Red,
Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics
Even Thomas Jefferson had
suggested that a solution to the problem of American slavery might involve a
repatriation of Negroes to Africa. In the early nineteenth century, the
American Colonization Society pursued this approach, which eventuated in the
founding of the Republic of Liberia in 1822. Both Jefferson and the colonization movement were explicitly
racist, holding that white and black folks could not live together
successfully. Indeed, the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote a
book attacking the colonizationists as racists and slavers, but even such
statesmen as Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln entertained the idea seriously. It
is not surprising that the idea also captured the imagination of some
African-Americans: after all, their emigration from Africa had not been
voluntary. In the spirituals and church services of American slaves,
"Zion" or "the promised land" of the Israelites became
implicitly identified with Africa. A number of black repatriation movements,
such as those of Henry McNeal Turner and Chief Alfred Sam, took some hold in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And even in the twentieth
century, there was some contact between black separatists and white racists:
Marcus Garvey endorsed segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo's repatriation
bill in the late thirties, and persistent rumors had black nationalist leaders
- including elements of the Garvey movement and the Nation of Islam - meeting
with members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party to try to institute the
physical separation of the races.
The Marcus Garvey
movement of the teens and twenties of the twentieth century is often called the
largest organization of African diaspora peoples until that point. And it is
often regarded, as well, as a failure: it dissolved in the financial meltdown
of Garvey's Black Star shipping line and in a vendetta against Garvey by the
American government, spearheaded by J. Edgar Hoover, issuing in Garvey's imprisonment
and deportation. But though it never gave rise to an enduring mass movement or
repatriated significant parts of the diaspora to Africa, it had infinitely rich
ramifications, specifically in religion and the arts. In the Caribbean, one
result of Garveyism was the religion of Rastafari, which informs the whole
history of Jamaican recorded music: most famously, of course, the roots reggae
of Bob Marley, the first third world superstar and a symbol of liberatory hope
and marijuana abuse, already, for generations. In North America, Garveyism gave
rise, among many other things, to the Nation of Islam and the ministry and
political organization of Malcolm X, as well as the 5 Percenters, or Nation of
Gods and Earths, which have influenced American music to a surprising extent.
The importation of Jamaican musical practices into New York resulted in the
musical style known as hip hop: like reggae, a major dimension of world music
ever since, with political as well as aesthetic ramifications.
Though music has been
the most recognizable heritage of Garveyite black nationalism, that political
movement has all possible aesthetic expressions, which in turn make connections
between religious, political, and aesthetic spheres in an exemplary way. Indeed
these spheres are indistinguishable on the ground, a fact that black
nationalism displays continuously. Garvey himself developed the red, gold, and
green (and sometimes black) black nationalist flag and color scheme; if one
walks down the street of any city in the world, one is likely to catch a
glimpse of it on people's clothing. Indeed, he wielded color per se as an
artpolitical weapon, celebrating "blackness" and trying to change its
valence in Western arts and imagery as a symbol of ignorance and annihilation;
the Nation of Islam and many others have developed this theme systematically.
Garvey denounced hair straightening and skin bleaching products then marketed
to black people, a theme later taken up by Malcolm X and others, and developed
an aesthetic of the Negro body as a political site. The Garvey-influenced
religions developed a series of iconographies that have likewise penetrated
everywhere, from the Lion of Judah to the faces of Malcolm and Marley to the
esoteric symbolism of the 5 Perecent Nation. Hairstyles such as dreadlocks and
even the Afro (and hence, e.g., the "Jewfro") derive from the same
sources. Whole minor languages, such as the "Dread Talk" of
Rastafarianism as well as hip hop slang, have remade the poetry and the
vernacular of English and other languages. Graffiti, associated with hip hop,
has changed the physical environment of cities and been appropriated into
advertising and typestyles.
The Garvey
movement coincided closely with the Harlem renaissance, and its themes were
mirrored by many figures in that movement, notably Zora Neale Hurston (also a
Garvey skeptic), Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, and many others. Langston
Hughes developed what might be thought of as a Black nationalist poetics:
"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark selves
without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are
not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."
This statement was welcomed ecstatically by, among others, Garvey's wife, the
activist Amy Jacques Garvey.
The vernacular literature of Hughes, Claude McCay, Jean Toomer, and others was
the literary embodiment of black pride and a celebration of black dialect.
1.
Race Theory and Ethiopianism
Though Marcus Garvey was
born in Jamaica (in 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, the same area from which Marley
originated) and spent a good deal of time in Panama and elsewhere while ater
influencing anti-colonialism in Africa, it was of course in the United States
and specifically in Harlem that he caught the imagination of hundreds of
thousands of people in the late 1910s and early 1920s. He did this with a
racialist rhetoric that derived in turn from German nationalism and the thought
of such nineteenth-century racialist thinkers as Gobineau, who taught that each
race of man had a particular origin and a particular destiny, embodied in its
thought, its politics, and above all in its arts. In Gobineau and in the black
nationalism that made use of this tradition (for example, the early thought of
W.E.B. DuBois), the concepts of "race" and "nation" were
run together: race might be conceived as the biological trace of national
geography, expressed in mythology and literature (as captured, for example, by
the Grimm brothers in relation to German nationalism). Each race had its spirit
or genius, its contribution to make to world civilization. Indeed, one way to
characterize much of the thought, particularly in Germany, that segued from
Enlightenment to romantic, was its enthusiasm for collective consciousness, present
in such extreme degrees in Rousseau, Hegel, Herder, and Marx, for example, that
the locus of consciousness is removed from the individual human body and lodged
in collective entities, including nations and races. It is this thought - of
historical actors smeared over many human bodies and generations - that
articulates the idea of race that was wielded as a weapon in genocides, but
also in movements of resistance and autonomy. The arts of a given people, race,
era, and so on, became one conspicuous and decodable expression of its
collective consciousness. Such a thought drives even an "empirical"
or scientific program to the present, and stands at the origin of anthropology.
The black race, or
"the Negro," or the nation(s) of Africa were often conceived in this
structure to be repositories of a particularly aesthetic consciousness, a
thought fully expressed by Gobineau. Obviously, racial theory of this type -
racialism, for short - is potentially racist, and every stereotype of every
people - including every negative stereotype of black people, is inscribed
somewhere in the various expressions of the theory. But just as obviously,
there are resources in racialism for a reversal, as DuBois's (from here)
bewildering 1897 essay "Conservation of the Races" makes clear.
(DuBois had been educated, in part, in Germany.)
The history of the world is the history,
not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who
ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and
overrides the central thought of all history. What, then, is a race? It is a
vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of
common history, traditions, and impulses, who are both voluntarily and
involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less
vividly conceived ideals of life.
This
is a pretty good statement of nationalism as applied to race, though DuBois
distinguishes the two. It might almost be a quotation from Herder. If every
race has a destiny, then every race finds a justification for its intrinsic
identity in the unfolding of world history. When black folks turned this notion
to account, the result was often termed "Ethiopianism," based on the
historical use of "Ethiopia" essentially to mean Africa as a whole,
and on the Biblical passage "princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia
shall soon stretch out her hand to God" (Psalms 68:31). This passage was
quoted or paraphrased in African-American writing at latest by the early nineteenth
century. For the Rastafarians, it made particularly vivid the crowning of Haile
Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia as a turning point in history or a harbinger of
the judgment and the redemption of black people. The members of a given race
are supposed to have a common origin, a common character, a common message to
carry to the world, and if that were so, it should be a matter of pride to
black folks to be black.
DuBois, in Souls
of Black Folk finds this
expressed in the American Negro especially in music. He called Negro spirituals
"the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet
born on American soil."
Even Frederick Douglass - who had little time for the cosmic essentialist
theories of race - had said much the same thing. This is both a stereotype and
a reversal of the stereotype or its strategic deployment in a liberatory
ideology, typical of almost all black appropriations of racialist theory: the
music of Africa and the African diaspora - captured in the image of the talking
drum and in the notion of natural rhythm and ability to dance, along with an
accompanying innate religious faith, soul, or religiosity - was both a limitation and a
liberation, a contribution of the Negro to the world, like the supposedly
innate philosophical consciousness of the Teutons or the commercialism of the
Anglo-Saxons. "Black Nationalism" makes use of race theory as a way
to unify black folks, and in particular it imagines for them a nation, a common
origin in Africa, from which unfolds a common destiny embodied in its cultural
expressions, often crystallized in the concept of repatriation. These
expressions are sources of pride, but also potentially vehicles of cultural
construction, ways to forge a unity among, in this case, a despised, enslaved,
and exploited people: the suggestion of a glorious destiny even in the midst of
a degraded history.
Garvey managed to
wield this thought in an unprecedented mobilization of the black race; he did
it with great dignity, accessibility, and flair: wielded racialist theory as a
potent form of liberatory propaganda aimed at average black folk of the
Americas. Here, from a speech Garvey gave at the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) convention of 1924, is a characteristic formulation of black
nationalism that formulates the common denominators of all such movements in
the twentieth century, secular and religious.
There is only one thing to save the
Negro, and that is an immediate realization of his own responsibilities. . .
.We are shiftless and irresponsible, and that is why we find ourselves wards of
an inherited materialism that has lost its soul and its conscience. It is
strange to hear a Negro leader speak in this strain, as the usual course is
flattery, but I would not flatter you to save my own life. . . . The jail does
not make a criminal, the criminal makes himself. . . . The Negro wants a
nation, nothing less, nothing more, and why shouldn't we be naturally free,
nationally unfettered? We want a nationality similar to that of the English,
the French, the Italian, the German, to that of the white American, to that of
the yellow Japanese; we want nationality and government because we realize that
the American nation in a short while will not be large enough to accommodate
two competitive rivals, one black and the other white. . . . As we deliberate
on the many problems confronting us . . . let us not lose control of ourselves;
let us not forget that we are the guardians of four hundred millions; let us
not forget that it is our duty to help humanity everywhere, whether it be black
or white. . . So, let no prejudice cause us to say or do anything against the
interest of the white, or the yellow man; let us realize that the white man has
a right to live, the yellow man has a right to live, and all that we desire to
do is to impress upon them the fact that we also have a right to live.
