Diverse Mediocre Genre Product

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Static is the best known creation of the Milestone Comics label. Judging from the first collected volume, the rest of the line must be unmemorable indeed.

It doesn’t give me any joy to say that. Milestone’s efforts to create greater diversity in superhero comics were admirable and courageous, and I would like to be able to praise the results. But writers Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III offer little in the way of innovation, or even interest. Static seems borrowed wholesale from Spider-Man — and not even from Lee/Ditko Spider-Man, but from the less interesting, less urgent, undifferentiated later rehashes. Static is a 15 year old trash-talking superhero. And…that’s really all there is to him. He experiences some minor relationship angst; flirts with some criminal acivity — but everything is resolved with little fuss or interest. Then the second bit of the first volume is given over to a largely incomprehensible and tedious crossover with a bunch of unmemorable other heroes. The goal is obviously to recreate the sense of a world of super-heroes you get in DC and Marvel — and I did get to feel just how utterly unapproachable those worlds must be to anyone coming to them cold without decades of background. I didn’t know who any of these people were, and there was no effort to make me care. The whole thing was almost impossibly pointless; random characters kept leaping up with no introduction to say something portentous before getting blasted. The whole exercise was dreary, joyless, and confused; not notably worse than the DC and Marvel competition of the day, but not any better either.

There’s a parallel with “Sleepy Hollow” perhaps, a current paranormal/crime television show notable for having a (relatively) diverse cast — and for not much else in terms of quality. I wish Sleepy Hollow was better, just like I wish Static Shock was better, because I appreciate their efforts to be more diverse and less racist than the competition, and I would like to be able to embrace them wholeheartedly.

But though I don’t really want to consume either Sleep Hollow or Static Shock, their badness is in its own way a kind of worthy breakthrough. Diversity shouldn’t have to mean greatness; most genre product is mediocre, and so, ideally, in a more diverse, less racist world, you’d have a lot more diverse mediocre genre product. White superheroes shouldn’t be the only ones who get to be poorly written and indifferently drawn; white actors shouldn’t be the only ones who get jobs in poorly conceived sit-com/adventure dreck. If we’re going to have mediocre entertainment, it should, at the least, be less racist mediocre entertainment. By the same token, I hope the new Spider-Man in the Marvel cinema franchise is played by a black actor. Someone is going to get to star in a massively overhyped bone-dumb nostalgia vehicle with explosions and moderately funny gags. Why should it always be a white guy?

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Delany, Definitions, and Comics

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Caroline Small wrote an interesting commenton Samuel Delany’s view of comics and Scott McCloud; thought I’d reproduce it here.

Jeet and Noah: I guess I am still deeply skeptical about the assertion that Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman represent “Delany’s taste” in comics, rather than a strategic choice of writers to call attention to. I guess I just disagree that “taste” is what’s at stake here at all, or even that “taste” is a particularly useful category for understanding the role that Gaiman and Moore play in what Delany has to say about comics. (I realize I’m making a big deal out of something that I’m sure Jeet said casually, but it seems to me a particularly fecund slip…)

It’s not that I don’t agree to some extent: I find it deeply unpalatable when Delany uses words like “powerful, insightful and brilliant” to describe Scott McCloud. McCloud is the epitome of “middle-of-the-road” as far as I’m concerned. But I tend to read Delany’s praise as strategic rather than sycophantic.

I’m not sure what else from comics Delany could engage OTHER than Gaiman and Moore, given his project of deconstructing the binary between art and genre: despite those writers being palpably middlebrow (and with that I certainly agree), comics just doesn’t have a Marge Piercy or even a Sam Delany of its own that he could grapple with instead. And Gaiman/Moore have the strategic advantage, even over Piercy and Delany himself, of being very familiar to a great many people and therefore valuable as illustration. Jeet, are there comics creators/writers whom you think he should write about instead, that would be less disappointing, but still effectively work for his project?

