Other Music: Listening to Blood Orange while White
1.
The first voice on “June 12th” doesn’t belong to Dev Hynes, the artist who performs under the moniker Blood Orange, to whom the song is credited. This isn’t entirely unusual; Hynes is one of the most in-demand producers and collaborators in popular music right now, and even his own albums are filled with other voices. These other voices are almost always female (or, perhaps more appropriately stated, female-sounding), often nonwhite (or -sounding), and sometimes pulled from nonmusical sources like films, conference speeches, and private conversations Hynes has recorded in public spaces around New York. The voice on “June 12th” belongs to this last category.
On a track that is ostensibly (possibly) named for the date of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016 or maybe (plausibly) named for the date Medgar Evers was murdered by the KKK in 1963, or conceivably (perhaps) named for the date Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in South Africa in 1964, but almost surely (positively) not named for the date of the 1967 Supreme Court decision that declared laws prohibiting interracial marriage to be unconstitutional, and very certainly (certainly) not named for the night in 1994 when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, the first voice belongs to an anonymous (to me, to the assumed average listener) person who sounds to be a gay man telling a friend a story of a public encounter he had with another man.
I don’t feel very comfortable making these assumptions based on the sound of a voice. But make them I do, quite naturally. Further, I assume the voice to belong to a black man. In the context of a Blood Orange song, I suppose this is not an entirely unfair assumption; Hynes is black and this particular song was released by Hynes on a Soundcloud playlist entitled “Black History.” But it’s still a slightly strange-feeling assumption to make as a self-aware, self-critical, white person in 2018.
The guessing, the assuming, the discomfort: this is central to my experience listening to Blood Orange. “Are u an ally or are you hiding?” Hynes asks on “June 12th.” I take the question to be rhetorical, which in this case, amounts to me hiding.
2.
The first voice on “By Ourselves,” the lead track from Blood Orange’s 2016 album Freetown Sound doesn’t belong to Dev Hynes. This isn’t true in a technical sense; the song opens with a chorus of voices, including Hynes, singing a gospel-tinged melody over a Charles Mingus piano line. But the first voice one really hears on the album, the opening salvo, the voice that populates and dominates the rest of the track on its own, belongs to spoken-word poet Ashlee Haze.
In a sample taken from Haze’s “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliott Poem),” the slam poet swerves through bars on feminism, representation, and how music, fashion, and dancing, especially dancing, can encourage a soul crushed by societal expectations. It slays. As horns kick up and more found city sounds (voices, walking, the rumble of a bus) swell, Haze ends her piece:
I will tell you that right now
There are a million black girls just waiting
To see someone who looks like them
I listen to Freetown Sound quite frequently. It’s become one of my favorite records. I have a running joke with a close friend that every time I attempt to listen to any one particular earworm on the album (for a while it was “Best to You,” later it was “Augustine,” and most recently “Hands Up”), I end up listening to the rest of the record; I just can’t help it. Always intending to switch back to whatever I was listening to before, I get caught up in the interludes, the urban backdrop, and the justonemoresong flow of the brilliantly ordered tracklist. But I often skip “By Ourselves.”
I don’t think “By Ourselves” is for me (“for me”). More specifically, I think “By Ourselves” might be exactly for me, which is even worse. I can feel myself in an audience of a slam poetry show, politely snapping at Haze’s last lines, cringing at the white person next to me cheering, “Go iiin!” while knowing my embarrassment comes from my own sense that, fuck, this girl is going iiin, and feeling a deep need to throttle my enthusiasm. Am I an ally or am I hiding?
3.
The first song I really hated was M.I.A.’s “Bucky Done Gun.” To be sure, I’d heard lots of songs I didn’t like before I saw the video for the Diplo-produced track on MTV in mid-2005. I might have even said I hated some of those other songs. But I didn’t know what it felt like to really, actively, evangelically hate a song until “Bucky Done Gun.” I made it a point to hamfistedly work every music conversation into a discussion of how forced, faux-political, and annoying the song seemed to me at the time. I discussed this so frequently with people who had no idea who M.I.A. even was that I ended up downloading the video and introducing quite a few people to the song. As a result of this exposure, I had a terrifying (terrific) experience: I came to love the song.
M.I.A. is now one of my favorite artists but more than that, she’s one of my favorite humans. She is so herself at every turn. She’s a provocateur with just enough political knowledge, cultural experience, and fashion sense as to be always relevant. Her most casual interviews can veer into the incendiary and her “worst” records can border on cheesiness, but M.I.A. is always real.
