Thinking of Sugar. . . Thinking of Home. . . And Those Lost This Week. . .

Written circa: 1999

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.

-L

From The Archives (Do We Have Those?)

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.

Here's a Bop FM Link In lieu of an available YouTube link (Main Ingredient)

Main Ingredient - No Tears

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.

-L

At The Intersection of Melancholy and Intimacy

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

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.

Dionne Brand

 . . . you could emerge from car wrecks as elegantly as from weddings . . .  - Dionne Brand

A Sentence to Rival All Others

"If you look into any face here you might fall into its particular need."

-Dionne Brand, Thirsty

Looking Back the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the Works of Chico Hamilton.

Every now and again, I make it a point to revisit Jazz on a Summer's Day. It is a documentary about the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. It amazes me how many incredible performers were on the bill that particular year. The highlight for me is the impromptu jam at 13:20. Instant Chills. Also, the session at 50 minutes, with the Chico Hamilton Quintet is absolute perfection to my ears.

When Hamilton passed in late 2013, I thought about the first time I bought one of his records from Lokee around 2002. We were at his friend's house in DC, and I will never forget how struck I was by Hamilton's infectious rhythms. Since then, they have carried on and within me.

Even before my introduction to his work as both a drummer and bandleader, I had heard his music through by way of all the rap acts who had sampled his music. Below are some tunes that stand out for me, which I'd like to share with you.

 De La Soul Sampled Chico's 'A Rose for Booker'  (Sample appears at 0:24)

In addition to the more traditional chugging jazz rhythms he laid down, he always had a skill for incorporating latin and bossa nova rhythms into jazz, which only made me gravitate to him even more. After all, I have been a drummer for over twenty years, with a strong influence of Brazilian and Latin Jazz styles.

Remembering Frankie Knuckles: House as a Practice

Sound Check: Inheritance & Legacy

            This is a piece about legacy, but it is a purposely limited one. In it, I want to focus on one aspect of what Frankie Knuckles left us. I am interested, then, in how house serves as a practice. To be sure, house is many things: a genre, a community; a global phenomenon; a definite and particular form of music. My decision to not address these aspects is neither to deny nor diminish their importance. Rather, it is a recognition of house's impossible reach and scope. And so I have decided to limit my consideration to house as a practice both because it has been one of the more valuable aspects in my life and because it seems to have been lost in so many of the articles I have read over the last few days.  Consequently, this is a piece that spends too much time theorizing and too little grounding. And it is also one in which I spend too much time thinking about what Knuckles gave me and too little on what he gave the world.  For this self-centered approach, I apologize.  I know no other way.

Record One: As Architect of a Practice

            Tracking a musical form is difficult. Determining a song's place within those forms is impossible. Not the least of all because sound is promiscuous. Notes and arrangements seem to have an uncanny ability to make genres their own. What is R&B in one instance seems to effortlessly transmogrify into rock or pop or house in the next. And those concerned with tracking the historical import of a single form are left having to draw artificial--even arbitrary--lines.  Thus, while it may be convenient to proclaim that R&B is this, and House is that, allowing for a shorthand through which to identify a song's particular traits, the act leaves us with little more than vague pronouns, which bound more than define.  And the question to ask is what or who is being bounded when we endeavor to such a task.

           

            The short answer is that it depends. In my more fanciful moments of allegory and analogy, I imagine this binding serving as a sort of Borgesian nightmare in which those of us who seek rigid categories take on the role of a record collector. This collector compulsively and perpetually buys a single record over and over again, so to be able to file it within every category that it might fit.  In time, a million copies have been amassed, and the collector can name just as many categories but, tragically, only knows one song. And so the collector files the physical object, triumphant in his or her imagined scope and depth, all the while fooling the world into thinking that he or she has harnessed the notes therein. Sadly, the comfort doesn't hold. Even the most cursory interrogation shows how the act of filing merely situates each of us within a sort of bureaucratic maze or sonic territory, whose boundaries truncate--indeed, stunt--the ability to consider music from various perspectives. The comfort of order disguises the limitations wrought.  And, thus, we who attempt to bind become bounded, no longer able to hear the innumerable possibilities all sounds offer.  