I think the way I phrased my initial comment led to this notion that Delany exhibits some “highbrow” taste in literature, and that he hasn’t shown as sensitive an “ear” for comics. But — to use Jeet’s examples — Nabokov and Updike are really no less middlebrow than Gaiman and Moore. Delany’s fiction leaves no doubt that he reads and engages writers much much much more ambitious than Nabokov and Updike. But his project (and possibly but not necessarily his taste) dictates that he not privilege the highbrow at the expense of the lowbrow. I prefer to view him as capable of such great appreciation of human creativity that he privileges instead a synthesis of the entire spectrum: low, high, and middlebrow. There’s a “hippie appreciation” to his writing about art that I think has to be recognized and taken in context rather than at face value.

So for me the “disappointing” thing here is not that Delany has less sophisticated taste in comics than he does in literature: I don’t think we have access at all to his taste through his criticism, because he is far too fine a critic to be concerned with matters of taste.

What’s disappointing — although, really, it’s not so much disappointing as fascinating — is that as a writer he wasn’t able to make as much hay out of his perspective in comics as he was in fiction. Sam Delany’s prose SF really does participate in and advance his project of challenging the ways in which we presume genre cannot be art: Dhalgren is an essential, if not the essential, text for re-examining the conventional wisdom about how the strictures of genre characteristics preclude literary experimentation. But you both pointed out that his comics do not challenge the binary between genre and art in the same way. That’s interesting. Saying that he has middlebrow taste in comics is not sufficient to account for the fact that what Sam Delany has to offer can’t complicate and “elevate” graphic genre fiction in in the same way that it did prose genre fiction…

It’s a fun thread in general; Caro has some more thoughts, as do Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others.

Utilitarian Review 2/14/15

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

From the Archive: Aaron Costain on architecture and comics.

Christina Wintturi on why you can’t take the sex out of Barbie.

Me on Batgirl overturning the patriarchy.

Chris Gavaler on ouija boards and superpowers.

I interviewed Jordannah Elizabeth about her lovely new album.

Ibrahim Ineke on how the gothic and comics are intertwined.

On art, society, and fear of a Beyoncé think piece.

On how the right can’t even tell when it hates Jews anymore.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Reason I wrote about how sex work stigma precedes criminalization, rather than the other way around.

At the Daily Beast I argued that Marvel comics aren’t better than the films in the handling of race.

At the Atlantic I reviewed Ted Gioia’s book on love songs (and Jessie J.)

At Ravishly I wrote about:

—the crappy cover for the new all-female Avengers title

— Beyoncé and all the better versions of Precious Lord.

—Dawn Richard and the reluctance to see black women as geniuses.

— being bored with your spouse.

At the Chicago Reader I did a review of a show on nudity.

At Splice I explained why Bobby Jindal insults John Boehner.

Other Links

Tessa Dare has a brilliant Taylor Swift fanfic.

Brianna Wu with some concrete actions folks can take to reduce harassment of women online.

Jessica Luther has a lengthy discussion of the implications of a Vanderbilt rape case.

Pajama Boy and Anti-Semitism

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
_________

Last week [when this first ran], the right’s five-minute hate was directed against pajama boy, a guy in an ad encouraging young people to sign up for Obamacare. I usually don’t pay much attention to the right’s five-minute hates, but I happened to click through on this one, and was somewhat startled to discover that this random guy looks kind of like me. I’ve even got a onesie that looks a big like that (my son calls it a sleep-skirt.) And the curly hair, strong features, prominent nose, sharp eyebrows, glasses…yep. He’s younger and handsomer, but there’s a similarity. Which is to say that he, like me, looks Jewish. And just to drive the point home, some anti-pajama-boy memes apparently post a “How did you know I went to Oberlin?” tag across the picture. I went to Oberlin, which is known both for being a very liberal school, and for having a sizeable number of Jews in its student body.

Rich Lowry sneers that pajama boy is “so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show.” The slur isn’t exactly surprising; Jewishness and nerdiness are often conflated, or equated (see Woody Allen or Howard Wolowitz.) Assimilated or model minorities are generally seen as unmanly or womanish; what happened to Jewish males is now happening more or less to Asian males.

