“This little kid had an incredible knowingness about him that really made me take notice. He sang his songs with such feeling, inspiration and pain – like he had experienced everything he was singing about. In between songs he kept his eyes on me, as if he was studying me.”
From Berry Gordy, To Be Loved: The Music, The Magic, The Memories of Motown
Aside from the iconic videos of the Jackson 5 debuting on the Ed Sullivan show or Jackson’s performance of Billie Jean at Motown 25, it is this audition tape that I’ve always obsessively returned to. At the risk of being reductive, the footage is shocking. It is shocking in that it is an almost perfect mimesis of James Brown (an undertaking which I’ve always thought was impossible, maybe even slightly crazy). It is terrifying to watch an eight year old step outside of himself, take James Brown apart and produce an uncanny act of both reassembly and resemblance. You get the impression that Berry Gordy was aware of what was going on here. Perhaps he knew it wasn’t quite right, but he also knew it was utterly compelling. Gordy realised that Jackson and his brothers were almost ready made for the machinery he had put together in Detroit. It was as if they had been birthed by Motown, and Jackson is part dancing, part shaking off the amniotic fluid of the assembly line.
“One thing that he was very clear about was that he did not enjoy performing,” said his West coast publicist Elaine Jesmer. “He hated having to go out on that stage. The way he seemed to handle it was to become part of the music. He became an instrument. You could see it. He closed his eyes and never looked at the audience. In those days he never played a show with his eyes open! He didn’t consider himself to be graceful, though of course he was in ways that he couldn’t see. So he stood very still and became a member of the orchestra.”
Taken from Ben Edmonds’ What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye and The Last Days of the Motown Sound, this passage introduces something of the instrumentality of Marvin Gaye. Jesmer notes that Gaye’s reluctance to perform live was assuaged by his ability to somehow meld with the songs orchestration, to disappear into the mix. This interplay between instrumentation and subsuming becomes a useful trope for thinking about Gaye’s performance. It offers a way of turning towards what I’d like to call the internal logic of space and eroticism within his sound.
Jemser isolates, through Gaye’s discomfort with public performance and his attempt to play with the instruments, a trend that seemed to develop out of his response to the ethos of Motown. The likes of Edmonds and biographer David Ritz note at length that Gaye’s career in Detroit was defined by his ambivalent relationship to work. He quite regularly vocalised and acted out his desire not to work at Motown’s speed, not to have demands made of him by the company. Instead Gaye wanted to work at his own leisure. The issue of Gaye’s leisure, as a counterpoint to the Motown demand for labour, leads us towards the draw of Jesmer’s comments. At a certain level, she is telling us that Gaye’s performance was about was about an intimacy achieved through a desire for leisure. He wanted to locate an internal space within the Sound of Young America where he could work at pace that was comfortable for him. It was a space that allowed him to become intimate with the machinery of the sound, it allowed him to become a member of the orchestra.
As is evident from the two recordings below, this was a stance that Gaye worked on throughout his career. The desire to slow the thing down, to make it more intimate, was evident in the mid 1960s and later blossomed into a refusal to work, which produced the likes of “What’s Going On” and the sublime “I Want You”. Gaye’s voice always appeared to operate at a tender point of slippage between him and the instrument. It opened up a libidinal energy that was always locked into the machinery of Berry Gordy’s organisation.
In his collection of decade long music writing for the Daily Telegraph, “All What Jazz”, Philip Larkin produced a type of criticism that could be used as a starting point for a lengthy engagement with the current of Blackness and radicalism that was testing the limits of musicality between 1961 and 1971. For the moment I will begin by mapping out some points in an imaginary exchange that occurs around the Black aesthetic between Larkin, Fred Moten and the primary target of Larkin’s ire, John Coltrane.
Written in August 1967, ‘Looking Back At Coltrane’ marked the news of the tenor’s death. I want to repeat the almost satirical rage for order that dominates Larkin’s assessment of Coltrane’s recording career. The selected passages of Larkin’s piece though will be interrupted at vital moments not only by Fred Moten’s turn to the refusal of logic and aesthetics that animates Black art and politics in his “Gestural Critique of Judgment”, but of course the de-instrumental freedom of Coltrane’s playing: a melodramatic excess that was at once both an appeal for rights and simultaneously a refusal of rights.
