“Someday When We’re Dreaming:” The Utopian Music of 1964

[This is the prologue/preface to a book about the music of 1964 I thought about writing. I might still write it.]

Prologue:
A Transvaluation of Boomer Values

When I was growing up, there were three musical eras on the radio: oldies, classic rock and contemporary music (both in its mainstream, hard rock, occasionally R&B, as well as “alternative” iterations). Steven Hayden has done a good job of describing the “classic rock” format in his book Twilight of the Gods (2018), but I’m curious about our category “oldies,” and what it might mean today. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the time during which radio would have been most dominant in my life, in Boston, WROR played “oldies” (essentially music from 1954-1964, or so); WZLX played “classic rock” (one of the first successful forays into the format in the country: music from 1965-1975); WBCN and WFNX played contemporary music.

 I would say my parents switched pretty regularly between the “oldies” and “classic rock” formats. I remember listening to classic rock more often, but that oldies stations hold dearer memories for me, because they obviously held dearer memories for my parents. You were more likely to see my parents drunk on a Saturday night singing along to Joe Martell’s selection of 50s hits than you would see them singing along to Dylan or Springsteen on classic rock. It makes sense to me now as a 45 year old adult: My parents were in their adolescent and teenage years when that music was released, in their young and not so young adult years when the music on WZLX was released. Just like my parents, I overly estimate the music from my youth: goes a long way in explaining my generation’s obsession with Yacht Rock.

 Now such distinctions seem meaningless. “Oldies” radio just means music made before 2000, and who listens to the radio any longer? SXM, which I now have in my car, seems to have a station for every musical taste (albeit stratified by decade, rather than format, and, although it once held the prominent position at Station #4, the forties music station has been relegated back into the 70s or somewhere). Besides, most people stream music in their cars, where any curatorial decision, either by man or by algorithm, can replicate myriad listening experiences: including the radio of my youth.

So now that the era seems to have passed, and my parents passed even before that, it seems important to figure out what shaped my understanding of popular music. Constructing a history of popular music isn’t something that is only done by historians or musicologists, it’s also determined by commercial forces, music availability, format and lived experience. One of the most powerful voices in music criticism that recognizes this is Hanif Abdurraqib, who recently in an interview remarked: “I think the stakes are raised when music criticism understands the world that music is being released into.” This is true not only of music being produced today, but of past music as well: understanding the world music was released into back then, as well as understanding how that music is heard in the world we inhabit now. What was the world in which that music was released into (albeit understood on a necessarily reduced level)?

What I am talking about is a set of values that constructs “the world” (or possible worlds) for a music listener. That, as much as anything, is constructed by a set of values alongside of historical contingency and individual genius. Values are constructed and what appears “natural” is a process that develops over time through the shaping of things well beyond our control.  For example, growing up, I was taught music periodization by the radio and what that periodization meant to constructing a cohesive narrative about popular music. Broadly defined: “oldies” radio meant a lot of different kind of music: you might hear a primitive jump blues number next to an orchestrated pop vocal from Roy Orbison. An early Beatles single, next to an early Doo-Wop single, next to the instrumental version of the theme from “A Summer Place.” It was meant to convey to its boomer audience the shock of moving from something your parents might have thought pleasant, to something you might have had to listen to under covers at night.

But mostly the music seemed to come from everywhere: Belafonte singing songs from coastal cities in countries people hadn’t heard of, girl groups from poor communities where humiliated men often took out the violence of the world on their girlfriends, Joao and Astrud Gilberto, along with Stan Getz, bringing Brazilian music to the masses, James Brown bringing sex to everyone. But the thing I remember most about the music of oldies stations is that many of the artists played there were people of color: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Drifters, Ben E. King, all the Phil Spector groups, the Motown groups and solo artists, all the Stax artists, the aforementioned Brown, the occasional weird jazz outlier like Louis Armstrong, Cannonball Adderley or Hugh Masekela sneaking in. As much as it is a format constrained by time, it was incredibly ecumenical in what it could play.

I can count on one hand all of the artists of color I heard on classic rock: Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Carlos Santana, War, Thin Lizzy…and that’s pretty much it. If one the DJs got adventurous, they might throw in a Bob Marley song. But that paltry offering is all I remember from hearing artists of color on classic rock radio, and, going through the list, all of those artists either played in bands with white musicians or were highly touted by other white musicians (specifically thinking of the racist Eric Clapton covering both Hendrix and Marley). In all my years of listening to classic rock radio growing up, I never once heard Funkadelic. I was more likely to hear “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “That Lady,” “Reflections” or “Psychedelic Shack” (all songs as influenced by “classic rock” as any in the format) on “oldies stations” then I was on “classic rock” stations.

Of all the insidious forms value can take, upholding institutions of power is the most insidious. This one time division of radio formats might seem benign or insignificant, but in terms of creating a social history of listening and consuming music, it highlights a natural seeming truth about music that obscures as much as it produces new ways of knowing through periodization and exclusion. Yet understanding this isn’t as simple as retrofitting a legible form of racism to the whole enterprise. Or, to put it another way, racism doesn’t always make itself legible on the surface. Experiences of the dominant group within an ideological structure can produce the naturalness of exclusion from experience alone.

The “classic rock” era, as defined by the radio formats of my youth, roughly 1967-1987 (someone once remarked that Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms (1985) was the official end of the “classic rock era”), was about relaying a set of understandable and collective experience to white baby boomers at the expense and exclusion of others. This wasn’t necessarily willful on their parts, but once they found themselves in positions of power (radio programers, label executives, etc.), it became impossible not to reinforce the narrative they had been told about themselves their whole lives.

I experienced this first hand in 1987. That year Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrated its twentieth anniversary. For anyone who has heard the record, the first line gives away why this anniversary was particularly important: “it was twenty years ago today…” The record was released on CD. Countless books were published. Covers were recorded. Perhaps the capstone, for 14 year old me, was Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest records from 1967-1987: “The 100 Best Albums of The Last 20 Years.” I’ve always wanted to write something about this list, but it’s always been too close to my own development as a music listener to give it its due. Now I know that what I want to write about it what the list was telling me about myself as a music listener. What it was teaching me.

The list, given the years it covers as well as its clear appeal to baby boomers (who would have just started to enter their 40s), is predominantly populated with white artists. Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix cracked the top ten. Steve Wonder, Otis Redding, Sly & the Family Stone, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Al Green all have albums in the list. Miles Davis Bitches’ Brew also shows up there. All in all, artists of color make up 14% of the total list. There’s one “international” record, The Harder They Fall, placed to represent all of reggae (and, one assumes, all of “world music”).  If I remember correctly, I don’t have my original copy and it seems to be all but scrubbed from the internet, there was a preface to the list that explained this skew with the assertion that, since this list started with 1967, it left a lot of great early music behind (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc.) and R&B artists tended to make better singles than albums, with the exceptions noted above. They also made sure to include how many copies each album sold, just to assure the reader that they weren’t biasing big selling albums by bands like Loggins & Messina or the Eagles.