The shift I felt towards “Bucky Done Gun,” and eventually to Arular, M.I.A.’s debut album, was rooted in the same energy that snaps at Ashlee Haze while feeling slightly unsure of how to properly appreciate the artist. I heard something that felt empowering, in the way that other people’s empowerment can be felt even by those that very empowerment might be leveled against, in a Sri Lankan woman commanding the world to quiet down so she could make her sound: “I’m armed and I’m equal.” Go iiin!
Every weekend for most of the past decade, somewhere in this country (probably the suburbs), white kids dance and sing along to a hook that is primary a cheeky nod towards the immigrant experience, expressed through the sounds of gunshots and ringing cash register drawers. I have been those white kids. It’s thrilling, as a music fan, as a radical leftist, as a person of great privilege, to hear such a transgressive song played (and loved!) in public spaces. It is also, undeniably, an act of cultural voyeurism for me to relate to the visa-counterfeiting, burner-phone-holding, “Third World Democracy”-repping character M.I.A. portrays in the song.
I would never want to experience most of what Maya Arulpragasam’s family experienced during the Sri Lankan Civil War. I am probably (assuredly) actively involved in systems that caused the conflict or at least created the conditions under which it worsened (Arulpragasam’s father was associated with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group labelled a terrorist organization by most of the West, including the United States). And yet, I guess as long as this is someone’s experience — and I would of course prefer to live in a world where it wasn’t — I’d like to hear about it, be made to feel passionate about it, be made to dance to it.
I’m not sure this is what is meant by “ally.”
4.
Of all the major releases by solo artists in 2016 hailed as triumphs of authenticity filled with deeply personal narratives and of-the-moment songwriting (and there were many), none felt “blacker” to me than Freetown Sound. Not Rihanna’s ANTI-, which though it felt more like an “album” than any previous RiRi release, included a lot of (seemingly) impersonal music: a cover of Tame Impala song, a reworking of a Dido melody, and some full-on Kelly Clarkson-ing. Nor Beyonce’s Lemonade, whose accompanying film is a masterwork in style and curation, but whose dominant narrative is relationship drama. Nor Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, which though it featured Chance’s endless positivity and trademark yelps, didn’t reach to say much he hadn’t said before. Definitely not Frank Ocean’s quiet, hermetic, insular Blond nor Kanye’s loud, dominant, ego exercise The Life of Pablo. To be sure, I loved all of these records (everyone did, really). But I couldn’t grasp at why they felt so steeped in identity politics to listeners when Freetown Sound was right there to be dissected for just that reason.
Then, late in the year, Solange (another artist with whom Hynes has worked) released A Seat at the Table. “This,” I immediately texted a friend during my first listen, “is everything people said Lemonade was.” (It might have been more accurate to say “everything people said “Formation” was,” but I’m prone to overreaching hot takes.) Why did I feel I had any right to lay such a claim? And how do I now, with some remove, justify making any declaration about the relative blackness of any record?
5.
I have on several occasions attempted to write an essay about my relationship to the Destroyer song “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker.”
Destroyer is the musical project of a Canadian man named Dan Bejar and also my favorite artist in any genre. In 2009, Bejar’s record label, Merge, was celebrating twenty years in the business by putting together unique collaborations for a compilation album. The visual artist Kara Walker, then known for her silhouette tableaus depicting stereotypical Antebellum South slavery scenes but more recently famous for a giant, site-specific sugar sculpture, was one of the special contributors. Merge sent Walker several records from their back catalog so that she could pick an artist to collaborate with and she chose Destroyer.
Walker has been something of a controversial figure in black academic circles, perhaps more so than in the art world, the latter fact being the source of the former: African American artist Betye Saar told PBS that Walker’s work was “basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.” In using a kind of grotesque, cartoonish violence in her portrayal of slavery, some argue, Walker participates in a kind of modern minstrel-ization of black identity.
I should note that I am an admirer of Walker’s work. I saw “Event Horizon,” a commissioned public installation by Walker, most days for the years I studied at The New School, right around the time Walker was getting into Destroyer. I appreciate Walker’s willingness to engage in self-critical dialogue almost as much as I enjoy her status as a provocateur of identity.
“Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” contains lyrics that were copied, inspired, or reimagined by Bejar from note cards sent to him by Walker. The result is a Roxy Music-indebted, smooth-jazz-meets-disco track that references Ralph Ellison, a “harmless little Negress,” and Dixie crying “Free me!” It is not typical fare for Destroyer. It is also my favorite Destroyer song. In speaking about the song to Blouin Art Info International, Bejar said:
It gave me license to do a lot of things I wouldn’t normally write or say. There were some moments when I was getting off on an idea that could land me in hot water. At the end of the day, someone is going to ask me what the song is about, and I’m going to say “maybe it’s about black women’s experience in America over the last 400 years,” and for me to say that is dicey. I’m not American, I’m not black, and I’m not a woman.
Bejar is not a black woman. Bejar is a Sephardic Jew and spent years living in Spain. I’m mostly French and was assumed to be Canadian by many Americans I met while living in New York. The fact is that go to great lengths to enrich and specify my whiteness (and Bejar’s) while Walker and Dev Hynes, who actually hail from two different countries and whose family origins lie with two different people groups, just get to be black. This, the primary critique of Walker’s work, is here my primary critique of myself.
Clearly there is a lot to explore here, thus the hypothetical essay. But what good comes of a white man using another white man’s work to discuss the work of an important black woman? I’m well aware that it’s my privilege to not have to deal explicitly with identity politics in my work (a privilege one hopes may be disappearing quickly, at least in the field of cultural criticism), so why knowingly wade into such matters? Why speak to the “blackness” of an album?
And, more to the point, why point this out here, as if it absolves me? Is not the pointing out itself an act of self-aware obfuscation? If I truly believed that the world doesn’t need me discussing Kara Walker by way of indie rock, wouldn’t I just delete this section altogether?
6.
A Seat at the Table includes a song entitled “F.U.B.U.” wherein the primary hook states very clearly who it is for. Us. Black people. Per Solange, it is an empowerment anthem, “almost an allowance to just let it out.” In a conversation posted on her website, Solange compares the song to punk music and notes how “white kids were allowed to be completely disruptive, allowed to be anti-establishment, and express rage and anger. They were allowed to have the space to do all of that, even if it meant being violent or destroying property and that wasn’t exactly inclusive to us even if we created the groundwork for rock and roll.” She’s clearly right. And so I hear myself intruding on Solange’s space in listening to “F.U.B.U.”
7.
Another song on A Seat at the Table is “Don’t You Wait,” which was written in response to a comment New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica made insinuating that the audience for Solange’s True EP was white and that Solange owed some portion of her career success to her friends Grizzly Bear. True is comprised almost entirely of throwback R&B and its lyrics are focused mostly on relationships and largely in generic terms. True was co-written and co-produced by Dev Hynes.
8.
This essay will not contain a discussion of non-black music fans singing along to a certain racial slur.
9.
When Hynes announced Freetown Sound, he noted that the album was intended for those who had been told they were “not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way.” The fragments Hynes uses to speak to this audience include a speech from Ta-Nehisi Coates; dialogue from Paris Is Burning, a 1990 documentary exploring New York’s ball culture in the 1980’s; and an oral history of the civil war Sierra Leone told in Krio, a language native to the country of Hynes’s father. I find this curation both fascinating and a little obvious. The choices themselves (a writer for The Atlantic, an underground-cult-classic documentary, and a native discussion of armed conflict are grad-school-level choices (which places them far above most everything else released in popular music, to be sure)) are not unfamiliar to a white audience, but the connections between them and the way Hynes sees commonality in marginalized communities is entirely exciting, especially for an outsider.
10.
Hynes again uses Krio on “June 12th.”
I’ve seen the way they look at you, cold oh I know
Kɔmɔt na rod
ɛp mi!
Translated:
I’ve seen the way they look at you, cold oh I know
Excuse me
Help!
I wonder if Hynes thinks about the way white listeners look at Solange. If True-era Solange had a lot of white audiences, her few live shows in support of A Seat at the Table, held almost exclusively at prestigious theatres and large music festivals, have likely done little to shift that. Hynes himself rarely plays outside these settings; surely he’s seen the way white audiences look at him, noticed the things they respond to in his music, maybe felt some bit of unease being vulnerable, political, and black in those spaces.
Certainly Hynes has thought about identity politics. “June 12th” opens thusly:
I as a black man, I may know pain but I don’t
Know the pain of a black woman
I don’t know if I like listening to Blood Orange for the right reasons. The same for Solange, M.I.A., or every other artist I listen to. I don’t feel like an ally, but I’m trying not to hide. A song like “June 12th” makes that feel aspirational, if not totally possible.
