Through the Walls

When I was doing my MFA thing I lived in a shitty little tenement apartment in Harlem with Victor Lavalle, there we both finished the first books that would get our careers off the ground. The place was mouse infested, falling apart, and loud, but for a while it was home and a place to hide from the rest of the city in. At night though, usually at about 10pm or so, I would hear this sound through the living room walls. Somewhere in the next building over, at full volume an old record player would drop its needle down and after a few loops of scratches a melancholy song would come on that would start out sorrowful and then slowly build to agony. Even through the walls it was clearly the most beautiful thing, and the most heartbreaking. And then at the end of the song, the needle would pick up, and there would be silence for about two seconds, and then the needle would drop back at the beginning, and the song would play all over again. This audio cycle would continue until 6:30 in the following morning.

Some older man came home and drank his sorry black ass to the point where he could wallow in his own loss and misery, and then he put on that song so he could wallow some more. And then he passed out, I assume, the sound of his ruin repeating endlessly beyond him. This is what I decided. When the music stopped a few months later, I decided as well that the man (and I assumed it to be a man) had either been gentrified out of Harlem or had finally died. But I didn't know. Part of me didn't want to know. Whatever his loss, whatever wrong turn he had taken in his life, it seemed like if you knew of it the weight it would crush you as well. It was enough to imagine him reeking of Colt 45 and English Leather in his 1960s polyester thrift shop clothes, his hair dyed and greasy and showing its grey roots against too black ends, waking up to his urine stained pants in the morning in a room decorated in stained photos of flair suited men and woman with big glasses, both standing besides Lincolns and Cadillacs. But what I did wonder was, What the hell is that song?

After that, I forgot about it for a while. One time, years later, I was watching a documentary about the Stax record label, and instantly I recognized the basic sound of the band and knew my mystery song had to be a Stax song. There is a line in Drop about the music through the wall, where I cannibalized this experience for some ambient description. But besides that, there seemed nothing more to learn about it.

Then one day about two years ago I was traveling through an airport for some literati thing, just trying to make my connection, and I heard the song. I hadn't heard or thought about the thing in years but I heard that bop-bop-bop-bop beat and instantly it all came back to me. I stopped what I was doing and headed into the Starbucks it was coming out of. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was nuts when I asked desperately for the song's name pointing me towards the cd basket. The song still playing, going into its last screaming throws, I searched through their pre-packaged compilation trying to find it, but nothing there was even close. In desperation, I turned to the long line and said loudly over the airport bustle, "Does anybody know what song this is?" Most people seemed to have another answer on their minds, specifically to the question "Is this dude crazy?" One guy in the back, seeing that I was standing there waiting for an answer, said, "I think it's Otis Redding." Others agreed, although I think they would have agreed to anything to keep the line moving.

After that I went through iTunes entire Otis Redding catalog trying to find the song. I figured it was an obscure b-side, so went through everything but the greatest hits album to find it. I'm glad I did this, not because it was faster (it turned out the song was #1 of the "Best of" album), but because I fell in love with Otis Redding's music utterly and completely in that brief time.

This is the song, Otis Redding's "These Arms of Mine":



If this was a fair universe, all men would be able to sing like Otis Redding when they wanted to, when they needed to. Not to diss Marvin Gaye, or Teddy Pendergrass or whatever brother is your favorite crooner, but Otis Redding sang like a man. Utterly strong but completely vulnerable, smooth without affectation, without restraint but still like he could carry the world in his big brown hands. Sensitive and heartfelt and masculine all at the same time.



Fuck Elvis, I want to impersonate this man.

Music in My Head- #1

I didn't know who Elliot Smith was when he was alive. I never heard him until someone burned me a copy of the Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack, and there was "Needle in the Hay." By then he was already dead.

St. Ides? Do they even make that shit anymore? And if they did, what kind of white boy would drink that poison and also sing about it on an acoustic guitar? But that's part of the excitement here: the improbable mix of folk sensibilities with Bukowskian darkness and hip hop bravado.