It’s correct to call the list racist, but I’m interested in the why. And I think the why, like a lot of whys in our current state, can be traced back to a narrative the post-war generation both were taught to believe, as well as taught to perpetuate. Most people center the baby boom generation from 1946-1964. My father was born in 46 and my mother was born in 49. In 1967, the “summer of love” and ground zero for the list, my father was 21 and my mother was 18. Again, judging from my own experience, that span of years is the first time a person begins to feel like an adult. Thus begins the narrative of popular music that it doesn’t become “serious” or “mature” until 1967, and that Sgt. Pepper becomes the paradigmatic example. But this narrative comes at a moment when the government started increasing the number of young men being sent to Vietnam, while allowing college students to defer. This would be still maintained through the 1969 draft. In 1967, 4% of the total African-American population enrolled in college, while 10% of the overall white population did so. Meanwhile, African-Americans, as a general population, were being asked to serve in Vietnam in disproportionate numbers. As historian Gerald F. Goodwin writes:
 
"African-Americans also complained that they were disproportionately drafted, assigned to combat units and killed in Vietnam. Statistics from the first three years of the war support these complaints. African-Americans represented approximately 11 percent of the civilian population. Yet in 1967, they represented 16.3 percent of all draftees and 23 percent of all combat troops in Vietnam. In 1965, African-Americans accounted for nearly 25 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam. By 1967 this percentage had dropped considerably, to 12.7, but the perception that blacks were more likely to be drafted and killed remained widespread."

This occurs during an extended period of time wherein the incarcerated African-American population grows exponentially. As a Department of Justice report from 1986, a year before the Rolling Stone list, explains:

"A major trend documented In the admission series is long-term growth in the size of the black prison population. From 1926 to 1986 the recorded black percentage among admissions to State and Federal prisons more than doubled from 21 % In 1926 to 44% In 1986. This growth is not explained by general  population trends. The number of blacks relative to the general population was about the same In both years, 10% In 1926 and 12%. [….] The recorded number of black prisoners in 1986 was nearly 9 times larger than the number recorded in 1926 (80,814 In 1986 versus 9,292 in 1926) (table 3). The recorded number of white prisoners was 3 times larger (100,874 in 1986 versus 33,626 In 1926), and the number of other races was 5 times larger (2,081 versus 410)."

The narrative around popular music develops as more and more African-Americans are being drafted and incarcerated. Meanwhile, the rate of African-Americans attending college, a refuge against the draft,  at the same time remains flat.

If we are going to reassess our understanding of the music that has so dominated my life, at least, it seems to me we need to take these statistics into account. The boomer account popular music’s “serious” development over the years 1967-1987 is determined by the luxuries afforded them by dint of their race, class and education. Moreover, the benefits of this experience then feeds into the narrative of what is “natural” and “worthy.” The “poptimism” of recent popular music criticism is a recent development, and is more likely to favor white artists (Taylor Swift, Robyn, Carley Rae Japson) than it is to favor artists of color. For most of my life popular music has been rock music’s ugly step-child in the face of serious art. And pop music that is most closely tied to genres where African-Americans are integral to their development, have always been originally sold as faddish or, at best, admirably held at a distance: disco, hip-hop, blaxploitation…I grew up thinking at one point or another that each one was bad, or certainly not as good as the stuff on the Rolling Stone list.

However, I argue that this doesn’t just affect minority artists, the obscure or the forgotten. If you Google “Radiohead Beatles comparison” you will most likely find some comparison like this: Radiohead are like the Beatles in that they made some insignificant music and then recorded a series of classic albums that changed rock. Generally, Pablo Honey gets compared to pre-Rubber Soul, with RS being compared to the Bends, Revolver to OK Computer, Kid A to Sgt. Pepper, Amnesiac to Magical Mystery Tour, Hail to the Thief to the Beatles and In Rainbows to Abbey Road. You can kind of see it, except for one flaw that supports my argument: you have to compare the first Radiohead record with the first four Beatles records. Records that completely changed popular music, whereas “Creep”  once soundtracked Steven Dorff slowly walking down the street in 1994’s S.F.W. (aside from Prince’s cover of the song, this is how I will always remember it).

It’s amazing to think of the early music of the Beatles, with songs like “If I Fell” and “Things We Said Today,” and so many more, being lumped with a mediocre debut album that now just seems like a grunge cash-in from a band that would go on to better things. The comparison itself demonstrates the still-held import of the Beatles, so this isn’t something that’s new upstaging something passe, but also demonstrates the very problem described above. We can only think of albums like A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles for Sale as necessary commercial compromises that led to the artistic breakthroughs. This is because my parent’s generation went off to college, instead of going off to war, and learned from people much smarter than them that childish things must be put away in favor of grown up concerns. In the shadow of war, nuclear annihilation, assassinations, etc. singing something as simple as “If I Fell” seems absolutely naive and immature. What is joy compared to the alienation and serious classical music of “A Day in the Life?” I can recall this narrative echoed in the Beatles/Dylan comparison of the rock histories of my teenage years: by 1965 Dylan had eclipsed the Beatles in terms of seriousness and sophistication. Or the Beatles/Beach Boys comparisons: as wonderful as Pet Sounds is, it’s no “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Motown and Stax were seen as “factories,” where geniuses had to fight the system if they were going to produce artistic statements. And on and on in Jan Wenner’s “transvaluation of all values.”

But that wasn’t quite true before 1967. And now that I’m getting older, and my parents are no longer around to talk about what happened before that, drunk, dancing to some old novelty R&B song, I have to recreate it for myself. As history moves forward, and pop music history even more so, it seems even more important to try to peer through the opacity of a time before I was born to try and rescue the past from a monochromatic blur. In that sense, I’m starting to become sympathetic to my least favorite Beatles’ songs, the songs where they sing (especially Paul) about the music to which their parents listened. Except, whereas Paul understood his parent’s music as evidence of a simpler time, I want to reawaken the radical nature of music in 1964: from pop, to R&B and soul, to jazz, to avant garde and, even, international music, everything seemed to be possible in the musical landscape of 1964, with a resonance that feels more present than ever.

“Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan, 2020

What good are pop artist in a pandemic?

1.

Bono offered a piano ballad, which eventually became something called “Sing for Life” with a bunch of other pop artists, and the accompanying video can only be described as akin to Flight of the Concords. Meanwhile, over in Madonna’s bathtub, we find out that the virus is “the great equalizer”—as much like her opinions on music, the virus will unmake the bourgeoise and the rebel. And let’s not forgot, through not strictly a gaggle of pop artists, the montage of famous people singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” telling a world full of soon-to-be unemployed and evicted people to “imagine no possessions.” So, yeah, it would be easy to see the utter failure of pop music to say anything about this moment as symptom of its decades of aspirational economics: pop stars want to be taken as seriously as tech gurus and health ministers during this difficult time. Not merely to gratify their own egos, but, especially in the case of Bono, as an additional revenue stream from the New York Times opinion page if the streams of the latest U2 album don’t meet expectations.