The intention is to set up the junctures where Larkin’s ability to hear but refusal to follow not only directly faces the sonic specificity of Coltrane’s artistry, but also to indicate how Moten offers a way of thinking about the politico-philosophical implications at work in Larkin’s writing on the arrival of the New Black Thing.
“Well, I still can’t imagine how anyone can listen to a Coltrane record for pleasure. That reedy, catarrhal tone, sawing backwards and forwards for ten minutes between a couple of chords and producing ‘violent barrages of notes not mathematically related to the underlying rhythmic pulse, and not swinging in the traditional sense of the term’ (Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties); that insolent egotism, leading to forty-five minute versions of ‘My Favourite Things’ until, at any rate in Britain, the audience walked out, no doubt wondering why they had ever walked in; that latter day religiosity, exemplified in turgid suites such as ‘A Love Supreme’ and ‘Ascension’ that set up pretension as a way of life; that wilful, hideous distortion of tone that offered squeals, squeaks, Bronx cheers and throttled slate-pencil noises for serious consideration.” (Philip Larkin, ‘Looking Back At Coltrane’ in “All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1960-1971")
“Much of this was doubtless due to the fact that Coltrane was an American Negro. He did not want to entertain his audience: he wanted to lecture them, even to annoy them. His ten minute solos, in which he lashes himself up to dervish like heights of hysteria, are the musical equivalent of Mr Stokley Carmichael.” (Larkin)
“Is there a relation between the ‘logic of white supremacy’ and pragmatism as the movement towards a neutral submission to the status quo that attends the disavowal of a kind of fervour that is aligned with (feminised, sentimental) blackness and the critiques (of property, of the proper, of judgment) that it embodies as cause and as a cause?” (Fred Moten, “Gestural Critique of Judgment” in “The Power and Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture”)
“Virtually the only complement one can pay Coltrane is one of stature. If he was boring, he was enormously boring. If he was ugly, he was massively ugly. To squeal and gibber for sixteen bars is nothing; Coltrane could do it for sixteen minutes, stunning the listener into a kind of hypnotic state in which he read and re-read the sleeve notes and believed, not of course that he was enjoying himself, but that he was hearing something significant. Perhaps he was. Time will tell. I regret Coltrane’s death, as I regret the death of any man, but I can’t conceal the fact that it leaves in jazz a vast, blessed silence.” (Larkin)
“The lawless freedom of melodramatic imagination, its constant irruptive and disruptive escape from the system it engenders, is structurally correspondent to the gestures that conjure it and which it conjures. Therefore, I’m interested in the incalculable gulf – the incalculable relation, the incalculable rhythm – between the beauty of a gesture that conventional aesthetic judgment finds unbeautiful and the morality of a verdict that conventional moral reason finds unreasonable.” (Moten)
Devised as an offshoot of Simon Reynolds’ talk at FACT in Liverpool earlier this year, “The Hardcore Continuum? A discussion” event at UEL sought to test the relevance of Reynolds’ framework for both the histories of 90s British dance music and the output of the current scene. The debate was at times heated, with the particular points of contention appearing to be the status of the nuum itself and whether the sounds being produced now were a sign of it lack of productivity. Whilst I would shy away from attempting to make any qualified comment on these strands of thought, some of the speakers raise pertinent points. Mark Fisher (known to us as Kpunk) mapped out the key features of the nuum. For him it is not only a dynamic feedback system, but an intelligent entity it its own right and sufficiently open to produce mutations. Alex Williams (Splintering Bone Ashes) fixated upon the ‘what you call it’ moment, moving back and forth between the event of genre-naming. Jeremy Gilbert’s mourning for the inability of patently dangerous musics such as Drum n Bass and Jungle to harness their radical energies whilst the nuum was at its heights drew the debate into the wider realm of Britain’s recent political history.
Despite the intellectual energies being emitted, the stand out paper of the afternoon was Steve Goodman’s (Kode9) and Kodwo Eshun’s attempt to call for pause and suspend the cacophony of the event. I want to briefly regurgitate the trajectories of their paper because of the combination of creativity and rigour that was on display as they tuned into a set of sonic actualities.