I guess I could go on now to accuse Lowry and the right in general of anti-Semitism here. But the truth is, I don’t think that that’s exactly what’s happening. In the same paragraph where Lowry sneers at pajama boy’s nerdiness, he writes that the guy is “probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey.” He’s plugging into stereotypes around Jewish appearance (nerdishness, Oberlin), but those stereotypes adamantly don’t for him link to Jewishness. He knows pajama boy is nerdy, he’s catching the cultural signs rooted in ethnic difference, but he doesn’t link those signs to ethnic difference in any way. It’s not even clear he knows where they come from.

Again, you could see this as indicative of the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and stereotypes. But to me it seems more like a sign of just how marginalized and defanged anti-Semitism has become in an American context. We’re beyond a dog whistle here; the prejudice and vitriol has been basically completely severed from its original ethnic target. Lowry and the right literally do not see that this man is Jewish. The fact that he may well not be Jewish simply underlines the point. Prejudice creates a stereotyped view of what Jews look like. That’s gone. So when confronted with a guy who looks (like me) Jewish, Lowry doesn’t immediately think he’s Jewish, which he may not be. Stereotypical Jewish features still provoke a shadow of prejudice, but they don’t any longer link to “Jewish”. People who say, “I don’t see race,” are pretty much full of crap — but it’s different when you talk about Jews. People really don’t see them. They don’t have preconceptions about what they look like; they don’t assume that someone who looks like a Jew is a Jew. At worst, they see somebody who is kind of nerdy. But the original ethnic basis for that nerdiness is gone.

On the one hand, it’s not especially pleasant to realize that some not insignificant number of people think that my looks alone make me an object of ridicule. I’d thought I’d stopped having to deal with that when I got out of high school. But, on the other hand, I basically did stop having to deal with it. Even these folks who clearly are trying to be as unpleasant as possible aren’t able to figure out what my looks mean, much less connect them to an actual systematic program aimed at making the lives of people who look like me miserable. As pajama boy, I face no prejudice. I can work where I like, marry whom I like, even make policy at a conservative think tank, if that’s my bliss. Hate lingers, but it loses a lot of its sting when it can’t remember who its hating.

Fear of a Beyoncé Think Piece

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Art exists in culture. By the same token, culture is represented in, and influences, art. That seems like a pretty obvious and irrefutable point. And yet, to talk about the links between art and culture consistently leads to panicked, even apocalyptic denunciations from those who otherwise occupy little intellectual common ground. Rather than being seen as complementary, or continuous, art and society are seen as matter and anti-matter; bringing them together, it is feared, will cause the end of all things.

Freddie deBoer fears, in particular, that the confluence of art and society will cause the end, or at least the decay, of society. In a Beyoncé think-piece calling for the end of Beyoncé thinkpieces, deBoer raises the familiar lefty fear that interest in art is a deadly form of false consciousness, distracting the intellectually flaccid from the real business of ridding the world of hegemons.

As I’ve said for a long time, a lot of progressive educated white types have essentially replaced having a politics with having certain cultural attachments and affectations. Really aggressively praising the Wire becomes a stand-in for “I am not racist.” Complaining that Selma was robbed becomes a stand-in for having done the necessary work to understand the history of race in America. Telling anyone who’ll listen that you think all of the creativity and risk are in hip hop now becomes a stand-in for advancing a meaningful political platform that could actually improve the lives of actually-existing black people. White people are so weird about Beyonce because Beyonce has become an all-purpose floating signifier, a vessel on to which bourgie white folks project all of their desires for how other people should see them. These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black.

It’s easy to get distracted here by the sweeping assumptions of bad faith — but that’s just standard deBoer being deBoer. What’s more interesting is the way that the typical Marxist/Frankfurt School mistrust of the popular arts is retooled in terms of racial justice. “Bourgeois” pops up rhetorically as it might have for Khruschev (who rather gloriously characterized an exhibit of experimental art as being equivalent to what you would see if you looked up from inside a toilet bowl at someone’s ass descending.) But the main sneer for deBoer is not directed at the middle-class, but at white people. DeBoer’s argument (with the unfalsifiable ad hominem mind reading taken out) is that white people care about Beyoncé, and that talking about her is (therefore) self-indulgent and decadent. Real revolutionaries should talk (all the time?) about income inequality, not pop music.

