IN MEMORY OF TERRY ADKINS 1953-2014: Innovative and Dynamic Conceptual Artist, Sculptor, Musician, Critic, Public Intellectual, and Teacher

TERRY ADKINS (b. May 9, 1953--d. February 8, 2014) http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/02/terry-adkins-1953-2014-innovative-and.html FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES (Originally posted on February 24, 2014): Monday, February 24, 2014 Terry Adkins, 1953-2014: Innovative and Dynamic Artist, Sculptor, Musician, Critic, and Teacher All, The death of the extraordinary, innovative, and eclectic installation and multimedia artist, sculptor, musician, teacher, writer, and cultural critic, Terry Adkins is not only shocking but at the early age of 60 is a tragic loss for American/global art in general and the black artistic community in particular.  It is impossible to overestimate what the brilliant and endlessly creative Adkins was consistently able to contribute to the contemporary art world and modern cultural discourse in the genres of music, visual art, design, multimedia, and critical theory.  He was beloved not only as a dynamic and very important artist but as a revered teacher and mentor to many students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels as a Professor of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his work will be sorely missed by many not only in this country but throughout the world... Kofi http://vimeo.com/59525918:   Terry Adkins interview   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/arts/terry-adkins-composer-of-art-sculptor-of-music-dies-at-60.html   Terry Adkins, Composer of Art, Sculptor of Music, Dies at 60 By MARGALIT FOX FEB. 22, 2014 New York Times Terry Adkins in the Arctic preparing a piece on Matthew Henson, a black explorer who accompanied Peary there in 1909. Credit: Tom Snelgrove   Terry Adkins, a conceptual artist whose work married the quicksilver evanescence of music to the solid permanence of sculpture, died on Feb. 8 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 60. The cause was heart failure, his dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn said. A sculptor and saxophonist, Mr. Adkins was at his death a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. His genre-blurring pieces, which might combine visual art, spoken-word performance, video and live music in a single installation, had lately made him “a newly minted breakaway star” on the international art scene, as The New York Times described him in December. Mr. Adkins’s work — cerebral yet viscerally evocative, unabashedly Modernist yet demonstrably rooted in African traditions — has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His art is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Tate Modern in London. His work will be shown this year as part of the Whitney Biennial, which runs from March 7 to May 25 at the museum. “Terry always saw object and sound and movement and words and images all as the material for his art,” Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said in an interview on Friday. “He was so deeply inspired by aesthetics, philosophy, spirituality, music, history and culture, and he had such a fertile and generative mind, that he was always able to move between many different ideas and create a lot of space and meaning in a work.” To his sculpture, Mr. Adkins sought to bring the fleeting impermanence of music, creating haunting assemblages of found objects — wood, cloth, coat hangers, spare parts from junkyards — that evoked vanished histories. To his improvisational, jazz-inflected music, he brought the muscular physicality of sculpture, forging immense, curious instruments from assorted materials. Many were playable, including a set of 18-foot-long horns he called arkaphones. The sculpture and the music were meant to be experienced in tandem, and with his band, the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, Mr. Adkins staged multimedia performance pieces that fused the visual and the aural. Many were homages to pathbreaking figures in African-American history, among them the abolitionist John Brown, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the musicians Bessie Smith, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix. “Meteor Stream: Recital in Four Dominions,” for instance, was one of a cycle of works in which Mr. Adkins honored Brown. In that piece, performed in 2009 at the American Academy in Rome, he explored Brown’s storied past through an amalgam of music, sculpture, video, drawing and readings from Brown’s own writings.  Mr. Adkins’s installation “Nenuphar,” which he showed at Salon 94 Bowery in 2013. Credit Salon 94 Mr. Adkins performing in New York in November; with him are giant arkaphones he invented.  Credit: Salon 94 In an installation devoted to Hendrix, Mr. Adkins homed in on lesser-known aspects of his subject’s personal history, including his service in the early 1960s as a paratrooper in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. To research a piece on the life of the African-American explorer Matthew Henson, who accompanied Robert Peary on several expeditions, including the one Peary said reached the North Pole in 1909, Mr. Adkins traveled to the Arctic to experience Henson’s milieu firsthand. At its core, all of Mr. Adkins’s work was about how the past suffuses the present and vice versa. Terry Roger Adkins was born in Washington on May 9, 1953, into a musical household. His father, Robert, a teacher, sang and played the organ; his mother, Doris Jackson, a nurse, was an amateur clarinetist and pianist. As a young man, Mr. Adkins planned to be a musician, but in college he found himself drawn increasingly to visual art. He earned a B.S. in printmaking from Fisk University in Nashville, followed by an M.S. in the field from Illinois State University and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Kentucky. Mr. Adkins, who also maintained a home in Philadelphia, is survived by his wife, Merele Williams-Adkins, whom he married in 1992; a son, Titus Hamilton Adkins; a daughter, Turiya Hamlet Adkins; his mother; two brothers, Bruce and Jon; and two sisters, Karen Randolph and Debbie Vereen. His work was the subject of a major retrospective in 2012 at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It has also been featured at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Queens, the LedisFlam Gallery in Brooklyn and elsewhere. In an interview with the website danaroc.com, Mr. Adkins spoke of his desire to reconcile the temporal imperatives of music with the spatial ones of art. “My quest has been to find a way to make music as physical as sculpture might be, and sculpture as ethereal as music is,” he said. “It’s kind of challenging to make both of those pursuits do what they are normally not able to do.” http://www.title-magazine.com/2014/02/terry-adkins-1953-2014/ Terry Adkins, 1953-2014 Title Magazine mourns the loss of an utterly unique teacher and artist. Terry died at the height of his powers, his work included in the Whitney Biennial just weeks away. As a teacher, he helped to nurture a new generation of exceptionally talented artists including Jamal Cyrus, Jayson Musson, Demetrius Oliver, and Jacolby Satterwhite. We invite former students and colleagues to submit their remembrances to be published here for all to share. If you would like to contribute your stories and thoughts, please email info@title-magazine.com, with the subject Terry Adkins. Simon Slater I moved into my studio number m-16 on the second floor of UPenn’s Morgan building around 4pm. I envisioned the next two years as a graduate student as time of serious (read analytical and humorless) study. I wanted to get started right away. I sat at my desk and started to draw and rationalize the stunning significance to humanity that each of my ideas had. After all, I was a serious professional, seriously. The seal on my temple o’ self-indulgence was broken around two or three in the morning by stomping footsteps and the tearing open of the grey curtain that stood in for a door to my studio. There was Terry. Terry and I stared at each other for about five seconds. Then he slammed the curtain shut as fast as he had opened it. A moment later he ripped the curtain open again, pointed at me and started belly laughing, shut the curtain and left. Later that year I took Terry’s Sculpture Seminar. For an assignment he instructed us to come up with a project that we would want to do if we had an unlimited budget. I did the assignment half an hour before class. That day he had us post our assignments up on the walls of the white room. He walked around and discussed each assignment with the student who made it. When he got to mine, a quickly drawn image of the moon with a flat, one-sided Dr. Seusse-esque billboard advertising a smiling Don Rickles, he stared and nodded. He did not acknowledge what a waste of everyone’s time it was. Instead, he turned around and asked me if the billboard had two sides. By my second and final year, I had come to really value Terry’s studio visits and enjoyed how much fun those half hour meetings were. However, I was not looking forward to my last visit with him as a Penn student. In order to maximize time in my studio, I took the class Jewish Humor and Terry’s class, Sonic Measures at the same time. For the last several weeks, I had been skipping Sonic Measures in order to finish up Jewish Humor. The morning of that last visit Terry strode into the middle of my studio, looked at me, and looked at my work. Then in a stern voice he said, “Mr. Slater you are making me look bad in front of the undergrads. You better have a great final project prepared, or I am going to fail you.” We then completed the visit out on the balcony of the Morgan building enjoying the beautiful spring day, laughing, and talking about art. Terry is not someone I can sum up in one moment or in a single beautifully packaged lesson that he imparted to me. Instead, the lessons I value, and there are many, came in the form of a series of complicated, insightful, fun, and warm moments. He was just a terrific man, a wonderful teacher, and one of those rare gregarious and magnetic people who highlight the great pleasure it is to be a free thinker. Terry died too soon and this is a tragedy. He had a lot more to contribute as a teacher, and as an artist. I will miss Terry, and feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to know him, learn from him, laugh with him, and eat Tastykakes with him at 2am. Kelsey Halliday Johnson I remember standing in the Tang Teaching Museum in front of an old vintage trunk neatly filled with dozens of copies of the 1972 album Infinity attributed to John Coltrane. It was Terry Adkins’s 2012 exhibition Recital, and I found myself surrounded by a monumental vertical stack of bass drums, what appeared to be the guts of an oversized music box, large-scale x-rays, and other curiosities. But this specific work nagged at me, as the album had been controversial: Alice Coltrane had overdubbed and rearranged previously unreleased recordings from 1965-66, after John Coltrane had passed away. http://vimeo.com/49853092: Terry Adkins Recital from The Tang Museum "Recital" comprises a selection of work spanning the last three decades by artist/musician Terry Adkins. Born in 1953 in Washington, DC, Adkins grew up deeply invested in visual art, music, and language. His approach to art making is similar to that of a composer, and the exhibition is conceived as a theatrical score that punctuates and demarcates space, creating interplay among pieces in different media and from diverse bodies of work. Together they act as facets of a crystalline whole, reflecting and illuminating each other in ways that amplify their intensity. Alice took great liberties with the album, adding (perhaps blasphemous) orchestral string backings, re-imagining the rhythm sections, and inserting her own solos within the compositions. Panned by aficionados and critics alike, the album seemed like the kind of thing a nuanced and judgmental fan like Terry would have snubbed. The devotional, if not obsessive, collection of such a biased artifact seemed at odds with Terry’s work, which typically highlighted and honored overlooked facets of historic figures. As part of his practice, Terry was known to boldly ignore, if not rewrite, popularized posthumous narratives. But Terry’s Infinity was not about John Coltrane. Terry would have been 19 when the vinyl album first hit record stores, and I learned that this work was in fact autobiographical. A young Terry Adkins had shoplifted a copy of the vinyl album. But later, after discovering an appreciation for recording artists and living with his guilt, he resolved to purchase the album every time he came across it. The Cherokee trunk on display housed over four decades of Terry’s life, filled with record store trips, late night eBay sessions, and many anecdote-worthy finds along the way. Terry demanded honesty in art making from his students, and it was the courage and idealistic allegiance of Infinity that taught me the full content of his character. Surely, we have all done things blindly out of infatuation, lived with childish regrets, and looked back on our early influences as naïve forms of admiration. But Terry