Flying Lotus and Flying Africans: "Never Catch Me" by Mark Anthony Neal

Flying Lotus and Flying Africans by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
As yet another #hashtag circulated—this time #16times—in reference to yet another of those shootings in Missouri, you perhaps get just an inkling of the spiritual and emotional fatigue of those who have to live with the realities of those deaths, and those of us left to wonder if the next one will be closer to home, if not the heart. 
Not always sure that the killings are more—or any more real than they were before the Chocolate Supa-Highway, to use a distinctly post-analog, but not quite digital reference; The killings are what they are, and like Mamas and Papas Soul taught us almost three generations ago, we march—as much a metaphor for getting up in the morning as it is another call to take the streets.
We Dance is what Flying Lotus, joined by Kendrick Lamar tells us now, in the brilliant visual rendering of the former’s “Never Catch Me” from his just released You’re Dead!  Visually “Never Catch Me” directed by Hiro Murai continues the tradition of Lotus’s “Phantasm” (dir. Markus Hofko) and the Khalil Joseph directed short for “Until the Quiet Comes.” Like the work that Terence Nance has done with Pharoahe Monch and Blitz the Ambassador, it’s a reminder of that some of the most arresting art being produced in the name of Hip-Hop is well beyond the “Beats and Rhymes.” 
“Never Catch Me” is answering Kendrick’s earlier query, “will you sing about me?” (or tweet about me perhaps more apropos for this minute), with, perhaps, we will Dance for you.  The opening scene of “Never Catch Me” is as familiar as it is unremarkable, whether pastoring to the deaths of dreams or ministering to the bodies that are all too real to those of us who choose to count the losses; the scattered bodies of the so-called living, each seemingly counting ‘till their own demise is confirmation that life and promise and ambition have long left these pews. The two bodies, actually dead–even on their miniaturized cooling boards—seem more alive, a point the film makes emphatic when both emerge, mid-footwork to dance the dance electric—to riff off of Andre Cymone, by way of Prince, by way of Whitman.  Is it still a Second Line if the dead are more free to dance than the living?
That we are burying children seems not to be the point; in the moment of Renisha, Jonathan, Eric--we’re all innocents—ain’t no saint and sinners in this, only dead Black bodies.  That these are presumably sister and brother—collateral damage in wars never designed to save their lives, even had they lived—provides clarity after a summer of “my brother’s keeper” and “my sister’s keeper.”   They were not in need of belts, bow-times, appropriately-lengthened skirts and caring adults in their lives.
They dance in death, because it is the only place they are, quite frankly, allowed to live, recalling Lawrence Fishburne channeling an early cinematic rendering of  Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson in the film The Cotton Club : “the White man ain’t left me nothing but the underworld, and that is were I dance.”
The sprint through the church, through the wake room, amidst Soulclaps of praise--like that iconic “Praise Break” from Richard Smallwood—out into a world of fellow others living and playing as they could never in life—leading to the awaiting hearse, Sister taking the wheel,  reminiscent of the best traditions; Flying Africans, as  Soyica Diggs Corbett  writes, “in it’s earliest renditions in the United States…offered hope for freedom and transcendence, even though that flight might mean physical death.”

As children we can imagine flight, as fast as it is fleeting, yet as Gerima showed in that majestic closing battle in Sankofa, sometimes our flight never leaves the ground—sometimes it’s just a drive home, in the big car.