If you listen to this live recorded version of "St. Ides Heaven," you can hear how thin Elliot Smith's voice was, how weak. Based on this, Smith's use of multiple layering of his voice for his studio albums makes sense. For a minute, I was disappointed that his voice was so small, and off tune. But then beauty of it hit me: even the ugliest, screeching little malcontent can sound like an angel if given enough time and attention, which Smith gets in the album version of this song:

The moon is a light bulb breaking
It'll go around with anyone
But it won't come down for anyone

The first line of this stanza is brilliant, and the way he sings it lets it resonate for you. The second and third lines though, those are the killers: the fact that he gets away with the word repetition just by being intentional and profound.

This music tells me that it is okay to be insolent and malformed in this world, that a constant smile is more horrific than the worst frown. That life is finite and it is better to live openly disdainful of its limitation that to cow before the inevitable.

As for Hip Hop

"As for hip hop - it died a long time ago but has not yet been put to rest. The positive aspirations of ghetto youth 's creation has become clouded with disillusion. The disillusion is fueled by corporate dollars and influence. What we've created as something to free ourselves from the bondage of poverty has been exploited and regurgitated returning to us as a monster destroying our seeds. We need to look beyond hip hop. Allow the youth to redefine who they are. Hip hop was our music like rock n’ roll was our parents. The images projected of us is not who we are. We need to redefine ourselves and our direction. This is why I produce images such as The Osiris Project. We need an alternative. The universe is vast. We can be Heroes and Heroines as opposed to bitches and hoes, pimps and playas. Look at our children and everyone you know. There is no individuality, robots one and all. Who's running the program?" —Nomzee, April 2007

One of the truly nice things that has emerged from my foray onto Myspace has been that I have been reunited with a several old and dear friends that I have lost contact with over the years, or simply don't get to say hi to nearly as much as I'd like. Add to this list my boy Norm from back in the day.

Norm and I skated in the same pack in high school, partied in the same crew moving on into young adulthood, and came of age in the same Native Tongues-inspired positive hip hop age. The last time I saw Norm I was a sophomore at West Chester College, a state school right outside of town, and he was an aspiring artist, taking classes at the local art college back downtown. Then he went out to Cali and that was the last I heard of him. Till I joined up on Myspace. Going through the site of another old friend from the era, and there was Norm.

Crazy thing is, despite the years and lack of communication, the direction that Norm took artistically and intellectually seem to me strikingly similar to my own. Norm, or now Nomzee, creates art of the type that has been called Lowbrow Art or Pop Surrealism, which uses common pop imagery from such things as comics and advertising, and manipulates it in ways that are informed but also free form. Pop surrealism at its best strives to make sophisticated art that can be appreciated by all people, not just art connoisseurs. Specifically, Nomzee's work seems to tap into the id of black American culture, twisting the images of our subconscious in ways that are comic and playful and through distortion ultimately give us a clearer vision of ourselves than any plain mirror could muster. In literature, through satire and surreal riffs, I'm trying to do the same thing.

Even more relevant in a larger generational sense, I was fascinated to see Nomzee's above riff on hip hop. My growing estrangement from my once beloved hip hop culture has been something I have been torn and embarrassed about. Even in my most intense moments of hip hop loathing, my boys from back in the day sit on my shoulders and tell me not to succumb to the hateration conspiracy. I can't tell you how much of a relief it is to see that in reality those actual boys are evolving past the ruin that our beloved art form has become as well.

on The Roots, Philly, and Black Boho Identity

In 1991, my cousin Ben lived in South Philadelphia at Fourth and Monroe, in a little townhouse shell that my aunt has long since abandoned. I still lived in the neighborhood I was born in, Germantown, but to get to my cousin’s house I had to walk from Market East Station at the Gallery II, heading straight down 10th to South Street, and then cutting up the alley of East Passyunk, right past Fifth Street. I spent years hanging out at the former Spike's Skates on that block before it closed, so knew the landscape pretty well. Right there on the corner there used to be a florist, and after 3pm they would dump the day-old flowers right in the back, and I’d long made it a habit to go through the pile to see what was salvageable. So one day, I was heading right past this exact spot and I saw that instead of the day’s trash on the curb there was this gang of dudes, about 20 of them, hovering around nervously, pacing in circles around this white boy tuning an upright bass and chubby dude who was piecing together a drum set. I paused, sat down on a curb across the street and waited as well, just curious. And then they started jamming. And I started listening. And I’ve been listening ever since.

