the pitfalls and constraints of being labeled a “political” rapper. Kweli’s point was borne out on the track “The Beautiful Struggle” where he raps emphatically “I speak at schools a lot cause they say I'm intelligent/No, it's cause I'm dope, if I was wack I'd be irrelevant.” Yet Smith’s point is well taken; communities have a right and should be expected to hold artists accountable for the work they produce—work that ostensibly represents the communities that produced the artist and offer the most loving support of their art.

To be sure this is not a new debate; early 20th century thinkers W.E.B. DuBois (“Criteria for Negro Art”), George Schuyler (“Negro Art Hokum”) and Langston Hughes (“Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain”) had spirited exchanges in 1926 in the pages of The Nation and The Crisis where DuBois argued for an art that served the race, Schuyler rejected the notion that “Black” American art even existed, while Hughes carried the blood-stained banner artistic freedom. DuBois’s critique, in particular anticipated the emergence of a younger generation of artists including Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent and Aaron Douglass, who coalesced around the short-term publication Fire!, who offered a fuller view of black life, that some Harlem Renaissance figures found offensive.

At the crux of Hughes’s argument and ultimately Kweli’s is that the artistic process is fluid. Artists may have specific political commitments and passions, but good artists are also expected to portray the fullest range of human emotions—the revolution might be digitized or pitched to a 24-hour news cycle if you will, but people do not sustain themselves on revolution alone; neither do so-called political artists. Ultimately are we holding artists up to criteria that doesn’t fully recognize how the “political” functions in everyday life?

There is no denying that there is such a thing as political music. The music of folk artist Woody Guthrie or black bluesman Josh White are among those whose legacies stand out in this regard. In their day though, no one referred to Guthrie (best known for “This Land is Your Land”) or White, (who like DuBois and Paul Robeson testified in front of the House Un-American Committee in 1950), as a “conscious” folk artist or blues musician. The fluidity of their lives and their politics was reflected in their art, where they passionately expressed resistance, patriotism, and a full range of civic, spiritual, secular and even carnal emotions. The notion of a “conscious” artists speaks less about the reality of politics, but more so the imposition of market forces on art. Calling somebody a “conscious rapper” is about reaching a buying demographic.

Because we often take a limited view of how politics function in the everyday or how political resistance plays out on a daily basis—as the late Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall might describe it—we often miss the more nuanced links between politics and art. In his classic text Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, historian Robin D.G. Kelley highlights the significance of what anthropologist James C. Scott calls “infrapolitics.” According to Kelley, “the political history of oppressed people cannot be understood without reference to infrapolitics, for these daily acts have a cumulative effect on power relations.” These infrapolitics also inform what Clyde Woods, in his book Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, calls a “blues epistemology…a longstanding African-American tradition of explaining reality and change.” Critical to understanding Kelley and Woods's concepts are notions of politics as organic, as opposed to contrived; informal in contrast to formal.

Let me be clear, political art and artists have always existed, but our investments in so-called conscious rapper strikes me as one of the first times that we’ve held artists accountable and responsible for providing political commentary and agitation in the absence of the kinds of broad-based political movements that previous artists felt compelled to contribute to regardless of their political orientation. Our desire for political rappers or celebration of the political gestures of R&B artists like Raheem DeVaughn or even Jill Scott is borne out of a frustration with the lack of visible broad based political movements in our era and a nostalgia for the historical moment that hosted the most important social and political movements of the 20th century, in the struggle for Black civil and human rights.

The labor movement of the 1930s, the struggles against segregation in the south, anti-lynching activism, resistance to anti-Communist blacklisting and the pursuit of voting rights offered black artists myriad ways to imagine themselves, without simply being defined as “political”—they were artists, not "technicians" taking direction from the NAACP, The Black Panther Power or the Politburo, even if their political beliefs might have been aligned with such organizations. A cursory glance at the careers of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley is instructive in this regard.

Though Billie Holiday was one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th Century (you hear Holiday in artists as diverse as Abbey Lincoln, Frank Sinatra and Erykah Badu), she is perhaps most remembered for the drug addiction that ultimately led to her premature death at the age 44 in July of 1959. Few though ever think of Holiday as a political artist, though her recording of the Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allan) composition “Strange Fruit” is likely the most important anti-lynching song ever recorded. Holiday’s recording of the song and the song’s proximity to leftist politics in this country (Meeropol would later adopt the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953 spying for the Soviet Union), likely caught the attention of the FBI, who by the end of 1949s maintained a dossier on Holiday, primarily concerned with her narcotics consumption.

In contrast Nina Simone is generally thought of as the epitome of a political artist, largely on the strength of her work during the 1960s with recordings like “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” and the scathing “Mississippi Goddamn,” a song that she wrote in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham in September of 1963.

On the one hand, Simone’s willingness to actively contribute to the movement via her songs and performances is unmatched—Simone was brought into the movement her friend the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who she later eulogized with the anthem “Young, Gifted and Black”—but to only read her career through that lens is to misrepresent her artistry. Simone was one of the great song interpreters of the 20th century, whether putting her spin on The Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy,” The Bee Gee’s early hit “To Love Somebody,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” or “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” Simone’s PG version of Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” The “politics” of Simone’s music was implicit, in her willingness to view the world via a distinct womanist lens, both before and after her singular contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.

