1. Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Upsetters, "Revolution Dub:" Cut it up and start again. Temporal and sonic disruptions in an Age of Crisis. Isolation and quarantine of have exposed the roots of my dischronia. In 1975, Michael Manley's socialist government was beset inside and out by the "dark forces."A year later, there was an assassination attempt on Bob Marley and the country swam in bloody political violence. Dubby Conquerors like Scratch were there to bear witness and to tear up all of our sonic chronologies. The past speaks in ghostly tones; the future is now. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of ghosts these days.
2. James Brown, "Take Some...Leave Some" from The Payback (Polydor 1973): The sounds of urban decay in the 1970s sounds really freakin' good right about now.
3. Zora Neale Hurston at the Crossroads; or, The Devil and Zora Neale: Thinking about African American folklore, the diaspora, and crossroads mythology. Today I ran across a citation referring to The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a grimoire first published in 18th Century Europe, but found a home in the syncretic religious traditions of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South and was then carried northward during the Great Migration. It was embraced by black hoodoo practitioners. It was a key early text in the history of Rastafarianism. References to the text are found in the songs of bands like Toots and the Maytals. It is an example of how so-called folk traditions aren't stale artifacts from the past, but parts of living, breathing spiritual systems, always changing, always with us. As a professional folklorist, Hurston had a different agenda than peers like Melville Herskovits who excavated black American culture in search of African "remnants." Of course the echoes of old Africa were there. Hurston wanted to document the ways in which these tradition were alive and well today--an argument for the validity and value of black spirituality. To study conjuration, magic, hoodoo, and voodoo, she became a novitiate studying African American esoteric wisdom from the inside as practitioner. According to much of the scholarship on Hurston, her frustration with the mediocre sales of these studies of the folk prompted an increasing focus on fiction-writing. There is a logic to that narrative. And yet, when you consider a work like Moses, Man of the Mountain, the dichotomy between Hurston's scholarship and her art grows unstable. Hurston's Moses is an amalgam of the Moses of black theology and folk traditions. He's the Biblical figure who led his people to the Promised Land; he's a conjure man and magician, a hoodoo priest, and trickster who with the turn of a phrase can fool old pharaoh and point his people in the direction of home. What if Hurston's Moses is more than the fictional character in the novel, but also Hurston's contribution to the folk traditions documented in the tales she collected? As a trained hoodoo priest, and student of and participant in the voodoo beliefs of Jamaica and Haiti, she was unique in that she had a foot in two worlds. She was a scholar who deployed a scientific methodology in the study of black folklore, and she was a believer and practitioner who mastered the doctrine and ceremony of black Atlantic esotericism. She didn't just document; she shaped and contributed as well. Zora Neale Hurston at the crossroads.
4. Myth and Robert Johnson: I love the blues. Although I'm generally inclined to read voluminously about musical genres I'm passionate about, the eternal bickering among the "bluesologists" bugs me to no end. The literature on Robert Johnson is especially off-putting. Every few years someone vomits up the "definitive" book on the subject--the "real" Robert Johnson. And then let the skirmishing commence! But does it matter? OK, I suppose it does, but to me the compulsive will to "completism" obscures the power of the Johnson mythology in the popular psyche. The "whens" and "wheres" of Johnson's wanderings are irrelevant to the ways in which his story captured the public imagination, and his sound burrowed into the consciousness. One text I found particularly interesting in this regard is Zeke Schein and Poppy Bright's Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson's Lost Photograph. By trying to track the origins of a photo alleged to be Johnson, Schein butted up against the blues professionals who were more interested in rebutting someone they considered an upstart and lawyers for Johnson's estate who wanedt to scrap over every possible penny to be earned. The joy expressed in Schein's book is in the hunt, as well as the immersive experience of listening deeply to and reveling in Johnson's music. What Schein teaches those of us still willing to learn is that in this here America, myth and spirit transcend the selfish nit-picking blather passing for "fact," especially when all too often it isn't.
2. James Brown, "Take Some...Leave Some" from The Payback (Polydor 1973): The sounds of urban decay in the 1970s sounds really freakin' good right about now.
3. Zora Neale Hurston at the Crossroads; or, The Devil and Zora Neale: Thinking about African American folklore, the diaspora, and crossroads mythology. Today I ran across a citation referring to The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a grimoire first published in 18th Century Europe, but found a home in the syncretic religious traditions of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South and was then carried northward during the Great Migration. It was embraced by black hoodoo practitioners. It was a key early text in the history of Rastafarianism. References to the text are found in the songs of bands like Toots and the Maytals. It is an example of how so-called folk traditions aren't stale artifacts from the past, but parts of living, breathing spiritual systems, always changing, always with us. As a professional folklorist, Hurston had a different agenda than peers like Melville Herskovits who excavated black American culture in search of African "remnants." Of course the echoes of old Africa were there. Hurston wanted to document the ways in which these tradition were alive and well today--an argument for the validity and value of black spirituality. To study conjuration, magic, hoodoo, and voodoo, she became a novitiate studying African American esoteric wisdom from the inside as practitioner. According to much of the scholarship on Hurston, her frustration with the mediocre sales of these studies of the folk prompted an increasing focus on fiction-writing. There is a logic to that narrative. And yet, when you consider a work like Moses, Man of the Mountain, the dichotomy between Hurston's scholarship and her art grows unstable. Hurston's Moses is an amalgam of the Moses of black theology and folk traditions. He's the Biblical figure who led his people to the Promised Land; he's a conjure man and magician, a hoodoo priest, and trickster who with the turn of a phrase can fool old pharaoh and point his people in the direction of home. What if Hurston's Moses is more than the fictional character in the novel, but also Hurston's contribution to the folk traditions documented in the tales she collected? As a trained hoodoo priest, and student of and participant in the voodoo beliefs of Jamaica and Haiti, she was unique in that she had a foot in two worlds. She was a scholar who deployed a scientific methodology in the study of black folklore, and she was a believer and practitioner who mastered the doctrine and ceremony of black Atlantic esotericism. She didn't just document; she shaped and contributed as well. Zora Neale Hurston at the crossroads.
4. Myth and Robert Johnson: I love the blues. Although I'm generally inclined to read voluminously about musical genres I'm passionate about, the eternal bickering among the "bluesologists" bugs me to no end. The literature on Robert Johnson is especially off-putting. Every few years someone vomits up the "definitive" book on the subject--the "real" Robert Johnson. And then let the skirmishing commence! But does it matter? OK, I suppose it does, but to me the compulsive will to "completism" obscures the power of the Johnson mythology in the popular psyche. The "whens" and "wheres" of Johnson's wanderings are irrelevant to the ways in which his story captured the public imagination, and his sound burrowed into the consciousness. One text I found particularly interesting in this regard is Zeke Schein and Poppy Bright's Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson's Lost Photograph. By trying to track the origins of a photo alleged to be Johnson, Schein butted up against the blues professionals who were more interested in rebutting someone they considered an upstart and lawyers for Johnson's estate who wanedt to scrap over every possible penny to be earned. The joy expressed in Schein's book is in the hunt, as well as the immersive experience of listening deeply to and reveling in Johnson's music. What Schein teaches those of us still willing to learn is that in this here America, myth and spirit transcend the selfish nit-picking blather passing for "fact," especially when all too often it isn't.