           

            For house, however, the effort to determine a song's generic placement is not a matter of classification but contextualization. It is an effort interested in discovery and consideration. To contextualize is to open up the field, to, as it were, demand that genres can teach us how to listen to songs. To hear house is a way of knowing, a particular method of listening, which takes in innumerable notes and arrangements so to see if they have the potential to, as it were, beat the box. Approached in this way, house is not a matter of categorization but positioning. It is a function of entering into a specific conversation, both literally and figuratively. Who, what and how one chooses to engage becomes more important than whether or not the sonic response falls within the arbitrary bounds of a single generic space. That is, boundaries are dictated by the conversations at hand and by the interactions between DJ and crowd, not by a set of static rules. And each of us enters into these conversations knowing that our tone, words and politics are responsible to both ourselves and the community that we have chosen to engage.

           

            Thus, house does not describe a set of traits that a song must possess in order for it to fit into the category. Rather, it describes a way of hearing; it is a practice in search of intersections. It is a practice that finds moments of sonic commonality not because it seeks to flatten the variety of differences it is capable of accommodating but, rather, because it recognizes the strength of difference itself. In this sense, all songs--no matter their generic traits--are potentially house, and a DJ is only limited by his or her ability to hear those intersections which allow for the sort of contextualization needed to place a song within its sonic space. When Teddy Douglass of the Basement Boys proclaims that "Where we come from the mix is more important than the selection. You'll have a real problem if your blend isn't smooth," he is not celebrating technique over sound.* Rather, his observation demonstrates the ways in which the mix serves as the method used by DJs to position a song--any song--into house. The mix, thus, becomes the moment through which two disparate songs are not only layered and sync'ed so to become one but, also, through which the DJ locates moments of sonic commonality so to be able to shift his or her crowd into new sounds. If the mix identifies those moments of intersection, the songs themselves, which stretch out and demand the crowd find ways to make sense of them, offers a sonic palette of innumerable differences. This ability to find the common so to accommodate and celebrate difference is what Knuckles--alongside other DJs and pioneers in both Chicago and New York--gave us.  Theirs is a practice that challenges us to find our place within a sonic space in which tradition, to paraphrase Jazz master Lester Bowie, is always a matter of innovation. 

            Indeed, Knuckles and house might be said to have offered us a new way to participate within the Black musical tradition. To say that tradition is innovation is to suggest that black art is always both a retaining of and departure from what has come before. The artist's goal is to create new techniques and practices accountable to both the values and history offered by the tradition but which are somehow also and simultaneously relevant and answerable to the moment at hand. In offering listeners house as a practice, Knuckles and his peers provided their respective communities with one such technique. House, thus, takes part of--indeed, is member of--what Amiri Baraka has called the changing same, a phrase used to describe those ever-transmogrifying forms that seek to accommodate the interests, values and aesthetics held by and created through the Black community. In this approach, sonic promiscuity is not an inconvenient fact that the collector must quarantine within a new category but, rather, evidence of the ongoing and innovative conversations occurring within the tradition's most durable technique, that of call and response. 



           As with the variety of musicians involved with black musical forms that precede house, the DJ offers the crowd a song, and the crowd, an equal partner in this ever democratic process of art, responds and responds in endlessly different ways. To riff off Ralph Ellison, House is. . . an' house ain't . . . at any particular moment, but then comes the next moment, the next response, the next song, the next crowd response and what ain't suddenly is and what is suddenly ain't. And that's its power. This, then, is not house as a collection of sonic traits or markers. This is house as epistemological practice. This is house as a method through which the sonic logic of genre is disallowed the convenient tendency to essentialize, to calcify and to deny any sound its due hearing. Under this direction, the DJ isn't god, as later dance forms have proclaimed; rather, he or she is one participant in the long tradition of innovation and expansion. A caller waiting for the crowd to respond so to know how to, then, call back again and again, endlessly and always with a difference. This is what Knuckles gave us. This is his legacy.

