Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 296

Gregory Porter & Brian Jackson perform Gil Scott-Heron's 'A Toast To The People'

Pianist and Gil Scott-Heron collaborator Brian Jackson joins Gregory Porter for a performance of Scott-Heron's "A Toast to the People" courtesy BBC 4

The Quarantine Tapes: James McBride

'On episode 092 of the Quarantine Tapes, James McBride calls in from his car to chat with Paul Holdengräber about writing and music. James talks about the issues he sees in how history is taught in the US and the hope he finds in the Black Lives Matter movement. Then, they touch on some of his heroes and influences in both writing and music. McBride tells stories from his time touring with Jimmy Scott and reflects on what jazz music has taught him about writing in a thoughtful conversation about history, creativity, and the importance of listening.'

Nas - "Ultra Black" (dir. Spike Jordan) from King's Disease

The visuals for Nas's "Ultra Black"(dir. Spike Jordan) from King's Disease celebrates the diversity and Beauty of Blackness.

Progressive Prosecutor Satana Deberry Made History. Now the Real Fight Begins.

'When Satana Deberry took the oath of office as district attorney of Durham County, North Carolina, in January 2019, it was a momentous occasion—for the city of Durham, and for her, as a Black woman elected to an office historically held by white men, whose “tough on crime” policies have devastated communities of color for decades. She ran her campaign being vocal about the over-policing of Black and Brown folks, promising sweeping reform. Now, more than a year into office, she faces the complicated realities of seeking to reform a deeply flawed criminal justice system and support a community ravaged by gun violence. She’s learning that implementing change will be harder than she could have anticipated.' -- Mother Jones
 

Pushing Toward the Black (W)Hole: A Review of Emily Lordi’s ‘The Meaning of Soul’