This
is an inspiring and decent vision, and Garvey made it literally inspiring in
part by pointed, self-conscious, and eclectic spectacle. The images of Garveyism
are above all Garvey himself in grand Napoleonic uniform - as Wilson Jeremiah
Moses describes it, Garvey "affected the airs of an Austrian
archduke" - and the
street parade that combined oratory, music, mass participation, and spectacular
clothing into a racial/martial/celebratory festival. He configured symbolisms
of Africa, of Masonism, of religion, of science and medicine, of circus into
coherent syntheses that called forth an ecstasy of celebratory identification.
Garvey's was a political aesthetics of genius, the ramifications of which we
still inhabit.
Garvey himself had been
raised in the Catholic church, and even as he exploited the religious elements
of his own spectacle - his image as Moses, his status as a prophet with all its
rhetorical implications, his self-forged title and uniform as Provisional
President of Africa - he was never quite comfortable declaring his movement to
be religious or to be a religion. Nevertheless he helped found the African
Orthodox Church, which remained a firmly Christian denomination, at the same
time hinting at the blackness of Jesus or even of . . . God. This was a
racialist interpretation, which even Garvey understood as symbolic. Garvey's
biographer E. David Cronon writes of the first bishop of the African Orthodox
Church, George Alexander McGuire:
From the first . . . Bishop McGuire urged
the Garveyites to 'forget the white gods.' ' Erase the white gods from your
hearts,' he told his congregation [in 1921]. 'We must go back to the native
church, to our own true God.' The new Negro religion would seek to be true to
the true principles of Christianity without the shameful hypocrisy of the white
churches. Garvey himself urged Negroes to adopt their own religion, 'with God
as a being, not as a Creature,' a religion that would show Him 'made in our own
image - black.' . . . Garvey's African Orthodox Church was able to report in
its monthly magazine, the Negro Churchman, that 'in its first year' it had 'extended its mission
through several states, into Canada, Cuba, and Hayti.' . . . During the opening
parade [of the UNIA convention of 1924] through the streets of Harlem, U.N.I.A.
members marched under a large portrait of a black Madonna and Child. . . .
'Then let us start our Negro painters getting busy,' the Bishop declared, 'and
supply a black Madonna and a black Christ for the training of our children.'
Such
paintings were, as Cronon indicates, actually produced and carried in Garveyite
parades. It is obvious that this is not the only possible response: one might
also reject Christianity in its entirety and engage in one or another form of
religious invention/repatriation. If the "white race" was associated
with Christianity - and of course Christianity had a role in the historical
oppression of black people, if also in their liberation - then the racial
genius might demand its own autonomous religious expression. Frederick
Douglass's most vituperative attack on slavery had been on the religious
hypocrisy of slavemasters who professed Christianity: "I love the pure,
peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt,
slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical
Christianity of this land."
2.
Garveyite Religions
As Garvey faded from the
scene (he died in the UK in 1940, after at least a decade of decline for his
movement), his followers began to preach various mystical interpretations of
Garveyism. Indeed the mystical aspects of race were always implicit in
racialist theory, and were exploited on the other side by Hitler and many
others. A number of astonishing scriptures that mentioned Garvey were produced
by black mystics of the twenties and thirties, such as the Holy Piby of Robert
Athlyi Rogers, an Afro-Caribbean working in Newark ("Therefore, Athlyi
yielded him a copy of the map, and declared Marcus Garvey an apostle of the
Lord God for the redemption of Ethiopia and her suffering posterities.")
We might also consider the surreal spiritual poem The Royal Parchment Scroll
of Black Supremacy by Balintine F.
Pettersburgh. The much older text of the Kebra Nagast, which narrated the story of Solomon, the Queen of Sheba,
and the religious history of Ethiopia and its line of emperors, was revived as
an ancient source for Afrocentric religion. Rather remarkably, most of the
texts of the Afrocentric religious movements emerged from the intersection of
the Caribbean and North America: Rogers came from Anguilla. He founded a church
based on his inspired scripture, which taught the destruction of Babylon and a "black
Zionism": repatriation to the promised land. Pettersburgh originated in St. Thomas. Here's a slice of The
Royal Parchment, which tradition has it
was dictated by Petterburgh in an inspired state.
THE LAW OF RESURRECTION
According to the RULE of Resurrections
(one Race) of people must go down to dishonour, and The Other to Honour.
CAUTION
Make your INDIVIDUAL way
Straight, when you are at THE head of AFFAIRS with GOD for HEAVEN DO NOT PAY,
every WEEK.
But your Due-bill is SURE for
every minute of your life. I am His and Her Majesty King Alpha and Queen Omega
The Pay Master for the Terrestrial Bar.
Black Supremacy is the Queen
of Ethiopia's Triumphant Resurrection.
Africa's DESIRE is to Rebuild
Solomon's Temple, but Solomon, is not BIG ENOUGH, nor his FATHER DAVID to
dictate to the Monarch of Dread Creation.
I am Building a World's Super
Capital for The Church Triumphant, The Black Supremacy at the World's Dam-Head.
I am the Master Builder of
Continents, and Countries, DYNASTIES and Kingdoms on this Earth PLAIN. I am The
Perfect Royal Head of This World, The Root of Creation.
King Alpha and Queen Omega,
The First and The Last.
The Pettersburgh and Rogers texts provided the basis of the first
properly Rastafarian scripture, Leonard Howell's The Promised Key.
In
the United States, one post-Garvey religious tendency, also perhaps beginning
in Newark, moved toward Islam. Some elements of Islam had been preserved in
African-American culture by slaves of North African origin, and Islam provided
an or perhaps the obvious alternative to Christianity as a monotheism that
could be associated with people of color. Black Masonism is also a connection
to Islamic ("esoteric") symbolism. An originary movement was the
Moorish Science Temple, founded in Newark and then Chicago by the Noble Drew
Ali (Timothy Drew) during the disintegration of the Garvey movement in the late
twenties (though perhaps Drew Ali had been working toward it since the
mid-1910s). The Moorish movement derived explicitly from Garveyism, and even as
it taught the flatly heretical view that Drew Ali was Allah incarnate, it
regarded Garvey as a prophet. Drew, too, had a flair for spectacle, and wore a
feathered fez that paid tribute both to the mysticism of the Middle East and to
Drew's American Indian ancestry. Drew Ali taught that "so-called American
Negroes" originated in Middle East, and that Islam was their
"natural" religion. He also produced a Garveyite scripture, The
Holy Koran of The Moorish Science Temple of America.
In these modern days there
came a forerunner, who was divinely prepared by the great God-Allah and his
name is Marcus Garvey, who did teach and warn the nations of the earth to
prepare to meet the coming Prophet; who was to bring the true and divine Creed
of Islam, and his name is Noble Drew Ali: who was prepared and sent back to
earth by Allah, to teach the old time religion and the everlasting gospel to
the sons of man.
In a structure that was repeated many times, the Moorish Science
Temple devolved into schism, with Drew dying, probably in Chicago in 1929 after
a series of schismatic shootings, while various followers claimed to be his
reincarnation, and thus Allah.
The Nation of Islam was apparently founded at around this moment by W.D.
Fard, also an incarnation of Allah, a mysterious door-to-door salesman active
in the Detroit area in the early 1930s, whose teachings were, after his
disappearance, taken up by Elijah Mohammad (Robert Poole). According to a
number of sources, Fard was one of a number of people who claimed to be the
reincarnation of Drew Ali, though the connection was denied by the Nation of
Islam. It is worth saying that all sources that connect Fard directly to Drew
Ali may derive from Arna Bontemps' and Jack Conroy's book They Seek a City, and ever since the scholars
may have been corroborating one another. Indeed, so elusive is Fard as a figure that one
might be forgiven for doubting his existence, and in a Chicago police report
from 1935, the leader of the Nation of Islam is identified as "Wallace Fard...or
Elijah Muhammad" as though these were the same person.
Whatever the case, where Drew and even Garvey had preached the equality of the
races, Elijah Muhammad preached black racial supremacy, saying that the white
race had been the result of a breeding experiment by an ancient evil scientist.
He taught also that the black race was God incarnate, and whites a race of
devils. This notion could be taken literally(sort of), or as a metaphor for the
evils that Europeans had visited upon the world: imperialism, colonialism,
slavery: in short, genocide.
The
Nation of Islam recruited widely in prisons, where it found Malcolm Little
(Malcolm X), who became its greatest preacher and organizer, an exemplar of its
severely ascetic discipline who explicitly began to apply the teachings of the
Nation to current political situations of the fifties and early sixties. Though
Muhammad also denied being influenced by Garvey, which seems ridiculous,
Malcolm's formative experiences had been in the Garvey movement, in which his
parents were fairly major figures in Detroit, and in the service of which,
according to Malcolm, his father had been executed by the Ku Klux Klan. Malcolm
left the Nation in 1964 - disillusioned by Muhammad's sexual and financial
antics - converted to orthodox Islam, and founded new religious and political
organizations. The Nation of Islam underwent a number of schisms in the sixties
and seventies, as Elijah Mohammed's son Wallace led much of the group toward
orthodox Islam. The original teachings were revived by Louis Farrakhan, a
preacher who had been trained by Malcolm, though Malcolm's family held that
Farrakhan had been involved in Malcolm's assassination.
Another Nation of Islam preacher, Clarence 13X (Clarence Smith Jowers or Father Allah), in the mid to late
1960s, founded the Five Percent Movement (five percent of us, or of them, will
be redeemed), also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths, which dispensed with
some of the ascetic and authoritarian aspects of the Nation of Islam. Indeed,
Father Allah set up headquarters in a bar (the Glamour Inn) and was known as an
excellent professional gambler. He did time in prisons and the notorious mental
hospital at Matteawan. "Gods" were black men, "Earths"
black women, while children were referred to as "Stars." The Nation
of Gods and Earths absorbed many of the texts and teachings of the Nation of
Islam, but also has as elaborate a set of teachings as any of these groups,
including systems of numerology, a mystical interpretation of the alphabet, and
a system of astrology. Starting out militant, the Five Percenters eventually
tried to bring peace to New York and worked in the late sixties with the
Lindsay administration to keep Harlem relatively calm, for example, after the
death of Marttin Luther King. Though it declined with Father Allah's shooting
death in 1969 (again, and typically, the circumstances are obscure), the Nation
of Gods and Earths revived dramatically in the seventies and eighties, and
spread over the boroughs of New York and then all over the country. It revived
the "Circle-7" symbol of the Moorish Science Temple, adding a sun,
moon, and star motif. The Five Percenters have carried their message above all
by hip hop music, where its astonishing hermeneutics is ubiquitous and
functions almost as a cipher.