. . . Or part of it. . .

           

Record Two: The Personal

            The night comes in bursts. Memories are quartered by gaps.  Flashes of story and then long spaces of experiential miasma, where facts smear into others, and myths shift to truth, while truths get lost to myth, and where time is not so much postponed but in a constant state of quantum leap: from minute to hour in the course of a second. There are, then, as many ellipses as there is narrative. This is a history that defies its realization but, nevertheless, demands it telling. Gaps and all. Forgive what follows.

            This much I know. It is December 31,1992. I am barely fifteen and on my way to Tracks, the legendary Washington, DC nightclub. Two women are taking me. They are sisters, well versed in the procedures of DC nightlife and, to one degree or another, my teachers in navigating underage entry. Indeed, it was Allison, the younger of the two sisters, who had taught me how to lick the top of my hand and then roll it over her own, so to transfer the club stamp needed for re-entry to Fifth Column, another of DC's dance clubs. Earlier in the evening, Cameron, Allison's older sister, had given me a tab of acid, and as we turned onto South Capitol Street, my belly began to churn. Part anticipation; part drug. I both welcomed and dreaded the feeling. To reorient myself, I looked for One-9's graffiti mural. Two blocks from Tracks and on the outside wall of a South Capitol playground, its letters had always offered a welcome comfort. They were a code that was legible only to a small group, and my ability to read them signaled a unique and uncommon literacy. On this night, however, the mural seemed to portend my entry into a world I no longer knew, that was far from legible. The painted hand, which held in its palm the Eye of Horus and served as the focal point of the piece, appeared to reach out beyond the wall in an attempt to pull me into its angular, neo-cubist world. When I finally found it, I closed my eyes, and a song from my first house mix moved to the fore. Then ellipsis.

            The line to get into the club was long, and not knowing any better, I stopped at its end and listened to the bass coming from inside the club. More felt than heard, it seemed to move through the concrete walls and rendered the club as more membrane than concrete.  As concentrator, not container. Here was a music capable of an inside and outside. A world unbounded. I reached out to touch the wall, and both Cameron and Allison grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the entrance.  When we arrived at the front of the line, they flashed Gold Tracks Club cards to the bouncers, evidence--to my young mind--of their expertise in this world, and we slid in ahead of the people waiting to be id'ed and patted down.

           

            Inside. A new kind of disorientation. The Tracks I knew--Friday nights--was not present. In its place was an entirely new terrain, population and camp. New superstars. Willie Africa. Kevin Aviance. Mama Vann. Sissy. New aesthetics.  Costumes. Jump Suits. Checkers. Shirtless men. Only Jay, the thin, older bartender, who poured heavy drinks just to the left of the dance floor every Friday, and the mix of spilled and stale liquor, cigarettes and various perfumes remained. I looked around and tried to focus on faces and spaces.  Both spiraled and twisted. A face would start to turn in one direction, only to halt and then twist in the opposite. Over and over. Roiling. Grimacing. I tried to un-dialate my eyes and thoughts, but it was no use. Both had begun to absorb more than I was ready to take-in. Ellipsis. 

As I settled into the trip, the roil and grimace dissolved. Faces stopped turning. Space cohered. The endless--indeed, exponential--dividing of moving bodies into faint traces of where they had been became joyous rather than disorienting, as echo rather than bombardment. And everyone was beautiful. I wondered if this status was a function of the red lights, which seemed to carve contours and cheekbones into even the limpest of faces, which seemed to paint pale faces like my own with a vibrancy otherwise unavailable, and which seemed to cast all of us into a more beautiful light. This was the first time that I admitted to myself that other men could be and, indeed, were beautiful. This was the first time that I admitted to myself that place shapes how we see the world. I gazed up at the disco ball--rumored to be the largest on the East Coast--and listened to the music. Both served as the points through which I began orient myself.

            Time shifts into an urgent and eternal present. Perhaps this is the acid. Perhaps it is memory assigning importance to what follows. Perhaps it's something more. Nevertheless, before I have finished staring at the ball, Cameron grabs my wrist and drags me toward the center of the room. On our way there, I trip over the lip of the dance floor and begin to laugh at myself for how I've allowed my discomfort at this new, gay community to erase my ability to navigate a terrain I had long known. Then ellipsis.

