I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAVE-Tiny Desk Concert #908 (November 8, 2020).

Usually if you go by a mononym, your name is unique.  This British rapper goes by “Dave,” which seems rather bold since it’s hardly unique.  It also seems like it would be very hard to find in a search engine.

Perhaps the understated name applies to his understated delivery.  He has a lot of great things to say, but he’s not grandiose about how he says them.

He also seems very nervous (you don’t mind if I steal one of these waters, do you?).

 Dave made a special trip all the way from the UK just for his Tiny Desk performance. If that isn’t proof that it was a big deal, his nervousness before the show confirmed it. But he powered through in a performance that puts his gift for making the personal political on full display.

“Location” is first.  Tashera Robertson sings the introduction. There’s quiet but somewhat complex guitar work from Markelle Abraham.  Daves’ rapping is very understated almost quietly rhymes.  His delivery is almost mumbly because it is so quiet, but her remains clear.

He shares the inspiration behind the aptly-titled song “Black” from his opus of a debut. “It’s just about the black British experience,” he says. “Everyone’s experience of being black is a little bit different, but this is my take on it. I wanted to deliver it to the world and here it is for you guys.”

“Black” starts with a spooky piano melody Aaron Harvell and a very simple drum beat Darryl Howell based around rim shots.  The bass from Thomas Adam Johnson punctuates the melody.  There’s cool scratching sounds from Abraham on the guitar which add a spooky texture.  Robertson sings backing oohs and ahhs.

But the lyrics are fantastic

Look, black is beautiful, black is excellent
Black is pain, black is joy, black is evident
It’s workin’ twice as hard as the people you know you’re better than
‘Cause you need to do double what they do so you can level them

…

With family trees, ’cause they teach you ’bout famine and greed
And show you pictures of our fam on their knees
Tell us we used to be barbaric, we had actual queens
Black is watchin’ child soldiers gettin’ killed by other children
Feelin’ sick, like, “Oh shit, this could have happened to me”

…

Black is growin’ up around your family and makin’ it
Then being forced to leave the place you love because there’s hate in it

…

Her hair’s straight and thick but mine’s got waves in it
Black is not divisive, they been lyin’ and I hate the shit
Black has never been a competition, we don’t make this shit

…

Black is my Ghanaian brother readin’ into scriptures
Doin’ research on his lineage, findin’ out that he’s Egyptian
Black is people namin’ your countries on what they trade most
Coast of Ivory, Gold Coast, and the Grain Coast
But most importantly to show how deep all this pain goes
West Africa, Benin, they called it slave coast

…

Black is like the sweetest fuckin’ flavour, here’s a taste of it
But black is all I know, there ain’t a thing that I would change in it

The song builds slow and dramatically with more guitar work as Dave’s delivery gets more powerful.  It’s really intense.

But the climax here comes near the end, when Dave takes a seat at the piano to accompany himself while rapping his 2018 hit, “Hangman.” In the moment before he plays the opening keys, he pauses to take a breath before channeling the weight of the world through his fingers.

“Hangman” is more of the intense personal political storytelling.  His delivery is so perfect for this power of his lyrics.  This song has a few extra musical elements–some cool bass lines and guitar fills.  It also has an instrumental interlude at the end which allows Robinson to sing wordlessly.

I’m not sure if he has earned his mononym, but it’s a great show.

[READ: April 30, 2020] Bitter Root

I was drawn to this book by the outstanding cover art.  A 1920s era family dressed to the nines standing around a robot-like creature.  It’s sort of steampunk, but with a Harlem Renaissance twist,

In the essays in the back, the style of this book is described with a bunch of awesome phrases: cyberfunk (black cyberpunk), steamfunk (black steampunk) and dieselfunk (black dieselpunk).  There’s also EthnoGothic and ConjurePunk.

This story starts in 1924 indeed, during the Harlem Renaissance.

The story opens with music and dancing in full swing until something terrifying happens.

Next we see some police officers.  The black officer saying that “these people” give me the creeps.  A white police officer says “these people?” and the black officer says “The Sangeyre family ain’t my people. My people don’t mess with this mumbo jumbo.”