Marvin Gaye is another artist who complicates our sense of what a political artist is. With the release of What Going On in 1971, Marvin Gaye created one of the most cohesive and timeless collections of protest songs. Indeed songs like “What’s Going On?” which critiqued the war in Vietnam, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” which anticipated the Green energy movement and the self-explanatory “Inner City Blues” are as relevant today, as they were in 1971. Gaye recorded What’s Going On, more than a decade into his career as Motown’s most bankable male solo artist. Label founder Berry Gordy initially rejected the album, famously telling Gaye that it would kill his career (and presumably Gordy’s bottom-line). Gordy only relented, when the single, “What’s Going On?” became a pop hit.

Gaye was a deeply impressionable artist and What’s Going On was produced in what was a perfect storm of personal and political crises in his life including the premature death of singing partner Tammi Terrell in 1970, the riots that ripped through Detroit in 1967 and instigated Gordy’s relocation of Motown to Los Angeles, Frankie Gaye’s (Marvin’s brother) tour of duty in Vietnam, Gaye’s drug addiction and the general malaise found in his hometown of Washington DC and his adopted city of Detroit. After the release of What Going On, Gaye quickly transitioned to a more carnal concerns, releasing Let’s Get It On in 1973. With the exception of the single “Who’s the Man?,” Gaye would never again recorded explicitly political work. The lead single from Gaye’s final studio album, recorded before his murder in 1984, was initially titled “Sanctified Pussy.” One wonders how critics might have viewed the trajectory of Gaye’s career if he was a “conscious” contemporary artist?

The point is that politics and arts is not as seamless as some critics would have us to believe; even a figure like Bob Marley, whose art clearly was informed by his politics and his spirituality, recorded an album dedicated to “ganja” with Kaya (1978). The album’s first song, “Easy Skanking” begins with the unforgettable line, “Excuse me while I light my spliff,” which provides another vantage to consider a recording like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992) a generation later. Despite the highly problematic nature of Dr. Dre’s work in the era, The Chronic also contains tracks like “The Day the Niggaz Took Over” and “Lil Ghetto Boy” (sampling the Donny Hathaway classic) that provide some context for the Los Angeles riots that broke out months before The Chronic’s release.

Though no one would ever equate Dr. Dre’s political sensibilities with Bob Marley’s, the fact is you’d be hard-pressed to find a political song that resonated among the masses of black folk (and quite a few whites) more than NWA’s Dr. Dre produced “Fuck tha Police.” For example, it was NWA’s track that raised the ire of law enforcement and the FBI, not any of the politically sophisticated music produced by Public Enemy in the same moment. While the scholars and the activists highlight the legitimate political impact that Public Enemy had a generation ago, it is basic everyday concerns expressed in black music that often resonates most. Arguably the most meaningful reference to everyday life in Public Enemy’s catalogue (“Fight the Power” notwithstanding) is the Flava Flav led “911 is a Joke” a song in which Chuck D’s voice is notably absent.

While many of us seek political commentary from our conscious rappers and more often than not, express disappointment when those rappers don’t live up to the, perhaps unrealistic, expectations we have for them, artist we would never consider “conscious” can provide the kind of insightful commentary that we desire. The recent release by Rick Ross, provides such an example. While much of the discourse around Ross’s recent Teflon Don centers on his seeming celebration of professional thugs Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory and Larry Hoover, the recording also includes the track “Tears a Joy” which features a minute long snippet of Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale. The song makes implicit and explicit connections between the kind of political agitation that the Black Panther Party was famous for and the so-called black proletariat and black lumpenproletariat that filled the ranks of the organization at it’s peak.

This is not to say that Teflon Don isn’t problematic on a number of levels, but if we are going to be honest about conscious music, the masses of folk will more likely to be introduced to the politics of the Black Panther Party via Rick Ross, than they are the music of so-called “conscious” rappers. Clyde Woods argues that by definition all black music is conscious, “that is they still must explicitly, or, implicitly address African-American consciousness of this period and the intellectual/performance traditions that emerged during it. They are popular in the true sense of the word: generated by and for an evolved community of consciousness and memory.” Under this definition, virtually all black artists are responding to the material conditions that produced them and in many ways there’s not much more that we can ask of them.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). Neal is also the co-editor with Murray Forman of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd Edition) which will be published by Routledge in January of 2011.

Re-Reading Nina

A new book offers an incomplete map of a complex and tortured artist.

Nina Simone’s Tragic Rise and Fall

by Rashod D. Ollison

She had been the toast of New York City’s pop scene for all of two years, but Nina Simone was already cementing her legend as a no-nonsense diva.

There she was onstage at the Apollo Theater in February 1961, barely two weeks before her 28th birthday. She was a slip of a woman, haughty and remote, her dusky voice commanding and blues-suffused. Halfway through her spoken introduction to Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” Nina thought she heard giggles and chatter, which wasn’t unusual for the notoriously rowdy crowd at the famed Harlem venue.