            Midnight arrives. And rather than continuing with the hard, driving house he has been playing since we arrived, Earic Patten, the club's resident DJ, plays Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You."  The crowd stalls. I stare at the undulating walls. On the stage, a man dressed as Little Bo Peep raises her white and pink shepherd's crook as if directing the crowd below. The crowd continues to stall. Patten holds steady. The song continues. I watch the crowd begin to give in to Houston's lyrics. I hold back. I can't make sense of what is going on. House, after all, is supposed to be underground. To my understanding, pop music has no place within spaces like these. Dancers begin to sway. I am further confused. A few people begin to sing along. Then Houston's signature long note plays, and by its end it seems as if every single person on the dance floor is singing with her, with each other. I stand there, in the middle of the dance floor, in the midst of a club cast in red, in the midst of a singer coming into her own power and am left without speech.  A man grabs my hands and lifts them above my head. His own are slippery from sweat, and I have to tighten my grip just to keep hold. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. I smile and begin to sing. We sing to each other until the song finishes. Patten follows Houston with a house song, and it dawns on me that he has turned Houston's ballad into house, not because of its sonic particulars but because he located a moment, a place, an opening in which no other song would have been able to do what Houston's recording had done to the crowd. To me. Then ellipsis.

            On our car ride home the next morning, Allison, Cameron and I decide to eject my mix. In its place, we turn on the radio. I can't be sure why they want to do so. Perhaps, it's because my technical execution was atrocious. (It was.) But for me, the decision has to do with the nagging fact that I was no longer satisfied with merely playing those songs that were categorized as house. Instead, I wanted to begin the practice of house.  And for both better and worse, every mix that has followed has been an attempt to do just that.

The Blend: When Practice Shapes the Personal and becomes Political

            Tracking the importance of Knuckles' contribution to music and community is difficult. Determining his importance to my development as a better person is impossible. The former asks for a scope an article of this length can't possibly achieve. The latter demands I face some ugly truths about myself. This scope and these ugly truths are, however, related, so allow me to begin with the latter, so to arrive at one part of the former.

            If I were forced to identify the greatest gift given to me by house and, thus, Frankie Knuckles, it would--unquestionably--be perspective, a hard won, and always uncomfortable, always challenging perspective. As I imply above, it is house that thrust me out of the homophobic ideas I had inherited and then harbored--even if only casually--prior to 1992. By casually I mean that I don't think that I ever disdained gay men and women, but I certainly took on the behaviors of a homophobe. I certainly affected a posture of masculinity which needed homosexuality to exist as its opposite. And while I would like to think that I would have eventually, no matter the circumstance, come to realize just how hateful, how violent and how disgusting such affectations were, I cannot be sure that I would have without house. And I know that any potential change would not have occurred at fifteen. I am, then, richer for these perspectives; I am richer for the ways that house obliged me to consider the violence of affectation and casual prejudice.

           

            This demand that house makes upon its users is not, then, merely sonic. It is social, too. And this social element exceeds the anecdotal. Its reach is longer than my own history. The community and practice that Knuckles helped to shape emerges in an era that also sees the rise of a new, racially and socially directed conservatism. House comes to be in midst of rampant homophobia, in the midst of a newly emboldened campaign to vilify persons of color, and in the middle of a recession that further disenfranchised already struggling communities. It is born at the very moment Reagan's domestic policies not only ended social programs but also found ways to enact a new jim crow, to borrow from Michelle Alexander. And it, too, is born in a moment when HIV and AIDS were not seen as evidence of our need to embrace a common humanity, but, rather, as the justification for a collective, American bigotry, which had long attempted to thrust the LBGTQ communities into categories of deviance, abjection and threat. This is the social milieu into which house emerges. This is the violent, shameful American space upon which house constructs its own counter-community. And in its capacity to find intersections so to keep present and, indeed, celebrate difference, house emerged as a powerful, if limited, tonic through which subjugated populations were able to reclaim both body and joy. 



