Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness) by I. Augustus Durham

Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness)by I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In the liner notes for the last studio album Maurice White helped to executive produce for Earth, Wind and Fire, Illumination (Sanctuary, 2005), he wrote:
The Message . . .“The path of illumination is achieved by living day to day. Take responsibility for every moment and thus we reach illumination.”PeaceM.W.Searching for the light
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To say that these past days have not been vicissitudinal in black life would be an understatement: Friday would have been the 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin, a bittersweet milestone for someone snuffed out so young; it was also the night the NAACP Image Awards were broadcast (was it me or did the statuette look significantly smaller than in years past?!); Saturday and Sunday, we were called to get in #Formation, and have been thought to pieces ever since (some of them good!); and after we completed lining up, we witnessed Cam Newton and his (BLACK and blue) Panthers fall short, only to then have the quarterback be called a boy (they still do that?!) and be mocked through racial encodation by one of his own.
This is not an endorsement: this is a recap of the five-day news cycle.
In some ways, these intracommunal goings-on are emblematic of those timeworn phrases: you can’t have it all, and you certainly can’t take it with you. But somehow, some way, Thursday’s loss has been overshadowed by the past few days, a loss that is as elemental as some of the occurrences of the past five days have been elementary.
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I say your name in echo because you have faded away. just. that. quick . . . ly.
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It is astonishing to think that well into my father’s lifetime, when Nielsen Soundscan started charting album sales, there was actually an album chart called Top Black Albums. This chart title did not change until well into my own lifetime in 1999. Within six years of albums being scanned under that banner, Earth, Wind and Fire dominated that charting for the better part of a decade plus. The group made black albums.
Instead of pondering how green was my valley, may I instead pose—how black are our albums?
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last night i had a conversation about blackness. one of my interlocutors put on the table a query recently posed to her: do black people have any cultural rituals equivalent to jewish people, like say shabbat? she posed music and religion as sacred rites. i posited cotillions, someone else fraternity and sorority culture. someone said blackness is a performance of rebellion on the inside and of the outside and of the outside of the outside. and then we surmised that often, when one tries to theorize blackness, it is difficult because it is an unspeakable sentience. and then i said like the head nod. and then someone else said or like when you are taught to acknowledge one of us when you walk past him/her, whether in haste or at leisure.
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in other words, we know a black album when we hear it.
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Maurice White, in tandem with Philip Bailey, wrote, produced, and sang really hard music. When you listen to “Can’t Hide Love”, you really need the range chops to pull it off: before the vamp, it borders on baritone singing at the lowest point all the way up to high tenor. I haven’t even mentioned the falsetto at the end! Or how the song has been sampled (8-9!) And then when you think about White producing on songs and projects like “Best of My Love”, “Don’t Ask My Neighbors”, or “Boogie Wonderland”—what we realize is that black music has a sound, a sound we know. In the same way that we know Prince’s influence when this or this or this comes on the daily device shuffle. Maurice White has left a (black music) calling card that has a recorded singing message when the call goes to voicemail.
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Although I recognize that Maurice White was born under the sign of Sagittarius, hence the name Earth, Wind and Fire, I reminisce about my childhood and the missing links: Water and Heart. Yes, Mr. White *said in echo*, your body of work is suggestive of you, in a nostalgic fit, being Captain Planet—a transcendent creativity of afrofuturistblacknationalisticdiasporica that made this planet, sonically, better. Your light search is completed—let the funk of Elsewhere illuminate you.
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As you levitate, we elevate.