harnessed the energy of these feelings and the root of their social context as a launching point for new cultural narratives. It saddens me deeply to consider that the Infinity collection is no longer ongoing; this personal ritual must now be seen as a completed object with its final count of records. Central to Terry’s life and artistic practice was his avid collecting of records, stories, photographs, history, artifacts, and art. The day (or should I say weeks) that he moved from one faculty studio at Penn to another became a sort of clown-car circus spectacle. The impossible quantity of knick-knacks and artifacts pouring out from one room confounded all of us, as we watched the common areas of our graduate studio building fill to the brim with taxidermied birds, drawings, and vintage metal apparatuses. Terry’s hobbies, collections, and artistic practice could be impossible to pin down from the looks of those weeks, but his deliberate and intuitive approach to finding objects that he claimed had “a spirit in them” proved all the more rewarding that summer day I stood surrounded by his austere and humbling work at the Tang. He was a man of strong convictions and contradictions, which was what made him so lovable, challenging, and fascinating. I remember showing a body of work exploring vintage hand painted postcards (an early still-frame kitsch Technicolor that fascinated me immensely), when Terry cried out in the middle of a graduate school critique “Why are you collecting this nostalgic crap?” I was taken aback by his flippant accusation – the postcard collection had come to me quite recently from my late grandmother, a former stewardess, genealogist, and epistolary packrat. Yet some months later, we found ourselves immersed in conversation about the first African American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, and the work Terry was planning as part of a residency in the Arctic. The names and history lesson felt oddly familiar and I quickly ran up to my studio and produced a postcard of a Robert Peary Arctic expedition that Henson accompanied from early 1900s. We were both baffled and amazed at the serendipity of the find. He looked at me with a mischievous grin, filled the room with his booming laugh, and said, “Well, I guess its not all crap.” Terry was proud, but did not lack humility or humanity. His fascination with people was far reaching, but he valued his beautiful family above all else. He rooted for historical underdogs in his personal work and for his students in his academic work – providing as much contextualizing support and as many opportunities as he could muster. And for all of that, Terry will be tremendously missed and monumentally remembered. Listening tonight to Infinity, I am struck by its genius. As many others have conceded, John Coltrane would never have released these tracks with string accompaniment, so the arrangement is certainly speculative. Yet with fresh eyes and loving hands, these recordings were recontextualized and sonically reconsidered in a way truly fitting for a living memorial. Infinity will never exist simply as a historic recording, but lives on as a dynamic interpretation of John Coltrane’s legacy. In many ways, it seems fated that Terry Adkins found himself ethically bound to this record as an artistic touchstone. Sometimes, a straight historical recording cannot tell us the full story. Or as we continue to learn, those histories can be flawed, biased, or incomplete. We desperately need fresh perspectives to excavate the details and draw critical attention to people and places that have been missed. This reanimation of history and overdubbing of its story is at the audacious heart of everything that Terry accomplished. To have witnessed his bravery firsthand is a privilege for which I will forever be grateful.   Kathy Goodell Terry seized the moment! He was larger than life! He was a subversive classicist, a scholar, and impudent observer; he was whatever he wanted to be in the moment. He knew exactly what he believed, where he stood, and he never wavered. Never afraid of the limits of language, whether visual or literary, he was a master at juxtaposition and paradox. He understood and realized the eccentric possibilities of sculpture, performance and music (jazz) and with bravura created a body of work out of great strength and independence. An activist and magician merged into one. Personally what bonded me to both the artist and the friend, Terry Adkins, was his infinite complexity – the fact that he understood that opposites are connected and embedded within each other, they create and transform, complement each other and create a greater whole. Terry possessed a nobility of purpose: to elevate matter to reveal the infinite essence of energy, with ‘Adkinsian’ style. Couple this with his comedic warmth, an elegant and beautiful presence possessing intelligence honed both by the street and a classical education, he was impossible to resist. At once theatrical and improvisational, he merged opposites seamlessly with the grace of a poet.   www.title-magazine.com   Art by Terry Adkins: Infinity. Cherokee trunk, John Coltrane Infinity albums 20 × 26.5 × 13.5 inches. Image courtesy of Salon 94 Meteor Stream Terry Adkins, Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, is the current Jesse Howard, Jr./Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. On Friday 16 October 2009 his show Meteor Stream: Recital in Four Dominions opened in the Gallery of the American Academy, to a large and responsive audience from the AAR and the Roman public. Read a synopsis and interview with Adkins (in Italian, by Giovanna Sarno) here. Meteor Stream is the latest incarnation of Terry Adkins’ ongoing cycle of site-inspired recitals on the abolitionist John Brown that began in 1999 at the John Brown House and sheep farm in Akron, Ohio. Commemorating the 150th anniversary of his Harper’s Ferry, Virginia campaign, the opening of Meteor Stream coincided with the inception of Brown’s 16 October 1859 raid on a U.S. armory to his execution by hanging on that December 2nd at Charles Town (West Virginia). In Meteor Stream Adkins dutifully explores biblical aspects of John Brown as a shepherd, soldier, martyr, and prophet through a muscular communion of sound, text, video, sculpture, drawing, and ritual actions. He has also responded to new research for Meteor Stream that reveals incredibly far-reaching ties, binding the legend of this enigmatic American figure to parallel histories of Rome, the Janiculum Hill and the American Academy in Rome. The 16 October opening featured performances on reed instruments by Adkins, sometimes accompanying readings from various Brown-related texts by current AAR Fellow and poet Peter Campion. Chief coordinator of the show is Lexi Eberspacher of the AAR Programs Department. Terry Adkins is an artist, musician, and activist who upholds the legacies of transformative figures from the past by reinserting them to their rightful place in the contemporary landscape of world history. His recitals are multimedia events that rely on the collision of imaginative intuition with the potential disclosure of unfolding biography and reclaimed materials. Adkins has exhibited and performed widely since 1982, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/TerryAdkins Terry Adkins, Aviarium, 2014. Steel, brass, aluminum, and silver, dimensions variable (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Estate of Terry Adkins; courtesy Salon 94, New York. Photograph by Bill Orcutt   Born 1953 in Washington, DC Died 2014 in Brooklyn, NY   Interdisciplinary artist and musician Terry Adkins approached his artmaking practice from the point of view of a composer. He arranged his works in sculpture, performance, video, and photography—many of which feature modified musical instruments or other salvaged materials—into “recitals” presented to audiences. For Aviarium, on view in the 2014 Biennial, Adkins devised a sound-based installation that is entirely silent. Using aluminum rods and multiple sizes of stacked cymbals, Adkins rendered wave vectors of birdsong in three dimensions, making visible the diverse sonic patterns inherent to the songs of each (unidentified) species. The sculpted songs hover in place and answer the artist’s call to “find a way to make music as physical as sculpture might be, and sculpture as ethereal as music is.” On View Second Floor Terry Adkins’s work is on view in the Museum’s second floor galleries. Works by Terry Adkins Terry Adkins, Aviarium, 2014. Steel, brass, aluminum, and silver, dimensions variable (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Estate of Terry Adkins; courtesy Salon 94, New York. Photograph by Bill Orcutt Terry Adkins, Blanche Bruce and the Lone Wolf Recital Corps perform The Last Trumpet as part of the Performa Biennial 2013. Courtesy of the Estate of Terry Adkins and Salon 94, New York Terry Adkins, Harvest, 2013. Blown glass, steel, fiberglass and aluminum, dimensions variable, Courtesy of the Estate of Terry Adkins and Salon 94, New York Terry Adkins, Installation View, Nenuphar, Salon 94 Bowery, 2013. Courtesy of the Estate of Terry Adkins and Salon 94, New York. Terry Adkins, Upperville, 2009. Concrete and quills, 36 × 20 × 12 in. (91.4 × 50.8 × 30.5 cm), Courtesy of the Estate of Terry Adkins and Salon 94, New York  http://danaroc.com/inspiring_020606terryadkins.html Terry Adkins Terry Adkins is an installation artist, musician, activist, and cultural practitioner who for 20 years has pursued an ongoing quest to reinsert historically transformative figures to their rightful place in the landscape of regional and world history. Although his "recitals" combine sculpturally based installations with music, video, literature, and ritual actions that intend to uphold and preserve the legacies of his chosen subjects, Adkins's work is always abstract and lyrical. An inspiration to younger artists for his uncompromising stance, he is also a dedicated teacher as Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally posted February, 2006 Terry Adkins is a REVOLUTIONARY. In a time and a place where courage seems to be waiting in the wings, Terry Adkins is front and center about what he thinks. About who he is and what he stands for - Terry Adkins offers no apologies. DR: Tell me. Terry, whatever it is that you want me to know about your life. TA: O.K. Gee.  I grew up kind of gifted, with the ability to be able to render things like a photograph. So I was moderately inspired or encouraged by my parents in funny ways. For instance, for Christmas, my younger brother might get a Tonka truck, but I would get Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper to paint by number. I can remember my mother saying "Don't mess it up! This cost me a lot of money!" I never really considered a career as an artist. Often times when you are gifted with something you tend to be the first one to take it for granted because you don't think there is any thing wondrous about it. All of your friends, who are gifted with other things, might be able to recognize your gift easier than you can. I never really took it seriously until I went to college. I went to Fisk University and saw an exhibition there by John Scott who is an artist that is still active in New Orleans, and it turned me around. From then on I decided to be a visual artist. I had always been a musician before that.  