Looked at through this wider social and historical lens, to beat the box describes more than a DJ's ability to drive the club toward ecstatic release. Though it is that, it is also a call to arms and a collective refusal to be categorized. It describes a song, a mix, a dance step, an arm lifted into the air that beats--or outmaneuvers--those boxes which frame individuals and communities as something less than they are. To beat the box, then, is to cast off the generic and essentializing descriptions too often used to reduce these same communities. In a moment when rock, and R&B, and, I would venture, even the emerging rap form sought to reinforce notions of hetero-normativity and those race and gender boundaries that dictated one's ability to occupy space itself, house offered its practitioners--both in the booth and on the floor--a means through which they were able to celebrate the innumerable and ineffable differences of sound, body and community. To be sure, such celebrations were not inevitable, and various prejudices did and continued to occur in the midst of the house space. Nevertheless, it was and is a practice that offered and continues to offer its users a way through which intersection could be accountable to difference, should we--those of us who call ourselves house heads--choose to keep present the value of difference and, indeed, the value of friction, of both the body and the mind.

This, too, is Knuckles' legacy, and it is, perhaps, his most important.

* K, Wendy.  "The Basement Boys: Rising To The Top."  Soul Underground.  Issue 25, October 1989. 

Practices of Quiet: On the subject of mourning, mothers, and love. . .

Last night, I had dinner with a friend whose loved one had recently passed. We spent a good deal of the evening speaking about presence, and what it means to be there for another person. As is usual, I learned a great deal from her and spent much of the night stumbling through a variety of complaints and jokes. Each served as an attempt to outline the contours of a generalized, abstracted mourning.  It was my hope that in mapping these contours I would be able to enact the sort of presence I wanted when my loved ones passed. I failed. Every reflection, every joke, every complaint only further denied the precision of individual pain. Each elided what both she and her loved one meant to each other. 

Thankfully, my friend is generous to a degree that exceeds most others, and, rather than refuse my folly, she simply and gracefully accepted my intentions. I watched her prepare dinner. Onions, tomatoes, garlic and ginger were first chopped and then gathered by dragging the blade across the cutting board. It was a violence that portended the tension present and more satisfyingly explained the pinkish tint that stained the board's surface. I sat next to her stove and struggled to find songs that were neither sad nor elated, neither quiet nor loud and that would leave no residue, pink or otherwise. 



Cymande "Genevieve"

Melodies blended like spice to oil and into the hissing and popping of frying onions, ginger and garlic. Our conversation moved across a wide variety of topics, each arrived with an ease that belied my friend's generosity. At some point, the conversation shifted to mothers, and, in particular, the wonder of ours. And it was then that she gently nudged me toward a better way to be present. 

She told me that her mother's way of grieving was to abstract pain. Pain was not to be felt but known, not experienced and shared but explained and talked through. This practice of abstraction, she told me, gave her mother the necessary distance through which to understand the passing. It was her mother's way to heal. But for my friend, the abstraction merely cleaved her from the hurt and denied her the right feel sad. By intellectualizing feeling, death was no longer an immediate and enduring loss, but, rather, something more distant--that, even if no less real, was made unavailable to her. 

After hearing her describe her mother's process, I could not help but wonder if my own attempts at comforting her had created a similar sort of abstraction. Had I rendered her pain abstract? I think that the answer to such a question is--most likely--yes. And so in lieu of an attempt to remedy the mistake, which would inevitably reproduce it, I offer a cobbled mess of quotes and songs and words below. They are, perhaps, as abstract and imprecise and searching as anything said last night, but I hope that they also shed some of the earlier pretense and document the lesson that she, as is her wont, so generously gave to me.  

From Susan Sontag's Journals:  

"But if I'm afraid of my mother, she is also afraid of me. On a more specific level, afraid of my judgment. Afraid I will find her stupid, uncultivated (hiding Redbook under the bedcovers when I came to kiss her goodnight), glamorous, morally deficient.  

