I’m fourteen. It’s 1991. I’ve dropped out of school. It’s winter time. I get a job filing documents at a law firm on K Street. Rap music, graffiti, fake ids and club life consume me. I meet a girl. My boy, just released from jail, is staying with her. They may be boyfriend and girlfriend. He’s not sure. Neither am I. One night, she grabs me and gives me my first kiss. My boy is there. I look at him. He shrugs, and I spend the next two weeks taking the train to her house in Takoma Park.
At the Takoma stop, the smell of oils—sandalwood, cherry and coconut—laze in air. The source is an oils vendor just outside the station’s entrance, on the very edge of the sidewalk. On his table, next to the sticks of incense and the vials of oil, a tiny radio blasts reggae. Its single speaker can’t keep up with the music’s power. Up close there is only distortion. Melodies compete with the crackle and fuzz. Farther out, a block down, even two, the songs stretch out. Voices clear. Melodies resume. I hear songs I know. Sister Nancy. Foxy Brown. Little Lenny. Red Fox. Yellowman tells me daily that “nobody move nobody gets hurt.” I smile when they play, and when I’m out of sight, my steps take on whatever bop the songs offer.
I hear new songs, too. Rhythms I’ve never heard. Voices that are unfamiliar. The thick patois. The fast chanting. They mesh, voice into voice, beat into beat, and create a chain of unidentifiable sound. Distinguishing the songs seems insurmountable and not worth the effort. Second and third kisses are more important, and my attention only lasts as far as the speaker can carry the songs.
A week passes, maybe more. Some days I stop to speak to the vendor. Others I nod my hello. He does the same. And I realize that I have begun to absorb the music. I can hum melodies, and the boundaries of songs, where one ends and another begins, have fenced in. Most of the voices, though, remain indecipherable. Only one refuses anonymity. I know it immediately and begin to will its presence each time I exit the train. Some days it happens, and for the song’s duration, I forget about forth and fifth kisses.
I ask the vendor to name the voice. He doesn’t, but tells me, “Come tomorrow.” When I return the next day, no words are given, just a Maxell tape. The word Sugar splays the plastic casing in thick, sloppy black marker. I thank him. He smiles, puts a fist to his chest and nods. I begin my walk. The smell of incense and oils drift up and off the tape, and this smell, in combination with the scrawled name, make it feel authentic, something to be handled delicately, an artifact that confirms my own place within the city. When I turn the corner, out of view, I insert the tape into my Walkman, press play and start the 6 block walk to Georgia Ave.
The video above is the first song on that Maxell tape. The 1000s of records, 45s and mixes that have followed all come from it.
I've been recording a lot of LPs over the last 6 months, and
the most pleasurable part has been revisiting (and
sometimes--embarrassingly--discovering) songs that I
tended to skip over in favor of hits. In that spirit, here are a few songs that I had forgotten about until today:
Betty Wright - I Love The Way You Love
Yes, the album and song share a name. Yes, this seems to indicate just how
much promise somebody thought the song had. Yes, there was even a 45 on Alston--you know, just in case folks like me missed the cues offered by the album title.
Still, I managed to miss it. I mean, I missed it good, so good, in fact, that I would not have even been able to have told you what album it was from before today. So, yeah, I missed it good. Though, perhaps, this missing is not so good, since it's so good. The song I mean. So, uh, yeah, I missed it bad. But I do. . . no, really, I do have a good excuse for missing it so bad . . . if, you know, that helps. Here it goes. . .
It was "Clean Up Woman's" fault. The supernatural force that is "Clean Up Woman"
made " I Love the Way You Love" disappear into the sonic ether . . .
. . . and its presence here is my attempt to make amends.
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway - I Who Have Nothing
Whether you think of the dentist-office classic "Where
is The Love" or the funky, sample-driven sounds of "Be Real Black For
Me," the opening track on Hathaway and Flack's first collaboration was
unjustifiably forced to warm the bench in my house.