I would be remiss if I left this catalogue of pop star failure and didn’t mention the counterexample of the leftist transformation of Brittney Spears, who started the week offering to go shopping for fans who couldn’t leave their homes, and ended the week by sharing a poem by Mimi Zhu arguing that we seize the means of production and redistribute. It surprises me not in the least that the pop stars who came closest to seeing how the sausage was made by starting out as pure product would be the first to call for redistribution.

In the midst of all this, Bob Dylan released his first song of new material in 8 years! Imagine being a songwriter stuck inside knowing that you’re going to write your very meaningful song about this difficult time and Bob fucking Dylan dusts off a song from seven or eight years ago about something that happened in 1963 and bests you before you even begin.

Writing about Bob Dylan now is like what writing about the Bible must have been like for people during the Black Plague: Everyone knows it. Everyone has an opinion about it. And whatever angle you think you can get at it that no one has ever gotten at it before, you’re wrong. I keep going back to Leonard Cohen (may his memory be a blessing) who, upon hearing Dylan had won the Nobel Prize, said that such honor was like pinning a biggest mountain metal on Everest—not merely a redundant gesture, but a gesture that says more about humans than mountains.  I had forgotten that Cohen had more to say about Dylan during that particular interview:

“I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow,” he said. “So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.”

Bob Dylan writing a song about a nearly sixty year old presidential assassination in the middle of a pandemic sounds like something that would have been on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. On that collection, Smith collected recordings of musicians from the late 1920s and early 1930s describing historical calamities of all types. The influence of Smith’s Anthology on Dylan is well documented. Greil Marcus, who has, in many ways, spent a sizable part of his career chasing this particular nexus, sums it up:

“In 1960, John Pankake and others who were part of the folk milieu at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis initiated a nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan into what Pankake would later call 'the brotherhood of the Anthology’; the presence of Smith’s music in Dylan’s has been a template for the presence of that music in the country, and the world, at large. From then to now verses, melodies, images and choruses from the Anthology, and most deeply the Anthology’s insistence on an occult, Gothic America of terror and deliverance inside the official America of anxiety and success-as Smith placed murder ballads, explosions of religious ecstasy, moral warnings and hedonistic revels on the same plane of value and meaning-have been one step behind Dylan’s own music, and one step ahead.”

And Dylan himself said during an interview in 1965:

"Folk music," he said, "is the only music where it isn't simple. It's weird, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts... chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything…"

At this point, the years between the “legends” in the songs of Smith’s Anthology are as distant to those singers as Kennedy’s assassination is to Dylan. It feels like the last survivor of a shipwreck or the last man to see John Henry or Casey Jones alive giving you his best recollection of an eyewitness report. It’s a ghost story for sure.

But Dylan isn’t a folk singer, and his songs aren’t reportage, rather Dylan is the one who brought modernism into pop songwriting. Ginsberg and his poetic tradition inheres in Dylan as well. Again Dylan:

“I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan said in 1985. “It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”

As I write this, “Murder Most Foul” is the highest viewed page at the song lyric site genuis.com. The analysis of the lyrics, this time, have little to do with Dylan’s hermeticism and far more to do with fact checking Dylan’s account of the assassination. I can’t help but think of “American Pie,” with its allegory by numbers history of the 1960s, a song that I have always imagined as the antithesis to what Dylan has been doing for so long.

But as with so much that Dylan writes and performs, it’s not what can be easily glossed that holds the meaning. The historical events that often become the central focus of Dylan’s lyrics become, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. So in reading over the genius page for “Murder Most Foul,” its the lines that lack a current gloss that draw my attention:

He said, "Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?"
"Of course we do, we know who you are!"
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car
Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
Was a matter of timing and the timing was right
You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect

The “wait a minute, boys” should immediately direct the listener to another long topical Dylan song, “Hurricane” (“Cops said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead!”). Though separated by race, power and time, in the face of some nameless “boys,” “cops,” etc the protagonist of both songs become nothing but disposable bodies (one rotting in a cell, the other dying like a dog) to men in power with guns. Again, this has little to do with the historical “truth” of JFK’s assassination, or the truth of the power differential between a black boxer and the president of the United States, rather it has something to do with a cosmic truth, to which Dylan is receptive.  “Shot down like a dog” recalls the final sentence of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel the Trial: “‘Like a dog!’he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.” Kafka’s novel points out the lack of humanity in Joseph K.’s death. Dylan’s lyrics point out the lack of humanity in JKF’s assassination. Such nameless, faceless killing is the essence of death. As Reverend Gary Davis sang, and Dylan’s friend Jerry Garcia would sing many decades later, “death don’t have no mercy in this land.”


2.

I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free […]

The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree […]

Play darkness and death will come when it comes [….]

All of these lines are currently without annotation. All of these lines, including the previous lines about JFK dying like a dog, strip the title and elevation from the office of the president. The first line is a response to the spiritual “Oh Freedom,” which Dylan would have learned from Odetta’s albums, and would have sung himself as an ally (or opportunist depending on whom you believe) in the civil rights movement. It’s answered by the old Dylan seemingly foreclosing the possibility of freedom as something that can be achieved in this world. One has no greater control over real or imagined freedom in this life than any other, even the president of the United States (who Dylan told us already in 1965 sometimes has to stand naked). Again, this is antithetical to everyone’s understanding of freedom, to the actual power inhering in the presidency,  but in the middle of this crisis in which we find ourselves, wherein even the President of the United States stands “perfectly” naked, maybe more naked than any leader in modern history, the fleshiness of this world and all the people in it lays low our received understanding. Elsewhere, well glossed by the geniuses, Dylan brings up “Merchant of Venice.” At the end of the day, we’re all just somebody’s pound of flesh that either does, or does not, get repaid ("You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect"). Even Shylock’s famous speech of tolerance and liberation reminds us that we’re all just meat puppets trying not to die:

“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?”

Dylan brings up Shakespeare’s play (elsewhere it’s the more obvious Macbeth) to remind us that we’re all subject to the same diseases. It’s worth remembering that Shakespeare lived through an outbreak of the black plague in Venice that saw 50,000 people dead.

The final line here finds us now. Dylan is playing darkness with “Murder Most Foul,” just like the poet Paul Celan played “death more sweetly” to bring the darkness in his poem “Deathfuge.” Max von Sydow lost his chess game with death, recently. Dylan knows it comes for all of us, ultimately, president, Shylock and Bob Dylan alike. A song about a sixty year old presidential assassination in the middle of a global pandemic seems to make very little sense, much like death itself. Dylan knows that in order to truly reflect on the time you live in, you must understand that you are not the subject, just the recipient of the catastrophe.