But the former Eunice Waymon of Tryon, N.C., was having none of it. She snapped: “For the very first time in your lives, act like ladies and gentlemen at the Apollo.”

The crowd shut up immediately, and Nina turned back to the piano and performed. The artist, whose only smash at the time was a tear-stained rendition of “I Love You, Porgy,” was hard to pin down even then. Nina’s approach was steeped in classical music. In fact, she was trained as a classical pianist and had hopes of breaking into that lily-white field. But her music rippled with the blues, jazz and gospel. European styles and African roots music were also braided into her work.

But her repertoire turned bitingly political, starting with 1963’s self-penned “Mississippi Goddam.” She traded elegant gowns for vibrant Afrocentric garb, and as she spiraled into the depths of mental illness, Nina’s behavior on and off the stage became more erratic. When she wasn’t rambling through her set, she would cuss out ticket holders—or not show up at all. She would pull knives on musicians and shoot at noisy neighbors.

But fans all over the world kept coming back. Although she never matched the commercial success of contemporaries like Ray Charles, Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin, Nina still became an international icon. Her commitment to using her music as a weapon, as a way to raise consciousness about the sociopolitical storms gathering around us, was unwavering throughout her 40-year career.

So it’s fitting for Women’s History Month that we remember Nina Simone, an oft-misunderstood artist who refused to compromise in an industry and a country that didn’t know (and still don’t know) what to make of self-assured, dark-skinned women with soul, brains and talent to spare. Her artistic triumphs and public struggles helped karate-kick down doors for the likes of Erykah Badu, India.Arie and, of course, Lauryn Hill, who name-checked Nina in the Fugees’ hit “Ready or Not.”

The legend’s strange and sometimes-volatile life is explored in the new book, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas, whose last book, Queen, was a biography of another troubled soul sister, Dinah Washington. Like that book, Princess Noire is painstakingly researched. It also clears up factual deficiencies found in Nina’s 1991 autobiography, I Put a Spell On You.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

The Cult of Musical Genius

from WYNC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer

What is a Musical Genius?

The word "genius" is used and abused in our culture. Musicians are praised as “genius” after a great album and terms like “boy genius” and “evil genius” resonate in popular culture. Today -- a week after the MacArthur “Genius” Awards were granted -- we ask: just what is genius? Joining us is Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code; and Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University.

Hearing (Thinking) Black Death

from CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Hearing (Thinking) Black Death
by Mark Anthony Neal

The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson's new book April 4, 1968 reads: "You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death," to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There's a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death. Perhaps more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death--the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments--all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it's been in the province of black creative expression--Black Genius more broadly--that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea death, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right.

When the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 "Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?" it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle. "Were You There?" was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang its words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible.

Read Full Essay

Freedom’s Desire
by Mark Anthony Neal

“I’m someone who will get heated about politics” rapper Pharoahe Monch tells Time Out New York’s Jesse Serwer, adding that “then the next minute , I just want to lay back with a glass of Hennessy and suck on some big ol’ titties.” To which critic Jaylah Burrell astutely observes that Monch “exhibits a Black square male anxiety that undermines the cool pose he’s trying so hard to assume.” A squareness that, she argues, “circumscribes all Black males who aren’t thugging and or/pimping.” Monch has likely been taking notes from Common—and both no doubt remember the challenges Big Daddy Kane faced nearly 20-years ago trying to channel his inner Al Green in a world for which most would have preferred Malcolm X. And it’s not that we haven’t desired our AfroBoHo icons (damn near all nerds in reality) in sexual terms—I’m thinking of the Stephen Shames photo of a bare-chested Huey Newton holding a copy of a Bob Dylan album (which incidentally graces the cover of Robert Reid-Pharr’s new book Once You Go Black) and have you seen Zadie Smith lately for that matter—but we are disturbed when our heroes speak back to our desires. We forget, perhaps, that our heroes often desire the very freedom(s) that we have emboldened them to purchase on our behalf—freedom(s) amorphous, personal and yes, carnal.

Desires for freedom or better yet freedom’s desire is palpable throughout Pharoahe Monch’s new recording. Desire opens with a rendition of the Negro spiritual “Oh Freedom” which segues into the Monch original “Free.” In the hands of another artist this might be an all-too-obvious nod to yet another drama about a rank-and-file rapper locked into a label deal that they didn’t like; Of course it’s about the paper—like our icons shouldn’t want to be fairly compensated for their talents (“Your A&Rs the house, the label’s the plantation/Now switch that advance for your emancipation/MCs in the field, like pick cotton for real”)—but, Monch offers a more generous view.

"Oh Freedom” is a obvious reference to Black America’s “greatest generation”—Nina Simone could have been shot for writing and singing “Mississippi Goddamn”—while the lyrics to “Free” are legitimately obsessed with clarifying the means of production of the very thing Monch desires your consumption of. But when Monch employs some of the on-the-ground rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement in “Free’s” chorus (“you can spit in my face/hold me down/I’ll keep my feet firm to the ground/Because I’m free”) the point is powerfully made that freedom has always been a thing of perspective; I believe I be, therefore I be.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com