War - Flying Machine
I owe thanks to Doug Smith from 95 North for hipping me to War's "Flying Machine." I had owned the Youngblood soundtrack for maybe ten years before Doug lent a much needed assist. Prior to that, I automatically played the Brand Nubian sample.
From their 1972 release, Bitter Sweet, "No Tears"
was lost to "Everybody Plays The Fool." Nevertheless, the writing
talents of percussionist Ralph MacDonald and bassist Bill Salter and the
introduction of Cuba Gooding, who provided a voice strong enough to clamp down
on orchestration that would have drowned out previous lead Don McPherson, take
the group's sweet and sometimes saccharine sound into much deeper territory on
this one.
The Police - Hole In My Life
While I am still as committed as ever to
"Roxanne," "Hole in My Life" may be the real masterpiece on the album. The way the bass so assuredly carries both the guitar and
Sting's vocal on its back make it one of those songs
that ends up on repeat whenever I put on Outlandos D'Amour. Add the subtle dub
effects toward the bridge, and it's a wrap.
Willie Colon - Junio 73
Like so many of Colon and Lavoe's records, Lo Mato includes
more than one classic. "Calle Luna Calle Sol," without question, does
the bad man trope better than just about any salsa song before or since.
Similarly, "El Dia De Suerte" takes the lament, so common in Latin
music, and manages to infuse it with a depth not often reached. From Colon's
opening notes, which uncharacteristically play in total isolation, to Lavoe's
lyrics (Y la gente decían al verme llorar/No llores nene que tu suerte
cambiará/Y ¿cuándo será?), the sense of loneliness is total.
Less popular is "Junio '73," which closes the
first side of the LP. Its lack of popularity, however, shouldn't be taken as a
reflection of its quality. Taking advantage of both Colon's loose, jazz-infused
arrangement and the way Joe Torres' piano ticks along with the precision of a
clock, Louie Romero constructs a timbales solo worthy of the pantheon. Romero's
timbales are tuned so tight that one can't be sure whether it is the stick or
the drum that is doing the hitting. And while the solo is neither as full as
Tito Puente's solos nor as funky as Roberto Roena's playing, there is a tension
created in which the percussion sounds as if it's trying to escape the piano.
Incredible stuff.
The Sylvers - We Can Make It If We Try
I'm pretty sure we can assign all the Pride albums as
records overshadowed by the Jackson 5. Nevertheless, Leon Sylvers
arrangements are on some other shit. I listen to the first three Sylvers' LPs and am ruined
for anything else for at least an hour. At least.
The way Sylvers lays the horns deep into the mix while keeping
the guitar, drums and vocal upfront is incredible.
Carrie Lucas - Show Me Where You're Coming From
However, Leon Sylver’s post-75 output, what we might call
the disco turn, cannot be dismissed. His work with Carrie Lucas ranks with the
best of the era!
Donovan - Wear Your Love Like Heaven & Get Thy Bearings
For these two, I had to stretch the parameters a bit past
the point of recovery. Neither of the songs are on albums that include
Donovan's hits. Yet, the reach of songs like "Mellow Yellow" and
"Sunshine Superman" loom over his catalog in ways that, I think,
justify looking beyond the album format and to the larger catalog. Aside from
"Wear Your Love Like Heaven" being one of the more beautiful
evocations of how love can be physically felt, the song's chorus manages to
move slightly to the left of the then ubiquitous pop structures developed by
the Beatles without losing the sweetness that the Beatles' domination mandated.
In contrast, "Get Thy Bearings" strips itself of all sweetness and
leaves only the barest scaffolding on which Donovan's vocal and Harold McNair's
sax can utter their respective laments. Indeed, if "Wear Your Love Like
Heaven" signifies the whimsy of early romance, "Get Thy
Bearings" signals the search for one's self after its been separated from
its other.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no musician that better soothes and, ironically, generates the sense of ineffable melancholy and loss than Van Morrison. I suspect that it has something to do with his ability to locate and then sit within these spaces of total disaster and, in doing so, turn them into intimate spaces, the moments that we remember most, wherein bonds and relationships are, if not made, then realized and, thus, fortified.