“The Yoko Ono of Jazz”

 This week, an old, ugly, misogynist, racist, character smear reared its ugly head (as so much vile, misogynist, racist slime does these days) when Dominic Green, music critic of the Weekly Standard, wrote: “The story goes that Coltrane was using LSD after 1965. If so, then the overreach and incoherence of his final music, and his mingling with admiring but inferior talents like Alice Coltrane, the Yoko Ono of jazz, suggest that Coltrane might be the sixties’ first and foremost acid casualty, flailing out rather than flaming out, the peak of his late style already behind him.”

Despite the welcome and robust rebuke Green has received online, this view, that “Alice Coltrane is the Yoko Ono of jazz” and that she is an “inferior talent” is not new. When Wynton Marsalis put together a celebration at Lincoln Center of Coltrane’s 80th birthday in 2006, he not only excluded any post A Love Supreme music (the music, with which Alice was most intimately involved), but relegated her concert to a side performance. Ben Ratliff, the great commentator on Coltrane’s music, was judicious in his comments at the time: “As far as Coltrane’s later work — mid-1965 to 1967 (when he died) — that music is alive from within and mysterious from without, and perhaps it’s better celebrated by other musicians anyway. (The accompanying list of highlights includes other concerts, including one by his widow, Alice Coltrane, that might do the job.) But let’s not get hung up on this issue.”

This hatred towards Alice Coltrane, her music and her relationship with John, had reached a crescendo in 1972 with the release of the album Infinty. On that album, Alice overdubbed her own orchestral arrangements over unreleased recordings of her husband’s playing. Though the outrage most music critics exhibited at the time was the re-contextualization of Coltrane’s playing (something akin to colorizing black and white films), it was also the “eastern” spirituality, the “feminine” strings, the squelching of the fire music that were also often cited.
    

What I find interesting about Green’s use of the “Alice Coltrane is the Yoko Ono of jazz” is that I grew up and developed musical taste somewhere between the controversy surrounding the release of Infinity and the 80th birthday tribute. My taste in music really developed in the 1990s, during a boom in CD reissues. I was in a position to actually compare Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono’s music respectively because Journey in Satchidananda and Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band were both reissued on cd in 1997 and I bought both when they came out. I think it’s safe to say that Alice Coltrane’s music and Yoko Ono’s music don’t have very much in common (or as much in common as Johns Coltrane and Lennon have to each other). I loved both cds very much, and understood each as a radical, alternative path for their respective chosen genres: jazz and rock. 

Moreover, even if their music doesn’t share much in common, it is clear that both musicians were greatly respected by their peers: Ornette Coleman frequently collaborated with both Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono (he appears on the bonus tracks of the Plastic Ono Band cd). Finally, as was pointed out by many musicians in magazines like the Wire during the 1990s, Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono’s musical influence was/is widespread, with many younger musicians collaborating with Ono on her 90s albums, and musicians as widely diverse as Paul Weller, Nick Cave and Sunn0))) singing the praises of Alice Coltrane and naming songs/pieces after her and her work.
    

But, of course, Green doesn’t ask you to compare their work, their relationship with their life partners, or their subsequent influence on music. He just asks you to nod in assent and recognize the opportunistic succubus for what she is. He would probably protest this characterization and sugar-coat it as something more along the lines of “these poor geniuses (Johns Coltrane and Lennon), if only they weren’t so blinded by love and clouded by acid, they would have recognized how talentless these women are.” It’s a kinder, gentler form of misogyny, but it is still bald enough on its face that most people called it out on social media.
    

Green’s column comes just weeks after David Crosby (who is an odious person, lacking any meaningful friends at this point) responded to new songs by Yoko Ono by tweeting: “She may well be a very nice person but She cannot sing , write , or play, at all ...I was offended by her demanding to be taken as seriously as John ...pretension to artistic standing she did not deserve.” In a sense, Crosby is basically saying the same thing as Green only about the other person in the analogy. The reactions on social media couldn’t have been different. Many people came to Alice Coltrane’s defense when Green called her the Yoko Ono of jazz, and then subsequently came to Yoko Ono’s defense as well. The minute anyone on David Crosby’s social media page attempted to simply point out facts, i.e. Yoko Ono had an artistic career BEFORE she met Lennon, and that HE met HER at one of HER shows, someone was there to respond with how talentless she is, or how much money she’s made since Lennon’s death. 

It is not surprising at all that jazz fans would come to the defense of Alice Coltrane, not only because jazz has a longer history of embracing many musical forms (if not being known for gender diversity), but because many of the people defending her online seem to be my age and younger. I imagine many of them either grew up with the cd reissues that I did (and therefore didn’t have to simply go with the received notions older siblings and parents passed down), or grew up in the age of YouTube and Spotify, where they can hear these albums in multiple contexts. Also, younger jazz musicians have embraced the larger, technicolor, worldly, yet spiritual approach to jazz that Alice used as her palette (Kamasi Washington comes most readily to mind).
    

Yet, Crosby’s timeline demonstrates how deep rooted the misogyny against female musicians can be in our society, especially among the baby boomers and the culture surrounding their music. If, in the current generation of jazz musicians and fans, such disparaging of Alice Coltrane can be called out for the misogyny it is, clearly misogyny among boomer classic rock fans can still be couched in terms of talent, technique and creativity.  Green can get away with the shorthand of “the Yoko Ono of jazz” only because David Crosby and others had already laid the groundwork of the talentless, minority wife of a more famous guy.
   

“With a faith at the size of a seed enough to be redeemed”

“The messiah will come only when his is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival [….]” -Franz Kafka

Introduction

It’s arguable that there has always been a “messianic” complex within rap music. Since it’s inception at the end of the 1970s, MCs have claimed the mantel of “the greatest”, or, alternately, the one who will save the music from those who speak falsely in its name. As hip hop ascended in its popularity and cultural influence, leading to its infamy among certain segments of the population, MCs increasingly saw themselves as persecuted in a messianic fashion, often using the most ignominious language of the church to describe their ordeals. Perhaps most infamously, Chuck D., lead MC of the group Public Enemy, in their 1990 track “Welcome to the Terrordome,” chastises the “so-called chosen” as “frozen” and argues “they [the chosen] got me like Jesus.” The messianic complex of the MC reached its zenith, perhaps, with the figure of 2Pac Shakur, who was shot and killed in 1996. A posthumous album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, featured a crucified 2Pac suggesting that he was a martyr within the culture at large. Despite the shooting initially being ascribed to a west coast gang related retaliation, 2pac’s death, in the subsequent years, has taken on almost mythic proportions, with theories abounding that the FBI might have been involved, as well as theories that, like Jesus, 2pac might still be alive having arisen from death.