All of these groups postulated historical origins for the
"lost-found" tribe of American Negroes; all of them taught
repatriation in some form - physical, spiritual, or metaphorical; all of them
took races seriously as historical actors and preached racial pride; all of
them saw a glorious racial destiny for people of African (or perhaps ultimately
Asian) descent; all of them conducted active ministries among the poor, the
addicted, and the imprisoned; all of them, as can be seen by these themes,
venerated the memory of Marcus Garvey as a precursor, a Moses, a John the
Baptist.
During the same
period in Jamaica, a similar set of Afrocentric theological traditions
developed, in part based on indigenous and African-inspired religious systems
such as Obeah, and in part by various forms of Christian mysticism. Robert Athlyi Rogers founded a small Ethiopianist sect in
Kingston in the 1920s. Garvey returned in the late twenties after his exile
from the States, and became a major local figure in Kingston, though again
without an explicitly original religious orientation. However, Garvey had said
that a king would appear in Africa and lead black people out of their
Babylonian captivity.
In
1930, Ras Tafari Makkonen, supposedly a descendant of the biblical Queen of
Sheba, was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia: "king of kings and
lord of lords, conquering lion of the tribe of Judah." This news caught
the imagination of the entire African diaspora, including a street preacher
named Leonard Howell, a Jamaican who had known and followed Garvey both in New
York and in Kingston. According to Hélène Lee, in her remarkable book The
First Rasta,
Howell's friend Annie Harvey, who had been connected with the "black
Jews" or "Israelites" in Harlem, attended Selassie's coronation
in Addis Ababa. She brought back a photograph of Selassie "enthroned as
the Prince of Peace." Howell began to circulate copies of this photo,
along with the purported Biblical prophecies and the words of Garvey that he
connected to it on the streets of Kingston.
Howell's street ministry was the origin of Rastafarianism, which was in full
swing by the mid-1930s both in rural Jamaica (especially Saint Thomas parish on
the eastern part of the island) and in Kingston.
It was a
remarkable religion, if nothing else, for its eclecticism. It was explicitly
"Zionist," teaching that Ethiopia was the promised land and that the
diaspora would be miraculously reunited in Africa, under an interpretation of
the Hebrew Bible. Howell composed The Promised Key in prison in the
mid-thirties, incorporating passages of The Holy Piby and The Royal Parchment
Scroll of Black Supremacy, and published it under the "Hindu" name Gangunguru
Maragh, or "Gong" (Bob Marley was later known as Gong, and his record
company was Tuff Gong). Hinduism, including the cult of Kali, had been imported
into the island with Indian laborers in the mid-nineteenth century, and
provided Rastafarianism with much of its ceremonial and aesthetic, including
the use of ganja (Kali or Collie weed) as a sacrament, the dreadlocks hairstyle
- reminiscent of Indian ascetic sects - and the vegetarian diet that became
known as "ital."
In 1935
Italy invaded Ethiopia, an event easily framed as the last battle between
Babylon and Zion. Italian propaganda invented a worldwide conspiracy of black
people to kill white people, supposedly headed by Selassie and called
"Nya-Binghi." Bizarrely, when this screed was republished in Jamaica,
it became almost a scripture, and led to the founding of a more violent strand
of Rastafarianism (Howell, under the influence of Gandhi, preached
non-resistance). Eventually
'nyabinghi' became the name both of a radical Rastafarianism and of the
ceremonial drumming style (often using three drums, an African motif) used at
Rasta groundations, and subsequently of a sub-genre of reggae music that hewed
close to ceremonial styles.
In
1939, after stints in prison and the mental hospital as a political prisoner,
Howell founded a community in the hills of Saint Catherine Parish, known as the
Pinnacle, which practiced the worship of Selassie as the living god, and also
began systematizing Rastafarianism in terms of groundation ceremonies and ganja
as sacrament (also as cash crop). Perhaps 5,000 Rastas were resident in the
immediate area, according to Lee (137). The Jamaican government raided the
Pinnacle a number of times. In 1954, they destroyed more than a million
marijuana plants and seized piles of cash (Lee 189-192). In 1958 the compound
was burned. Thousands of Rastas scattered into Kingston and Spanish Town, where
they practiced their ceremonies in "yards" or small public spaces in
ghettoes such as Trench Town. Under the influence of Jamaican music, starting
in about 1960, Rasta doctrine was carried to the whole world, and gained
adherents in many places, notably Africa. Haile Selassie visited Jamaica in
1966, where he received the astonishing welcome offered to the living god. He
set aside a tract of land in Ethiopia, Shashamani, to host repatriated Rastas
and diasporic Africans. The Rasta movement faced a crisis in the seventies,
when Selassie was deposed, and when, a couple of years later, he was reported
to have died. This many Rastas regarded as impossible and as a lie of the
Babylonian media.
Like the "Black Muslim" movement, Rastafarianism taught that
Garvey was a prophet, that the black race would be carried to the promised
land, and that it had a grand historical destiny. In addition, it taught
explicitly that "Babylon" (first, the British colonial government,
then the Jamaican state, then the system of white/Western oppression as a
whole) must fall. Rastas attempted to "chant down Babylon" or
literally bring the end of the system by singing and drumming. They employed
the red, gold, black and green as a symbol of black redemption. And both north
and south, the movements were apocalyptic: they anticipated the end time.
And like
American black Islam, Rastafarianism taught (in the words of Bob Marley) that
"mighty God is a living man": that people must make their heaven or
hell on earth, now, in this life. Both African-American Islam and
Rastafarianism, that is, are, as we might put it "imminentist"
religions: they reject pure spirit and affirm the essential embodiment of both
people and god. "'The Holy One' is God in person and not a spirit!"
wrote Elijah Mohammed in Message to the Blackman in America, referring no doubt to Fard,
as Marley to Selassie: "we know and we overstand, that mighty God is a
living man."
That, of course, has revolutionary political implications, as we do not seek
redemption after death, but here and now: redemption is identified with
justice. Indeed, the spiritual orientation of Christianity was associated in
both movements with oppression: it justified patience and capitulation,
promising a reward after death. But as Peter Tosh and Bob Marley said: "If
you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth. So now we see
the light, and stand up for our rights."
3. Music
From the beginning, Rasta ceremony was marked by chanting and drumming.
And from the beginning of Jamaican recorded music, in around 1960, the Rasta
elements were central. Count Ossie, who ran a Rasta commune in eastern
Kingston, appeared on one of the first Jamaican-recorded hit songs, "O
Carolina" by the Folkes Brothers. The record was also one of the first to
move toward the beat that became known as "ska," and which has
informed a number of revivals since, such as the "Two-Tone," a
specifically interracial style of the late seventies in Britain associated with
bands such as the Specials and Madness. A later stateside ska revival in the
1990s produced a number of hit songs, as well as enduring pop stars such as No
Doubt and its singer Gwen Stefani. Indeed, members of the foundational ska
group the Skatalites, such as Dizzy Moore and the great trombonist Don
Drummond, had also played in Rasta ceremonies or "groundations" (or
"grounations"). The nyabinghi style played by Ossie, based on African-revival
"burru" drumming, probably dated from the thirties, and involved
three drums (the bass, the funde, and the repeater, African ceremonial styles),
along with whatever instruments were to hand, and chanting or spoken-word
lectures or meditations on slavery, Garvey, African repatriation, Selassie, and
so on. The best document of this style and ideology is the album
"Grounation," by Count Ossie and the Mystical Revelation of Rastafari
recorded in the early 1970's, where the connection of groundation ceremonial music
to ska, rock steady, and reggae is developed with beautiful coherence, and in
which the music is presented in conjunction with rasta prayers for peace and
brotherhood, and meditative developments of esoteric Rasta doctrine. But from
the very start, Jamaican recorded music featured recognizably Rasta themes and
drum styles, in such songs as "Babylon Gone" by Winston and Roy, and
"Another Moses," by the Mellow Cats.
Ska blended American R&B, which could be heard in Jamaica on radio
stations out of New Orleans and Miami, with a distinctive lurching beat
originally associated with a dance craze. The featured instruments were horns,
though the style was defined by its rhythm, like the styles that followed, and
began the tremendous emphasis on drum and bass that has characterized Jamaican
music - and hence the music of the world - for much of the last fifty years.
The teenaged Wailers began their career in the ska era as a vocal trio
consisting of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer. At the start,
Rastafarianism was still a controversial and repressed religion, and though
many of the musicians were involved in it to one extent or another, the Rasta
themes were for the most part slightly disguised under images of lions or
possibly-Christian spiritual motifs such as the promised land or judgment day,
traditional since Negro spirituals in slavery. Indeed, much ska was primarily
instrumental, which made thematic subterfuge otiose, and some early artists
were Christians (such as Toots and the Maytals), or even Muslim (as in the
astonishing Prince Buster). As subsequent developments would show, however,
these religious strands were not necessarily regarded by their practitioners as
ultimately incompatible, and a whole strain of Christian Rastafarianism
developed, associated with "Jesus Dread" Yabby You and the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church, to which Marley converted before his death.
During
the hot summer of 1966, the beat began to slow down. Partly because the large
ska-style band was an expensive proposition, the horns were to some extent
sheered away, and emphasis shifted to what would basically be a rock band:
guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. The style that eventuated became known as
"rock steady," and it has provided the foundation for Jamaican
popular music ever since, which has continuously sampled or reproduced its
rhythm tracks. Rock steady as a dominant pop style lasted a bare two years. It
produced a number of great singers in an American soul mode, and also began to
introduce explicitly racial and political themes, as in "Young, Gifted and
Black," by Marcia Griffiths and Bob Andy. Desmond Dekker had worldwide
hits with "007" and the
obviously Rasta-inspired "Israelites." Rastafarian theology became an
ever-more explicit theme in the rock steady era.