Take "And It Stoned Me." I have never been caught in a downpour half a mile from a county fair. I have never carried fishing gear, with tackle on my back. And I don't think that I've even stood with my back against a fence. But I have been with a friend when plans were halted for one reason or another. I have been with people in the midst of minor events that seemed major. And I have been forced, complaints and all, to make do . . . only to learn that the act of making do produced an abundance that previous plans would have lacked. We lingered in the midst of failed plans, and, in doing so, made clear that it was company, not activity, that we desired. Half a mile from a county fair or an evening spent on a DC stoop, they're the same, and only Morrison drives that home for me.
In some ways, I suppose that I'm lying right now--or, at the very least, exaggerating to make a point. All songs, in their ability to linger, to repeat, to play over and over and over again, illuminate this space where a mutual, melancholic longing makes intimacy possible. This effect isn't unique to Morrison. And the songs that most resonate with me are those that can, in a note or word, generate that sense of intimacy.
The Dramatics' "Thank You For Your Love" is a good example of how a song uses sound itself to communicate intimacy. If Morrison guides the listener toward what we might call the intersection of melancholy and intimacy, The Dramatics' harmonies might just be intimacy's best defenders. On it, the lead voice enters alone, only to be joined by a second voice at the altogether oddly placed third beat of the first bar. This odd structure and entry seems to me to be the sonic enactment of initial longing--bare, melancholic, painful--and then an-almost-too-late-but-right-on-time fulfillment, a partnership that comes not at the end but close enough. In the course of a bar, we learn not of patience, not of reward, not of cliched notions of love--though those, too, are present--but of the texture of waiting and the often invisible, unappreciated ease in which waiting transforms into intimacy. Like "And it Stoned Me," "Thank You For Your Love" reminds us that no matter how easy it may be to slip into others, the melancholic material, that sad longing substance or stuff required to get there can never be--should never be--taken for granted.
Taken
Lands, Taken Lives: The Crimes and Legacies of Colonialism and the Necessity
for Discussion
In
Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Case for Reparations
By Balraj Gill
I write these words while sitting on the second level of a
triple-decker house on land that once sustained the Massachusett people, land
that was taken, enclosed, parceled, privatized, and has since been under the
ownership of generation after generation of settlers. I am sustained by a
stipend, given to me by a top private university, a university built on land
that once sustained the Massachusett people and benefitted in part from the
profits generated by the trade and exploitation of slaves. I am a member of the
U.S. polity, a polity that was built on lands that once sustained the
indigenous peoples of the northern part of this continent, land that is now the
territory of the United States of America, a nation-state that derived huge wealth
from the slave trade and exploitation of enslaved peoples.
At the very foundation of our polity, of our political
community, are taken lands and taken lives—the lives of indigenous peoples and
the lives of peoples of African descent sold into slavery. The legacy of such
takings includes the decimation of indigenous communities. It includes the
violation of treaty after treaty with Native bands, tribes, and nations. It
includes the continued brutalization and economic deprivation of black
Americans and institutionalized racism that further affects countless others.
These are the crimes and legacies of colonialism and imperialism. As members of
the U.S. polity how do we take account of and responsibility for such crimes
and their legacies? There are two threads of discussion that must be taken up
seriously and simultaneously: the case for reparations and the relationship
between indigenous peoples and the U.S. state.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s "The Case for Reparations", published in the
June 2014 issue of The Atlantic, is
an important political intervention in this regard. The cover of the magazine
provocatively states: “250 years of slavery. 90 years of Jim Crow. 60 years of
separate but equal. 35 years of state-sanctioned redlining. Until we reckon
with the compounding moral debts of our ancestors, America will never be
whole.” The two most salient features of the article are Coates’s move away
from the neutral, ahistorical, social-scientific term “race relations” as a way
of understanding racism in the United States to instead naming it a history of
white supremacy; and his call to publicly discuss—simply discuss—this colossal part of our history and what that history
means for the present and future through informed
opinion and analysis rather than resorting to old prejudices and the
superficiality of knee-jerk reactions.
