Good Food for your thoughts~
N Y Times Book Review:
Race, the Remix ‘The Grey Album,’
by Kevin Young
By DAVID SHIELDS
Published: April 20, 2012
From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn’t fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. Slave bodies lied to their masters. Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. The trickster was born. In his new work of literary and cultural criticism, “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” the accomplished poet Kevin Young unearths, orchestrates, improvises and imagines lies and more lies — in short, American history.
THE GREY ALBUM
On the Blackness of Blackness
By Kevin Young
483 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $25.Young places the trickster near the axis of black American culture. “A tradition of counterfeit and fiction, of storying,” he writes, “has just as much place in African-American letters as our rituals of church or prayer or music.” Separated from their families, blacks created a communal story from fragments. Condescended to, suppressed, effaced, ripped off and covered, black artists have resorted throughout American history to subversive styles of artistic expression largely revolving around the “trickster” as mask and music. How much of Young the Author is in the trickster tradition? He’s escaping even as he’s explaining. “The desire to escape America is as American as you can get,” a friend warns him.
One rides Young’s groove from slavery to hip-hop, a line that looks like this: the slave poet Phillis Wheatley, whose authorship had to be proved by white “experts” before her book could be published; another slave poet, George Moses Horton, who sold his poetry in thwarted attempts to buy his own freedom; the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, in whom Young sees “modernism’s not-so-modest beginnings”; Zora Neale Hurston, who “collected ‘lies’ as a folklorist but lied just to get by”; Robert Johnson, evoked via W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”; Louis Armstrong (“entertainer is no less a mask than cool is for those who came later”); bebop, which Young sees as the early flowering of a “postmodern black aesthetic”; the obscured Beat poet Bob Kaufman (“anonymity is not indeterminacy, but rather, namelessness as a state of grace, an acceptance of being part of the unnameable universe”); Otis Redding, who reverse-engineered the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” laying bare its black influences; Jimi Hendrix, who commandeered the national anthem, turning it into a “benediction”; Afrika Bambaataa, sampler of Kraftwerk, who “renamed himself in order to craft something interplanetary, his earlier identity erased so effectively few if any know it”; Lauryn Hill, whose “Miseducation” album represents “the possibilities of a post-soul aesthetic”; Jay-Z (“the maker as mogul, translating the street game to the corporate one — and making this somehow the stuff of realness”); N.W.A., following in the Jamaican and African-American tradition of “bragging and hyperbole as a form of critique”; Danger Mouse, the D.J. who merged the vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with the unlicensed beats from the Beatles’ “White Album” to create his own illicit “Grey Album,” which gives Young’s book its name.
What does the trickster-curator want? For one thing, to overthrow the literary executor of black writing. To Young, white critics who read slave narratives “simply in terms of authenticity do two quite damaging things: first, they read (white) skepticism back into the slave’s writing and thus limit the ‘freedom’ of black authorship; second, they ignore or downplay the African-American trickster tradition, itself related to black rhetorical strategies like lying.” It is not just creation per se but specifically creation of the counterfeit that “provides a means of black acquisition of authority (even as so-called authenticity is called into question).”
The figure in the carpet is “the notion of lying — the artful dodge, faking it till you make it — the forging of black lives and selves in all their forms.” This lying can manifest in the “storying” of Hurston, “the ‘lies’ black folks tell to amuse themselves and to explain their origins,” or in “counterfeiting,” a term Young uses to “discuss ways in which black writers create their own authority in order to craft their own, alternative system of literary currency and value, so to speak, functioning both within and without the dominant, supposed gold-standard system of American culture. . . . For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie — forging an identity, ‘making’ one, but ‘lying’ about one too.” Young is “interested in the ways in which black folks use fiction in its various forms to free themselves from the bounds of fact.”
The problem is, one reads the scholarship and misses the party. A potentially incendiary throw-down gets lost in a redundancy of too-long, too-close readings. Black life has taught America how revolutionary pleasure is against the capitalism of the Pilgrim, the plantation and plagiarism. “Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain,” Young argues. “Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.” The historical remix is in session. Do you hear the thrumming bass line?
A core conviction of the book is “the centrality of black people to the American experience, to the dream of America.” Young understands that language is a weapon and that black self-defense necessitates a radical reimagining of the English language. “We are, after all, not immigrants but imports to this experiment America, lending not just everyday artifice to our experience in English but true violence” — dismembering and reassembling the master narrative.
To complete the remix, Young needs to remake modernism and postmodernism. He nominates the blues as a fount of modernist artistic impulses, and he promotes James Weldon Johnson’s “Book of American Negro Poetry” as a gathering that “should be thought of as one of the heights of modernism.” Young wonders if the “it” in Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it new” might refer not to “tradition but the Negro.” “White folks projected back onto blacks the kind of pastiche or ‘blank copy’ that Fredric Jameson saw as one of the fundamental qualities of postmodernism — a full century before the idea took hold. In this, those of us in the postmodern era may glimpse a fascinating, racialized aspect of the postmodern — its possible black origins.” Young wants what everybody else wants. He wants the zeitgeist (the stealth-made man’s moment is now). He wants it all.
The party is on, but it’s deadly serious. The curatorial trickster claims American language as black music. “At our peril we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs. . . . For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.” The mask drops; Young exercises power. “It is black culture that is the dominant culture. English broken here.” This Young is a musician with muscle.
The story could be called “How Blacks Invented America.” In the end, the trickster’s desire isn’t to replace white America (which, after all, the trickster’s black America helped construct), but instead to remix the destroyed dream of integration as panacea and say, as Dr. King said, “I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ ” Did I dream this book or did it just kill me and the dream? America is built on the tension between black and white. “The Grey Album” is angular scholarship for whites, a storying songbook for blacks. Who is the liar, who the thief, who is telling whose history, and who is keeping score? Young forces us to contemplate who controls the music.
Photo: By Todd Martens
lovu,
Kentke
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