Pushing Toward the Black (W)Hole: A Review of Emily Lordi’s ‘The Meaning of Soul’by Tyler Bunzey | @t_bunzey | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Al Green’s falsetto, Sam Cooke’s croon, Minnie Riperton’s whistle register, and James Brown’s scream all have one thing in common: they all fall under the widely deployed rubric of “Soul.” Often argued as undefinable, Soul has been used throughout Black expressive history to describe racialized resistant practices ranging from music to politics to food. By the 1960s and 70s, Soul—including its musical and culinary practices—came to represent Afrocentric nationalist politics that fought for Black pride and unity in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Soul, however, has largely been read as temporally bound, representing the sound of a bygone era and Civil Rights politics whose power faded as the next generation saw political gains systematically eroded in the 1980s and 1990s. Put simply, Soul died with the promises of the Civil Rights era. Displaced by the Hip-Hop generation, Soul faded from the national imaginary as the dominant representation of Black empowerment, henceforth representing the sounds of the 60s and 70s and the politics that accompanied them.
However, Soul isn’t dead as post-Soul theorists suggest, and it certainly isn’t aesthetically limited to the music of the past. Emily Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke, 2020) revises this characterization of Soul by arguing for its efficacy as a transhistorical identity of resistance that resonates from the 1960s to today. Post-Soul theorists broadly suggest that Soul is attached to the heterosexist and essentialist politics of Black nationalism in the 1970s—what Lordi calls a “misremembering” of both an era and music much more inclusive than these critical engagements suggest (17). Instead, Lordi broadens the rubric of Soul, developing an engagement with the concept that is broad enough to encapsulate its racialized political meanings while honoring its technical musical innovations that have been deployed since the 1960s in the music of artists like Prince, Janelle Monae, and Solange. With caring attention to the un(der)theorized musical innovations of Black women in the Soul era, Lordi’s book is able to tease out the everyday musical practices of Soul without evacuating the concept of its broader political implications in resisting the violence of White Supremacy. 
Across town from Lordi, another gifted innovator of Soul theorizes its logic in his contemporary adaptation of the Soul aesthetic. Devon Gilfillian’s Black Hole Rainbow (2020) sounds as if the studio sessions of Curtis Mayfield, Kanye West, Marvin Gaye, and Ari Lennox were remixed into a world-building astro-Soul journey of self-reflection. The album is a clinic in Lordi’s arguments about Soul, applying a Soul logic to our time in which the promises of the Civil Rights movement seem farther than they perhaps ever been. This review reads Gilfillian and Lordi alongside one another, showing how Soul’s logic is as relevant as ever, particularly as an aesthetics of resistance deployed to alchemize the pain inflicted by White Supremacy into narrative of self-empowerment and resilience. 
After brief history of academic discourse surrounding Soul in Chapter 1 to outline her theoretical intervention, Lordi turns to Soul covers from artists like Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Rotary Connection to demonstrate her theory of Soul alchemy. She writes: “[The cover] signifies not just a remake but also a process of covering over or supplanting an original recording, and of creating cover behind which to stage subversive, if not unspeakable, conversations about racial influence, recognition, and profit, as well as intraracial struggles for power and love” (49). Lordi argues that covers such as Aretha Franklin’s 1971 cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Trouble Water” allow artists to push against white appropriation of Black musical innovations. In this case, Aretha swallows the duo’s “Bridge” in a sweeping gospel-informed rendition, revisioning the song into the Black sacred musical tradition, thus returning the song to its gospel power from Garfunkel’s lifting of the line from Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertone’s 1958 “Mary, Don’t You Weep” (59). Lordi argues that covers like this undermine white appropriation, resisting the violent commodification of Black artists that has always been white popular music’s modus operandi in the States. 
While Gilfillian doesn’t feature any sweeping gospel covers that swallow the original, his cover of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” at almost every live show can be read as performing similarly resistant work. Gilfillian’s typical cover structure—always a capella—begins with him singing softly by himself at the top of the stage, his band members surrounding him and snapping on the two and the four. When he reaches the first chorus, he trades singing lines solo and in four-part harmony with his band: 
Gilfillian: Lean on me,All: When you’re not strongGilfillian: I’ll be your friendAll: I’ll help you carry on.
After singing the bridge—“call on me brother, when you need a hand”—supported by his band’s clapped syncopated backbeat, Gilfillian typically calls on his audience to join, singing the chorus together, a capella. This musical arc—while almost certainly for aesthetic effect and not to communicate some kind of hidden subversive message—provides the kind of resistant cover that Lordi argues for in her book. Gilfillian’s oevre from his debut EP Devon Gilfillian to his most recent single “Cracks in the Ceiling” carries the theme of self-empowerment. Gilfillian, stylistically starting with the self, moving toward the support of his band, and then creating a moment of unification with his audience, revisions Withers’ Soul anthem in the present, aurally enacting an empowerment that starts with the self before finding power in community. 
While “Lean on Me” isn’t explicitly resistant, Gilfillian’s cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” clearly speaks back to state-sanctioned racialized violence. The cover video was recorded at Nashville’s protest against the murder of George Floyd, and Gilfillian trades verses with gospel artist Emoni Wilkins. Trading verses and harmonizing on the chorus, the artists share an improvised connection on the side of the street. In a protest designed explicitly to rise up against the white supremacist logic of American policing, this cover serves as a public spectacle of Black communal love in spite of the specter of Black death that haunted each of these protests. This impromptu cover alchemized pain to joy, finding resistant love when that love is consistently met with violent, systematic oppression, thus illustrating the ways in which Lordi’s configuration of Soul logic persists in cover songs far past the those of Franklin and Simone. 
If Soul covers provide explicit resistance to White Supremacy through their ability to provide communal pleasure and recontextualize white cultural theft, Lordi’s discussion of ad-libs in her third chapter suggests the power of the erotic for Soul artists. Reading ad-libs through performances like Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and Donny Hathaway’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” Lordi argues that ad-libs enact the “hard-won and collectively meaningful achievement of self-trust that allows people to break with stifling or destructive conventions” (76). Ad-libs, in other words, highlight the power of improvisational aesthetics to shirk convention and push toward collective self-expression. While this quality is broadly theorized in jazz and gospel music, Lordi’s focus on ad-libs as improvisational self-definition transposes this theoretical discussion into Soul’s key, thus paying respect to a relatively unrecognized but fundamental aspect of Soul performance. 