Jamaican music of this period was presented largely by sound systems, in
which huge speakers would be set up in fields for outdoor parties. These
featured not bands but DJ's spinning records. Some of these DJ's themselves
became stars by playing brand-new or unknown records (the main Jamaican record
producers, such as Clement Dodd and Duke Reid, ran sound systems), and by
"chattering" into and out of the record, as American R&B DJ's
were wont to do. As DJ's such as King Stitt and Count Machuki became
better-known than the recording artists they were playing, the producers
started experimenting with issuing the B-sides of singles without vocals, so
the DJ could do an extended chatter or "toast." Eventually they
realized that multiple versions of songs could be successful commercially: the
vocal version, the version with the vocal removed, and finally the DJ version,
records in which they recorded the DJ chattering over the instrumental or with
some vocals in almost a call-and-response pattern. The first DJ to become a
Jamaican recording star was U-Roy, who by 1970 dominated the Jamaican charts.
Meanwhile, producers also began to experiment with the instrumental
versions, kicking the vocal in and out, adding echo or reverb effects by
re-recording over the initial tracks (all on tube equipment). These "dub
plates," the greatest technician of which was King Tubby, who owned a
stereo repair shop in Kingston, became a fad in themselves and presented the
possibility of yet another score with a single song, as well as a perfect
context for DJ versions. Tubby stripped rock steady rhythms down to the drum
and bass and rebuilt them with a kind of cosmic insouciance, conceiving his
hand-made recording equipment as a musical instrument in itself, a fundamental
innovation that has ramified through world pop music ever since. Much of this
was improvised as a set of cost-cutting measures. Rather than putting a band in
a studio, producers would recycle the same riddims again and again, creating
generations of hit songs from a single recording session. But in its conception
of appropriation, recycling, or continuous re-interpretation, it also brought
pop music into the postmodern era.
One question that arises in
dub and in many other places is technology as a form of subordination, a form
of resistance, and an instrument of aesthetic expression. We might think, for
example, of the gun. Like many technologies, the gun is designed in relation to
the human body, as, we might say, a prosthesis: the pistol-as-hand or
rifle-as-arm. And of course the gun as an enhancement of the body's capacity to
kill has been central to power in modernity: a key to the slave trade,
colonialism, genocide, and just the everyday policing that represents the
small-scale or pedestrian saturation of our lives by the state. On the other
hand, the gun has provided a mode of resistance, and one can't conceive of an
"unarmed" insurgency or guerilla band. The gun, as it were, exceeds
its intended application as prosthesis of power and is also the instrument or
even the very body of the resistance. It introduces and enhances forms of
order, but it simultaneously and in complement induces chaos. That chaos in
turn drives the technology of the gun and its ammunition, the projection of the
body into other bodies, the penetrative purpose which is the real power of the
gun, its trajectory from my body into yours that expresses the gun's actual
power. We introduce ever-new generations of the gun to enforce order on the
ever-spiraling chaos. The gun locks down Virginia Tech, or secures its
students, but then also erupts in the insane or unaccountable explosion of
violence. It's the principle of order and the whirlwind of alien, suicidal
strangeness, the essence of both rationality and insanity at one and the same
moment at one and the same place.
If we think of
technology in its conceptual structure or as Heidegger might put it, its
essence, as purposiveness, we can begin to conceive our problem and our hope.
The idea of technology is the idea of controlling our environment and each
other in accordance with some telos, of bending the world and each other, or
including each other, to our will. This of course divides the world into
subject and object, animate will and the inanimate reality over which it wants
dominion. This, we might say, is in one sense the origin of the human
individual, of the phenomenological detachment of the body from the environment
and from other human bodies. But it is of course also the continual compromise
of the individual, now nested in a power structure that proceeds through it or
that manifests itself within it as it environs it in instruments. The gun is an
assertion of integrity or even invulnerability, a defense of the body that
increases the space it occupies in potential, the carving out of a defended
space that asserts and preserves the body as an individuated object. That is,
the gun individuates the body by asserting its identity with the space around
it, by increasing its scope beyond the skin and into the space beyond, or even
into the bodies of those that might occupy this space. The gun is an instrument
of self-assertion or defense, but also in both directions a demonstration that
the body does not end at the skin, that the skin can be penetrated and the body
can be projected into surrounding space.
Technology typically
has this multivalent or contradictory effect. It increases the integrity of
bodies or expands that integrity: of the human body, of the state or
corporation, of the specific inanimate thing. To move from violence into art,
the technologies of control, of systematic generation of and pursuit of
purpose, always also enhance the possibilities of improvisation. Improvisation
is one way to "turn" or deflect technologies, one way of showing
their excess to their own essences, or to mount a demonstration that they have
no essence, that each instrument packs within it or entails excesses to its
conceived purposes. Each assertion of control is also an atmosphere of
improvisation or makes possible arts previously unimaginable.
Dub music is a
technological music in the sense that though its materials originate in the
music-making of guitarists, drummers, etc, what makes the music dub is the
technological intervention in the song by the "engineer." The
engineer proceeds, first, by subtraction: removing vocals and dropping
instruments out, then bringing them back in. And by enhancement, adding echo
effects or reverberations that create a sense of vast space and then close it
down, toproject the sound into an imaginary world and then collapse that world
back in on itself. And by addition: of beeps or snatches of other songs, often
in a different key, an explicitly foreign element disrupting or fragmenting the
riddim, creating a fractured surface.
One effect of dub is
to break down the integrity of "the song," and dub's expansion and
destruction of the song is now common coin in the world's popular music. Like
American pop, Jamaican music of the 1960s presented the listener with integral
songs suitable for radio play, three-minute temporal organisms characterized by
internal "narrative" order: verse/chorus verse/chorus bridge chorus.
The basic way these songs were presented was, again, on the Sound System, at
outdoor parties or dancehalls where the system operator would set up a speaker
system and a DJ would spin records. These began by playing American jazz and
r&b records in the fifties. By the early 60s, when Jamaica achieved
political independence from the UK, the sound systems were spinning Jamaican
ska records, which, like subsequent Jamaican waves such as rock steady, reggae,
and ragga, in turn colonized England, Canada, and much of the rest of the
world.
King Tubby improvised dub
versions of tracks brought to him by various producers. He used improvised
effects to create shattered soundscapes that would be comprehensible to people
already familiar with the song. He would throw or drop a reverb unit, for
example, to create crashing echo effects. He would pull pieces of the vocal and
DJ versions into and out of the mix, or delete the bass, suddenly pushing it
back in in a way designed to create a different atmosphere for sound system
dancing. Now a single song could support an indefinite number of versions, at
once an economical strategy for reducing overhead and a profound compromise of
the very idea of a song. Some songs have sustained dozens of versions from the
rock steady period to the present, been extended to whole sides of LPs or
provided the vaguely recognizable underpinnings of entirely new generations of
vocal, DJ, and dub versions.
In the seventies, dub
became a Jamaican industry that came to be emulated in many ways all over the
world. In the US, disco producers made "extended mixes" so that
people could dance for ten or fifteen minutes at a time to, say, Le Freak. Hip
hop masters such as Kool Herc (from the Bronx, but raised in Jamaica) started
versioning or "sampling" previously-recorded funk and disco records
and putting rappers over them, first at parties, and then on separate singles.
These various uses of sound technologies (the turntable, the mixing board) had
never been conceived by the people who invented them, but they have been
absolutely central to world popular musics since the seventies.
One aspect of these
practices is that they introduced new dimensions of improvisation, both in the
sense of using technologies in unintended and unpredictable ways, and playing
with them as a jazz player plays with his horn: by feel, as it were.
Improvisation is in some sense opposed to the conceptual framework of
technology, which relies on systematic administering of means toward a
pre-determined end. Both the ends and means were put at stake by dub producers:
songs undermined, combined, indefinitely extended or suddenly cut off in
mid-stream. Michael Veal, in his wonderful book Dub: Soundscapes and
Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae
writes as follows.
Given the heavy demand for dub mixes from
sound systems preparing for weekend dances, it is important to realize that
these mixes were improvised on the spot. . . . Most dub mixing was done on
Friday evenings, when producers deposited their master tapes with engineers,
and sound system operators gathered at the studio so that each could be given a
unique mix of a currently popular tune. Under these circumstances, an engineer
might create dozens of mixes of a given tune in one remix session. . . . [E]ngineers had no way of
preparing a mix beforehand; they usually improvised their way through dozens of
mixes of the same track. King Jammy's approach was typical of most engineers:
"I don't plan it before I get into the mix, it just comes creatively. I
don't plan like, Okay, I'm going to take out the bass at two minutes or
whatever. It's just instant creativity." ... Using the mixing board as an instrument of spontaneous
composition and improvisation, the effectiveness of the dub mix results from
the engineer's ability to de- and reconstruct a song's original architecture
while increasing the overall power of the performance through a dynamic of
surprise and delayed gratification.
Every
new dimension of technology brings with it the possibility of creative misuse;
you can throw it at the wall and see what happens. As the world becomes more
subject to control, it exceeds or undermines the mechanisms of that control, or
pulls them into a subversion of themselves.
Technology
territorializes the world, maps it, surveils, brings more and more of it into
the scope of comprehension. But people appropriate technologies in all sorts of
bizarre ways, often with transformative effects, as dub music transformed world
popular music. Then of course such developments are themselves colonized,
comprehended, exploited, driving a new series of technological innovations (for
example, in this case, digital sampling). Dub and digital sampling undermined
such ideas as intellectual property or the integrity of the work, its
authorship, its origin, which in many cases became untraceable or impossibly
complex. These ideas then have to be reconstructed or elaborated at different
levels, with different effects, which are in turn encoded in new technological
means of definition and elaboration. Then of course these are in turn subject
to misuse: they will be torn apart and turned to use and beyond use in
sequence.