My quest has been to find a way to make music as physical as sculpture might be, and sculpture as ethereal as music is. It's kind of challenging to make both of those pursuits do what they are normally not able to do. That has been my challenge. Another aspect of how I work is that I use figures in history whose contributions to society are either under known, under appreciated or just not given the stature that I believe they should have in society. In the past I'd do these events called recitals where I would do a body of abstract works that relate to the topic at hand. In the past they have been Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, John Coltrane, Ralph Ellison and W.E.B. Dubois, and others whose world view I find similar to my own. My quest is to use abstract means, to educate the public about these figures through ways that are not image based or narrative based but to challenge them to think abstractly in relating to the stories of the lives of the people concerned. TERRY ADKINS RECITAL Terry Adkins Recital from The Tang Museum on Vimeo. Recital brings together a selection of work from the past 30 years by artist and musician Terry Adkins. Combining sculpture and live performance, Adkins has described his approach to art-making as being similar to that of a composer. His sculptures re-purpose and combine a range of materials, such as fiberglass propellers, wooden coat hangers, parachute fabric, and a variety of musical instruments in a process that the artist calls "potential disclosure," which aims to reveal the dormant life in inanimate objects. During performances with members of his Lone Wolf Recital Corps, Adkins activates these objects through improvisational playing and singing, spoken word, costumes, and recorded sound. These events intend to uphold the legacies of immortal and enigmatic figures such as Bessie Smith, John Brown, Sam Lightnin' Hopkins, Matthew Henson, and John Coltrane, among others. Adkins not only resuscitates individuals from historical erasure, but also sheds light on willfully neglected or ignored aspects in the lives of well-known figures, such as Ludwig van Beethoven's possible Moorish ancestry or Jimi Hendrix's military service as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. Terry Adkins Recital is curated by Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, in collaboration with the artist. DR: Terry is there something, when you think about your work or your life for that matter, is there something that  stands out that you are really proud of? TA: Well, I am most proud of my...what I have partnered in...to be my greatest creation, my son, OUR son, Titus and OUR daughter Turyia. They stand out because... Well, in the instant a child is born you adapt a vision beyond your own lifetime and it brings things really into focus in your life. I find that, in the United States, there is very little vision beyond ones own lifetime. If there were then teachers would be the highest paid workers in society, as they are the caretakers of the future of the country. As it is in Korea and in other places where teachers are the highest paid. But in the United States, there is so much preoccupation with wealth being equated to success, and the billionaire is the hero of modern life and it is all backward to me. What I try to do is instill in my kids, so that they'll carry on the baton to make the world a better place -- that theses materialistic things really don't matter. It's what you carry within your soul that matters. DR: How do measure success then, Terry - personally. TA: Personally I measure success by being able to express myself freely, being able to exercise my creative imagination freely and if I am able to do that without any kind of hindrance and to, every once in a while, make  some money from it, although that's not really ideal, I measure that as a form as success. Also because I am a college professor at U Penn, I measure success by how well my students are then equipped with what I give them; how they then surpass me in their careers - which a couple of them already have. DR: When people look at you, what do you hope that they see? TA: Well, first of all, I know this is idealistic, but I would hope that the first thing...that they would not, at first, "race my face"; that they would be able to look past that to see a little deeper and to uh... DR: Did you say "race my face"? TA: Yeah. "Race my face". In other words Ornette Coleman has a saying in one of his songs that says "don't race my face to class my ways". Living in America...that would be a great achievement - to have that occur. Although I feel that particularly in New York City, or in many other urban centers, that it rarely does because of the negative images projected of Black men and the fear generated in cities by the images they see in the media.  If a person would be able to look at me to see past that, then we could then begin to relate to each other as human beings. The big question to day is "What does it mean to be human" and "How does that play out in relationship to what W.E.B. Dubois said" which is "The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line.", which is so prophetic a statement as evidenced today in just about - everywhere. Smoke Stack 2003 copper, aluminum, tar, 16.5 x 30 x 30 inches DR: So if people were to look past your race, if they didn't "race your face", as you say, what would they see Terry? TA: I have no idea. It's in the eye of the beholder and I think that they would see what they bring to it. I, however, am steadfastly - myself. I guess for any number of individuals, they would see any number of different things. What -- I would not begin to try and suggest. If they could get past the "face racing", that would be an achievement in and of itself. DR: What do you think is most inspiring about you? TA: I was born into a segregated America so, as a torch bearer of the way things were during that period, I guess, I would hope that people find it inspiring that there is a sense of self achieved from witnessing segregation wherein there were all sorts of Black businesses and entrepreneurship all around.  Having been educated at an all White, all boys, Catholic school called Ascension Academy, where I went on an on an academic scholarship from the 5th grade to the twelfth grade...it allowed me to acquire a sense of myself that didn't even deal with the idea of being inferior, but also didn't deal with the idea of being superior either. It made me, very early on, able to see that it was. Dr. King would say in "the content of one's character" that one should be judged - well not judged because you could say "Judge not, lest thou be judged", but the "content of ones character" is what matters most. I got to see that the richest kids were also the dumbest. I got to see the social strata that exists in society, disappear because in the classroom everyone was equal. It really mattered how smart you were, more than anything else. Very early on, I didn't really have any sense of any inferiority complex or anything like that. I think the sense of self and security in knowing oneself, I would think would be the most inspiring thing about me. DR: What do you think that you have contributed to the world so far? TA: I have tried to contribute to the creative area of Black art in America in a way that does not cow tow to a certain kind of "minstralry" - that's what I call it. I think that the majority of Black art that you see in America is image oriented for a very particular reason. It relates back to this idea of "Brand Black" entertainment. America has never had a problem being entertained by Blacks in this country but always a problem being challenged by us. One of the troches of bringing back entertainment are - there are two of them. One is that it must first be posited in an image...like a cartoon. And the second is that it try to explain the "being in the world of Blackness" to a White Art audience - through image. To me, it creates a situation wherein the Black art that you see today, 98% of it, which is image oriented, is not too far removed from the images that you see on Uncle Ben's converted rice and Aunt Jemima's pancakes that you now see in the grocery store. It is entertainment oriented toward an audience. I call it a very conciliatory Louis Armstrong-how-are-you-ism, that attempts to explain the "being in the world of Blackness" to a White audience. I am from the school of the Miles Davis-how-dare-you-ism, that deals with the principles of what  Afro-Atlantic culture is, not through the appearance of it in images, but through the principles that guide it that are very high order abstract thinking. This is evidenced by anybody that takes a look at African sculpture and the societal norms that created a society in which abstraction was primarily their means of expression.  If you look today you will see mostly image oriented stuff which I think is a crisis. So, my contribution to the world, finally getting back to your question, is that I have maintained this connection, to genu gap a generation of African American artists who work entirely abstractly and, I keep that flame burning. DR: I am inspired by that and I have never really thought about, or stopped to consider what you just shared, as it pertains to art. Particular Zither 1990 7 x 108 TA: Well it's true of art. I think it's true of the athletic arena. I think it's true of song and dance. I think it's true, to a certain extent, to the movie industry. I mean Big Momma 2 is coming out. I mean c'mon! You know what I mean! Those kind of images, which I think Spike Lee really addressed in his Bamboozled film, are the result of a long history of Black entertainment in America, which has never ever been a problem. That's why Ben Vareen could do an Al Jolson thing at Nixon's inauguration.  Never a problem with entertainment -- Always a problem with being challenged. And for the challenging side, you can see how people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois were treated in this country. The intellectual vanguard of Black America has always had a rough time because they didn't succumb to the entertainment value and the image thereof. The intelligencia has always, to a certain degree, been persecuted, particularly those who show a vision beyond; a world vision, that is beyond the fifty states of America. DR: I think that these are not only interesting points that you bring up, but I think particularly relevant on a day like today when people are thinking about race on the heels of the death of Coretta Scott King and the contribution that she made. Those kinds of things have people contemplating the issue of race. What you are talking about is a layer that rarely gets addressed. TA: Well, I think that you are right about the death of Coretta Scott King, rest in peace. The recent death of Rosa Parks, too, also focused it. The re-opening of the case of Emmit Till, his body being exhumed - all of these things have brought back the ghost of the Old South, right back into contemporary society. DR: What I want to know Terry is, when you think about disappointment, is there something that disappoints you about yourself and how do you reconcile it, or live with it? TA: Oh I often find disappointments. Sometimes I think I'm not being the best husband or father in the world, particularly when... You know as well as I do that there is no text book on parenthood. There is no right way to do it. Every child that you come across will make you change the notes that you have already taken. I have disappointments when I feel that in some way I have made improper judgments as far as they are concerned and may have wounded them in ways that I may never know. That's what I get disappointed by. Sometimes you get disappointed - if I feel that I begin to get down on myself about sticking to my guns and how that might have compromised my career -- in sticking to my guns about this abstract thing.  So, sometimes I get a little disappointed maybe thinking that maybe, had I thrown in the towel and succumbed to it, I could have been more economically successful. But in the end I guess it's really not a disappointment because I feel more noble not taking part in it. DR: And so is that part of how you reconcile it for yourself? TA: Yes. That indeed is the reconciliation. I think about the commercial aspect of it only in terms of how it might have benefited my family. So I get disappointed sometimes when I can't sell work and can't contribute financially through my creative efforts. But teaching takes a lot of the edge off that. DR: Tell me - A hundred years from now, what do you want to be remembered for? TA: I want to be remembered as a creative individual, who in spite of the tide of the horizontal breadth of image ridden work by Black American artists, stood for something else; stood for something different.  I hope that a hundred years from now some little boy or girl somewhere, will see something that I have done, and pick up the baton and go on to continue the tradition. Thanks Terry! http://observer.com/2014/02/terry-adkins-artist-musician-and-educator-dies-at-60/   lives Terry Adkins, Artist, Musician and Educator, Dies at 60 By Andrew Russeth | 02/09/14 The Observer   Adkins. (Photo by LaMont Hamilton Photography) Artist and teacher Terry Adkins, whose work in a variety of media earned him widespread and growing acclaim, died on Friday in New York at the age of 60. His New York dealer, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who runs Salon 94, said the cause was heart failure. “Terry was an intrepid and accomplished artist, performer, musician, and educator who approached his life and work with enormous spirit, audacity, humor, and indefatigable intellect,” Ms. Rohatyn said in a statement she released via e-mail. “He was a beloved professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, whose influence will be felt by younger artists for years to come.” Mr. Adkins grew up in a musical household—his mother was an amateur clarinetist and pianist, and his father played organ and sang in the church choir—and music played a vital role in his practice. “I try to make sculpture and other works of art that have a feeling of being as ethereal and transient as music,” he told an interviewer last year. When it came to music, he added, “I’m a torch bearer of the avant-garde from the ‘60s, so that has a very visceral, kind of physical quality to it.” That description could equally well fit his meaty, elegantly muscular sculptures, assemblages that often include wood, metal, textiles and found objects, like musical instruments (drums, horns) or stereo equipment, and that have the look of ritual or devotional pieces. ‘Norfolk’ (2012) by Adkins. (Courtesy the artist and Salon 94) Picking objects to include in his assemblages, he said that he was interested in a process he termed “potential disclosure,” which he described as “an animistic approach to materials where you feel that they have more than just physical mass. There’s a spirit in them.” Sifting through junkyards early in his career, he would look for “materials that sing out to you, or identify themselves as being, of having the potential to do something else, besides just being in this junk pile,” he said. His sculptures were often inspired by, and dedicated to, historical figures, from musical heroes like blues singer Bessie Smith, guitarist Jimi Hendrix (whose music he credited with saving his life, drawing him away from friends who were negative influences) and composer Ludwig van Beethoven to the writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and the abolitionist John Brown. What united them? “Super-human feats of singular vision, overcoming adversity and being able to affect large bodies of people by these actions,” he said. Mr. Adkins was born in 1953, and was adept at drawing at an early age. “I didn’t consider it to be anything special because I was good at it,” he said, and instead focused more of his energies on music early in his life. He completed his undergraduate studies in 1975 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., and earned an M.S. at Illinois State University in Normal, Ill., in 1977 and an M.F.A. at the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1979. He performed music throughout his career, forming the Lone Wolf Recital Corps in 1986, with which he performed widely, frequently as a component of art installations he produced. The Studio Museum in Harlem has a video of his recent performance with the Corps, as part of its “Radical Presence” exhibition (in conjunction with New York University’s Grey Art Gallery), available here. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he was quick to say that he tried to keep his art-making and educating separate, but conceded on one occasion that, in his art, “I guess you could say that I am [teaching] in that I’m trying to educate the viewing audience to things that I feel would otherwise be forgotten.” Terry Adkins, Blanche Bruce and the Lone Wolf Recital Corps performing ‘The Last Trumpet’ in the Performa 13 biennial. (Courtesy Performa/Salon 94) His work is held in numerous public collections, including those of Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Mr. Adkins had recent solo shows at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., and has been tapped to appear in this year’s Whitney Biennial. He is survived by his wife, Merele Williams-Adkins, and two children, Titus Hamilton Adkins and Turiya Hamlet Adkins. Addressing his influences in a 2012 interview, Mr. Adkins mentioned the importance attending Catholic Church as a child had on his eventual art career. “This early exposure to…an architectural space that was meant for ceremony as well as contemplation had a profound effect on me,” he said. “I don’t know whether faith is the right word,” he added later. “I think it has to do with my belief that art can be a force for change.” (Photo by LaMont Hamilton Photography) Read more at http://observer.com/2014/02/terry-adkins-artist-musician-and-educator-dies-at-60/#ixzz3SlDCQSf7 Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook Terry Adkins, Blanche Bruce and the Lone Wolf Recital Corps performing 'The Last Trumpet' in the Performa 13 biennial. (Courtesy Performa/Salon 94) Terry Adkins, Blanche Bruce and the Lone Wolf Recital Corps performing ‘The Last Trumpet’ in the Performa 13 biennial. (Courtesy Performa/Salon 94) His work is held in numerous public collections, including those of Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art,  the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Mr. Adkins had recent solo shows at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., and has been tapped to appear in this year’s Whitney Biennial. He is survived by his wife, Merele Williams-Adkins, and two children, Titus Hamilton Adkins and Turiya Hamlet Adkins. Addressing his influences in a 2012 interview, Mr. Adkins mentioned the importance attending Catholic Church as a child had on his eventual art career. “This early exposure to…an architectural space that was meant for ceremony as well as contemplation had a profound effect on me,” he said. “I don’t know whether faith is the right word,” he added later. “I think it has to do with my belief that art can be a force for change.” Read more at http://observer.com/2014/02/terry-adkins-artist-musician-and-educator-dies-at-60/#ixzz3S5ykrCAd Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/5-exhibitions-school-design-s-terry-adkins 6 Exhibitions for PennDesign’s Terry Adkins Media Contact: Jeanne Leong | jleong@upenn.edu 215-573-8151 April 26, 2012 As a teenager growing up in the 1960s, Terry Adkins, a fine arts professor in the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, was influenced by the major cultural, political and social events of the era -- and the music of Jimmy Hendrix. Adkins’ recital, “The Principalities,” which opened April 26 at Galerie Zidoun in Luxembourg, features that era and the singer, songwriter and guitarist, who died in 1970 at age 27. Adkins’ work examines Hendrix from the perspective of his short stint in 1961 as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. Adkins casts Hendrix as an angel descending to earth described by Dionysius the Areopagite in his De Coelesti Hierarchia (Celestial Hierarchy) as being from the sacred order of the Principalities, who are princely angelic soldiers who govern the earthly realm of generative ideas. Adkins presents his mixed-media work using architecture, sculpture, photography, video, drawings and sound. Hendrix’s “creative imagination, charismatic persona and avant-garde fashion sense all changed my life,” Adkins says. “His progressive politics and otherworldly musings ushered in my manhood and expanded my consciousness.” Hendrix’s profound effect on Adkins is reflected in the installation. “I developed a heightened awareness of Eastern poetics by becoming a student of his compelling lyricism and a full-fledged pacifist upon hearing his Machine Gun,” Adkins says. Six versions of Hendrix’s song opposing the Vietnam war are incorporated into “The Principalities” installation along with Martin Luther King’s “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” speech. It’s been a busy time for Adkins, with exhibitions in 5 other galleries and museums worldwide. Currently, he has a suite of prints, “The Philadelphia Negro Reconsidered,” exhibited on campus at the Amistad Gallery in DuBois College House. His work is included in “The Bearden Project” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in “Intense Proximity” at the La Triennale in Paris. Adkins’ work is also part of a group exhibition, “True North,” which opens in May at the Anchorage Museum of Art. And, in July, Adkins’ work will be the subject of a 30-year retrospective, “Recital,” at Skidmore College’s Tang Museum. http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/09-04-2006_terry-adkins-darkwater-at-gallery-51.htm   Terry Adkins: "Darkwater" at Gallery 51 Presented with MCLA's celebration of W.E. B. DuBois By Jane Hudson - 09/04/2006 Terry Adkins: "Darkwater" at Gallery 51 - Berkshire Fine Arts   www.berkshirefinearts.com   An installation of sculpture/performative objects/sites as a tribute to the memory and works of W.E.B. DuBois at 51 Main St., North Adams, MA "I am a sculptor, musician and latter-day practitioner of the long-standing African-American tradition of ennobling worthless things. My work is primarily forged out of the accretion of found materials in a process called "potential disclosure" (as opposed to found object). Therein I attempt to clothe the potentialities that the articles themselves suggest, stripping away the unnecessary to get at the essence of things. My approach to the creative experience is intuitive, driven by impulse and faith rather than by reason or dialectic critique." (from Terry Adkins artist statement) Born into an era of rising African-American consciousness within the urban foment of Washington, D.C., Terry Adkins has been schooled in the language of contemporary art, poetic metaphor and the politics of race in America. These various syntaxes combine in his sculptural installations to speak eloquently of historical truths, emotionally evocative sites, and the wisdom of jazz. In 'Darkwater' Adkins celebrates the soul-consciousness of W.E.B. DuBois who, more than any other figure in the struggle of African-Americans to attain full selfhood, combined oratorical power with a political philosophy that inspired generations. In 'Postlude', the central piece in the exhibition, Adkins constructs a trough-like container filled with water upon which float a grid of black spheres. At either end of the tank stand two transparent towers containing bubbling water which sparkles with internal light.. We are reminded of the bier of a dead prophet and the brilliance of his ideas that continue to fulminate. Beside the main stands a large iron cage. It has the decorative quality of a pulpit perhaps, but also the dangerous affect of a prison cell. This is a cage! The artist uses iron quite liberally in many of his pieces, and it has the effect of reminding the viewer of manacles and other such devices used to constrain bodies. This piece is one of the objects of 'potential disclosure' which the artist sets in motion with the suggestion of an action. Pictured here wearing his saxophone, Adkins celerates Jazz as the redemptive force of his culture. Funerary drums hang with black crepe from which are suspended ink spools suggesting the powerful message hidden in the music of DuBois words. The drum, its roots in African life, is transformed in American culture to communicate the passion and brilliance of the disenfranchised. We are instructed about lynching with maps of the behavior, but we are moved to its reality by the harness and bells that hang from the ceiling. Music and violence have been welded together in the caldron of the struggle. There is no question that this work is an indictment, but spoken with compassionate tenderness and devotion to the essential humanity it seeks to celebrate. If you can make it to the performance on Saturday, Sept. 9, it should be wonderful. Terry Adkins, jazz man   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Adkins   Terry Adkins From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Terry Roger Adkins (May 9, 1953 – February 8, 2014) was an American artist.[1][2] He was Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.[3] He was born in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Fisk University with a B.S., from Illinois State University with a M.S., and from the University of Kentucky with an M.F.A. He leads the Lone Wolf Recital Corps that has premiered works at ICA London, Rote Fabrik, Zurich, New World Symphony, Miami, P.S.1 MOMA, and ICA Philadelphia.[4] Adkins died of heart failure at Brooklyn, New York in February of 2014; he was 60 years old.[5] Contents 1 Awards 2 Exhibitions 3 References 4 External links Awards 2009 Rome Prize [6][7] 2008 USA Fellows [8]   Exhibitions: 2012 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York[9] 2009 Gallery of the American Academy, American Academy in Rome, Italy[10] 2006 Gallery 51 [11] 1999 Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania [12][13] 1997 International Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 1995 Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York 1987 Salama-Caro Gallery, London 1986 Project Binz 39, Zurich   References Jump up ^ "Salon 94 profile". Jump up ^ "Artist's Biographies". Driskellcenter.umd.edu. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ "PennDesign | Terry Adkins". Design.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ "Charles Gaines/Terry Adkins Collaborative". NewMuseum.org. 2009-08-06. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/arts/terry-adkins-composer-of-art-sculptor-of-music-dies-at-60.html?_r=0 Jump up ^ [1][dead link] Jump up ^ "Penn School of Design Professor Terry Adkins Wins Rome Prize in Visual Arts | Penn News". Upenn.edu. 2009-04-20. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ Moyemont, Terry. "Terry Adkins - Profile - Visual Arts - USA Projects - Artist Fundraising & Advocacy". Unitedstatesartists.org. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ Terry Adkins RecitalJuly 14 - December 2, 2012 (2010-05-15). "Tang Museum | Exhibitions | Terry Adkins - Recital". Tang.skidmore.edu. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ http://www.exibart.com/ "Terry Adkins - Meteor Stream". Exibart.com. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ Hudson, Jane. "Terry Adkins: "Darkwater" at Gallery 51". Berkshire Fine Arts. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ "Past Exhibitions > Terry Adkins: Relay Hymn - ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art - Philadelphia, PA". Icaphila.org. 1999-11-07. Retrieved 2012-07-09. Jump up ^ "Terry Adkins: Relay Hymn". Icaphilastore.org. Retrieved 2012-07-09. External links[edit] "Terry Adkins", Dana Roc "Terry Adkins", Artnet "At the AAR Gallery, Meteor Stream: Recital in Four Dominions", by Terry Adkins After John Brown Public artwork at the Harlem - 125 Street train station, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit   Posted by Kofi Natambu at 5:48 PM Labels: African American Art, Art theory, Conceptual art, cultural history, Ideology and Art, Sculpture., Terry Adkins, Visual art