Although the deification of 2pac seemingly fits with the longer inter-rap tradition (if not larger aesthetic tradition) of the genius who must be sacrificed for his art, his death transpires so that the art—all the way up to the son, Kendrick Lamar—may live, the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson sees something else in the conflagration of 2pac and Jesus: 

Upon deeper reflection, Tupac’s Black Jesus might have more to do with the 

actual Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus of history, than the one whose crucified body bears the marks of his misappropriations and mischaracterizations, and whose resurrected body suffers under the weight of two millennia of historical

accretions and theological distortions. Black Jesus is the Jesus of deep, dark 

history, the God of the underside […] the God who literally got beat down and hung up, the God who died a painful, shameful death, subject to capital 

punishment under political authority and attack, but who came back, and keeps coming back, in the form and flesh we least expect. 

Both 2pac’s thematization of the Black Jesus figure in the posthumous track “Black Jesus” and his ultimate death, weather falsely or not, at the hands of “political authority” is a political act that speaks to a longer tradition of the “black Jesus” within African-American culture. 

In recent years, this figure, the “black Jesus” or, more appropriately, the “black Messiah” has resurfaced as a trope within the culture of rap and R&B. The three albums under consideration, Yeezus, Black Messiah and To Pimp a Butterfly all engage with this figure and with the thematics of redemption in general. West’s album makes this connection explicit with its title (albeit interpolating it into his own nickname), D’Angelo reinvigorates its political efficacy with his album, and Lamar lays out the afterlife (literally by conjuring up 2pac as the estimated prophet at the end of the album) of its tradition.

The Messiah

I don’t come to this topic well-versed in the history of the black Messiah. My interest in the figure comes from the intersection of my research on conceptions of Judaic Messianism in the 20th century thought and my love of hip hop. As these albums were being released, and as the news events of 2014 were unfolding, I was writing a chapter, in an unrelated book project, on the debate between the Jewish theologians Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes regarding messianic Judaism. Scholem’s thesis, developed in the essay “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism” (from which this essay gets its title), argues that while messianism in Judaism “always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community,” messianism in Christianity “conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm […] which need not correspond to anything outside.” Scholem’s critique of the Jewish messianic idea, therefore, leads to “endless powerlessness,” something “preliminary,” concluding that while “there is something grand about living in hope […] at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it.” In his indictment of the messianic idea, Scholem argues that it “compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.” Taubes, in his direct response to Scholem’s essay many decades later, argues against its pessimistic conclusions: “It is not the messianic idea that subjugated us to ‘a life lived in deferment.’ Every endeavor to actualize the messianic idea was an attempt to jump into history, however mythically derailed the attempt may have been.” 

Although this inter-Jewish dialogue with regard to the messianic idea would seem to have little to say to the “black Jesus” or the “black Messiah,” Scholem’s initial desire to map out the interiority/exteriority along the Christian/Jewish axis does broaden the scope of the essay’s applicability. The notion of the “black Messiah” complicates the interiority/exteriority distinction Scholem makes. Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ book Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms offers a definition of messianism as follows: “the perception of a person or a group, by itself or by others, as having a manifest destiny or a God-given role to assert the providential goals of history and to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.” Because Moses is interested in both the religious and secular versions of the messianic idea, black messianism affords the flexibility to play with the concept outside of traditional boundaries. Moses argues that “[n]o group of Americans have had more deeply rooted or more stubbornly maintained messianic tradition than black Americans […] This is singular because, unlike the other subgroups in society who have seen themselves as messianic, black Americans have not had a common religion. They have nonetheless been able to maintain a distinct messianic tradition despite differences in class culture and regional background.” In that sense, black Messianism, according to Moses, mirrors more closely 

Scholem’s argument of Jewish messianism, which plays out on the stage of history and within the community. Yet, there is a theological difference insofar as the Jewish messiah still remains a religiously redemptive force that speaks of the fulfillment of laws. And, since a portion of the African-American community still identifies itself as Christian, there is, one would assume, an aspect of the African-American community that would fall under Scholem’s rubric of an interior messianism. 

Moses’ study seems relevant in the analysis of these records not only because of his concentration on black messianism but, because, Moses is interested in mapping out the “literary and historical” dynamics of the myth rather than in the theological efficacy and actuality of the black messiah. This allows for a dynamism which encompasses both “real” historical figures such as Nat Turner, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X but literary figures such as Uncle Tom and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This mode of analysis is useful for discussing the three albums in question since, the various concepts of messianism and redemption that feature in their music, first and foremost, have a political and secular focus. 

Yeezus

When Kanye West entitled his 2013 record Yeezus it seemed like a cynical joke: the latest in a long line of rappers crowning themselves the second coming. Kanye’s nickname has always been “Yeezy”—a nickname given to him by Jay-Z—and the album title conflates his nick name with Jesus. At the listening party for the album, however, Kanye elaborated on the origin of the title: “Simply put: West was my slave name and Yeezus is my god name.” Whether or not one wants to think that might be the most cynical move of all—using the Nation of Islam’s removal of the slave name to give himself the most exalted new one—Kanye clearly wants to mark the title of his album as a continuation of political history. Of course, this isn’t the first time that Kanye had explicitly gone political. His first exposure on a national stage, beyond the music world who had already embraced him after the release of The College Dropout (2004), was a nationally televised segment in a concert for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In his rambling comments,  West compares  the lack of response to the African-American victims of Katrina with the media’s representation of the event, his own culpability in contributing to the culture of consumerism before helping members of his own community (his self-condemnation echoes George W. Bush’s now (in)famous address after 9/11 that Americans should go out and shop), and the war in Iraq.  After his co-presenter, the comedian Mike Meyers, discusses the loss of “the spirit of the people of Southern Louisiana and Mississippi”, Kanye West looks straight into the camera and utters the sentence for which he is still somewhat famous: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Again, it’s entirely possible to understand Kanye’s statement as part of a larger, cynical strategy to become a known commodity through shock (something for which he would become increasingly famous). What’s fascinating, however,  is both the distant echoes and contemporary realities of political undercurrents that run through his public life and work. For someone who is mocked (even by the current president!) as a “jackass,” it seems that his understanding of contemporary politics, refracted through the prism of mass-media culture, is part of his work. 

To this end, it is significant he concludes his 2010 album, My Dark Twisted Fantasy, with an unexpurgated section of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1,” an overtly political poem critiquing American hegemonic ideology, concluding with the repeated phrase “who will survive in America?” It’s a curious ending to Kanye’s album, an album which, throughout most of it, Kanye seems more interested in discussing his own fame and relationships then discussing politics per se. More fascinating still is that he concludes his album with a voice that is not his, rather, it is Gil Scott-Heron’s, a complex artist in his own right who emerged, originally, as a spoken-word musician (it’s worth noting that in his first solo hit, “Through the Wire,” Kanye compares his own style not with “coke and birds” but with “spoken word”) firmly rooted in the Black Power movement of the late 60s. In the original song, the parts not sampled by Kanye, Gil Scott-Heron dedicates “Comment #1” to the “Rainbow conspiracy” of The Students For A Democratic Society, The Black Panthers and the Young Lords. In Gil Scott-Heron’s original track, the possibility of this coalition is called into question due to the class and racial differences that exist between the various groups. 