Everybody else around the way heard The Roots too, or The Square Roots as they were calling themselves at the time. They were raw and crude, but in the sense of raw materials and crude oil. Even then, they were that good. Even in those first moments, in those first days, they sounded like the stars they were for the moment pretending to be. Even more, they sounded like Philly. They sounded like the world I knew, a surprisingly sophisticated, urbane, neo-soul black bohemian culture. That Philly could contain such a vibe may not seem like a stretch now, but this was before The Roots changed everything. Jill Scott wasn’t a diva; she was just that cool (and slender) sister who always read the sex poems Friday nights at October Gallery. King Britt was just the DJ who spun at Silk City on Monday nights and worked at Tower Records on the weekdays. I didn’t know Kindred, Bilal, or Musiq Soulchild even existed.

Back on that street corner on, their backpacks still on and actually filled with books they needed for high school, it was clear they were articulating something that hadn’t been heard before. I couldn’t count how many of them were rapping, but I did notice that there was this one little dark-skin cat that consistently rocked it, whom the others returned the mic to like he owned it. I came back a couple of times in the weeks that followed, and they were out there fairly often, rocking that corner like they were paying rent. Their crowds were clearly growing, too. One day not long after the first, there was a rumor in the crowd that someone had hired them to perform at a wedding for three hundred bucks. At the moment, that seemed to me to be such a high level of accomplishment.

Not long after this, I left Philly to go to college out in the Midwest, and when I tried to contact Cricket, their early manager, I found out that the band had left for Germany to record a cd. When I heard that, that seemed like it: if it were possible for any of us from Philly to make it on a national level, it would be The Square Roots. With all of their skills and originality, if they couldn’t make it then none of us could. Their talent was undeniable, so if they were denied we all would be. I included myself in that estimation. The album came back from Europe with them, Organix, with a low budget black cd cover that got passed around thoroughly long before it hit the stores. “On the actual, I swings like I'm Satchel/And brings groovy things to my peoples on the natural,” Tariq wrapped with Amir’s drum snapping behind the words and that was exactly the sound that I heard the first time on Passyunk. They captured it.

But it looked like nobody outside of the black boho scene in Philly really cared. The album got barely any play on Power 99, or the only other black station at the time, WDAS. I heard more cars drive by in Germantown rocking it on their cd players than I did on the radio. So for a while, I thought that was it. Judgment from the universe. Then their deal from DGC Records came through and it looked as if they would get a reprieve from obscurity. This new album actually had a budget behind it. There was this butter Philly jawn I was trying to talk to, and one of our first dates was cancelled because she ended up working till 3am designing the cover for one of first Roots singles, “Proceed.” I was salty, but I was also eager to hear the LP, so I got over it.

In 1994 though, I found myself in London, stuck in a disastrous relationship with a different woman, a relationship that I desperately wanted to work despite all evidence it was rightfully doomed. Emotionally exhausted, disconnected from my own roots and hometown, I managed to get tickets to see The Roots perform in the U.K.’s Camden (very different from Camden, NJ) for a concert put together by Straight No Chaser magazine. As much as I loved London, I had no family in that world, no friends that knew me from back in the day, no real connections, and at this hard time I was feeling the effects of that. I entered that theater a damaged and wounded man, disconnected and reeling. Waiting through the other acts, I stared down at the stage from the balcony until finally they appeared—it was only three years later, and there were those same dudes from the corner, now on the world stage. And for the length of their performance, I was home again. Not just in Philly, but also in a world where I existed and mattered. They actually did the song that my past crush had worked on the LP design for, “Proceed,” and for a moment I felt the strength to do just that. The nightmare relationship I was in took another four months to truly hit the wall, but that breather, that moment to collect myself, helped me gather the strength to make it through that period and get beyond.