Malcolm X is Remembered by His Daughter Illyasah Shabazz and Friend and Movement Comrade A. Peter Bailey On the 50th anniversary of His Tragic Assassination of February 21, 1965

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/24/50_years_after_murder_malcolm_x

VIDEO: 

50 Years After Murder, Malcolm X Remembered by Daughter Ilyasah Shabazz & Friend A. Peter Bailey
Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Democracy Now!

 
As Democracy Now! continues to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, we are joined by his daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, and friend, A. Peter Bailey. Both were inside the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965, the day Malcolm X was shot dead. Shabazz was just two years old, while Bailey was among the last people to speak with Malcolm X that day. Shabazz is a community organizer, motivational speaker and author of several books, including the young adult-themed "X: A Novel" and a memoir, "Growing Up X." Bailey is a journalist, author and lecturer who helped Malcolm X found the Organization of Afro-American Unity and served as one of the pallbearers at his funeral. Bailey is the author of several books, including "Witnessing Brother Malcolm X, the Master Teacher." Shabazz and Bailey discuss the circumstances surrounding Malcolm X’s killing and share personal reflections on his life and legacy.

Watch Part 2 of the discussion here.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: As Democracy Now! continues to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, today we spend the rest of the show with his daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, and his friend, A. Peter Bailey. They were both inside the Audubon Ballroom on February 21st, 1965, the day Malcolm was shot dead. Ilyasah was just two years old.

AMY GOODMAN: Ilyasah Shabazz is a community organizer, a motivational speaker, activist and author. She recently co-wrote a young adult book called X: A Novel. Her previous books include Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X and The Diary of Malcolm X: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Her 2003 memoir is called Growing Up X. Her latest piece for The New York Times was headlined "What Would Malcolm X Think?" She joins us here in New York.

And from Silver Spring, Maryland, we’re joined by A. Peter Bailey, journalist, author, lecturer, helped Malcolm X found the Organization of Afro-American Unity and edited its newsletter, Blacklash. Bailey was one of the last people to speak with Malcolm X on the day of his assassination. He served as one of the pallbearers at Malcolm’s funeral. He’s the author of Witnessing Brother Malcolm X, the Master Teacher.

We want to welcome you both to Democracy Now! Ilyasah, let’s begin with you, although I’m sure it’s hard to remember this day. You were in the Audubon Ballroom on February 21st, 1965?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: I was. I was there. My two older sisters, Attallah and Qubilah, and my mother, we were there to hear our father’s confederation on the OAAU. And I don’t—

AMY GOODMAN: What row were you in, or did your mother tell you after that you were in?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Yeah, yeah, we were stage right, in the front. Yeah. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have any recollection?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: I don’t have any recollection. But, you know, I wasn’t quite three years old, and I—when I was writing Growing Up X, I remembered my uncle Wilfred visiting, and I remembered being at the Malcolm X College in Chicago, and I remember when he was leaving. And I was about a little over three. And I remember just crying at the top of my lungs. And my mother, later, she had this story that I used to wake up looking for my father. And, you know, she would replace this with cookies, because we used to share cookies late at night. And so, I used to wake up, when we stayed at Peter Bailey’s—I mean, not Peter Bailey, at Sidney Poitier’s house, and looking for my father, and so she started putting cookies at the door. So I sort of made the correlation that even though I was so young, I’m sure, you know, the chaos, the loud noise, had some sort of effect, and just remembering that your father never came home, you know, that missing.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Bailey, your recollection of that day—where you were, what happened—at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, February 21st, 1965?

A. PETER BAILEY: Well, I was at the Audubon, and Brother Malcolm, when he came in, asked me to come backstage, which I did. And we talked about several things while I was back there. And then he asked which one of us—there was about five of us back there—recognized a New York City minister, who had been very involved in the school battles in New York. He was coming to the Audubon that day to make a pitch for support for clothing for Brother Malcolm’s children, which had been burned up in the firebombing of his home the previous weekend. So I said, well, I recognized him, so he asked me to go out front to the little lobby area before you came into the main ballroom—and the ballroom was huge—and wait for Reverend Galamison and bring him backstage.

So I was sitting there facing the entrance, and I heard Malcolm say, "Assalamu alaikum." And the next thing I heard, you know, was shots. It sounded to me like hundreds of shots. Later, I found out there weren’t that many, but it sounded like hundreds of shots. And I, with a few of us that were out there, we ran into this bathroom that was off to the side, and when the shooting stopped, we ran back. I came back and ran through the swinging doors into the main ballroom. And people were yelling and screaming and crying and cursing, and chairs were all knocked over, tables knocked over. And I ran down, and I jumped upon the stage. And Mary Kochiyama, a Japanese American who was very close to us, had him cradled in her arms. And his shirt was open, and I saw the bullet holes in his body. And I remember thinking to myself, "He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to die." And then the brothers came in with a rolling stretcher and put him on the stretcher and wheeled him over across the street, which was Columbia Presbyterian Hospital at that time. And I still remember that no doctor  from the hospital would come to the Audubon.