You could make the argument that Yeezus is the answer to the question posed on the final track My Dark Twisted Fantasy: living “upside-down”, only a messiah-like figure could save us from the “rapist known as freedom, free-DOOM”. But if it seemed easier to imagine in Heron’s time a messianic figure emerging from any of the “Rainbow Conspiracy,” even if Scott-Heron seems to have no illusions regarding said conspiracy,  then who will redeem America  in 2013? Thus, the ambivalent messiah in Yeezus emerges, willing to portray himself as confused and materialistic, far away from the spiritual but always hinting at the political. What’s important about Kanye’s statement regarding the album title is not his own self-aggrandizement, rather that he would remind everyone that as long as we adhere to the slave name we will remain slaves (even if the “new slaves” no longer quite resemble the old). 

If there is a theme that marks Yeezus’ redemption of the world, it is that the world seems beyond redemption. Or, rather, that redemption as it was imagined by the Gil Scott-Heron’s of the world, a revolution that will not be televised, won’t even be not-televised. It simply will cease to exist. One of the more controversial songs on Yeezus is “Blood On the Leaves,” which samples Nina Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit,” the powerful civil rights song that Billy Holiday originally made famous. People were offended by Kanye’s use of the sample: that a song ostensibly about a previous relationship would use such a politically charged song as a backdrop. Not only that, but that the version of the song Kanye used is sung by Nina Simone, an artist who, like Gil Scott-Heron, was profoundly effected by the black power movement of the late 60s and early 70s. In Yeezus the personal collapses into the political and the suggestion is that redemption, at once playing out on the stage of recognizable political struggle, now moves into the inter-personal and, perhaps most problematically, the economic.

“Blood On the Leaves” isn’t the first reference to “Strange Fruit” on the album, that comes in “New Slaves”. “New Slaves” begins with an image from this earlier period of civil rights struggle, an artifact, a fading photograph, that begins only slightly after “Strange Fruit” leaves off: “My momma was raised in the era when/ Clean water was only served to the fairer skin.” But now West lives in a different time: You see it's broke nigga racism/ That’s that ‘Don't touch anything in the store’/ And it's rich nigga racism/ That’s that ‘Come in, please buy more’ […] Used to only be niggas, now everybody playin’/ Spendin' everything on Alexander Wang/ New Slaves.” Just as West bates his listeners by equating a failed relationship with lynchings in the south, he now equates hyper-capitalism and consumerism with a new slavery for blacks with disposable incomes: hardly the redeemer that will save the meek of the earth. Yet, by the end of the song, he places his own slavish affluence against a more systemic problem: “Meanwhile the DEA/ Teamed up with the CCA/ They tryna lock niggas up/ They tryna make new slaves/ See that’s that privately owned prison/ Get your piece today” If Yeezus/Kanye is trying highlight the real new slaves of racist late capital, then what is his solution for fighting against this system? “They prolly all in the Hamptons/ Braggin’ ‘bout what they made/ Fuck you and your Hampton spouse/ Came on her Hampton blouse/ And in her Hampton mouth.” Hardly a solution for reforming the CCA but it suggests that the new politics of redemption won’t come from a figure of the outside who is “yet without sin”. Based on this problematic lyric, the redeemer may come directly from an old racist stereotype itself: the sexually depraved former slave who will rape “our” white women. Although he received a lot of flack for these lyrics, the assumptive violence which lies underneath West’s evocation of the racist stereotype fails to die: as I write this essay Dylan Rood killed nine people in the A.M.E. Emanuel Church, allegedly telling the congregants as he killed them: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. You have to go.”

Although such uses of a racist tradition hardly seems redemptive, the music offers a redemptive moment. The most striking musical moment on the album, of which there are many, comes at the end of the aforementioned “New Slaves”. Out of the minimal electronic track (disruptive, verging on the avant-garde) comes, at the end, a completely different kind of music, a completely different kind of song: a hard rock sample from the Hungarian rock band Omega plays while West and the singer Frank Ocean proclaim: “I won’t end this high, not this time again/ So long, so long, you cannot survive/ And I’m not dyin’ and I can’t lose/ I can’t lose, no, I can’t lost/ Cause I can’t leave it to you/ So let’s get too high, get too high again […]” “High” here can mean a number of different things: there is the obvious connotation of getting high (with the additional “too high” echoing the first track off of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, where the main character, a girl who is never named, continuously gets “too high” to avoid the world around her) but it can also be understood as a commentary on the music itself: whereas most of the track is content to stay in the low end of things (low end theory) the outro modulates up and “ends high”. West seems to admonish it/himself for ending what is ultimately an aggressive indictment of the slavery/imprisonment pipeline on a “high” note (literally…that guitar solo keeps reaching for the highest register possible). It reminds me of something John Berger recently wrote in Harper’s: “A song fills the present, while it hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere.” 

We are now listening to this song in 2015 after Ferguson, after #blacklivesmatter and, what might resonate most for this song, #icantbreathe. All of these statements come after Yeezus, although we can’t un-hear their resonance today. “I’m not dying”, “I can’t lose” and “not this time” seems, to us, to be slogans on signs, chants heard during the mass marches that have sprung up over the last year or so. So, despite the darkness, this is ultimately a song of hope. A messianic hope that “you” (here read as the system that produces the new slaves) cannot survive and the “I” (Kanye, Frank Ocean, black men, Kendrick Lamar who will name his single of 2014 “i”) can’t lose, won’t die and, certainly, won’t leave it to you. West doesn’t leave the track with his and Frank Ocean’s vocals (like “Who Will Survive in America” West wants to leave the last word to others), he ends it with a vocal sample from Omega in Hungarian. And I will leave my discussion of Yeezus  with a translation of its final, surprising words: “One day the sun, too tired to shine/ Slept in the deep, green sombre lake/ And in the darkness, the world did fail/ Until she came, for all our sake.”

Black Messiah

If Kanye West reimagines the messiah as Yeezus, the materialist messiah that can only redeem from the stalls of the money lenders, D’Angelo and the Vanguard return to the traditional notion of the messiah—albeit a black messiah. The album was originally supposed to be released in 2015, but after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, D’Anglo decided to release the album before the end of the year, thus commenting on real events as they are unfolding. The redemptive politics that D’Angelo describes on the album, echo the traditional civil rights and post-civil rights struggles that haunt Kanye’s record in the sampled figures of Gil Scott Heron and Nina Simone. Kanye’s Yeezus is a singular messianic figure that replaces the slave name only to point out the slavery of consumerism; D’Angelo’s Black Messiah is the collective struggle towards redemption. The cultural critic Nelson George provides a definition for the album title in the liner notes: “It’s [the album title] about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them […] Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that collectively, we are all that leader.” This is reflected in the album cover artwork: a photograph of people holding up their hands in fists. There is no context for the photo: it could be a photograph from 1968 or it could be a photograph from 2014. That’s the point. Until the world is redeemed there will always be a need for the (black) Messiah. 