The problem for deBoer here is that black people have an incredibly long, rich, and important history of caring about art, and seeing it as central to their struggle for freedom and justice. Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and many many more, would all be surprised to hear that their focus on cultural expression and representation was misguided and antithetical to the civil rights movement. Even if you’re just talking about Beyoncé, there are no shortage of black folks who have debated her as a political and cultural force (as just a sample, here’s Janell Hobson, Ebony Elizabeth, bell hooks and Janet Mock, Sydette Harry…the list could go on and on.)

DeBoer leaves himself some wiggle-room; you could read him as arguing that it’s only white people whose Beyoncé thinkpieces are awful. Perhaps he thinks, not that Beyoncé thinkpieces are bad in themselves, but that only African-Americans should be able to write about black popular music. But then you end up in a place where Beyoncé is a specialist, marginalized issue. Black people can talk about this thing that doesn’t matter; white people like deBoer will be over here analyzing matters of authentic importance, like the failure of the left, or the failure of the left (deBoer’s repertoire is somewhat limited). The need to separate trivial discussions of art from important discussions of social issues ends up effectively erasing black voices and black expression, either by suggesting those voices don’t exist, or by assuming that what they say is of only marginal importance to a struggle which is (in theory) centered on black people’s lives. (HT: Sarah Shoker for explaining this issue to me.)

Sarah Horrocks comes at the issue of art and culture from a very different place. DeBoer is worried that discussions of art will distract from the important work of social change; Horrocks is concerned that the battle for social change will distract from the particular, transcendent importance of art.

I do not believe that art has societal power. I believe art creates the sacred. What I mean by that is that, for each individual that experience a piece of art, a space exists that only that person experiences, that can be profound and moving, based upon what they have projected out as their perception, and how that filters back to them with this thing called art. But that experience is not something you can translate to another person. Two people can see the same piece of art, but the experience they have is never wholely translatable to the other. You take that shit to your grave. I know this because as a critic, I spend tons and tons of words trying to explain the power of my experience–but in the end, all I can convey is just that…the power of my experience. But even if you think you experience something similar–it is still different.

So what that means is that art can be extremely powerful to the individual, but because it is not translatable to society as a whole, it’s power is isolated to each individual that perceives the work.

It’s popular to say that art is this super powerful thing. This notion that a great work of art can crack the world in half. It is a moronic idea, and I say that as an artist, who absolutely believes in the creation of the sublime experience. But if art was so powerful–then why couldn’t Godard stop Vietnam? Why couldn’t Ralph Ellison end racism? Was their art not powerful enough? And if their art isn’t powerful enough–how can a bullshit issue of batman be that powerful?

Horrocks’ piece is much more careful, and much more generous, than deBoer’s. Partially as a result, she says directly what is implicit, or danced around, in his piece. Ralph Ellison (or those Beyoncé thinkpieces) have not ended racism; therefore Ralph Ellison (or Zainab Akhtar criticizing Horrocks) are socially pointless; they don’t matter, and cannot matter. The fact that neither the Civil War nor Martin Luther King ended racism is an conveniently ignored (by deBoer as well). Art can affect people individually Horrocks says, and is valuable for that reason. But it can’t have any social or political effect — a truth witnessed by the fact that great art with social commitments has not created a utopia.

Which leaves you, with deBoer, wondering why all those fools like Ralph Ellison and bell hooks bother to try to deal with political issues in their art or criticism. It seems like you should either be creating individual AbEx yawps, or organizing protests. Mixing the two is dumb — and dangerous. For deBoer, it leads to decadent bourgie white people congratulating themselves rather than overturning capitalism the way they should be. For Horrocks, writing still in the shadow of Frederic Wertham, “A society where art is considered powerful is not a safe one for art to be created in.” If people think art matters, there will be censorship, and even violence, against artists. The problem with censorship is not that voices for freedom are silenced, but that the state and those creating political art both collude in a silly but tragic error. If only Paul Robeson had realized that political expression was irrelevant, he needn’t have bothered with all those songs about racial and class justice, and he never would have been blacklisted.