Jamaican recording and
remix studios, which created many of the most radical technological innovations
of modern popular musics, were primitive by the standards of cutting edge Los
Angeles, London, or Nashville recording facilities. No one is going to take a
beautiful expensive new piece of technology and see what happens when you drop
it. In superseding the technologies available to King Tubby or Scientist,
recording technology suggested that those technologies were trash, detritus,
which opened up a space of freedom for their exploration. As it were, the
technologies are made into pre-technological authentic equipment, hand tools or
acoustic instruments; they are disinterpreted, we might say, underdetermined
and hence enriched. Or we might say their determination and interpretation had
lapsed, so there are no longer right or wrong ways to utilize them. They are
rendered over into improvisational environments. Lee Perry famously buried
unprotected tapes around his studio and then used the weathered, degraded
material as masters. He treated his tapes with rum, smoke, and urine, among
other things, obscuring the distinction between natural and technological
processes.
What circulated from
the studio to the island, from the island to the world, were snatches of a
torn-up revolutionary consciousness, a black nation in disintegration and
recohesion. Veal speculates that the reverberations and echoes of dub mixes
were a symbol of the yearning for and disintegration of the African origin
thematized in the original Rastafarian-oriented lyrics and nyambinghi drum
styles. Echo is a sonic representation of multiple repeated diasporas where the
music circulated - Africa/The Pinnacle/Kingston/London/Toronto - where at each
point the origin is lost and recovered, reconstrued, reasserted, mis- and
displaced.
Technological
innovation itself rely on this process of the reinterpretation of its own
history; you don't know how the posthuman moment should be articulated except
by the human purposes welling up from below; we rely wholly on the primitive,
and the primitive is as volatile and as progressive as the cutting edge of
technologies. The cutting edge is arid, yanked out of the human context, but is
continually being recontextualized in the human from below. The first world
provides its last-generation technologies to the third world or the internal
third-world pockets within itself, then skims off its artistic improvisations;
controls the third world and depends on it to live; takes its resources and
re-exports them as trash; then re-imports them as art and reinterprets the art
in technologies. And so on.
From rock steady emerged roots reggae music, built on the
same pulsing beat that served as Rastafarian gospel music. The cult of Marcus
Garvey was a dominant theme, spearheaded, as it were, by Burning Spear's
Winston Rodney:
Yes, oh yes
The image of Marcus Mosiah Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the image
The image of Marcus Mosiah Garvey
The image of Marcus Mosiah Garvey
The image, the image
He was one of the first black men
Who try to uplift the masses
The traits of society
The image
The image of Marcus Mosiah Garvey
Let's talk about the image
Let's talk about the image
The image was from the parish of St. Paul
The capitol, St. John's bay
That's where he's from
Marcus Mosiah Garvey
The image, the image
He's the first black man
Who bring black civilization universally
Marcus Mosiah Garvey
The image, the image,the image
The image, the image
The image of Marcus Mosiah Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey say:
Man you cannot get no words
True make words, make words
Be creative, be creative,
Come, let's talk about the image....
Burning Spear's album covers featured images of Garvey, which also
appeared on flags and in murals throughout Jamaica.
As
political art and political speech, reggae was carried around the world by the
Jamaican (double-)diaspora, in particular to London, New York, and Toronto.
Here is a scripture by the Jamaican/British band Steel Pulse:
Rally round the flag
Rally round the red
Gold black and green
Marcus say, so Marcus say
Red for the blood
That flowed like the river
Marcus say sir Marcus say
Green for the land Africa
Marcus say
Yellow for the gold
That they stole
Marcus say
Black for the people
It was looted from
They took us away captivity captivity
Required from us a song
Right now man say repatriate repatriate
I and I patience have now long time gone
Father's mothers sons daughters every one
Four hundred million strong
Ethiopia stretch forth her hand
Closer to God we Africans
Closer to God we can
In our hearts is Mount Zion
Now you know seek the Lion
How can we sing in a strange land
Don't want to sing in a strange land no
Liberation true democracy
One God one aim one destiny
This is an anthology of quotations from Garvey's speeches and
writings.
Such artists as Max Romeo issued a long string of Rasta hymns, underlain
by the drumming of such Rasta masters as Horsemouth Wallace. A particulalry
interesting synthesis was developed by keyboard player/dub master Augustus
Pablo, whose "far east sound" combined serene, hypnotic reggae with
elements of Hindu chants and Jewish Klezmer. The early records of Marley and
Wailers, like Romeo's and many others', were constructed by Lee Perry at the
Black Ark studio in Kingston. Once Marley signed to Island records, Chris Blackwell
reconfigured the Wailers into a showcase for Marley's voice and into something
like a touring rock band rather than a studio construction. Marley himself had
been assigned by Rasta leader Mortimer Planno to be a missionary to the world,
a mission on which he succeeded to an extent almost beyond belief. At this
point, Bob Marley is perhaps the most recognizable pop music icon throughout
the whole world, and has inspired a variety of liberatory political movements
with songs such as the profoundly beautiful "Old Pirates (Redemption
Song)." The political turn taken by punk, as represented by such groups as
the Clash and Rancid, emerges from this tradition. In a particularly
appropriate development, reggae has become one of the dominant popular forms in
Africa, under the auspices of such singers as Alpha Blondy of Ivory Coast and
the late Lucky Dube of South Africa. Indeed, a coup in Ivory Coast was in part
credited to or blamed on Blondy's music, which carries a message of universal
brotherhood delivered in French, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. There are
Rastafarians throughout the continent and throughout the world.
The death of Haile Selassie presented roots reggae and Rastafarian
religion with a crisis. Marley's death in 1981 was also disastrous for the
form. These events and the influx of cocaine into Jamaica, the introduction of
digital recording technology and in particular digitally-constructed rhythms,
as well as a number of other factors, led to a disintegration of roots reggae
in Jamaica in the eighties. It moved toward dancehall or ragga styles and
"slackness," or obscene lyrics. Nevertheless, the roots tradition in
rhythm and lyric themes have also been in continual revival in Jamaica and all
over the world ever since.
4. Hip Hop
Hip hop was born by an importation of Jamaican musical culture into New
York City in the mid-seventies. DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), generally
acknowledged as the first hip hop DJ, grew up in Jamaica, going to sound system
shows. In his definitive history of hip hop Can't Stop Won't Stop, Jeff Chang writes:
The blues had Mississippi,
jazz had New Orleans. Hip-hop has Jamaica. Pioneer DJ Kool Herc spent his
earliest years in the same Second Street yard that had produced Bob Marley.
'Them said nothing good ever come outta Trenchtown,' Herc says. 'Well, hip-hop
come out of Trenchtown.'
In the Bronx, Herc deployed the twin turntables of Jamaican DJ's,
extending the "break" or drum/instrumental passages on disco and funk
records to make them more danceable. The basic idea of constructing new songs
from the remnants of old recordings on the fly was Jamaican in origin, and
opened the creation of music to a different set of people with different
skills. Grandmaster Flash began employing "rappers" to do his
talking, in the fashion of Jamaican chatters such as U-Roy and Big Youth, so he
could concentrate on turntable heroics of his own invention, especially
"scratching" or moving the record back and forth under the needle to
produce a rhythm. Herc and Flash were party acts, and the rappers that appeared
with them delivered party rhymes that encouraged participation ("Throw
your hands in the air, and wave 'em like you just don't care"). The DJ
Afrika Bambaataa began drawing some of the political implications, forming a community
association in the Bronx to ameliorate gang struggles and police brutality: the
Zulu Nation. The child of Caribbean immigrants, Bambaataa started sampling
Malcolm X speeches over his rhythm tracks.
Hip hop from the start was essentially as a system of all the arts. Its
"elements" were DJing (now associated with turntable manipulation),
rapping, breakdancing, and graffiti: movement and visual arts were intrinsic
from the outset. Indeed graffiti has been one of its most potent political and
aesthetic expressions, as "writers" "take space" or vie
with officially sanctioned ways that the urban environment is articulated and
adorned. This often involved the explicit defacing of monuments or advertising,
for example, though the greatest graffiti gallery was the New York subway
system. We might add that hip hop gave rise to clothing and hairstyles,
starting with sweat suits and adidas, but later including designer lines such
as Sean John. For a time double dutch jumproping was also considered a hip hop
discipline, for one thing to include the girls. And hip hop in all its arts
gave rise to practices of renaming in accordance with aesthetically-defined
personal identities; few rappers or writers used their full given names, but
rather they transformed them into poetic identities, such as Zephyr or Futura.
The films of Spike Lee might also be connected to hip hop aesthetics in this
regard.
As I say, at the beginning, hip hop was a party style, but black
nationalist political themes began to be woven into the lyrics from a fairly
early point, for example in the records of Run-DMC. By the late eighties, Black
Nationalism became a dominant theme of hip hop in the work of such seminal acts
as KRS-One and Public Enemy. Sampling was a weapon in the artpolitical war, as
speeches by people such as Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and Khalid Mohammed (the
radical Nation of Islam preacher) could actually be incorporated into the
ever-more complex sonic structures. The teachings of the Nation of Gods and
Earths were explicit from an early moment, for example in the work of
ur-rappers the Cold Crush Brothers, who never recorded, but can be seen
performing in the indispensable graffiti film Wild Style. Kool Herc says: "a lot
of Five Percenters . . . used to come to my party. . . . [Y]ou might call them
'peace guards,' and they used to hold me down" (Muhammad 177). Indeed,
much of the best-known hip hop slang or patois derives from Five Percenter
teachings. One hears the phrase "dropping science," for example,
continually. The term "Word!" or phrase "word up!" which
has entered the language, derives from the Five Percenter declaration
"word is bond." The term "bombing" as applied to graffiti
and "da bomb" to mean any good thing probably originate in the Five
Percenter practice of "bombing" one another with "knowledge of
self" (Muhammad 178).