This seems to place D’Angelo’s record back in the realm of 2Pac’s “Black Jesus,” as opposed to West’s “Yeezus”. As Michael Eric Dyson explains in his essay “Searching for Black Jesus”: “When the divine intersects human identity, a transformative energy is unleashed that redeems finitude and furnishes the human project with unshakable purpose [….]” D’Angleo, unlike 2Pac, decides to name his album Black Messiah rather than Black Jesus. The lack of denomination in the title suggests a universalizing of the “transformative energy” that Dyson speaks of, and that Nelson George makes explicit in his liner notes. In contrast to Yeezus, the redemptive power of Black Messiah, is still firmly political in a traditional sense: marching, on the ground, with bodies in the fight. The “blood on the leaves” of this struggle will be as likely to  come from the bodies of present in the streets, as well as the blood of those who are invisible behind institutional walls. 

The two songs on the album that make its politics most explicit are “1000 Deaths” and “The Charade”. Although D’Angelo had been working on this record for almost a decade before it was released, the song titles seem like possible hashtags themselves, slogans passing across your Twitter feed. The first, “1000 Deaths” begins with a sample from a former Nation of Islam spokesman, and New Black Panther party leader Khalid Abdul Muhammad. His presence links contemporary struggles with the struggles of the past, a past that seemed past on Yeezus, where the old (er) struggles were replaced by the “new slavery” of capitalism. On D’Angelo’s record the same wars are being fought time and time again. “Jesus, the black revolutionary Messiah […] the devil talked about a New World Order. The devil talked about giving Jesus all of this world out there, if Jesus would just seek an alliance with him, if he would just bow down to him.” The sample betrays the difference between the two messages: Yeezus fools himself into thinking that he can survive in America by imitating the very actions that had been sold to him, infiltrate, and then show them at their game (or worse). Black Messiah still imagines redemption outside of this system in struggle and solidarity. The second sample is from Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party: ”Black people need some peace, white people need some peace and we are going to have to fight, we’re going to have to struggle we’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace because the people that we’re asking for peace, they’re a bunch of megalomanic war-mongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means.” The sample surprisingly, given its source, speaks of a shared inter-racial need for peace against the true enemy: the military-industrial complex. The two samples form a genealogy of the moment we are in: the marches in Ferguson mirror the marches in the late 80s and early 90s (the period from which Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s speech was given), which mirror the struggles of the late 60s. Adding the “war mongers” to the critique allows another layer of meaning: the endless wars of the last two decades that have drained resources and bodies from the African American community and beyond. 

Musically, the track recalls the force and murk of Sly and the Family Stone’s classic record There’s A Riot Going On. That album pessimistically mapped out the disillusionment felt at the end of the 1960s into the 1970s, as protest movements morphed into an inward-turning narcissism. However, D’Angelo and the Vanguard turn that murk into a battle cry: “I been a witness to this game for ages/ And if I stare death in the face, no time to waste.” Later: “Yahweh, Yehushua/ He don’t want no coward soldier/ Aaah stick in the golden sand/ Musta dina hearda ma prayer/ I receive everything that it means/ And wield it victoriously/ Aha, and cast out all the wickedness/ (When they) send me over the hill/ I was born to kill/ Send me over the hill.” The chorus concludes with a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser: “Because a coward dies a thousand times/ But a soldier only dies just once.” The connection to Sly Stone’s ambivalence is juxtaposed in the speech from Fred Hampton that begins the track: to achieve peace we must wage war. Yet, ambivalence in terms does not translate to ambivalence in political motives and it is the living (at the end of the day) who must wage war to achieve peace, even if, as D’Angelo’s lyrics make clear: “I [We] been a witness to this game for ages.” 

This sentiment is echoed in the following track “The Charade.” Sly Stone murk has been traded for Prince-like clarity, indeed the song sounds like something that might have fit well on Prince’s mid-80s political masterpiece Sign O’ the Times. The main target of “The Charade” seems to be the media, a “virtual [hive] mind fucks in streams.” Uplifted by political movements that have grown over recent years, the “Twitter” revolutions mentioned by George in his liner notes (Ferguson, Egypt and the Occupy movements), D’Angelo sings: “With a faith at the size of a seed enough to be redeemed/ Relegated to savages bound by the way of the deceivers/ So anchors be sure that you’re sure we ain’t no amateurs.” George and D’Anglo universalize the struggle to reveal “at the end of the day, the charade,” offering the seed of redemption. The song “The Charade,” however, racializes the struggle nonetheless: the “savages” who, it is repeated throughout the song, get “only […] outlined in chalk” are the members of the black community whose motives are constantly questioned (most often far more violently than the motives of white, Occupy protesters) by “the media” and “anchors.” What might connect Black Messiah with Yeezus is the understanding that redemption comes not in spite of the over mediation of the resistance, but is concomitant with the “fuck stream” of the media itself. 

To Pimp A Butterfly

The absent center of both Yeezus and Black Messiah is the first black president Barak Obama. Although the right seems to have a monopoly is defaming the president as a black messiah (at least viewed as one by the dupes who elected him to office), nevertheless there is a way, at least on the political level, the election of the first black president should have  produced some kind of political redemption. That the murder of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, among countless others, could have taken place during the Obama presidency seems both shocking and sadly inevitable. That one expected something  to change with his election is one of the central points of Kendrick Lamar’s dense, difficult To Pimp A Butterfly. 

The White House looms in the background of the album cover artwork. Like D’Angelo, Lamar uses black and white, with the image of the White House scratched and distorted as if it were an older photograph (much like the timelessness of the photograph on the cover of D’Angelo’s record) but this time a mass, another mass, of bodies occupy the foreground: roughly a dozen young African-American men, shirtless, with requisite (per the media’s representation) blunts, and stacks of money. The image plays on the old joke: what if there were a black man in the White House? The joke of the first black president. The joke, told by some of the greatest black comedians of the last several decades, either plays upon the idea that the first black president will barely be able to “pass” as white before giving himself away by, to paraphrase Dave Chapelle, “getting real.” This getting real can either be reflected in language and/or demeanor, leading to the (unspoken) reality that white America would never allow it. Of course, we do have a black president, so this begs the question how does the reality of a black president match up with the culture’s assumptions beforehand? This is Lamar’s cover: although there is a black man sitting in the White House, the black men in front of the White House are the “real” version of the joke. They not only represent the actual black president(s) that we (someday) will have, they also are stand-ins for Barack Obama’s “black male America” which he routinely evokes with which to either sympathize or criticize. 

