Working Through: P R O S P E C T

Now that we are moving our quicker thoughts, glimpses and lissening notes over to the red light, the blue light becomes the place for our longer thoughts only. The Body and Soul Project, still underway, is the best and maybe the only example of what we gonna be up to.

In upcoming weeks, we'll be working through extended exercises that we will call working through. The all about will remain the same, though. We're gonna make the fabric of what the AEC called ancient to future out of other peoples' threads.

Five starting points:

• James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry
• Devilin.' This thinking was given to us by Allen Lowe, a heroic anthologist, who proves there is salvation at the crossroads between what we know and the new details we learn.
  
• Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Links
• Goodie Mob, Soul Food
  
• OutKast, Aquemini

There's plenty of other threads, and we expect to work them in as we go. The last three are, obviously, an indulgence in the love massive we have for a body of hiphop that takes its place in a history it enacts.

In the mean time, we'll keep elaborating on the threads we're already playing out:

• Life and Times of Marvin Gaye (what ever happened to that one, anyway).
• Body and Soul
• Versionology. The psuedoscience that the old world likes to label variation on a theme (to be confused w/ fugues and fugue states, conditions it treats with escalating gravity, hoping to cure it w/ copyright and other controls.).
  

مصرمصر

We were digging for threads through the house -- the devilin archeology, 'spose. In one of the back corridors, under stacks of newspapers, we found a clip of bullets that taught us another thing about the unnaground: You dig deep enough into the ground you reach outerspace; you dig deep enough into the past you find Great Black Music, ancient to future.

We been wanting to tug on this thread for a long time, but we 'a begin in the middle.

We first came across Greg Broussard late* in the game, during M.I.A.'s pre-pregnancy tourstop in Dogtown. It's hard to remember back that far, but the recollection is that the show ate him up: too much space; not enough time. But there was something big, even if it was buried under all of M.I.A.'s momentarily big personality/sound system. And it was good to see him fresh, not packed into some oldies tour like Artis Leon Ivey, Jr.

Chaboy threw down his back in the day tracks. The kids got their feet off the wall a few times. They wanted to hear it, even though they never had the opportunity to remember it:

Pyramids are Oh so shiny
The women here are Oh so cute
The freaks are on the floor now
Dancing to beats that I compute

We listened hard and heard all this back-to-afro-futurism stuff all at once. It was like Charles Ives, you know: at the crossroads where all the parades come together. You could hear the Sun Ra. You could hear the Earth Wind and Fire. You could hear the Burning Spear, calling the children of the ghosts back to homelands free of oppression.

We are not sure, now that we listen backwards on this clip where that homeland is, but I think it is somewhere on the dancefloor, somewhere near the serpentine fire.

• "Egypt, Egypt," Egyptian Lover
• "Egypt Strut," Sun Ra and Salah Ragab
• "Little Egypt," The Coasters. Listen for the chipmunks coming in at the end. Fo sho, ma bro.
  
• "Nights Over Egypt," The Jones Girls.
  
• "'Mid the Pyramids," Clarence Jones.
• "Serpentine Fire," Earth Wind and Fire

I been reading recently some of Stanley Crouch's hateration (more on that later his genius self gotta give it up and find some love for all of us and not just the 10th that he's in; it's an ungenerous way of life). He needs listen hard to this and find a new path to the crossroads, one that brings all of the 10ths to the future through the past.

P E A C E

* N.B.: We got to admit that when we're devilin' we are always late, we're always falling behind. That's the way.

We Look Up...

Or you can look in the alley, where the Papa Shady pizza workers deliver what you want, not what you think. But of the two glances, this glances right. So we put a bullet in for to commemorate.

• "Lucky Old Sun," Ray Charles. From the hymnody. We always sing, "Amen."

P E A C E

Old and New Dreams

In putting ideas into poetry, I have tried in each case to use the medium most specific for the purpose. I owe allegiance to no master.

-- Claude McKay, "Author's Word," Harlem Shadows (1922)

This morning we read these powerful words, and we asked ourselves about McKay's use of the word medium. It was powerful, especially in light of our recent move, and our new home, in Our Piece of the Rock. Any trip from here to there needs a guide.

So we offered: made a small pile of flour and placed an egg in it. We asked to see one way to do less* than splain how we do. Our vision is sketched out in the bullets. It is a pitcher of a journey: beginning, middle, end, middle, beginning. It's a homegoing of sorts. It's a fabric of sorts. It's a beauty of sorts. It's, as always, a story of sorts. It's also the way we do the things we do here.

Give this pitcher a listen. Make of it what you will.

• "Ghosts: First Variation," Albert Ayler Trio†
• "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," Robert Johnson
• "Handwoven," Old and New Dreams
• "Cross Road Blues," Robert Johnson
• "Ghosts: Second Variation," Albert Ayler Trio

* That's 'cause less is more.
† The brovah Gary Peacock deserves some very big ups for hanging w/ this caterwaul, creating groove w/out the bars. Chea.

Mo Devilin'

While we're on the devilin' thread, let's make the quick case that chaboys Sacha, Elliott, the Chairman, Gabriel and Brent are a team up ≥ Allen Lowe. They take the slowed down nostalgia for coulottes and espadrilles in Nelson George*and remind us that just 'cause we didn't have the money to by the rekkids during the eight zero area code, or just 'cause we were pimpin the industry (but calling it indie) during the same, doesn't mean we can't listen to more now. How much of hip hop's first 10 years did Nelson miss? I am trying to visualize the circumference of how much he didn't see.