Their desire to pause and step back from the energy that was being discharged was premised on the feeling that the debate over the critical status (maybe even the politics) of the nuum may actually prevent us from listening to the continual evolution of the sounds which are its fixations. More importantly, the general levels of contestation appeared to rush past the sonic giants of free jazz, reggae, funk, dancehall and electro which overshadow and nourish the nuum.
Goodman’s and Eshun’s starting point was Afro-Futurism, an intellectual project that appeared to have lost its impetus towards the end of the 1990s, but which they sought reinvigorate by way of the nuum’s current output. The stalling of Afro-Futurism took place because of the ways in which it was temporalised, with a normative commitment to linear time and the inability to think beyond desires for progress. Goodman and Eshun stepped away from that procedural framing of Afro-Futurism and resuggested the work of its temporalities. Afro-Futurism for them, in a flourish perhaps borrowed from Paul Gilroy, is an issue of roots/routes and futures. Rather than a preoccupation with causality, they seem to be more in favour of the diagonal diagrammatics of Afro-Futurisitic activity.
In this space sonic legacies become less deterministic and take on a Janus head quality. For example whereas Dub reggae is commonly figured as the progenitor of Jungle, that formation can be reversed, multiplied and refracted to the extent where they are heard as backgrounds to each other, flipsides of the same track. Theses are sonic signifiers which forge pathways within and, significantly in the case of the nuum, beyond the horizons of Afro-Futures. In essence what Goodman and Eshun illustrated was that Joker, Zomby, Prince and P-Funk can be endlessly enfolded into each other to the degree that finite sonic roots/routes appear to melt away.
The alternative diagrammatics they drew centred on a set of 5 synaesthetic signatures which can be heard cutting back and across the sonic activities of Afro-Futurism. The 1st is Day-Glo tone colour where sounds are heard in visibly toxic tones. Secondly there is Metric Drift which is marked by rhythmic patterns stumbling, and knocking into each other, like people negotiating their way through a busy street. But mysteriously these contrapuntally opposed beats always return to the “The One”. The Animatic Apparatus and Machinecorality that make up the 3rd and 4th signatures work, I would argue, in tandem. Sound machines come to life, the audio life form begins to pulse, breath. Conversely the voice responds by allowing itself to be subsumed by the machinic elements surround it. One thinks here of not only Stevie Wonders adventures on the Vocoder but the preminent squeal of the synth in much music of Afro-Futurism. That squeal at times strikes up rememories of Marshall Allen’s playing for the Sun Ra Arkestra, and in particular his attempt to get that thing to speak on “When Angels Speak of Love.” Finally, the sound more often than not becomes drenched in the synaestehtic signature of Cosmic Sleaze. The solar heights of the squeal meets the libido, cosmic dust becomes cosmic lust. The obvious reference points for this signature are the likes of Prince, P-funk and even Rick James, who take Funk out beyond the auditory and into its olfactory and sensuous terrains. Yet we can hear cosmic sleaze being reprogrammed by the likes of Jodeci and R Kelly into what our own poacher calls a simulacrum of lust. Taking this sleaziness out even further, there is the rabid (one could even say rapid) hypersexuality which dominates Charles Mingus’ extended self analysis in his “Beneath the Underdog”. Mingus’ grandiose libido speaks to the “huh” that fills the ensembles pause on “Old Blue’s For Walt’s Torin”. And finally we even have Miles Davis’ tales of nightly cocaine and sex binges during his self imposed exile from playing. Possibly a necessary rerouting of the machinic throbs and moans that can be heard throughout “On the Corner”.
The energies of Goodman’s and Eshun’s paper were then the result of a unique investment in types of sonic oscillation. Their redrawing of Afro-Futurism in light of the nuum emerged from and generated further dislocation. To reorganise a phrase which I tend to quasi-obsessively return to from Nathaniel Mackey, they appeared to be working on the crux of multiple yet broken claims to connection.