This isn’t the conclusion that either Horrocks or deBoer wants to arrive at, of course. Rather, Horrocks hopes that separating art and political expression will leave the world free for purer, less constrained artistic expression. DeBoer hopes that separating art and society will lead to purer, more effective politics. But if you stipulate that art can’t change the world, you end up with art made only by people who don’t care about changing the world — which makes much of the art by marginalized people irrelevant or incoherent. And similarly, creating a politics walled off from discussions of culture or aesthetics ends up with a politics of struggle oddly divorced from the emotions, or thoughts, or interests, or feelings of those on behalf of whom you’re supposedly speaking. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement, but it’s also a poem — which is why, with the power of art to mean more than it means, it can, and has to, apply to black women (and men) at the Grammys, as well as to black men (and women) targeted by police.

Horrocks loves art, and wants to see it protected. DeBoer is committed to creating a better world, and doesn’t want that struggle debased. I love art and want a better world too. But I don’t think you can have art without the impetus, or hope, of change, and I don’t think you can get to a better world by denying the power of dreams. Surely if the African-American experience in this country has demonstrated anything, it’s that you can’t take the struggle out of art, nor the art out of the struggle.

Twined Weeds: Comics and the Gothic

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Ibrahim Ineke

Jeffrey Catherine Jones

Like the label of ‘Comics ,’ the designation ‘Gothic ‘can be a confusing one. The Gothic form shares its name with widely divergent forms of cultural expression, from which it takes inspiration and which it influences in turn. The term is used as the designation of a people; of a building style not originating with this people; of an expression of fashion; of the aesthetic of certain films; of a literary mode.

It is this last one, the literary mode, which has brought forth a direct progenitor to the North-american comic book periodical, in the form of the18th century Penny Dreadfuls or Bluebooks (chapbooks presenting illustrated and abbreviated versions of popular Gothic novels).There is, however, a deeper connexion between comics and the Gothic, beyond their aesthetic convergences and their overlap in the history of printed matter. At the level of their basic functioning, both the medium (comics) and the genre (the Gothic) exhibit characteristics that are not mere approaches or tactics but part and parcel of their nature.
Thus, due to certain shared essential qualities, comics and the Gothic, given the circumstances, can each serve as function of the other.

Building the Ruins

The Gothic is, not unsurprisingly, given its namesake, a highly architectural genre. Consider the centrality of The House: from Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto,’ to Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves,’ the house exemplifies both the narrative’s maze and the monster awaiting at the center of that maze. As in the building style, there are serpentine arabesques that twine and link and uncross again. Folding both inward and outward, a Gothic narrative is never a focused one; nor is clarity its aim. Quite the contrary: showing the mental states of characters through the description of the environment, or conversely, showing the environment through the prism of the mental state, the genre utterly collapses the definitions of identity and environment. In effect, that arc of collapse is what the Gothic narrative is built of. The Gothic is an edifice in perpetual ruin: it rises, blasted, from the prefiguration of its own destruction. Like the house from (and into) the tarn of Poe’s Usher, its fall perfectly describes its rise.

Contortedly echoing the crucial trick of Gothic architecture (the use of mass and weight to suggest light and weightlessness), prose and narrative construction subservient to the demands of the literary Gothic are often dense, encrusted, layered and winding, to create the illusion of solidity, the suggestion of weight, mass – in short, of space.
What the Gothic needs, comics has got, in spades, by definition: in comics, relations between characters, even when expressed through dialogue, are read spatially (balloon placement), the illusion of the passage of time is effected through the laying out of events spatially. The declaration of space is an innate characteristic of the comic book page to such an extent that it can be said to define the medium. This characteristic in turn influences another of the medium´s traits: the embodiment of time.

Physical Demand

The Gothic house, especially the castle or mansion, serves another aim, and that is the making visible of age. The ancient rituals and traditions in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, the lineage that precedes its young heir Titus down the centuries, these are all embodied by the sprawling enormity of the castle Gormenghast itself.