AARON MATÉ: Mr. Bailey, can you—

A. PETER BAILEY: It was right across the street.

AMY GOODMAN: No doctor would come?

A. PETER BAILEY: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Why not?

A. PETER BAILEY: I assume because they were afraid.

AARON MATÉ: Well, on that point—

A. PETER BAILEY: So the brothers literally—they literally had to bogard and just take a stretcher and roll it through the streets back over to the Audubon and put Brother Malcolm on it. Now, when I jumped upon stage, he had not died, because he was gasping. I was watching as he was gasping. And then they put him on the stretcher and rolled the stretcher across the street to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

AARON MATÉ: Mr. Bailey, can you talk about the climate for Malcolm at that time? You mentioned the firebombing of his house. He had recently broken with the Nation, living under constant threat, undergone what we believe to be a sort of political evolution in some of his views, or at least changing his views publicly. What was life like for him at that time?

A. PETER BAILEY: He was under constant threats from the Nation. There were elements in the Nation of Islam who were out to get him. And there was also the federal government. See, most people want to talk just about the thing between him and the Nation of Islam. But the federal government, the FBI, the CIA, were very concerned, because Brother Malcolm was on a mission to internationalize the movement. That’s why the organization that he founded, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, of which I was a member and editor of its newsletter, we called ourselves a human rights organization, not a civil rights organization. And Brother Malcolm was planning to take the United States government before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights for being either unable or unwilling to protect the lives or property of black people. And he spent most of the last year of his life, you know, moving towards that goal. And because of what he was doing, he was getting—being threatened by elements in the Nation of Islam and by U.S. government agencies. And I think that the assassination was a willing collaboration between these two factions.

AMY GOODMAN: And for young people especially, Peter Bailey, when you talk about the rift with the Nation of Islam, who might not be familiar with what happened, how Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam?

A. PETER BAILEY: Well, Brother Malcolm—I think it really got down to the fact that there were elements in the leadership of the Nation of Islam who wanted to keep—you know, like it’s better to control a small—what is it? You know, a small pond than to be—have a larger thing to deal with. And they did not like the fact that he was making outreach to the traditional civil rights organizations. And, by the way, this happened before he even got out. In 1963, he had a rally in Harlem that he invited all the major civil rights leaders to come to. They didn’t come. And at that time, he was still in the Nation of Islam. So, they did not want—they didn’t like what he was doing in terms of the outreach. They did not like what he was doing in terms of being more involved actively in making some connection with the civil rights movement. They wanted to keep themselves isolated, and many of them resented that.

And so they began to try to undermine him with Elijah Muhammad, who was the leader of the Nation of Islam. And I’ve always believed that if Elijah Muhammad had not been ill at the time, where people can take advantage of a leader who’s ill, he might have just called Brother Malcolm in and said, "Listen, what’s going on here? Let’s sit down and talk." But when I read a book called Pathology of Leadership, that sometimes when a leader is ill, it can have a major effect on events.

And so, those—and then, of course, again, government agencies were helping to promote this. They would call Brother Malcolm’s people and say, "You better watch out for Elijah Muhammad’s people." They would call Elijah Muhammad’s people and say, "You better watch out for Malcolm X’s people." So they were kind of trying to keep the rift going. And there were elements in the Nation leadership who were working, who were collaborating with this effort. And that’s the way I have to come to realize it and see it after all these years.

AARON MATÉ: Ilyasah, can you reflect on this time for Malcolm? One of the big revelations in the movie Selma that surprised many people is that your father goes to Selma to meet with Coretta Scott King while Dr. King is in jail.

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Right, that’s correct. First, you know, both of our families were very close—Dr. King’s family and Malcolm’s family. And both were seeking solutions to this human condition that would oppress its fellow man. It’s just an unfortunate situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Ilyasah, while at the time, of course, you were too young, you have written extensively about your dad. You’ve written—you co-wrote, with Herb Boyd—you co-edited The Diary of Malcolm X in that last year. In 1964, your father went to Africa, went to Mecca. Talk about the significance of that period. And then, how interesting that your families knew each other—Dr. King’s family and yours—yet a lot has been made of the rift between your father and Dr. King. But you’re saying there was something else going on.

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Well, yes, our families were very close. But, you know, it had to have been quite challenging for my father to discover that the Nation of Islam wasn’t what he thought it was, that he had sacrificed so much of his life, that he had dedicated so much to this organization that he felt was the best kind of organization to help black people reliberate themselves, reclaim their history and so forth. And so, you know, to find that it wasn’t the organization that he thought had to have been quite devastating. And he was fortunate to go and make his pilgrimage and, you know, be treated as a human being. And many times, you know, we forget what the social climate was like in the 1960s. And so, that he was able to go to this holy place and be treated as an equal, you know, to be treated as a man, which was not the case here in America. And I think that that’s really one of the things that we—we seem to forget that, the social climate that was in the 1960s, that my father and Dr. King and so many others fought against.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you tell young people? Now, you wrote the novel; it’s called X: A Novel. Why did you choose to make it a novel?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Historical fiction to bring the young reader in, you know, along into Malcolm’s journey of self-discovery. He was evidently in pain by the loss of his father, by—

AMY GOODMAN: What happened to his dad?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: His father—you know, his father was a great activist—both of his parents. And he was a Garveyite. He was the president—

AMY GOODMAN: Follower of Marcus Garvey.

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Yes. He was the president, actually, of the Milwaukee chapter where they lived in the Midwest. And he wrote a letter to President Coolidge when Marcus Garvey was arrested. And, I mean, when you read this letter that he wrote to the president, you can see his son, Malcolm X, you know, where he said, "I suggest that you let this dear man out of jail. He did not commit any crimes. And if you do let him out, you will be in good graces with God and the people and history." And not too long after, President Coolidge released him from jail. So you see the kind of father that Malcolm had, you know, the two parents who contributed to this development, the foundation of Malcolm. And so I thought it was important to write first the children’s book, because it promotes self-love and leadership for young children, and then to write X: The Novel, which would bring the young reader along the journey of Malcolm in this time of pain, sometimes living a life of self-destruction, self-destructive behavior. And so, young people, challenged, can see that ultimately he would grow to become one of the greatest political strategists of our time.

AARON MATÉ: Mr. Bailey, the place where Malcolm X was killed, the Audubon Ballroom, is now a center in his name and that of his wife, Betty Shabazz. Looking back 50 years later, how do you want us to remember Malcolm X?

A. PETER BAILEY: I want him to be remembered as a wise leader; as a man who at a time when white supremacy terrorism rampant, between 1955 and 1965, was courageous enough to stand up to that; as a man who advocated the gaining of knowledge; as a man who understood that we were part of a world, not just the United States, but that we were part of a world, so he was reaching out to kind of internationalize the movement and connect the movement against white supremacist terrorism to the movement against colonialism, especially on the African continent. I mean, he was a teacher. That’s why when I talk about him to young people especially, I always refer to him as a master teacher. And there’s no more important a member of a community than a master teacher. He taught us. People say, "What did he do?" I say he changed minds. He gave us a perception on how to view the world, and the country and the world. He taught us the importance of doing research and speaking, and not just off the top of your head, of actually getting the facts. He used to say, "I know when I go out and speak at various places that there are people in the audience whose sole reason of being there is to catch me with my facts wrong. So I don’t give them that opportunity."

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Bailey, we have to break now, but we’re going to do part two of this discussion with you and Ilyasah Shabazz, and we’ll post it online at democracynow.org.

Re: Malcolm X and James Brown--RAP Since 1960: From Political Ideology To Popular Culture + Three New Loku Poems by Kofi Natambu

FROM THE KN ARCHIVES:
Re: Malcolm X and James Brown
 
RAP Since 1960: 

From Political Ideology To Popular Culture
by Kofi Natambu
St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC)
April-May, 1992

What’s truly significant about RAP as a form of public discourse in the United States over the past three decades is the fact of its transition from a pop culture context (e.g. radio broadcasting, novelty recording and vernacular communication within the community) to a more formal and intellectualized political format during the mid and late 1960s, and its even more complex evolution into a form that today encompasses both social ideology and popular culture. From Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and H. ‘Rap’ Brown to Richard Pryor, Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets in little over a decade (ca. 1963-1976) is quite a leap even for the extraordinary pace of most black cultural change in the U.S. during the 20th century. That these major innovations in the form and content of language use have taken place in a social context that has been as strained and tension-filled as the explosive cultural terrain of American life since the 1950s only highlights the intense aesthetic seriousness and commitment of RAP to social and cultural transformation. This examination of the “modernist” roots of RAP in the period before the seemingly “unprecedented” appearance of the New Wave of rappers since 1980 also helps to clarify just how integral and profoundly influential these pioneers from the 1960s and 1970s have been.

A good place to begin this investigation would be the political styles and behavior of the leading advocates of ‘Black Power’ thinking and activity during the volatile 1960s. What is distinctive about the public rhetoric of such important political figures and activists as Malcolm X, H. ‘Rap’ Brown (dig the nick-name!), Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale (as just four representative examples) is that they all consciously used and in­cluded in their public speech and writings, phrasings, cadences, tropes, rhythms and stances that come directly out of the RAP tradition. These particular techniques and values also characterized the cultural aesthetics and politics of such leading African-American writers and intellectuals as Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones), Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Don L. Lee, Etheridge Knight, David Henderson, Quincy Troupe, and lshmael Reed.