And I, obligingly, do my best not to look, not to record in consciousness or ever consciously use against her what I see, or (at least) not to let her become [aware of] that + when I see.

But there's something more. Hard to describe. Like magical powers which my mother ascribed to me--with the understanding that if I withdrew them, she'd die.  I must hang on, feeding her, pumping her up. " 

I don't know if my mother and I share the sort of relationship Sontag describes. Frankly, I doubt that she fears my ability to see her beyond that which she chooses to show--either to herself or to me.  Nevertheless, Sontag's appraisal of her mother's dependence gets at something larger than the immediate circumstances described in the passage. I would venture that it describes how love is always a state too intense to linger upon, and so we glimpse it--this state, this feeling, this yearning for--not because love, as the cliché goes, is fleeting, but, rather, because we know that to stare, to linger, to gaze is to undo the person upon whom our love is directed. To stare is to render the individual into parts, to, as it were, abstract the person, replacing the subject with object of our affection. It is not, then, that it is impolite to stare (as momma's across the country tell us); it's that embedded within the courtesy lies an existential mandate, an obligation to always be aware that desire of all sorts (motherly, sisterly, friendly, sexual) is the space of construction and vulnerability. To stare is, of course, to build, but it's also always and simultaneously to destroy. 

Darando  "Didn't I"

And, yet, to not stare feels a bit like a lie, too, if only because it is a non-act that acts,  one that demurs and preens, and so pretends that desire isn't greedy, isn't desperate, doesn't want to take in all of another. Continually. Perpetually. Until all energy is depleted. Until both people arrive at relational entropy. The glimpse is no more than a gesture, an affect performed, moving us back to the space of clichés, of sitcoms and sentimentality, of myths that dissatisfy and exact a distance in the midst of presence. The impossibly close becomes the infinitesimally unavailable. And there, caught in gestures of looking away, we are left alone, isolated in a space that offers proximity without propinquity. There, caught in some perverted and vertiginous dance, we enact an absence under the guise of presence, as strangers casting glances across a subway train, all while pretending that glance and glimpse are enough.  They're not. They never were.  They never will be. 

David Ruffin "Let Somebody Love Me"

If we take Sontag's observation to heart, as I think we should, how do we apprehend those whom we most want to be present for and with? How do we take in those whom we seek to celebrate? How do we avoid depletion and abstraction? To be sure, Sontag doesn't offer us much by way of direct answer, but I would suggest that she leaves us an answer all same. It lies in the words themselves, and in how they explicitly deny us the ability to gaze upon her mother. We don't see her mother hiding a magazine under the covers; we see Sontag remembering the act. We see, then, Sontag. Bare. Alone. Trying to wrest meaning from fragments. They--these words, these fragments, as rambling and searching as my own right now--make Sontag vulnerable to the atomizing gaze and, thus, demonstrate that it is not that we apprehend our loved ones by being strong for them. Nor do we apprehend them by abstracting their vulnerability or hurt, nor in solving nor in articulating nor in explaining them. The passage, instead, makes clear that any desire to bridge the infinitesimal divide obliges us to drop our words. It demands that we abandon our abstractions and allow ourselves to be glimpsed, to ceaselessly make ourselves available for inspection and, thus, to always risk being seen without the protective myths we wear. In becoming less than precise words, in leaving behind abstractions, in allowing another--a trusted other--to glimpse us, or, if it be his or her want, to destroy us, we, in that moment, reach across the divide, fingers grazing fingers in an electric shock, and apprehend what it means not only to be loved but, in fact, to love--whether as mother or daughter, as brother or sister, as friend or lover. In refusing the urge to hide behind abstraction, in having no answer, no recourse, we conjure a moment in which we are finally present to and for others.

And so we listen and, more crucially, admit that there is no answer, no saying, no joke, no complaint that solves or explains away the sorrow born from death. To be present in such moments is to admit defeat, to give into the totalizing fact of sorrow, to accept, as another friend has taught me, that it never goes away completely, and to learn how to be ok with the sorts of discomfort borne by such an admission. 

Valerie June "Somebody To Love"