Thus history acquires a massive physicality, an actual presence that can hold, and keep; can ask, and demand. The influence that the past will inevitably exert over the actors in all Gothic fiction (family curses, revenge for ancient misdeeds), is not the influence of a ghost. It is not even the hand of Time itself: it is the presence of the story itself, in time, as an encrustation of layers enveloping the characters in the stone embrace of actual hallways, real cellars and attics and drawing-rooms.

A pervading sense of imminent doom is thus conveyed by the continued working of the past within the skein of the present. Events are not merely foreshadowed but set in massive stone, not mirrored but duplicated as totemic effigies.

In comics, past and present exist simultaneously on the page; a ‘flashback’ on a comics page does not so much gaze at the past as embed the past firmly in the present. That very simultaneity gives the lie to the panel borders, which are made to seem feeble guardians indeed; like the past and present represented that they contain, they merely affirm, by their placement, the souvereignty of the Wall, of the House as Gothic Body.

Natural Born Meta

Finally, it is in confronting the individual with History embodied, the mortal with the Undying, the scientist with the Unthought-of, that the Gothic makes its well-known thrust for the Sublime, and exhibits its most essential trait, which is scale.

If, with Edmund Burke, we claim that the ruling principle of the sublime is terror, the terror of scale is the terror of consciousness shifting to accomodate a new perspective, a perspective that brings out the true proportion of things.
It is what the critic John Clute calls ‘Vastation,’ the “moment when the real world cannot any longer be apprehended as knowable.” It is the crumbling of the House of Usher, and thus of the Gothic Body in its entirety; a negation of all that was articulated before. The ghostliness, not just of the ghost, but of the whole narrative, stands revealed. “There was nothing there, all the time.”

In respect to this facet of the Gothic, comics can be said to offer such a realization continuously. The medium possesses an inherent weirdness, a wrongness if you will, that may serve as a perfect visual corollary of the effect of vastation actuated by scale.

Richard Sala

Because of the aforementioned simultaneity of depictions it can be argued that comics wears its artificiality on its sleeve. It only takes a glance further down or up the page to be reminded that time passing in the narrative was a mere illusion. With comics, it is far easier to ‘step out of” the narrative than it is while watching a film, say, and this enables, even subtly encourages, the reader to experience the differences in scale occasioned by the shuzhyet as differences of scale in the fabula; it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to read a close-up of a visage next to a long shot, as a huge face dwarfing a panorama. All this means there is probably no other medium which has such a power to jolt the reader out of the story, to the surface of its telling, to shift the perspective so radically.

Vastation is to comics what movement is to film.

This is not to declare the entirety of comics a purely Gothic medium, but the parity is strong enough to claim that comics are the medium- the mediating agent, the communicator- of the Gothic, par excellence. Any thorough reading of a work of comic art must necessarily take into account that the very medium slants the narrative, however slightly, towards the Gothic.

An Interview with Jordannah Elizabeth

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Photo Credit: Matthew Fowle

Jordannah Elizabeth is one of my favorite contemporary musicians; I picked her “Bring to the Table” as the best album of 2014.Her new album, “A Rush” is going is streaming on Bitch now; Jordannah let me interview her about it.

Noah: Your last album, “Bring to the Table” was mostly in a folk music vein, but there are a couple of tracks here — “A Rush” and “14 Minus 13” — that seem almost like left-field R&B pop, like FKA Twigs perhaps. Why did you decide to move in that direction? Was it listening to different music, working with different collaborators…?

Well, Bring to the Table was a clean folk album because my drummer missed his airplane from Baltimore to the studio in San Francisco. He was the ace up my sleeve that was going to bring a unique spin to the sound of the music. I rejected Bring to the Table for several months because it was a really structured album. I put it out because I had an open night at El Rio in San Francisco, and I thought, “Well, why not throw an album release party?” With that said, for Bring to the Table, I was inspired by a Bob Dylan – Lightenin’ Hopkins and Etta James vibe…so that came across in the sound.