So then we meet the Sangeyre family.  Blink Sangeyre says she doesn’t like it that the police just bring them to their store. But Ma Etta Sangeyre says it’s better they bring them in before the kill someone.

We cut to the roof where Berg Sangeyre, a very large man with a wonderfully expansive vocabulary says “Cullen, might I offer you a bit of sagacious insight to your current predicament.  My assistance would hardly prove heuristic to your cause.”

Cullen Sangeyre is a skinnier, younger gentleman and he is fighting a bright red, horned demon known as the “Jinoo.”

Back downstairs, Blink says she wants to go up and help but Ma Etta says fighting is man’s work.  Men have the brawn and women have the brains.  I was concerned that this story was going to be gender restrictive, but she follows up with “Women only fight when there’s no other option.”

There are wonderfully drawn close up profiles of her and later of Ma Etta–Sanford Greene is an amazing artist.

Blink asserts that there is no other option, so she heads to the roof and takes care of the Jinoo.

We cut to a scientist, in San Juan Hill, west of Harlem. Doctor Sylvester and his assistant Miss Knighstdale.  He says they are running out of serum and need the Sangeyre on their side.

Cut back to the Sangeyre who inject a serum into the Jinoo and the demon calms down.

The story cuts to Mississppi where a bunch of hooded dickheads are chanting “hang ’em” at a black man. Things are getting very close when one of the Klansmen says “You need to know your place, Boy.”  I was really concerned that there was going to be a lynching in this story and revenge would come after.

Happily, someone was there to stop it a man wit a large gun. Ford Sangeyre says “Wrong. If anyone needs to know their place it’s you.  And I’m sending all of you to your place.  Straight to hell.”  YES!

Only one Klansman is spared, Johnnie-Rae Knox.  The others have turned into some kind of demon. The living peckerwood yells at the “black bastard” and says “you killed my folks, boy.”

Ford: “Don’t ever call me Boy.  And if these are your folks, maybe I best take care of you, like I took care of your folks.”  The Peckerwood recants his association saying he doesn’t really know them and that he ain’t never lynched anyone.

Ford says if you never spilled any blood then you ain’t infected.”  He tells Johnnie-Rae Knox to keep his soul clean.  When Knox says he might know where some more of the monsters are, Sangeyre says to get in the van.

Back in Harlem, Berg is out in the wilds when he is attacked by a creature–not a Jinoo, this is more birdlike and it has infected Berg.  The creature returns to Doctor Sylvester.  It is Knightsdale.

Chapter 3 opens with a fantastic multi-page scene with action happening in three locations simultaneously (I love the way this was done).

In Harlem, police are looking for a killer.  In the Sangeyre house, they are trying to contain Berg and in Mississippi they have found a Confederate general–a real nasty racist piece of shit who is all monster underneath.

Ford deal with this general: A Jinoo is a man with a corrupted soul. This here is a devil pretending to be a man. Killing the devil is very satisfying.

Back in Harlem it turns out the police (not the two we saw earlier, the rest of the force) are actually Jinoo too.

Meanwhile Berg is so bad off that Cullen goes to find Uncle Enoch, a disgraced member of the famliy.  No one has talked to him for years, but of course Enoch will help Berg.

In an ensuing battle (so many battles) Cullen is pulled into a void.

The family assumes it is the end up him but later in the battle he falls out of the sky.  He is with Nora, Blink’s mother. Which is impossible because everyone saw her die–pulled into the abyss like Cullen in an earlier battle.

Nora apologizes for being gone so long as the book ends.

Wow, what an exciting story and such a great idea underlying everything.  I can’t wait to read more (and to read this one again).

This book concludes with several scholarly essays

First an essay from writers Chuck Brown and David F. Walker who talk about horror stories and how “one of the greatest horrors we face is racism.  It is an ignorant, vile, vicious monster that lurks inhumanity’s past, present and sadly, in our future.  Bitter Root takes this monster and gives it a face and a body and an uncontrollable desire to kill.

There’s quotes from Toni Morrison (from Beloved), W.E.B. DuBois, Ntozake Shange and James Baldwin.

