Found Object -- Old Time

• Floyd Gordon, unknown title or date. Found rolling in the back woods of the dirty dirty.
  

We never quite know what to do with this kind of picturing of the old south. The brovah, who stands above most of this work for his strong views of the city & storybook colorism, consistently traffics in nostalgia, and we're asking ourselves whether that's a bad thing. It may be a very different kind of unnaground that he's walking through, and while he's busy resurrecting what he wishes happened, we're walking the streets doing only the same and wishing for the wrong things.

I would ask the queen of the blues what she thinks, but only after Dust Tracks. She might have the right thing to say.

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 Down

The route to the unnaground is sacred. A book of prayer, like Nik Cohn's Tricksta, can teach us a part of the way.

Tricksta is a book that plays out loose threads of undisentangled, troubling fabric of writing about the panhiphop tradition. He's walking up and down the twelve steps bookwide like they were piano keys and he was Fats Domino, coming back as himself after he can no longer tell up from down. As scholar junky emeritus, or as a character in his own after the fact cash in version of Spike Lee's requiem, it is his willingness to describe the crossroads as the up and down, as well as east and west, and his own play it out as a failed Lazarus that makes the book as lively as it is.

We pour a little liquor on the ground for him and load a couple of bullets in the clip.

• "Hyena Stomp," Jelly Roll Morton. Massively sacred 2n that we'll be seeing again and again on the pages of this commonplace.
• "Rum and Coke," Professor Longhair. The Dr. walks w/ his chicken in his hand. Chea.

Tricksta is not a map of New Orleans. But it is a full clip pointed at the unnaground. No map to the unnaground is complete. And of course they don't have a way in or out.

P E A C E

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.