Breck Brunson and Steve Kille [producers on the new album] appeal to different aspects of my musical persona. Breck is an experimentalist. He’s a beat maker and a visual artist. With him, I wanted to do some experimental trip hop stuff. I love Massive Attack, Portishead, Shabazz Palaces and FKA Twigs. In fact, I discovered FKA in Breck’s kitchen…so yes, that stuff was an influence, but I really just sat in Breck’s studio and let his work inspire me. Some of those beats are several years old, so “14 Minus 13” and his remix for “A Rush” are strictly him. You have to ask him who his personal influences are.

Steve did the live studio songs. His goal was to capture me in my true element. He wanted a raw live look at my songwriting skills. I didn’t record the original version of “A Rush” until I sat with Steve because I knew I could just sit down, have some whiskey and let myself just exist and play. I think Steve understands people in a way a lot of people don’t. He’s empathetic and patient. Baltimore came out because I’d been itching to rerecord a demo version I did. We had some time, do he encouraged me to just sit down and freestyle the a folk cover of the track. Breck and Steve lived in DC and I am from Baltimore, so we all had that bond as well.

“A Prayer for Black America” has a lot of gospel touches, it seems like. I was curious if you had sung in church?

Breck made the music for “A Prayer”. But yes, my father has been a preacher for 35 years. I grew up in the Baptist church. I went to church often until I was about 15 years old. I sang in choirs all through grade school and in college. I am classically trained, so I sang classical church cannons for my education along with traditional black gospel music in church. I love gospel music. I love African American spirituals… I also love Ave Maria. It is all a part of me.

I was very broken and saddened by the Travyon Martin and Mike Brown killings. As a journalist, I made the choice not to make a statement through writing. Writing is what I do, but I felt a facebook post, a short message, or a letter was not enough. I am a spiritual person, a sister of three brothers, a daughter and a Black woman before I am a writer.

I wrote this song as an intrinsic message of comfort to my community. I am praying for us all. -When I saing “Hold us down…” in the song, I mean “hold down our fort.” When someone in the Black community says “I’m holdin’ it down” it means “I have things under control.” “Keep us clean, keep us lean” is 70s jive talk (old school Black slang). To be clean and lean, means you look together and healthy. Our language- it bonds us.

There are a number of live solos at the end of the album — you usually perform live is that right? But you collaborate in the studio? Do you have a preference? Or what do you enjoy about performing solo vs. working with other folks, and vice versa?

Well, the live solo songs are live studio recordings. Steve Kille produced them. I think it is important having a good producer whether you are singing over their beats or if you’re in their booth alone, with just you and your guitar.

I play solo shows, yes, but I am never completely alone when I’m making an album. It takes a village to do anything. I’m never alone in the room when I am playing a solo show either. Music is collaborative even if it just means vibrations are hitting ear drums… it takes at least two for it to exist.

I know you’ve said you’re planning on giving up your music career after this album. What’s led you to decide to stop? And are you going to stop all together? Recording, playing live, playing on your own — the whole thing?

I got really sick, and I was scared when I said I was going to stop. I am getting better now. I don’t think I am going to stop. What I meant was that I want these album to really sink into people’s hearts. Bring to the Table started picking up momentum months after I recorded and released it. I’m realizing that I should let these two albums exist. Now, I got through this sophomore indie album (A Rush). I will promote it and play some shows, but yeah, I want to slow down. I want to travel for pleasure. I also have a journalism and writing career that I enjoy and a personal life that needs tending to.

When I put out an album, no matter how many people I have on my team, on my side, in my band, it all ultimately falls on me. I pay everyone and for everything out of my pocket. Indiegogo takes care of maybe 20% of my expenses (thanks to my kind contributors. I love you!) I’d like to put my money into a savings account.

I have had a couple of major illnesses during this process as well. I lost a loved member of my family, lovers left, friends got weird and doing a press tour and working full time is just hard. I am human…

But you know, if a label were to pick me up and help me with the work load, I’d make another record sooner than later. It’s just intense being 100% indie. I’m blessed to be able to do it and do it well, but I think it’s time I have management and a label to support my work load.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: February 2015