The work
of Public Enemy, which for a time was the biggest act in hip hop, was
particularly potent in this regard, and Chuck D, Flavor-Flav, DJ Terminator X,
and "Minister of Information" Professor Griff, Public Enemy created hyper-aggressive hip hop
that presented Nation of Islam and Black Nationalist ideologies in an extremely
compelling way, constructing a sonic equivalent for a militant ideology on
albums such as "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back" and
"Fear of a Black Planet." The stage presentations were filled with
paramilitary imagery; Chuck D dressed in black with uniformed bodyguards
scanning the crowd, while Flavor-Flav presented a jester figure or a bit of comic
relief. Flavor-Flav famously wore giant clocks to ask the political question
"What time is it?" It's time. Past time. The
rapper/poet/memoirist/activist Sister Souljah - whose supposedly anti-white
lyrics became an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign in an argument between
Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson, also emerged from the PE nexus.
Here are
some of the lyrics from Public Enemy's "Prophets of Rage":
With vice I hold the mike device
With force I keep it away of course
And I'm keepin' you from sleepin'
And on stage I rage
And I'm rollin'
To the poor I pour in on in metaphors
Not bluffin', it's nothin'
That we ain't did before
We played you stayed
The points made
You consider it done
By the prophets of rage
(Power of the people say)
I roll with the punches so I survive
Try to rock 'cause it keeps the crowd alive
I'm not ballin', I'm just callin'
But I'm past the days of yes y'allin'
Why wiggle round and round
I pump, you jump up
Hear my words my verbs
And get juiced up
I been around a while
You can describe my sound
Clear the way
For the prophets of rage
(Power of the people say)
I rang ya bell
Can you tell I got feelin'
Just peace at least
Cause I want it
Want it so bad
That I'm starvin'
I'm like Garvey
So you can see, B,
It's like that, I'm like Nat [Turner]
Leave me the hell alone
If you don't think I'm a brother
Then check the chromosomes
Then check the stage
I declare it a new age
Get down for the prophets of rage
I'm considered the man
I'm the recordable
But God made it affordable
I say it, you play it
Back in your car or even portable
Stereo
Describes my scenario
Left or right, Black or White
They tell lies in the books
That you're readin'
It's knowledge of yourself
That you're needin'
Like [Denmark] Vesey or [Gabriel] Prosser
We have a reason why
To debate the hate
That's why we're born to die
Mandela, cell dweller, Thatcher
You can tell her clear the way for the prophets of rage
(Power of the people, you say)
Hip hop in the nineties became a dominant pop style, under the auspices
of Dr. Dre on the West Coast and Sean "Puffy" Combs on the East,
among others, who developed a melodic, loping style underneath lyrics about
sex, cash, and substance abuse. This style became known as "gangsta"
rap, and was pointedly apolitical, though it said nasty things about the
police. Nevertheless, the political and Black Nationalist strains continued in
"underground" hip hop. In particular, followers of the Nation of Gods
and Earths turned in some of the most seminal and interesting material of that
era, including records by Big Daddy Kane, Brand Nubian, Mobb Deep, and Poor
Righteous Teachers. This strand became commercially potent under the auspices
of the massive hip hop collaboration/nation Wu-Tang Clan and its many
offshoots. Meanwhile, some of the most esoteric imagery associated with the
Nation of Islam, Rastafarianism, and the Nation of Gods and Earths found its
way onto the records of less commercial artists, such as Jedi Mind Tricks,
Aceyalone, and Self-Scientific, who made some of the best and most absorbing
hip hop records in the history of the style. Here is a verse by Wise Intelligent of Poor Righteous
Teachers, spouting 5% truth and damning the (then-and-still) current of
materialistic hip hop.
Since I've been away I've been thinking about
How gunslingers turned singers and black culture went out
Wake up all you teachers tired of teaching and wait
Grass roots, pass truth into the ears of black youths
Watch me talk the talk and walk the walk right now
As mystic as it seems, I bring for real to your dream seeing
Midnight marauder got it dipped off the block drug
Street niggas bug cause they know we do it for the love
We rose above every limit that they said we had
Who loves your ass enough to strictly educate the mass?
Come get your cash, fill your mind with swine and dash
For longevity, these niggas we will never be
You will remember we from now till forever gee
I am infinity, lyrics flowing endlessly
You ain't no friend to me so don't even pretend to be
Like O.J. Simpson be sleeping with the enemy
I call you out and make the world know your ass is lacking
Quoting some lessons but see no parts of understanding
You standing under my rain, snow, sleet, hail and thunder
That's why you wonder what's causing this to exist
I raise the mist, distill the myths of many currents
Don't be determined except to life forget the death
Nevertheless you're being blessed cause I'm who God is
Don't know the time niggas must be wearing Guess watches
Hands on your boxes, turn 'em up like seven notches
Your Magnavoxes amplify my super conscious
Shit providers, we'll call us straight civilizers
And true suppliers for Gods, Earths, and 85ers y'all
A typical and outstanding Gods and Earths act is the California
duo Self Scientific, who on "Love Allah" sum it up as follows:
"News flash, the black man is God, no doubt."
5. Graffiti and Language
Foucault
and Deleuze, among others, have pointed out that language, and in particular
written language, is an instrument or form of power. One suspects, indeed, that
to some extent written language was developed to preserve and disseminate the
decrees of rulers, as well as to keep records of debts and violations. It is
hard to see how one would set up or preserve an elaborate hierarchy, a proper
state, without a written language, and though tribal cultures have had a
variety of inscriptional tools, they've rarely had anything like hieroglyphics,
or written Chinese, or Sanskrit, or English, unless they were subjected to
them. Indeed the rise of the state - systematic power worked on a large
territorial scale, eventually global - coincides with the development of
written language and is inconceivable without it. Much the same might be said
of the huge religious hierarchies associated with Judaism, Islam, Christianity,
and Hinduism. These have relied to one extent or another on the mystique of
text, and a monopoly on its interpretation or even on sheer access to it, as in
Catholicism in relation to Latin, for instance. The God of monotheisms,
conceived by analogy to human rulers, expresses himself in text, as to Moses:
gives laws. World capital also proceeds in the same way, more or less:
advertising is largely incomprehensible without text; the idea of franchise,
the recognizability of Wal-Mart, trade regulations, even which crops are
planted where, the transfer of funds, all depend on textual forms. Science
depends on repeatability of experiment, which in turn supposes the careful
written description. Technology is cumulative in virtue of its textual
encryptions. All forms of systematic power, we might say, are text-heavy, are
forms of sentencing.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between "major" and
"minor" languages; the former (such as French or standard English)
are instruments of power; the latter (such as, to use two of their examples,
Quebecois and Black English) instruments of resistance. But their point is more
complex than that. In fact, nobody speaks standard English - slang and
ephemeral idiom make their way into everyone's speech. And likewise the minor
language depends on the standard forms, which it puts in play, adapts,
reverses, or sets spinning.
[I]f a language such as
British English or American English is major on a world scale, it is
necessarily worked upon by all minorities of the world, using very diverse
procedures of variation. Take the way Gaelic and Irish English and any number
of "ghetto languages" set American English in variation, to the point
that New York is virtually a city without a language. (Furthermore, American
English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the minorities).
That is, the major language lives in its minor variations, or
feeds on its own destruction.
The problem is not the
distinction between major and minor language; it is one of becoming. . . .
Black Americans do not oppose Black to English, they transform American English
that is their own language into Black English. . . . Conquer the major
languages in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the
minor language to send the major language racing. . . . The notion of minority is very complex, with
musical, literary, linguistic, as well as juridical and political references.
(104-105)
And, we might add, the aesthetic, linguistic, legal, and political
aspects are inextricable.
I
have already mentioned the centrality to hip hop and graffiti of processes of
renaming; we ought also note their centrality to Black Nationalist religious
expression. Rastafarians have achieved a minor language, based largely on
remaking the word/syllable "I," used in many contexts, notably the
plural pronoun referring to African peoples: "I and I": the name of a
nationality and of oneself. The Nation of Islam replaced the "slave
names" of black people with the marker "X"; "Clarence 13X
was the thirteenth Clarence converted at the Harlem Mosque. Elijah Muhammad
writes:
God offers you His own name.
Every attribute of His name means something glorious, worthy, and something of
divine. Not one of his names can be interpreted other than something of divine,
but you have the name of the devil: Johnson, Williamson, Culpepper, Hog, Bird,
Fish and what not. These are nothing but common devil names. Your Bible teaches
you that in that day, God will call you after His own name. They must have the
name of the beast taken away from them and given the name of God, before they
could ever see the hereafter. Well, this is the time. You hear my name called
Muhammad. Go check the devil's dictionary. Read the meaning of it, and he will
bear witness to me that it means one that is praised much and is worthy of
praise. It is the name of God.
We might also point out that African-American musical styles have
elaborately practiced renaming, and also presented and driven Black English:
the slangs associated with jazz and hip hop, for example, are incredibly
elaborate, and have to some extent been codified. Hip hop is, among other
things, a patois or minor language, centrally invented by the Nation of Gods
and Earths, whose teachings are always presented as codes for re-interpretation
of the major language, always presenting new idioms to be decoded.
Our environment bristles with rules expressed in signage. Or consider
the tax code, and try to conceive of a system of taxation in anything like the
modern sense without written language. "Standard" English is written
English as issued by authoritative outlets: the New York Times, for instance,
or books published by Knopf. And standard English is a node of power and a
flashpoint for power struggles about such things as multilingual education,
"official" languages, ebonics. Ebonics is a pretty good example of
the whole thing: an oral tradition holding out against written standard
English, preserving tribal anachronisms, taking standard English and ripping it
up or reconfiguring it, playing with the dictionary to create cultural spaces
in the context of incredibly elaborate caste systems and power hierarchies. The
standard written language, indeed, has a certain monstrous dead weight:
enshrined in Chicago Manual of Style or the OED, always a step behind the
living word as it emerges from people's mouths, bearing with it the whole
weight of history and law: slow, cumulative, growing behind us inexorably. It
yields an incredible profusion of expressive tools, but it also canalizes our
expressions through forms of power.
Children are subjected to the written language in the most literal
sense. Their education is compulsory. We force their eyes to the linear form,
discipline them to it. Much of their "socialization" consists, first,
of learning to read, and, second, of what they read and what we say about what
they read and what they write: the five-paragraph essay: topic sentence, body,
conclusion: rigid as possible. The public school is a textual environment: even
more replete with written instructions and other messages than the rest of the
settled world. The text is the primary vessel of the "shared
culture," "our" history, "our" Constitution and codes
of law: it's a primary tool by which this "us" is forged, to whatever
extent it is forged.