Keep up w/ it. It's a matter of staying close to the truth.

• "Rapping and Rocking the House," Funky Four Plus One
• "New Rap Language," Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three
• "Jazzy Sensation (Bronx Mix)," Afrika Bambaataa Jazzy 5

Yes, yes, y'all. It cant stop and it won't stop. So we'll come back to this, too.

* Let's just confess here and now that Nelson George plays the role of an easy target. I don't want to be a hater, tho. Think of him as the Smithsonian Collection of Classic HipHop. As iffing.

Devilin'

It's that big.

A while ago, at least for those who grew up when Coleman Hawkins was alive, The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz surveyed the circumference of jazz. I can remember sitting in my room nexta the rekkid playa trynta to put every note of songs like "Harlem Air Shaft" to memory in case I wore the groove flat and I could not find another copy. The collection's purpose was simple: You went in looking for giants and you found 'em.

And yet, you'd listen and no matter where you listened there was no room for Maceo Parker next to John Coltrane, or even Skip James next to Billie Holiday. For every "Lonely Woman," there were 100s of other ones not on the tracklist.

Here is where the Art Ensemble of Chicago comes in. The professors offered a course of "great black music, ancient to future." Although many saw the reference looking backward as a creator of a tradition, in my blindness, I always saw it as forward looking. I could see all around, from vaudeville and ragtime and field songs to Bootsy Collins and Malachi Thompson and Kool Herc.

In this time after, chaboy Allen Lowe*has taken 36 discs to fall short in 1950, proving that circumference a.) is too big to measure and therefore, b.) is a dangerous science. He's composed a quirky box that only sends the listener back to gaze in the fire looking for more because so much is missing, even before 1950. It's no longer about the giants; it's about all them devils living in the details.

The work of making history is really the work of making a beautiful story. Every attempt to tell the story from the beginning is never more than a story where you start out from the end. With this understanding, I take my own devilin' view of things as if there is a panhiphop tradition. That's cause there's angels in the details, angels.

So one place to begin might be at the end of 2008, where chaboy Trav @ radio WYDU has left a cookie jar of 200 tracks from the last year. There's more going on here than in any top 10. I'm'a listen for some mo angelin' tunes.

In the mean time, why'on't you stare into this fire:

• Art Ensemble of Chicago, "Nice Guys"
• Bert Williams & George Walker, "My Little Zulu Babe"
• Elzhi, "Motown 25 (feat. Royce da 5'9")"

NB: part of ongoing observations on historical syncretism and the panhiphop tradition; not to be confused with the tag "historiographers," which signifies exemplary artists whose aesthetic is made from historical syncretism then and now.

* I am amused by, but not convinced by, much of what Allen Lowe has to offer as jazz history. He is correct to check Marsalis and Burns for their errors, but he does not always correct them from any vantage point.

How Close to the Street You Gotta Be?

Chaboy John Jeremiah Sullivan published a distant autobiographical paper in Harpers. I'm not sure I understand it. The brotha confesses that he listens to blues music while he works the Oxford English Dictionary with his other hand. Therefore y'all should print it, read it and keep it in a safe place so you can come back to it.

Some of his argumentation is already clear and not much about the blues, but everything. "The problem words refused to give themselves up, but as the tape ran, the song itself emerged around them, in spite of them, and I heard it for the first time." I think we just caught him (and his friends in the American Primitive factory) in the liturgical act -- worshipping the aura of the original while listening to a rekkid. Let's not remind Jeremiah that "For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."

Next, Jeremiah trysta get Elijah Wald to redeem his sh*t. J misreads E, adding complexity to J's own misreadings, calling E out for believing that "all folk was someone else's pop." This almost catches our heroes at the crossroads where they dwell: "when the music was all but unknown, they hailed it as great, invincible American art; when people...caught on and started blabbering about it, they rushed to remind us that it was just a bunch of dance music for drunken field hands."

In the end, Jeremiah becomes the shark writah -- copies someone else's story that, though, brilliantly apropos, betrays just the point he's missing, and does it by ventriloquy. It's a long one.

"There's a moment on those discs of Gayle Dean Wardlow's interviews the ones in Revenant's Patton discs. Wardlow is talking w/ Booker miller, a minor prewar player who knew Charley Patton. And you can hear Wardlow... trying to describe the ritual of his apprenticeship to teh elder Patton. 'Did you meet him at a juke joint,' asked Wardlow, 'or on the street.' How did they find each other? It's the kind of question one would ask. 'I admired his records,' answered Brooke Miller."

So here's what's what.

1.) The distinction between primitive and artifice (or underground and crossover, or roots and mainstream, or Robert Johnson and Sam Collins, or etc., etc., etc., or original and mechanical reproduction) means more to shark listeners biting up a way to think 'til they think different. It's not a bad thing to do, but it doesn't do much unless it gets either the autobiography tag or the aesthetics tag or both.

2.) Even then we are all crossovers, even the shark listeners. Send my regrets to Nelson George (but more on that later).

In the mean time, some unnaground queenz for your soul:

• Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words Blues"
• Sister Nancy, "One, Two"
• Jean Grae, "Nonsense"

Me, I'm'a go admire some rekkids.