Gilfillian’s “Stay a Little Longer” from Black Hole Rainbow shows how the mode of improvisation—even in a recorded session—highlights Lordi’s discussion of its erotic potentialities. The song, sung from the perspective of a lover in bed musing in morning light, opens with faint cries of “stay a little longer” over sustained whole notes on a synthesizer, sounding as if the voice is floating down from heaven before being grounded with a deep, muddy bassline and trashcan-like programmed drums. The juxtaposition between the ethereal ad-libs and the deeply grounded bass and drums pushes the erotic to the fore, as the listener feels both the heart flutter of the improvised vocals and the below-the-waist groan of the bass. While Gilfillian’s vocal delivery is marked by small improvisational flourishes, the line “touching you is fun an all but maybe you could meet me to my ma—awwww shit” foregrounds such erotics. His delivery blends “maw” into “aw shit,” pushing the expected end rhyme “maw” with an unexpected exclamation that illustrates the extent of his passion. As Lordi puts it, “Soul ad-libs shake things up” (76), and the erotics of his vocal performance certainly makes you want to be the one he’s taking home to his mother. More star-crossed lover than ogling sexual partner, Gilfillian’s ad-libs push us into the vulnerability of his interior as he falls for his partner. 
It is precisely this movement into the interior that Lordi maps on to the use of falsetto in Chapter 4. Lordi uses the interior to signal two important departures from critical engagement with the falsetto. First, she argues that explanatory readings of the falsetto as representative of male vulnerability and racialized pain limit the affective range of the falsetto. Lordi, instead, argues that the falsetto is used to represent the complexity of the Black interior. Her related second intervention argues for the presence of the female falsetto—a vocal quality that some critics deny the presence of altogether—in artists like Riperton and Ann Peebles, suggesting that these artists engage in gendered “self-reinvention” through its use (102). 
Gilfillian explores these depths of the interior with his falsetto throughout Black Hole Rainbow. Almost every song in the album features some use of the falsetto, particularly those in the center of the album that explore pain, suffering, love, and loss. The arc of the album can be read as a finding power in community (“Unchained,” “Get Out and Get It,” “The Good Life”), descent into to the self (“Lonely,” “Start It Up”), the pleasure and pain of that descent (“Thank Me Later,” “Stay a Little Longer,” “Even Though It Hurts”), and how to move back out into the world (“Find a Light,” “Full Disclosure,” “Stranger”). It is no coincidence that the middle of the album—from “Lonely” to “Black Hole Interlude”—features both the most complex emotional moments and the most uses of falsetto. According to Lordi’s argument, Gilfillian is participating in a long history of the Soul falsetto as self-fashioning, creating a deep, textured interior: a rainbow in a Black (w)hole. 
The resilience that emerges from the interior leads to Lordi’s argument in her final chapter that argues that attaches the false ending—bringing a song to a close and then restarting it—to notions of recursive resilience. Exploring artists ranging from James Brown to Flying Lotus, Lordi suggests that the falling and rising action of Soul performance sacralizes resilience, making participation in the cycle the transfiguration of power from performer to audience. The false ending is the rebound, the bounce back, the resurgence, or the life after that marks Soul as empowerment.
While the rebound often takes the form of the song or performance ending and then suddenly restarting, Gilfillian uses the false ending in his narrative arc. “Black Hole Interlude”—a 40 second distorted track that samples the voice of Guion Bluford, the first Black astronaut in space—teases the listener as if Gilfillian’s exploration has ended. It sounds as if he is lost in himself, floating down into the black hole’s nothingness. However, the album concludes with three songs that restart the album’s arc toward collective belonging. It moves into a “Duckworth”-style cycle in which the album could be replayed, re-inaugurating Gilfillian’s astro-Soul exploration. While Gilfillian has a traditional false ending in the album—a Pete Rock-esque isolated sample that plays at the end of “Start It Up”—this false narrative ending enacts Lordi’s discussion of Soul as resilience. In the words of Gilfillian, “Nothing’s ever going to hold me back” (“Unchained”). His self-exploration, false ending, and restart allow him to continually find power in arching toward a vision of the good life. 
It is this “good life” that Gilfillian and other Soul artists continually attempt to envision, a phenomenon that Lordi maps as “Afropresentism.” Contrasting her theory with Afrofuturism, Lordi writes: “Afropresentists think beyond the here and now — but they do so by reckoning with ‘beyonds’ that have come before, turning back to earlier freedom dreams to see what was lost and what might be regained” (156). Afropresentism is the legacy, then, of the 1960s and 70s as it resonates today, not with violent misrememberings of Dr. King in the form of asinine memes or the whitewashing of civil rights figures like John Lewis, but rather the remembrance of the resilience of Franklin, Hathaway, Gaye, and others through their musical innovations. The logic of their legacy is deployed in the works of artists like Beyonce, Erykah Badu, and Monae, using sonic citations to reconsider and revise the freedom dreams of those who came before. 
Afropresentism, in other words, is what Devon Gilfillian dreams of as the good life. He sings: 
Remember when the violence stoppedand all the doors were left unlockedand a stranger was your brother.Remember when the bank got soldand everybody took their gold and everybody helped each other.Ooh so it seems in my dreams. May it be.
Of course, Black Americans have never experienced such utopia. At first listen, Gilfillian sounds like he’s regurgitating a nostalgic dream of what white people think the 1950s were—white picket fences, unlocked doors, and friendly neighbors. But importantly revising the white-picket-fence American dream, Gilfillian pushes us to think of an anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-heterosexist, and anti-racist world might really look like. As he trails off in a lifting “may it be” into the chorus, he is urging toward the freedom dreams of the 1960s, although radically recontextualized into the present moment of the Black Lives Matter era. In the words of his new single, he is looking to push at those “cracks in the ceiling,” daring to imagine what would happen if we truly were able to push toward equity instead of regurgitating the changing same of racialized violence and white supremacist institutional racism. That good life isn’t a whitewashed utopia. Rather it’s a dream of what the Soul singers’ freedom dreams of the 60s and 70s means in the present—a push toward life.
Reading Gilfillian and Lordi in tandem is not simply an illustration of Lordi’s chapters with a contemporary artist. Rather, it honors Lordi’s argument that Soul artists do important and engaging theoretical work, work that theorizes resiliency and empowerment to subvert White Supremacy’s formation of the good life as good white life. Gilfillian is pushing us toward the Afropresentist Soul dreams that Lordi discusses throughout her study, and his work demonstrates the salience of her theoretical interventions. In a time when Soul seems to be the echo the past’s forgotten freedom visions, Gilfillian reinvents them, daring to resurrect the unabashed desire for a better world. In mapping the theory of Soul, disentangling it from heterosexist and essentialist ideology, and showing how its logic persists long after its perceived death, Lordi has created a germinal work on an oft-overlooked genre in Black musical studies. 
Lordi’s work makes Gilfillian’s work a bit more legible in a broader historical sense than contemporary genreic categories allow it to be, and it historicizes contemporary artists—whether neo-Soul, R&B, gospel, or any other Soul-adjacent genres—within the historical innovations of foundational musicians like Riperton, Brown, Franklin, Hathaway, and many more. Put simple, The Meaning of Soul enables all kinds of new scholarship on Soul, paving a path forward to future scholars who want to study the good life and those who continue to theorize it.
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Tyler Bunzey is a  Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.  Follow him on Twitter: @tbunz3