Last weekend, I finally watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and saw the guys from The Roots, and Jill, and thought about this. I read a review of Block Party that criticized Chappelle for having such minor acts such as The Roots, Jill Scott, and Erykah Badu instead of Jay-Z, Beyonce, and other A-list black musical guests. I knew immediately that this writer was not a part of our community, nor had any real understanding of it. That is what that movie was about, community. Black artists who do sophisticated work invariably find the majority of their audience to be, as Amir eloquently put it in the film, “People who don’t look like us.” The result of this is that we rarely get to be in environments where we are the majority, where we control the reality, where we are completely at home.

Writing prose is probably the most solitary of artistic endeavors. I create my art alone, and in silence, and my audience receives my art in much the same way. And though I have been successful in my field, mine is a small small audience as well. Writing, unlike comedy or popular music, is not greatly appreciated by this society, regardless of ethnicity. I go on tour every couple of years, meet those few people who come out to say hi, but besides that I have no connections to my audience, and rarely any with most of my literary peers. I have almost no connection with other artists of my caste and age in other mediums either. Along with Vic LaValle, I hung out with Mos Def once—a huge Victor LaValle fan—but that’s about it. Mos is an avid reader, and as such a rarity. I have never hung out with dancers, musicians, visual artists, or comedians of the larger black bohemian world. As a result, the artistic community I belong to is largely in my head, on my laptop, and in my iPod. Both of my novels have been in part about that: creating a community on the page, asserting the boundaries of my internal world. In the creation of my voice, I owe as much to The Roots in their articulation of that Philadelphia reality as I do to many of the literary giants I tried to emulate. That’s true regardless of the fact that no literary critic has ever identified my work as being a part of that Philly neo-soul aesthetic, nor that most of the people who were and are in that world have never read me. Still, “I shall proceed to continue to” write my books. In the hope that someday I too will find my audience out there waiting for me.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com


PS- When Vic asked Mos Def whom his favorite MC was, Mos answered in an instant: “Tariq from The Roots.” In particular, “I'm like Aquaman and Brown Hornet/I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it,” is what he quoted, nodding his head in awe.

PS-PS- that "butter Philly jawn" that stood me up to work on The Roots LP and I hooked back up five years later. She said yes when I asked her to marry me. As I write this, our three kids rock to Phrenology.

MF Grimm, MF Doom, and the Aftermath of Hip Hop

My boy Victor LaValle sent me this rather amazing piece on MF Grimm:

Voice Article Here

We both met Grimm at NYC Comicon '06. Grimm is also doing a graphic novel at Vertigo, illustrated by the amazing Ron Wimberly who did my covers for Papa Midnite. I found Grimm to be very polite, humble, but also a clearly weighted soul—and I'm not just saying that because of his wheelchair.

The Voice essay is about his life, but in Grimm's life you can also see a clear metaphor for the aftermath of hip-hop culture. The normalization of the inner-city drug epidemic, the acceptance of sociopathic violence, the immorality of the music industry: all of the ills of the hip hop era are visible here in the experiences MF Grimm has endured.

And in his more famous friend, MF Doom, we see the continuing damages pop culture success can have on African American mental health. Although I really enjoy Doom's music, it seems from his interview that the brother has lost his mind.

When future generations look back on us, will we be revered for the creative brilliance of hip hop culture? Or will be judged for our general inaction against the mysogyny, violence, materialism and minstrel shows the hip hop movement has produced so much of? I really don't know.

There are some among us who still dismiss the latest wave of criticism of hip hop from the generation of the New Black Aesthetic as proof that the old heads have really gotten old. But perhaps it's something else. Perhaps it is just that we, the first descendents of hip hop, are the first generation fully qualified to be critical of it. Our problem, therefor, is not that we oldheads "don't get it." Rather, our problem is that we do.