Text is conceived to be abstract. All the kids in class have "the
same" book, thought of as an essence subsisting simultaneously in
indefinitely many spatial locations. "The rule of law" is an
interesting phrase - odd actually. It attributes power to an abstraction,
offloads it from the human body or even any concrete object of any kind
whatsoever. It's the repeatability, the reinsciptive or reprintable or
cutandpasteable incessant power of the type: the true presence and authority of
the Platonic form. "The text" itself is nowhere and hence everywhere;
it floats around us like a spirit environment, and flows through us too.
Foucault talks about bodies as "zones of inscription," and no doubt
the very firing of our neurons has taken on a textual form.
If
the basic functions with regard to authority of the text are performed by its
rigidity - its repeatability from context to context, apparently without
alteration of information - the prestige of the text is essentially a function of
its ontological status as an abstraction. This connects it with
"mind" in a Cartesian or Platonic sense, and on a social scale with
"civilization": mind bloated precisely to the size of a political
state. Indeed, the ontological prestige of any given object in the European
history is essentially connected to the degree to which it is conceived to be
non-physical=spiritual. The savages who are excluded from the written world are
insistently, pointedly physical: this is still our mythology of race, for example.
It's not really all that false about them, it's false about us, since our own
status within the hierarchy rests on a metaphysics for which there can be no
evidence. There is, of course a long history in the West of iconoclasm, but
understandably as well there is a long history of logoclasm: burning books,
rubbing out the laws, defacing signs, and so on, and perhaps the logoclastic
tradition is a bit more alive at the moment than iconoclasm, which has an
anachronistic flavor.
At any
rate, logoclasm or the eradication of text is only one possible response.
Others work from within, and rest on acts that compromise the abstraction of
the text. Pre-eminent among these, I suggest, are poetry and graffiti: textual
arts that are also at their essences the concretizing of text. Poetry and
graffiti insist that, more or less like everything else that exists, text is
particular and physical: that it cannot be separated from the occasion and
location and the bristling particularities of its inscription.
Poetry relentlessly emphasizes sound: at a minimum it needs to be read
as imaginatively spoken. All the traditional formal elements of poetry - rhyme,
metre, alliteration, line breaks that correspond to pauses, and so on - are
incomprehensible outside of a conception of text as a representation of the
spoken word that allows for the reproduction of spoken language on particular
occasions. Surely it originates in bardic traditions of the spoken word and
returns us to them through textual media.
Rap is a particularly insistent and innovative example: its medium is
the recording of a particular voice speaking its poetry in music. Rap is in
fact a fascinating phenomenon here for many reasons. For one thing, it
reconnects the spoken word explicitly to music, both as its context and in its
actual performance, which is often a compromise between singing and speaking
(cf. Nelly, for example, or for that matter the "singjay" reggae
style of such figures as Eek-a-Mouse). We might say it is Homeric. It is not,
as much pop music remains (though this is less and less the case under the
influence of hip hop) the recording or simulation of the recording of an
antecedent performance (a paradigm here would be the Lomaxian "field
recording" of folk music; another is the rock band, which continues in
recording under a performance model), but something that relies on recording as
explicitly its material and medium: made initially on turntables, and then
through digital sampling. Here we might consider the techniques employed by
Beck, for example. Hip hop, we might say, occupies a site interstitial to text
and oral tradition: it is mechanically reproducible, but what is mechanically
reproduced is the voice. It has an immediacy that pure text lacks - more trace
of the body, we might say - and it uses the forms of ebonics and various other
slangs and dialects. Not surprisingly, it is a site of power struggles. Derrida
has rejected the view that the written text is a representation of spoken
language, and that much seems basically right to me - text is its own animal,
though as I say it can perform on occasion as a representation of speaking. And
it emerges at least as much from pictorial as oral communication, in the
hieroglyph or ideogram. In its fully alphabetic form - rigidified and
regularized or militarized, disciplined into the line or march of one-way
communication - it is fundamentally distinct both from picture and sound. But
the hip hop disc or mp3 is something of a unification of spoken word and
publication, now a translation of spoken word into digital information, which
is both an apotheosis of text in its effortless reproducibility and an
undermining of text as pure abstraction.
Graffiti, though it often employs images, is fundamentally a form of
writing, and indeed graffiti artists refer to themselves as
"writers." The medium of much of it is the name, the re-name. The
name itself occupies an uneasy or ambiguous zone of the language. When
philosophers such as Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Kripke have gives accounts
of reference, or the relations of words to the world, they have had special
difficulties with names and often had to confer on them a special status or to
develop particularly elaborate accounts to work them into the wider theories.
Evidently, what a word like "chair" refers to, and the process by
which it comes to refer, is somewhat different than in the case of a word like
"Crispin." Doing any responsible or interesting account of this
distinction or its history would take us far afield, but a couple of points
might be pulled out for mention. Russell tried to account for names on the
model of his logical theory for general terms or predicates and the existential
quantifier. This reverses a long history - explicitly rejected by Wittgenstein
in the Philosophical Investigations in relation to a quotation from Augustine, but stretching at
least to Plato - in which general terms or predicates were accounted for on the
model of names. Kripke and Putnam, among others, have attacked this view.
Kripke's account is sometimes called "the causal theory of proper
names," and according to it the referential function of proper names is
radically distinct from that of predicates, which perhaps can be given some
sort of Russell-style account. Names, on the other hand, originate in specific
dubbing ceremonies (like when my Mom dubbed me "Crispin"), and are
rigid across possible worlds.
Obviously if you don't get all this and you want to, you are going to
have to tackle the insanely elaborate history of twentieth-century analytic
theory of reference. But what it amounts to for present purposes is this: the
relation between a person and her name is a particularly vivid relation, or a
particularly intimate relation, or a particularly concrete relation so far as
relations of words to the things to which they refer goes. Learning to use the
term "chair" correctly is a triumph of the human abstractive capacity
because you are learning to construct and deploy into your mental economy and
public communicative space a "kind" or universal or Form. But the
dubbing ceremony and the use of the name that is parasitic on it proceeds from
a specific speech act in the presence of a specific object: it is a concrete
utterance on a particular occasion. Then the transmission of the name proceeds
by a series of these concrete interchanges in specific oral or written
repetitions. The name, we should say, is the least abstract zone of the
language, the most specific and concrete of its applications.
In
graffiti, the name and the act of dubbing (!) is seized and simultaneously
undermined. Most graffiti artists dub themselves with the name they use in
their work. In part, this is an attempt to undermine the use of names in the
legal system and modes of surveillance: to create a persona that worms its way
underneath the forms of textual power. The idea is simultaneously to be hard to
identify by power and massively famous outside it: to manufacture an unofficial
name that does not appear on the birth certificate or other documents and then
to broadcast it as far as can possibly be (to king a line for instance, or go
all-city) in a culture underneath the official one. And the means of broadcast
is not, essentially or initially, publication or the infinitely reproducible
abstract textual form, but in a perfectly concrete inscription: a version of
the name that is completely space and time-bound, unlike our imagination of
published text, which floats free of all dimensionality. The tag is actually
made of paint, unlike the word "chair," which is not actually made of
anything. And insofar as it is text it is name, which means that it lives in
some particularly particular and concrete relation to what it names. I wonder,
for example, whether you feel this with regard to your own name: that it is the
text closest to you, that you and it exist in a particularly intimate relation:
more intimate, for example, then your relation to words that might pick out
your gender, or your race, or the place where you live etc., though all those
words "apply" to you. This is why practices of renaming such as we
have briefly examined are practices of re-identification, of creating a self
that evades existing power structures, an extra-Babylonian self.
The art history of typography, as I have argued, exists in a rather
uneasy relation to the general idea of text in the West. Typography treats
words as concrete objects, focuses on their inscription at particular spaces.
People have expended tremendous energy on the art of typography. Part of this
expenditure can be given a kind of ideological reading: the purpose of it is to
create maximum transparency to reading, to make the abstraction as effortless
as possible, to enable you to forget that you are a particular body looking at
a particular page. But people also get caught up in the sensible qualities of
type: its beauty, or the appropriateness of its shape for expressing its
meanings. There is an aesthetics of text as visual array as well as as
significance. These two functions - the sensible and the semiotic - are complementary,
but also often enough in tension, because while the semiotic function of text
tries to draw you away from the concrete interaction you are having with the
screen or page, the sensible can be trying to draw you back into it, or to
mediate the meaning through the concrete sensible interchange. Typography, we
might say, can enable mind, but it can also operate within a nostalgia for
embodiment. This is true of other "arts of the book" as well, such as
paper-making and binding, internal and external design. It is true of web
design or the design of street signs.
One of the places we see the interaction of the sensible and the
semiotic most vividly is indeed in signs and advertisements. Different
typefaces can be central to the semiotic effect. You tilt the type right, for
example, to convey the idea of speed or the future. You resort to Old English
to enforce a sense of tradition or persistence. Or you use the plainest block
lettering you possibly can to give yourself a "no-frills" atmosphere,
which promises that things are inexpensive, and so on. Probably in every case
the communicative trace of written text is effected in a collaboration of
typography (or calligraphy) and semiotics; another way to put this is that the
two are not on any particular occasion separable. Even in cases where maximum
transparency to meaning is the intention, that itself takes up a place within
the semiotic interchange that occurs around the text. Every inscription is
necessarily a concrete object: a specific object with particular sensible
properties; and though these may be blinked or may exist in tension with, as it
were, text's conception of itself, it is always part of the situation, part of
the construction and the disintegrations of meaning. Berkeley argued against
Locke's theory of general ideas - essentially conceived as a variety of mental
image - that it was impossible to imagine a dog, say, that was neither a
dachshund nor a pit bull not a mongrel, whose hair was neither long nor short,
who was neither black nor white nor brown, small, large or in-between, and so
on. Any image of a dog in the mental economy of anyone necessarily had a
variety of specific features apparently extraneous to the status of the idea as
the general idea applying to all dogs. The same is precisely true of text: its
generality and abstractness is qualified on every particular occasion by a
bristling collection of concrete sensible qualities.