A very good case can be made that the widespread public appeal of these political and cultural figures in the black community was precisely their perceived ability to communicate in the vernacular mode as well as use the “King’s English.” This double-voiced quality of black verbal and cultural expression is characteristic of rappers who rely heavily on innuendo, irony, satire, inversion of tropes and what is known as the “put-on” (and “put-down”) to subvert and manipulate conventional significations. This highly creative and innovative ap­proach to language allows these speakers and writers to connect with their audiences on a visceral level that often enhances and gives deeper social-cultural resonance to what they say.

As Henry Gates points out in The Signifying Monkey, this double-voiced discourse is designed to critically examine and question the mainstream as it simultaneously celebrates (again in a critical or “negative” sense) an alternative vision. Much of the so-called “boasting” done by black male and female rappers alike is derived from ancient African rituals of verbal expression that invokes a playful yet highly serious response to the complexities of human behavior. In this way parody, ridicule, in-jokes, punning and double-entendre serve to create and sustain an independent universe of social and linguistic communication. The act of refiguration in language leads to a fundamental revision and transformation of what is received or given. Thus black vernacu­lar modes like RAP actively seek to intervene on and thereby revise previous texts or modes of expression. The very idea of sampling is concerned with just this kind of implied celebration and critique of the past since as a method it consciously “brings back” the past while commenting ironically on its presence in the present. This is accom­plished through using melodic and rhythmic material from earlier songs as an integral part of the rap’s struc­ture. Through the textual manipulation and restructuring of the sound-text we encounter an understanding of the actual root meaning of the word “text” which is derived from the ancient Latin root-word textus and the past participle texere which means “to weave.” In a major study by the distinguished linguist and cultural histo­rian Walter J. Ong, entitled Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982), we get a defini­tion of the significance of this etymology:

‘Text’ from a root meaning ‘to weave’ is, in absolute terms, more compatible etymologically with oral utterance than is ‘literature,’ which refers to letters etymologically/ (literae) of the alpha­bet. Oral discourse has commonly been thought of even in oral milieus as weaving or stitching ­rhapsodien, ‘to rhapsodize,’ basically means in Greek to “stitch songs together.”1

In any event, it is the intersecting dimensions of orality and literacy that constitutes the real form and content of all rapping regardless of context. This is what characterizes the speech and writing styles of African ­American cultural and political figures who are compelled to be fluent in both areas because of their heavy involvement in public media. But what is fascinating in this synthesis of writing and oral expression is that they are used to not only “communicate” certain ideas and feelings, but to involve the listener (or reader) in a total experience that allows them to respond in a direct, visceral way to the information being presented to them. This transmitter/receiver relationship in black cultural settings is crucial to any examination of these language modes as both expression and critique. For the fundamental purpose of most black discourse in this context of social media is precisely to engage in critical theory about what (and how) meaning is conveyed. In fact, much of the often vociferous white academic and media response to the use of these methods of black “signifyin (g)” is a result of them not understanding or liking what is being said/written. This is important to acknowledge in as much as one of the major codes of the ideology of racism is that blacks are intellectually incapable of just this kind of subtle parody, satire, and critical analysis, especially of the sacred philosophical and aesthetic cows of the (white) Western tradition.

Masters of this (re)codifying strategy include the RAP group PUBLIC ENEMY and their extraordinary wordsmiths CHUCK D and FLAVOR-FLAV, as well as LL COOLJ, KRS-One, ICE-T, A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, ERIC B & RAKIM, QUEEN LATIFAH, DE LA SOUL, MC LYTE, ICE CUBE, and RUN DMC, all of whom have emerged as leading cultural figures in the past five to seven years(!). In a later chapter we will examine just why they are so important to this development.

But suffice it to say, for now, that these “new” rappers (as distinct from the previous generation of the 1960s and ‘70s) represent a decided leap forward in the complex semiology of figuration and (re) figuration that characterizes innovation in language use during this epoch. In the 1960s the black cultural nationalist and revolutionary nationalist movements as represented say, by the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa; the Nation of Islam and SNCC, as well as such fundamentally black Marxist groups as Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers, all used rapping strategies to translate and express complex political ideas and philosophies about the dialectics of “race,” class, gender and political economy to a popular audience of blacks (and even some radical whites) who were well-versed in the signifying traditions of Afro-America where mean­ing is derived from historical experience and the myriad ways in which this experience is inscribed (figured, translated, interpreted, expressed) in language. The importance of italicizing this idea is that much too often critics and theorists mistake or substitute sociology and (pseudo) psychology for linguistic and cultural phe­nomena when dealing with black cultural reality. This is the result of venal racial mythology which attempts to reduce the “identity” of African-American culture to extremely narrow, predetermined essences of authenticity and ‘naturalism.’ What this acknowledgment foregrounds is the awareness of the signifier as being integral to any on-going, indeterminate conception of the signified in black culture. This is accomplished of course at the level of a creative and signifying challenge to the sign of meaning itself as encoded in the conventional English word signification. In other words, the black use of the word “signifyin (g) signifies on (that is, revises and trans­forms) the very term signification (i.e. meaning) itself.

Thus in the rapping tradition we find a different conception of how and why any particular meaning is conveyed through language. In the context of black political and cultural activists like Carmichael, Brown, Huey Newton, Kenny Cockrel, Baraka, Cortez and Scott-Heron, we encounter the continually creative (re) appropriation of conventional English words and phrases that are consciously revised, transformed and rede­fined to construct an entirely new or fresh approach to projecting meaning in society. The classic model for this kind of quick-witted revision and dynamic use of language was the great Malcolm X whose speeches, writings, and public statements are suffused with copious references to, and modern take-offs on, traditional folk expressions, tales, tropes and values. The highly personalized ‘spin’ that Malcolm would put on these modal elements was the adaptation of the urban hipster persona who through inside knowledge (the very defi­nition of the word ‘hip’) and a razor-sharp manipulation of irony, paradox, and innuendo laced with a wicked sense of humor could slyly redefine and frame the terms of discourse in any given situation.

As a past master at the subtle and sometimes brutal art of signifying, Malcolm X excelled at the droll practice of what the English call “one-up-manship.” One of his favorite ploys was asking a seemingly innocent question, then when the person he was addressing couldn’t come up with an answer (and of course any response that they gave would be the ‘wrong’ one) he would delight in what in African-American culture is called “smacking someone upside the head” by giving the devastating ‘right’ answer to his own question. One question that he often asked of stuffy, pretentious black intellectuals (or any black authority figure) he was debating in a public forum would be the following:

Malcolm: Sir, what do they call a black man with a Ph.D.?
Respondent: I don’t know (or some other response)
Malcolm: A Nigger!
 
The point of this exchange would be to frame the very terms of the discourse by establishing immediately that racism was an ideological and social force that didn’t go away or become less destructive merely because an individual black person had ‘succeeded’ at something in the general society. Malcolm’s discursive strategy here was to foreground  his critique of American society by including even the person(s) he was debating as an example of that which he was indicting. The fact that he did this equally with black and white men and women (either to make a negative orpositive point) meant that he was highly conscious of, and adept at, using the power of language to tell complex truths about the society and culture. That this was largely accomplished through the practice of signifying only made Malcolm’s ideas and perspective more accessible to the largely young audience that he was trying to reach.

The rapping aspects of Malcolm’s oratorical style were most clearly demonstrated in the syncopated cadences and staccato phrasings that he often used. Alternating with a sly, sometimes sinister sounding chuckle and highly dramatic, almost ominous silent pauses, Malcolm would often keep an audience spellbound by deftly weaving a pastiche of historical allusions, folk proverbs and admonitions, ironic jokes, satirical puns, the inversions of tropes and indirect discourse (a prime element as we’ve noted in the art of signifying). He was also a brilliant storyteller whose allegorical tales epitomized the innovative use of the rapping tradition. As the linguist Mitchell-Kernan points out: “Signifying does not always have negative valuations attached to it; it is clearly thought of as a kind of art—a clever way of conveying messages.”2

In Malcolm’s most famous collection of speeches MALCOLM X SPEAKS (Grove Press, 1965), we find many examples of just this sort of artful “cleverness.” In fact, this book and the world famous AUTOBIOGRAPHY published in 1965 after his death by assassination, (and now in its 40th printing!), are classic texts that clarify exactly why Malcolm is revered as a major sampling source for the current generation of rappers. A few examples of his singularly innovative style follows (all taken from Malcolm X Speaks and his Autobiography):

“I’m the man you think you are. ..If you want to know what I’ll do, figure out what you’ll do. I’ll do the same thing—only more of it”

I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate,and call myself a diner...Being here in America doesn’t make you an American.”

“I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American night­mare.”8

“Shorty would take me to groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks’ and cats’ pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.’4

“You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom, then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it.”