“A Long Time Between Suns”, The Otolith Group’s latest exhibition at Gasworks in Vauxhall, offers a unique opportunity to showpiece the concerns of a collective whose lineage can be traced back into the Black Audio Film Collective and the Cybernetic Culture unit at Warwick University. Last week they presented Mark Fisher’s audio-essay “LondonunderLondon”, which was originally broadcast on Resonance FM in 2005. Fisher may be better known to some in his Kpunk guise (a site which lingers somewhere between a blog and a thinking machine), and his piece centred on a series of themes which reappear in that space.
“LondonunderLondon” sounds as if it were made by the cyborg children of Iain Sinclair. There appears to be a conjunction between his psychogeography project and Kodwo Eshun’s notion of sonic fiction in an attempt to produce an alternative map of the city. It is fiction that really comes to the fore here, and one could certainly identify the presence of Ballard. The opening passage, focusing on a walk through Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road, was a kind of channelling of the detached, analytical voice that occupies High Rise. But what Fisher and the other voices of the Otolith Group have produced with “LondonunderLondon” is not only an audio walk through the spaces of the city, but also an engagement with its temporalities. The essay encounters what Eshun called the capability of buildings to act as recording devices, architectural machines soaking up the sounds of all who passed through them. In fact it was suggested that ghosts could be thought of as playbacks, the sonic memories stored in these buildings seeping out into the streets (interestingly The Overlook Hotel was mentioned as a way to think about this). As much as “LondonunderLondon” was an encounter with the city’s ability to memorialise its inhabitants, it was also an imagining of what is to-come. The dystopian feel of the London Fisher can see forming on the horizon is both terrifying and compelling, but as he maintained, that future is always in part here amongst us.
Despite the unavoidable intensity and richness of the essay, I have some nagging criticisms which gather precisely around the strengths of the work. “LondonunderLondon” is at points too well read, and too aware of itself to realise all its own possibilities. It appears to have emerged too easily out of an engagement with both fiction and philosophy, particularly through the Derridian preoccupation with haunting. There was a moment, around the imagining of a lagoon in Wandsworth, where the essay threatens to break out of these references. The thing starts to take shape around a deep thrum, almost as if the work was taking on a pulse, taking on a life and moving ahead of those of who conceived it, but unfortunately this moment was too fleeting.
Perhaps “LondonunderLondon” should be considered in relation to other recent soundworks which have also sought to operate at the juncture between the sonic and the geographical. The mappings and playbacks which Dusk and Blackdown’s “Margins Music" and Burial’s two albums (they apparently were made with night bus journeys in mind) produce, offer something which I think “LondonunderLondon” misses out on. But I suppose there may be a distinction to make between music and the Otolith Group’s attempts to realise and release sonic fictions. Putting any reservations about Fisher’s audio essay aside, sonic fictions is certainly a project I believe needs to be given room to develop and work itself out. One possibility that springs to mind is an uncanny resonance with the improvisatory poetics of Nathaniel Mackey, a writer who operates in the breaks between modernism, sound and mythology.
Edit: just a quick note to say that the Londonunderlondon project was incorrectly solely attributed to Mark Fisher when it was in fact a collaborative work between Fisher and Justin Barton.
Not only a great tune, but also a superb retro accompaniment from DR. SMOOV. All courtesy of the phenomenal Blackdown, who also managed to interview SMOOV
Having only encountered Taylor outside of his music through rare interviews and odd transcripts of jazz roundtables during the mid 1960s, I am now congratulating myself for trying to idle some dead time by entering Taylor into a Youtube search. Through his 2006 documentary ‘All The Notes’ Christopher Felver has somehow managed to gain access to his home/workspace, and appears to have given Taylor the space to speculate on his endless interrogation of both the piano and sonic limits.
The short sequence available through Youtube fascinates me, primarily because in it he repeats an intriguing insight on James Brown, the likes of which he has also discussed in other interviews. Despite his most obvious reference points arriving through the likes of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and the conservatory training of his youth, Taylor nearly always also isolates Brown, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin as artists who constantly feed into his work. I read a story somewhere of Taylor warming up for a performance backstage ( I think it may have been at the Lincoln Center, before he was effectively forced out by Wynton Marsalis). Apparently Franklin’s ‘Say a Little Prayer’ was booming out over the speakers, and he was offering an accompaniment by way of his restless polyrhythmic thrashing of the piano. Taylor obviously hears something going on in there, something we perhaps refuse to acknowledge but which he equally refuses to ignore.