Sterling K. Brown: Black Actors Have Waited 'A Long Time To Be Fully Recognized'

"The history that Black folks have as performers in the industry is a very specific one...It's taken a long time to be fully recognized as human in front of the camera and in life." -- Sterling K. Brown via Morning Edition

Camping While Black

'President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act into law. It’s a bipartisan piece of legislation, putting money towards the maintenance of our national parks as well as the federal government’s Land and Water Conservation Fund. But as The Takeaway has been covering on the show, National Parks have notoriously been accessible mainly to white families in this country. Black people and other people of color have long believed camping, canoeing, swimming, and other outdoor activities were just not for them.  Nikki Brueggeman , a writer and oral historian, joined The Takeaway to discuss her relationship with the outdoors. She recently wrote about some of the misconceptions around Black people and camping, and what she learned from her own experiences camping as a Black child with white parents.' 

'Make Farmers Black Again': African Americans Fight Discrimination To Own Farmland

'There is a growing movement of young farmers led by people of color in the Northeast but barriers to accessing funding and land remain. The family behind Triple J Farm in Windsor, N.Y., knows this.' -- Morning Edition

The Quarantine Tapes: Howard Bryant

'Episode 093 of the Quarantine Tapes sees Paul Holdengräber and sports journalist Howard Bryant take a deep dive into how the sports world is responding to the ongoing protests. Bryant tries to parse what is performative and what is powerful in the response from both athletes and the corporate sports culture in the past weeks. Holdengräber and Howard also dig into the history of protest in sports and talk about how Howard has been thinking lately about figures like Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. Finally, Bryant offers his opinion on what dissent and protest in sports may look like in the future.'

Start Making Sense: Defund—and Disarm—the Police: Kelly Lytle Hernandez and D.D. Guttenplan

'Defunding the police and re-imagining public safety—in Los Angeles—starts with the LAPD, but includes the sheriffs, the school police, and the UCLA police force. Kelly Lytle Hernandez comments—she’s a professor of history at UCLA, she wrote City of Inmates, a history of the LA jails, and she’s the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. Also: it’s time to disarm the police. They didn’t always carry guns, and there are other big cities in the world where most cops are NOT armed—like London. D.D. Guttenplan, editor of The Nation, explains.' -- Start Making Sense