Blackness in Sequence by Mark Anthony Neal

Blackness in Sequence  by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)  

In December of 2017, Kendrick Lamar released a vinyl collector’s edition of his critically acclaimed album Damn., but unlike the original release, the collector’s edition was sequenced in reverse order. Given the flexibility that digital music platforms allow, some fans had already experimented with the reverse sequencing, leading off with the 9th Wonder produced “Duckworth” instead of “Blood.” Lamar admitted to The Independent (UK), “I don’t think the story necessarily changes, I think the feel changes. You listen from the back end, and it’s almost the duality and the contrast of the intricate Kendrick Lamar. Both of these pieces are who I am." (Aug 2017)  Lamar’s further admission that sequencing is “something that we definitely premeditate while we’re in the studio" highlights how important song order (what I'm referring to here as sequencing) remains  for artists in an era where technology allows listeners to easily shuffle song order or skip songs that they don’t like; it is not unusual to hear young folk say that there are more than a few songs they have never listened to on an album, simply because they don’t have to.

That Lamar released the reverse sequenced version of Damn. as a vinyl album is not insignificant; the genius and limitation of vinyl is in the difficulties associated with skipping songs and the impossibility of changing sequence.  Lamer was, in essence, forcing some listeners to experience the album as he might have originally intended it.

The sequencing of an album was something that I took for granted as I began to consciously seek out music as a child. Though my home was filled with my father’s vinyl collection -- largely made up of Gospel quartets and quintets like the Soul Stirrers and Mighty Clouds of Joy, and Blues and Jazz artists like B.B. King, Jimmy Smith, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Jimmy McGriff -- my mother’s platform of choice was the 8-Track cassette, a long obscure format, whose popularity in automobiles and home stereo systems peaked as I was growing up in the early 1970s.

Though the 8-track offered a kind of portability that albums didn’t -- The Columbia House mail-order service exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s because of that portability -- and you didn’t have to worry about damaging records (the reason why I was never allowed close my father’s turntable), the 8-Track format had several clunky conventions, such as the changing of its four channels during the midst of songs, or that sequencing sometimes had to be jumbled to allow for songs to fit neatly into the format.

It was via the 8-Track format that I first listened to the Jackson 5’s second album ABC(released in May of 1970) -- the aptly titled Third Album, released in September of 1970 is the first vinyl album I ever bought -- which began my childhood love-affair with the Jackson 5. Yet because of the quirkiness of the album sequencing of 8-tracks, the first track I heard from the album was “La La Means I Love You”, which opens the 4th channel. “La La Means I Love” -- a cover of a Thom Bell produced classic from the Delfonics --  remains one of my favorite Jackson 5 songs, in large part, because of my initial listening experience; one would never start an album halfway through side B, which is where the song appears on vinyl.  Years later when I purchased the album in the compact disc (CD) format, I was in fact shocked that the album didn’t start with the Delfonics cover.

To be sure Berry Gordy had little interest in the sequencing of Motown releases in the 1960s and early 1970s, as he was trying succeed in an industry that was not driven by the singles chart, and  not album sales. Yet the emergence of Stereo recordings and FM radio in the 1960s helped shift the form, content and process of popular music, as jazz and progressive rock groups began to create concept albums that took advantage of the new sonic technologies, including multi-track studio recordings.  


Thus when one listens to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (1969), what one hears is sequencing (and editing, with producer Teo Macero) that function as acts of curation. And this not say such curation didn’t occur on same level (often as negotiations between artists, producers and record labels) prior to the late 1960s, but  when emboldened by new technologies ands new platforms such as FM radio, such curation took on greater significance -- particularly as Black artists came to greater public voice in tandem with the Black liberation movement of the 1960s.

That sequencing as curatorial act, or what I’ll just call the sequencing of Blackness or Blackness in sequence, might hold political value in the spirit of aesthetic choices -- and I’m thinking of recent works by Margo Natalie Crawford ( Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics ) and Gershun Avilez ( Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism ) that highlight continued resonances from that period -- was not lost on Berry Gordy.

Well known was Gordy’s chiding of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971) as being too political; but Gordy’s concern was as much about the album’s sequencing as it was Gaye’s political commentary; the first side What’s Going On was sequenced and edited as a 6-song suite.  At the time that Gaye released What’s Going On, he was largely a singles artist; “I Heard Through the Grapevine” (1968) was Gaye’s first #1 Pop hit (and Motown’s best seller at the time), though the album it appears on In the Groove, peaked at number #63 on the Hot-100 charts. “That’s the Way Love Is” (1970), Gaye’s last top-10 single before the release of What’s Going On, was featured in an album that peaked at 183 on the Hot-100 Charts!

In Gordy’s mind Gaye was a pop star -- the male counterpart to Diana Ross -- and not an artist, in the way that one might have thought of Miles Davis or Isaac Hayes, who had to provide production on nearly 30 Stax recordings in 1969, to be granted the freedom that became Hot Buttered Soul; Gaye saw himself differently.   

Yet Gordy’s grudging allowance to let Gaye release What’s Going On as the artist saw fit, not only helped Gaye have his most successful album to date (it peaked at #4), it became the template for later Gaye artistic and commercial achievements notably Let’s Get it On (1973), I Want You (1976), and the roundly panned Here, My Dear -- which 40 years later echoed in Jay-Z’s 4:44.  

More to the point, Gaye’s What’s Going On, in content and form, became a blueprint for a generation of Black musical artists seeking to moor artistic vision with political concerns, at the level of sequencing and editing; there was no greater example of this than the series of albums -- Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) and Songs in the Key of Life (1976) -- recorded by Stevie Wonder, in what was arguably his peak artistic moment. It is hard to imagine any of those Wonder albums being made, had Gaye not found success with What’s Going On. It begs the question though, as to how the music of Gaye and Wonder -- both pop stars by contemporary conventions -- might have been sequenced and promoted had they been originally released on current digital platforms?

Solange Knowles’s, A Seat at the Table, presents such an example of a curated album that functions on the level on concept album, while being pitched as a pop offering for digital audiences.  Many have commented on the symbolism of A Seat at the Table, with regards to Knowles commentary on racial and gender inclusion, though if we were to think of A Seat at the Table as a literal place setting -- curated for consumption -- there are moments that appeal to regional inclusion (a recovery of the dirty South) and that of her own very public immediate family.

With the use of interludes, Knowles and her producers are more heavy handed in the sequencing process; the interludes serve as logical introductions to some of the album’s songs, bridges between philosophical gestures, and also as footnotes to many of the album’s more nuanced contexts. A Seat at the Table  features contributions from Knowles’s mother Tina Knowles, her father Matthew Knowles, and most surprisingly Percy Miller aka Master P,  whose third interlude “For Us By Us” serves as A Seat at The Table’s denouement; -- the interlude and following track “F. U. B. U.” (with a nod to Damon Johns) and represents Knowles’s most dynamic claim on a Black Cultural Nationalists tradition.

Knowles’s use of interludes, not just as levity breaks, as has been the case on several classic Hip-Hop recordings, represents one of the strategies that artists will have to continue to engage, in efforts to encourage listeners to consume their art in the spirit of its curation.  In this regard Knowles, and her sister Beyonce, represents blueprints of their own, with A Seat at the Table, and Lemonade; blueprints that can be discerned in literal use of digital footnotes on Jay-Z’s 4:44.  No doubt Gaye, if he were still alive, would have taken notes.