Although our eyes and ears have been bombarded with the news of a crisis in neo-liberal capital (K-punk is customarily lucid on this here), those who try to catch the trails which slip past such a monolithic media event would have noticed that the arrival of October also brought with it the launch of Black History Month 2008. BHM has now become, along with the Notting Hill Carnival, the MOBO’s and Diwali, a recognisable feature of Britain’s cultural landscape, or at least in the cosmopolitan areas. Even though the establishment of BHM signals the continued progress of a project invested in the increased visibility of race, I think it is important unsettle the frame which operates around it. We need to ask what BHM and other similar events indicate about the ways in which race has passed through Britain over the decade or so.
To produce this type of unsettling, I want to begin by taking a closer look at the manner in which BHM comes to unsettle me, the ways in which I find it unsettling, despite a wish to take part in its celebratory ‘history as democracy’ ethics. My vexations around BHM materialise through a peculiar attachment to and overinvestment in the term ‘Windrush’. As a common referent ‘Windrush’ has become an experience, it also names a generation, and I would argue that its use as a kind of default term points to a set of problems in the narrative which has been instituted around the Black presence in Britain. The first problem involves elements of basic historical inaccuracies. ‘Windrush’ feeds into a popular image of the Afro-Caribbean population’s arrival as a singular event, - a fresh off the boat story, when the reality of that movement was far more complex. Following the U.S governments heavy legislation on immigration during the 1940s, Britain, having been second preference became the primary destination for West Indians. But the arrival at the ‘Motherland’, rather than a cross-Atlantic stampede, was a gradual process dependent upon a close analysis of both the strength of the pound and the local employment market.
Windrush
Secondly ‘Windrush’ as a trope for race and historicism reflects a broader desire to situate a clean, coherent, and ultimately safe narrative around the Black presence in Britain. The history of major port cities such as Bristol and Liverpool point to the fact that the Atlantic slave trade allowed Black communities to form in Britain almost four hundred years ago and there is even evidence that points to the presence of Black Roman soldiers in Britain. The tendency to overinvest in the cleanliness of ‘Windrush’ reflects an avoidance of complexity when it comes to considering the question of race. Paul Gilroy, in his revised introduction to the 2002 edition of ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ describes this as the reduction of race to a “corporate mission statement”:
“Stripped of legitimacy and effectively depoliticised, anti-racism could be reduced to empty, ethereal statements. It became equality of opportunity, was trivialised in the poetry of management science, and then in the theatrical inclusiveness that was regularly staged to create the impression of more solid shifts.”
It is that very “theatrical inclusiveness” that bothers me about BHM. The idea that an a concept-metaphor such a “Windrush” once refined and made palatable, can be placed neatly into, say, a school curriculum - the story of race can be done, box ticked, next item on the agenda please. Perhaps what we need to do is ask how race in this country has moved on from those almost normative positions of Black-British or British-Asian. Perhaps we need to shift our focus and pay attention to striking underpaid Brazilian cleaners, Fauji’s in Southall, or the Muslim schoolboy from Exeter; groups of people who are very much present and serve to upset the minority communities which an event such as BHM tries to celebrate and coerce into an acceptable ideal of Britishness.
The effort of trying to produce a worthy post for Mountain 7 on my first experience of dubstep Live involves taking a series of risks that produce an unavoidable guttural discomfort. First there is the formal risk of playing the role of Dylan’s Mister Jones in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. Secondly is the more fundamental but related problem of becoming involved in a broader anthropologisation. Can one write, discourse about a ‘thing’ without taking part in a kind of demand for it to become known, defined, given classification?
The slightly unnerving feeling that we were taking part in an event which was not ours but was none-the-less well worth tuning into.
Skream has a flourish for the unexpected and the obscure which lends his music a lyrical sway.
A chance encounter and conversation with kode9 on our way home. It turns out that he and Eshun were colleagues during the early days of the Ccru project at the University of Warwick. I should have asked him about those links. Did he hear this thing coming, did he know that it was going to spew forth from Croydon’s own Big Apple?
If you've got stuff for us to listen to or read then get in touch and we'll do our best to get something written. You can reach us at mountain7blog at googlemail dot com