Graffiti is strongly related to the art of typography; indeed, many
graffiti artists have invented a repertoire of alphabets, created in their
black books and deployed on trains and walls. In addition, they have
appropriated lettering styles from advertising, comic books, and many other
sources, which they have adapted to their purposes. But it is also worth
pointing out some of the differences. Typography proper inhabits - at least
apparently - a more abstract zone than graffiti, which is even more insistently
focused on the particular inscription. Typefaces are expressed as a series of
types open to mechanical reproduction. Certain typefaces become standard, and
this is a reflection of the basic purpose of most typography to enable
standardization and to apply to any number of specific texts in their
indefinitely wide dissemination through publication. Graffiti alphabets, on the
other hand, are always aimed squarely at entirely specific inscriptions. They
retain a handmade quality: they are guides for the hand in producing specific
works. The works themselves are paintings and partake of the ontology of
paintings: that is, they are specific physical objects. Destroy a copy of Ulysses and the novel persists;
destroy the Mona Lisa, the actual specific physical object, and the work is
extinguished. Ulysses is pristine: as perfect now as at the moment it was completed:
the Mona Lisa, like all particular physical objects, ages and alters in time.
The twentieth century, of course, saw a thousand intersections of
picture and text, and thousands of objects that were not clearly one or the
other or that were both. That is true of graffiti with special intensity. It
inhabits a particular zone between the picture and the text as rap inhabits a
particular zone between the text and the spoken word. Graffiti is essentially
the name as particular painting, the text drawn into a physical ontology, a
complete merging of type and token. Maybe this is in part a revival of the
forms of writing current before Gutenberg, a kind of reincarnation of the
scribe. This is true in more ways than one. It is no coincidence that printing
coincides roughly with the Reformation, whereas scribe traditions could be
associated with texts used for hermetic or even secret purposes in a world of
illiterates. The scribal text involved a connoisseurship of visual form and had
a magical significance, a particular power that has been lost in the world of
continuous publication and compulsory education. Essentially texts were
reproduced for particular people, their functions and even legibility limited
to certain individuals and interpersonal formations.
The history of graffiti text can in part be written as a history of
unintelligibility. The early work - by and large dedicated to the fame of the
writer - presupposed legibility as well as a fairly conventional set of
lettering styles, especially "bubble" letters. But with the advent of
"wild style" graffiti in the early eighties - embodied in pieces
rather than tags or throwups - letter styles started to became more and more
elaborate and less and less easy to read. This is usually accounted for as a
shift to a kind of "code" analogous to the most slang-ridden
varieties of rap: the idea was to mark off those who could read the lettering
as a special group with its own language. To some extent this is certainly
true, and one can of course learn to decode various lettering styles, or to
associate them with particular crews or writers even where one can't decode
them. Indeed, wild style graffiti was, fairly quickly, taken up into actual
typography and signage styles. But further developments took some writers well
beyond any attempt at legibility and into a kind of purely visual play with the
word: a systematic fragmentation or disintegration, often arrayed in a
perspectival three-dimensional space that was essentially pictorial rather than
linguistic. Such developments would certainly be hard to employ in advertising.
The book
Taking the Train produces a record of the great graff artist PHASE 2's styles over
the decade from 1972 to 1982, as reproduced in his black book.
Each of the ten steps reveals a loss of legibility. At the sixth, I would have
to look at the thing for awhile to decode it. At ten, it wouldn't matter how
long I looked. In the last few pieces, the name literally seems to be more and
more torn up; by the last, it is in shreds. In part it thematizes the physical
qualities and in particular the fragility of the paper on which it appears.
In the
case of PHASE 2, at any rate, this process is magnificently conscious. Joe
Austin quotes him as follows:
I'm absorbing and devouring
language in its co-existing state and creating something else with it. . . .
The English language isn't much, especially in its current state. By comparison
(to Chinese and Japanese) it's like a dot. Why not go beyond that and just
create an alphabet or language? You can't put a limit on communication or how
one can communicate; you've always got to look further; that's how style
expanded in the first place. . . . If they really need Western thought, why
don't they examine the Greek myth of the alphabet? Cadmus sowed dragon's teeth
and they sprang up as armed men. Greco-Roman letters were . . . (regiments) for
an imperial, militarized world - social realities that still curse us. (Austin
114)
This presents the linguistic approach of graff at its widest
scope. First, it connects it with the ideogram and an explicit critique of the
alphabet. But the content of that critique is of special interest: it
associates alphabetic languages to military and state power in its very
structure or visual appearance as something lined up and regimented, thought
conveyed as a military maneuver, disciplined in a military style, like the rows
of Germans arrayed before Riefenstahl's cameras.
Any book that reproduces contemporary graffiti shows that the process of
deconstructing the text - at once venerating and destroying it - has proceeded
ever since the early 80s at the latest, and has reached a point of astounding
refinement and variety. It is now accomplished by virtuosi, people as immersed
and well-skilled in their craft as Raphael was in his. There has never been a
more elaborate art of text, and there has never been a more elaborate
interruption of text. One other element in this, which is also incorporable in
the more casual tag, is the intentional use of the drip (poster by Shane
Jessup: "DRIPS ARE TOTALLY HOT RIGHT NOW"), emphasizing at once the
physical presence of wall and paint. Often you have the sense that you could
read what the thing says, except the drips have made it impossible: the word is
flowing down the wall, melting or liquefying in the re-emergence in dry form of
its liquid origin. Many such works, we might say, depict drips, as do the
comic-book versions of gestural painting by Lichtenstein.
It
is likely that many of these developments can be accounted for by analogy to
well-established structures of mainstream art history. And in fact, about the
same time as wild style graffiti appeared, graffiti merged to some extent with
mainstream art history. Artists such as Dondi, Zephyr, and Futura started
working on canvas and getting gallery shows, while many graffiti artists also
started doing legal murals. Such developments - along with the increasing
handskills of writers as they matured - encouraged a culture of virtuosity and
an avant-garde structure in which the point was to surpass rather than merely
imitate or venerate one's forbears. In addition, these shifts accompanied a
shift in basic values from quantity to quality: where before the point might
have been to do the maximum number of tags and throwups, which would form the
basis of the writer's fame, now the source of fame could also be the writer's
artistic ability and stylistic innovations. Before that time (and to some
extent this remains true), graffiti deployed more a craft guild structure than
a romantic/modernist/avant garde ideology. What was privileged was not the
genius or the masterpiece, but the labor. This if often true of arts that are
actually in process and vital rather than being monopolized by professional
poseurs. And it's a revealing juxtaposition because the two worlds were in
parallel in the same city. But at any rate the art boom '80s had a bit of an
intersection with the graffiti world, which predictably though unfortunately
had more of an effect on graff than on Jeff Koons, who could have used a dose
of work ethic, commitment, and craft. And though the incorporation of graff
into Soho art turned out to be a brief fad, and galleries dropped artists
within a couple of years for the most part, it did manage to help set graffiti
spinning into some new directions.
Graffiti
went from being words to being pictures of words, and then being the
simultaneous incredible elaboration and tearing apart of words. The work
expresses both a veneration of text and a very direct hostility toward it: the
act of celebration is also the act of destruction. Surely while the typographic
and other writing arts have had bits that were extremely elaborate and even
hard to parse, there has never been a moment before in the history of text in
which illegibility was so explicitly thematized, celebrated, explored, and
exploited. Sometimes lettering is consumed in flames, or blown sky-high, or
dispersed by the wind, or taken in a hand and shaken out of comprehensibility.
Text is merged into picture, but then also compromised toward pictoricity or
shaken out of its status as text almost altogether. Nevertheless, the sheer
fact that text is involved is preserved: that's not usually the question. The
name is still evidently present, only it's buried, sliced, blendered, flipped,
folded, twisted, disassembled and put together again in a different order, as
dub treats the song.
Written
language has a future, if we do. It's obviously in flux right now: one might
mention hypertext and other ways that its linearity is being exploited and
compromised. Graffiti, I'm suggesting, shows one way that language is being
altered and created, one with particularly anti-authoritarian implications. But
like hypertext too, it is constantly being reappropriated into essentially
authoritarian systems such as the avant-garde artworld and corporate design
culture. It is also undermining these worlds.
Graffiti
started out as a crime and graffiti proper (as opposed, e.g. to post-graff
design style) remains a crime. The idea of art as a crime and a subversion of
order is a rich one historically, but has rarely been quite so pointed.
Graffiti is explicitly at its root an anti-authoritarian art, and that fact has
informed its history, its look, its practitioners, its surfaces: in short, the
medium is incomprehensible without the crime, or: the medium is crime. The
fundamental impulse of graffiti is the anti-authoritarian impulse. What I'm
arguing is that this is not only a matter of the sheer fact that the stuff is
illegal: it's not just a matter of racking paint and running from the cops.
It's inside the form and content of the art itself. This of course is not
surprising, and the fact that the fundamental impulse of any given work of art
is in some sense visible on its face is typical rather than the reverse. In
this case it drives forward a saturated sign system of revolution that attacks
the state and the schools by attacking the word, while also reclaiming the word
or claiming a place in authority: claiming the power to remake the word and
hence the world. We could say that it's an attempt to revamp or rearticulate
authority, to read it through a new set of codes, to take control of it and
bounce it back and play with it make something of it instead of merely
knuckling under to it. It's an attempt to take language back.
The political life of a
culture is conducted in the fine arts and under the sponsorship of the state
and its representatives: as we have seen, particularly in architecture. But it
is also conducted in the popular arts, which present modes of resistance in
which the aesthetic and political elements are inextricable. Of course,
African-American popular musics were the popular musics of the world for much
of the twentieth century: blues, jazz, swing, bop, rock 'n roll: all of these
are fundamentally African-American styles, where ska, reggae and hip hop are
Afro-Caribbean-American. The youth sub-cultures of the second half of the
twentieth century - greasers, mods, hippies, punks, anti-globalization
anarchists - have been largely identified by and configured around music;
despite the basic failure of such sub-cultures to entirely remake the politics
of Western culture, their political effects were incalculable. And the
treatment of language as an aesthetic site has been a central motif both of
political power and resistance to that power.