Then an essay entitled “Deep Roots / Rich Soil: Race, Horror and the Ethnogothic” by John Jennings (a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California).  He discusses the return of Afrofuturism (in this incarnation as Afrofutirism 2.0) or since these stories have components of the supernatural and the spectral with decidedly surrealist elements, they coined the term “EthnoGothic.”

Another essay called “The Root of the Matter: Rootwork and Conjure in Black Popular Culture” by Kinitra Brooks.  She explain that Conjure is “a magical tradition in which spiritual power is invoked for various purposes, such as healing, protection, and self-defense.”  In this graphic novel, Ma Etta is a Conjurewoman, a woman learned in the pharmaceutical art of rootwork.  Much of the arcane knowledge of Conjurewomen has been lost.  But many scholars and historians are looking to find what has been eschewed and treated with disdain.

In “When Locke was Key” Jennings talks about how white Americans looked at black Americans more like a shadow than a real person: “The amount of self-delusion it must take to create something as fictitious as the technology of race, and its index is nothing short of herculean.”  How to unmake the lies?  Alain LeRoy Locke believed that stories of black people and the art of black people were symbols of their humanity.  The New Negro attempted to show a spectrum of black experiences because while the white race was never judged as a whole by the actions of one, to be black in America is to be an index for all blackness. But it is important to emphasize that black joy is a radical notion too.

“Blood and the Rut” by Regina N. Bradley celebrates Zora Neale Hurston and the idea that blood at the ruts (or roots) applyies ancestral power, magic and prayer as a way of connecting to the land.

John Jennings continues the celebration of Hurston in “Genius of the South: Thinking of Mother Zora.”  He emphasizes a never before published (until 2018) interview that Hurston conducted in 1927 with Kossola Cudjoe Lewis, the last survivor of the last slave ship which brought him and 115 African slaves to Alabama illegally.  “How amazingly sad that this story is still so relevant in a still racially divided Unites States.”  The interview is called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” with an introduction by Alice Walker.

In “Skin, Skin, Don’t You Know Me?” Qiana Whitted tells of the Gullah folklore about the Boo Hag, a figure that draws its life force from a sleeping person’s breath.  The Boo Had is often described as a skinless woman.  She speaks of EC Comics in the 1950s and how they created empathetic horror stories and social protest comics “that dramatize the absurdity of assigning arbitrary characteristics and biological traits to race, often through plots that conceal the skin color of black characters and which leave white racists outraged upon the reveal.

See “In Gratitude…” or “Blood Brothers” from Shock SuspenStories and “Judgment Day!” which features a reveal that shocked everyone.

This legacy continues in black speculative writers like Jeremy Love, John Jennings, Taneka Stotts, Victor LaValle, Shaneé and Shawnelle Gibbs and Ezra Clayton Daniels.

In “Building Black Utopia” Stacey Robinson talks about “Black Wall Street,” the Greenwood section of Tulsa Oklahoma, which was an affluent and ever-growing Black-community self-sufficent in more regards than any Black American neighborhood today with social growth and no police brutality.  This community which had been forced into segregation flourished to become the brightest example of collective Black wealth inside of colonial America. It was then destroyed one hundred years ago in the Tulsa Race Riot.  Greenwood was Wakanda in real-time, a shining contradiction to the narrative that says Black people can’t unify, govern and prosper.  What the hell is wrong with racists?

“Roots, Risk and Resilience” by Ceeon D. Quiett Smith explores the risk and mitigation of migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban cities so the north. Migrating families faced isolation and criticism among African Americans in the North. But the Harlem Renaissance is an example of a community resilience.  By 1910 African Americans had become the majority in Harlem and by 1920 Harlem had emerged as a capital of black America.

Finally, in “A ConjurePunk Aesthetic at the Root” Jennings talks about the new terms coined above an says that whether it’s digital, steam-based, or diesel-powered apparatuses, conjure and rootwork stands the test of time because of its oral and culturally situated basis.  He notes that Jamaican born, Canadian bred speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson is the godmother of this form.  Another pioneer is Ishmael Reed’s notion of “NeoHoodoo.”

This graphic novel was excellent and these essays were so informative–opening my eyes to so many things that I didn’t know.

I love being given this list authors to look up to encourage the rise of a criminally persecuted people.