What is impossible to convey with these written examples is the subtle nuances of inflection, tone, cadence and phrasing that characterized Malcolm’s speaking style and how it directly affects his ability to signify in the terms we have already outlined. What most impresses the current generation of RAP artists is precisely Malcolm’s ability to transgress cultural and political sacred cows through his mastery of the verbal modes of parody, satire, circumlocution and mockery. Many of Malcolm’s speeches consciously set out to revise and transform conventional ideas about the nature and meaning of American history through the art of troping. By (re)figuring standard notions of what constitutes historical and social reality in the United States we get a critical narrative of the content of race relations, cultural expression, political philosophy and economic theory through a withering investigation into the mythology of these structures within the institutional parameters of the larger society. Malcolm was extremely adept at using indirect discourse and the implied or highly suggestive statement or phrase in lieu of literal minded posturing. The emphasis would always be on foregrounding the actual reality of conflict and contradiction in American culture vis-a-vis the given or received myth of how things “should be.” The result was often provocative and insightful.

The inspiring example of Malcolm X in the glaringly public arena of national and world politics led the next generation of African-American activists to base their oratorical and writing styles in the tradition of the vernacular. The bold, brash and scathing verbal expressions of such well-known figures as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale and the great boxer/poet Muhammad Ali were the very epitome of the rapping tradition in that humor, irony, parody, troping, and ingenious turns-of-phrase were the very content of their “messages.” The fact that rhyming, repetition, riffing, and indirect discourse (as well as scatology, insults, and folklore) were so integral to their cultural speech put them and others (like the comedian/philosophers Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and Bill Cosby and the legendary singer/musician/dancer James Brown) right into the ‘mainstream’ of the signifying styles so widely used and expressed in the general black community.

In the cultural work of Richard Pryor for example, one finds a particularly ingenious use of the official mythology of African-American identity in the United States as it confronts or contradicts the historical reality of actual cultural experience. Most of Pryor’s brilliant routines of the period from 1973-1983 (his era of greatest influence as an artist and as a cultural icon) concern themselves with signifying on or about America’s most treasured and insidious myths and lies about racial relations as they were connected to matters of political economy, sex, social consciousness, sports and everyday life. In his stand-up monologues Pryor spent a great deal of time having a discourse with his various characters as they related to the mass audience. These charac­ters were drawn largely from the black working and lower middle class who were struggling to maintain a tenuous connection to their society despite the brutalizing and patronizing aspects of economic exploitation, political corruption, racial discrimination and street crime. The role of rapping in this context was to allow the audience to perceive, as in a Brechtian drama, just how and why their real lives served as a social counterpoint to the personas being “acted out” by Pryor in often tragicomic terms.

In all of these performances on records, concert stages, television, and film, Pryor was able to bring pathos and humor to the utterly idiosyncratic languages that his characters would use to engage the audience in an on-going psychodrama with the dilemmas of being human in a context that tried to deny cultural difference through crudely reductive appeals to “racial” myths that obscured how relations between people were grounded in the material conditions of their lives. The RAP aesthetic served to arm Pryor with the linguistic tools of signifying and vernacular expression necessary to cut through official lies (or ignorance) advanced by the general culture. Once again it is impossible to convey the incredible range of verbal signifiers encoded in a dazzling collection of voices, inflections, accents, cadences, and phrasings. A great place to begin an inves­tigation into the hilarious and poignant world of Pryor’s imagination would be his award-winning recordings That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), Is It Something I Said? (1975), and Bicentennial Nigger (1976), three of the truly radical masterpieces in modern comedic history.

What the RAP tradition has learned from Pryor is that linear narrative styles can be used to tell cautionary tales in the folkloric tradition or that it can be seen as a structural foundation for highly improvisational strategies of critique or celebration. Thus specific methods of signifying can be revised, inverted or extended to make a point or deliver a message while using humor and laughter as a “weapon” in the war against racial ideology. Allusive language, allegory, scatological imagery, and cultural analysis/criticism can all be included in the density of effects (or “mix) that make up the environmental theater that is contemporary RAP. The seminal role of sound in this particular process can’t be underestimated since it is an element that so closely corresponds to the role of inflection, accent, and phrasing in the RAP-oriented poetic styles of such ‘70s figures as Ali, the Last Poets, and Scott-Heron (who was also a singer and musician). Many of the finest, most creative rappers today have mastered this synthetic/syncretic unity of persona, voice, and sonic mix, particularly the PUBLIC ENEMY crew (Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Terminator X), as well as LL Cool J (and his DJ, the amazing ‘Cut Creator’), Eric B & Rakim, Paris, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah (and her extremely versatile posse called ‘The Flavor Unit’), and the political activist/philosopher/poet/storyteller KRS-One.

It’s no coincidence then that this generation of RAP artists have listened so closely and carefully to the great ‘70s artists. The pervasive influence of Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, Pryor, and Ali can be heard very clearly in nearly every major (and minor) RAP album, CD and cassette-tape since the first recordings began to appear on the open market in 1977. However, the most important and seminal influence on the present generation, and a man whose entire career since the early 1950s embodies a highly sophisticated synthesis of music, language, performance, and social activism is the one and only “Mr. Please, Please, Please, the Godfather of Soul, The Inventor of funk, and the hardest working man in show business, Mr. Dynamite Jaaaammmess Brown!”

What makes James Brown (1933- ) so important is his profound understanding and use of the myriad African-American folk traditions in music (e.g. Blues, Gospel and Jazz), language (e.g. rapping, signifying, melisma, narrative, metanarrative), performance art (e.g. historical rituals of dress, stagecraft, public rites of communion and testimony, confession and mass participation); as well as a commitment to the principles of social justice, political and personal freedom, economic self-determination and independent cultural expression). What Brown represents so deeply and embodies so clearly in his very life is an elegant embrace of his own “blackness.” This is a blackness not of a contrived or fake essentialism but a cultural identity and philosophy forged out of an agonizing and joyous struggle with the vicissitudes of living. The idea of what the writer/poet/playwright/ critic Amiri Baraka calls “the verb force”8 dominates Brown’s aesthetic. The recurring preoccupation with history that permeates Brown’s massive collection of songs and performance (e.g. “There was a Time,” “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Money Won’t Change You,” “Think”); the fearless political statement (“I Don’t Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing—Open Up the Door and I’ll Get Myself,” “Soul Power,” “It’s A New Day,” “Get Up, Get Into It and Get Involved,” “New Breed”); the fervent celebrations of sex (“Cold Sweat,” “I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me,” “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” “Sex Machine,” “Sexy, Sexy, Sexy”); the brash, bold (so-called) ‘boasting’ songs that celebrate the sheer art of living (“Superbad, “Ain’t It Funky Now,” “Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn,” “You Got To Have a Mother For Me,” Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “I Got the Feelin’,” “Mother Popcorn”); and his overtly educational or “message’ songs which provide the major transitional link between current RAP and the Rhythm and Blues tradition that Brown pioneered (“King Heroin,” “Brother Rapp,” “Don’t Be A Drop Out,” “Get On the Good Foot,” “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothin,” ‘The Payback,” “There It Is,” “Ain’t That a Groove”); not to mention the hard driving rhythmic dance music that revolutionized what could be done with beats in popular music (“Get It Together,” “Funky Drummer,” ‘The Popcorn,” “Let Yourself Go,” “Licking Stick,” “Cold Sweat,” “There Was A Time,” “Make it Funky,” “I Got Ants in My Pants,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Papa Don’t Take No Mess”). All these monster hits and many, many more (Brown has over 50 platinum records to his credit!) have established Brown as the biggest single influence on the new rappers whose age group (largely 21-30) were only small children or pre-adolescents when Brown was in his glorious prime (1965-1975).

What’s fascinating about Brown’s impact however, is how every aspect of his act from singing to dancing to his tireless community activism off the stage has been lionized, emulated, copied and incorporated into the form and content of contemporary RAP. His influence has been so great that he is the only artist whom all sectors and factions of today’s rappers readily agree on. This particular fact accounts for the legendary status that his music, language (from lyrics to oral sounds), performance sensibility, and fidelity to certain political and moral stances regarding his social and personal identity continues to have among the leading aesthetic and political forces in the RAP world. As a result, Brown provides an excellent point of departure for clarifying our understanding of the history of RAP in the 20th century.


Bibliography
 
The Death of Rhythm and Blues. Nelson George. Pantheon Books, 1988.

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Oxford University Press, 1988

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Walter J. Ong. Methuen, 1962.

Malcolm X Speaks. Malcolm X (Edited by George Brietman). Grove Press, 1965.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Grove Press, 1965.

The Beer Can By The Highway. John Kouwenhoven. Doubleday, 1961.

“Repetition As A Figure of Black Culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. James Snead Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Methuen, 1984.

Fresh: Hiphop Don’t Stop. Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker and Patty Romanowski. Ran­dom House, 1985.

Black Music. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). William Morrow, 1968.

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace. Ecco Press, 1990.

Mikhail Bahktin. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Harvard University Press, 1984.

The Dialogic Imagination. Mikhail Bahktin. Edited by Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981.


NOTES

1 Gates, Page 45

2 Ibid.

3 Malcolm, Page 56

4 Autobiography of Malcolm, Page 57

5 FRESH, Page 81

6 Kouwenhoven, Page 142

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

"When I was a young boy, I used to read Chinese and Japanese poetry, and I loved the form the Japanese created called the haiku. So I created an Afro-American form called the loku, which is just short. We don't have time to count the syllables.”

--Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

Three Loku Poems by Kofi Natambu:

American Exceptionalism

Only one country in the
history of the world
has ever used an atomic bomb

In the Age of Obama

If it appears that reality
is actually changing
it only means that
appearances are
deceiving

Grand Old Perversions

Welcome to the land of the spree and home of the knave
this eternal domain of the 3H Club
hatred hubris and hypocrisy