Coates’s case for reparations is an invitation to Americans
to consciously participate in an act of finding out—to investigate—and through
that act to engage in and raise the level of political discourse, a
surprisingly simple yet radical proposition. To say, “I didn’t know,” and leave
it at that is not enough. Go find out. Analyze. Form your opinions. Discuss
with other people. Find the ways and means to broaden the discussion. This is
the basic requirement of democratic participation, not waiting around to cast a
vote every four years as some would have us believe.
Based on his own investigation, mainly through interviews and
his reading of a selection of scholarly works published in recent decades, Coates
proposes that reparations might be a way to repair the wealth gap, of which, he
said, there is no better statistical illustration of the “enduring legacy of
our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens,
sub-Americans, and sub-humans.” But he further noted that only a national
discussion could reveal how or even if
the damage done by centuries of subjugation is reparable. In this respect, he
supports Congressman John Conyers’s bill H.R. 40 to establish a commission to
study reparation proposals, a bill Conyers has reintroduced in Congress every
year since 1989.
I have my doubts that liberal democracy could ever fully
deliver in terms of an honest discussion on reparations or on the remedies for
institutional racism, that is, for the history of white supremacy. Yet the case
for reparations nonetheless deserves broad, critical attention as a starting
point for discussion, keeping in mind the urgently needed changes in social
policy that could provide short- and mid-term relief for the most vulnerable
members of U.S. society—that is, relief from the constant state of emergency
that has been the norm in so many people’s lives.
Yet while we discuss reparations, we cannot escape
discussing the land upon which such reparations might be made. In response to
Coates, Daniel Wildcat noted that indigenous peoples have been deprived of
their homeland and for them reparations could never be a remedy. “To American
Indians,” he wrote, “land is not simply a property value or a piece of real
estate. It is a source of traditions and identities, ones that have emerged
from centuries and millennia of relationships with landscapes and seascapes.”
As such, the struggle of Native peoples has been around treaty rights and the
right to self-determination.
In his case for reparations, Coates moves from slavery in
the United States to Germany’s reparations for the Holocaust. His example of
what reparations did for Israeli nation-building unfortunately elides the
longer history of Israel, that it became a fact on the ground as a nation-state
through the expropriation of Palestinian land. Therefore, in the spirit of
contributing to the discussion, I propose that the field of our inquiry be
broadened, that it include the taking of lands in the Americas, the occupation
of Palestine, and go even further. Anything less would be a grave injustice.
How do we do this? We certainly cannot rely on the wisdom of John Locke whose
very ideology underwrote this state of affairs, who presented the
justifications for the taking of land from “savages” and for the enslavement of
Africans. (Coates begins his article with three quotes related to reparations, including
one from Locke’s Two Treatises on
Government.) That is to say, while we have to engage with liberal democracy
because that is what we have, liberalism and its political systems cannot be
left off the hook. With this, perhaps, Coates might agree. And when liberal
democracy doesn’t deliver, we cannot lose hope; we have to take stock of our
experience and delve ever deeper into our imaginations to conjure other
possibilities.
Lives shattered by slavery, Jim Crow, separate but equal,
and redlining cannot be discussed separately from lives shattered by genocide,
removal, and the taking of land. The uniting factors are the histories of
colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy and the numerous crimes
sanctioned under the auspices of liberal democracy. So where does that leave
us? Coates wants to make America whole through a national reckoning that would
lead to a spiritual renewal. “Reparations
would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our
self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history,” he
commented. Yet making America whole and spiritually renewed is an
ambiguous task. To be a touch more concrete, I would suggest that democratic
renewal is a more achievable goal. In other words, our project has to be one of
people’s empowerment and social justice, a project of taking control over the
decisions that affect our lives, a project of collectively setting social and
political agendas with a view to end exploitation and oppression in their many
manifestations.
To that end, let’s start with some much needed discussion.