Tracks two through four on the album, “For Free?” through “Institutionalized”, thematize the idea of “the king”—with Lamar playing the role of the king. The first, a jazz-infused spoken work performance, plays like a 21st century version of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’ “Tramp” with the female voice admonishing the male for not being “shit”. It ends with her voice telling Lamar “you ain’t no king” which immediately goes into the second of the three tracks “King Kunta”. The title refers to the character of Kunta Kinte from Alex Haley’s novel Roots, with the reference of “cut the legs off him” a reference to the plantation owner cutting of Kinte’s foot so that he won’t run off the plantation. Though Kinte was not a king, Lamar re-imagines him (and himself) as a king: “from a peasant to a prince to a motherfuckin’ king.” As with many rappers before him, Lamar imagines himself as the savior of rap, in contrast to the rappers who are plagiarists (“a rapper with a ghost writer”) or self-destructive (“everybody’s suicidal, they ain’t even need my help”). Fascinatingly, what gives Lamar his power is “the yams”, a reference that winds its way from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man all the way back to the African culture that birthed the character of Kunte Kinte. This trope will lead to the fellow compatriots who also “got the yams”: Richard Prior and Bill Clinton. 

Why these two? Pryor is often considered the greatest African-American comic and, perhaps, the greatest comic period. More specifically, Pryor, in a televised skit from the late 70s, played the first black president. The skit takes place during a white house press briefing, starting out as a typical, boring press briefing that slowly reveals the “black president” for who he is, becoming more belligerent to the white journalists and revealing his affinity with the militant black journalists in the group. The whole skit ends with a white journalist asking the black president about “his mamma” before Pryor runs to go off and fight him. This image of the black President unable to control his “blackness” will be repeated twenty years later in a stand-up routine by Cedric the Entertainer in the film the Kings of Comedy who, in the voice of a spectator who has just witnessed a press conference in which the black president, again, fights a white journalist, states “the president fight too much…that’s why I don’t go nowhere with him!” This is why the idea of the “black president” seemed impossible in a white dominated society: the black man who would be president couldn’t control his true nature as violent black male. 

It’s ironic that Cedric the Entertainer’s routine makes reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal that nearly ended Bill Clinton’s presidency (as in a black president would never stand to have white journalists talk about his public life that openly, in front of his family, friends, etc.) Lamar makes reference to this scandal (“the yam…manipulated Bill Clinton with desires”), however his appearance in “King Kunte” contains another layer. In a now famous piece in the New Yorker, Toni Morrison suggested that: “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” The label of Bill Clinton being the first “black president” stuck, so much so that even Clinton himself commented on it stating, to Jimmy Kimmel, that he “love[s] being called the first black president.” 

Of course, it’s hard to read Morrison’s piece after Obama’s election. Lamar is aware of this: from the cover of his album to the concerns of the lyrics. “King Kunta”  moves into “Institutionalized” wherein Lamar sing/raps: “If I was the president/ I’d pay my mama’s rent/ Free my homies and then/ Bulletproof my Chevy doors/ Lay in the White House and get high, Lord/ Who ever thought?” This is Richard Pryor and Cedric’s black president: when he finally gets in the White House (still marked by the linguistic wish fulfillment “If I was…”) thinks only of his own community and family, is marked by the violence of the inner city and ends up lazy and high inside the White House. In Lamar’s verses he is a walking stereotype, but ends up in reality (“who ever thought?”) The title of the track has a double edged meaning: Institutionalized refers to the incarceration of young African-American males (“I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it”; “Institutionalized, I could still kill me a nigger” and “Free my homies”) but it also refers to the ascendency of the “real” black president to the institution of power. It’s worth remembering that Obama’s main slogan in the 2008 presidential campaign was “Change” and “Change We Can Believe In”. In an ironic, mocking deflation of Obama’s political rhetoric, Lamar changes his voice for the chorus to an older, grandmother figure who admonishes: “Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass nigger.” As this chorus suggests, the song, coming after the previous two, is the nagging doubts that remain after one is installed as “king” (even if he is elected president). That young African-American men still are “institutionalized” at a much higher rate than ever before, suggests that the change the Obama presidency promised (specifically to the African-American community) has not yet arrived. 

Lamar ends the album with an imagined conversation between himself and another messianic figure in contemporary culture, the aforementioned 2pac Shakur. Shakur on the album plays the counterpoint to the unspoken figure of the black president. Whereas the president, represented by the White House on the cover and hinted at in the lyrics to “Institutionalized”, is the figure of unfulfilled potential, the continued institutionalization of the African American populace despite the black president’s arrival and institutional power, it is 2pac who is allowed to speak. At the end of “Mortal Man” Kendrick asks 2pac (whose responses are taken from a twenty year old interview conducted for a Swedish radio show) what he thinks the future holds for Lamar’s generation. 2pac responds: “[n]ext time it’s a riot there’s gonna be, like, uh, bloodshed for real.” And, making the apocalyptic prophecy even more explicit, Tupac goes on to say: “It’s gonna be murder, you know what I’m saying, it’s gonna be like Nat Turner, 1831, up in this muthafucka.” The bifurcation of the messianic idea continues anew with the black president essentially telling the African community: I have arrived, I live in the White House but you, like the throng of African American men on Lamar’s album cover, will continue to wait outside. The evocation of Turner makes the tension of institutional politics and redemptive violence explicit. 2pac, like the apocalyptic messianists that have always, in the words of Jacob Taubes, attempted to “jump into history”, imagines the arrival through apocalypse. 

Yet, 2Pac doesn’t have the final word on the album. Instead Lamar reads a spoken word piece, attributed to a friend of his, which describes, in his own words, “his world”.  In this piece, the caterpillar is set against the butterfly: the caterpillar is “prisoner to the streets that conceived it” whereas the butterfly “represents the talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty” within the caterpillar. Although the metaphor traverses much with regard to the themes of the album, it can also be grafted onto the ongoing messianic discourse found within these three albums: if the butterfly is the final arrival of what the caterpillar “ought” to be, then the caterpillar represents the  “faulty” consciousness of what gets left behind. The butterfly might best be represented by Kanye West’s Yeezus—the messianic insect, which emerges fully formed within the culture “pimping” to his own benefit (reality shows, sneaker brands, indulging in the logical of consumptive capitalism as a way to liberate oneself) and the caterpillar is represented by D’Angelo’s Black Messiah—fighting the struggle both outside and inside, adhering to an older form of resentment that marks him as the soldier fighting the “good fight."

 Lamar, younger than both West and D’Angelo, concludes with a reconciliation, much like the attempted reconciliation between the black president and the revolutionary: “Finally free, the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered, ending the internal struggle/ Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.” This is not much different from the ending of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing where the photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X shaking hands we’ve seen throughout the film is shown with two quotations from the men: the former predictably admonishing violence as a method of achieving racial justice and the later arguing that violence as a means of self-defense is justified. Yet, Lee’s film was made at a time when the thought of a black president would have been the material for comedians. Now that the black president has arrived—a political form of messianism in which racial reconciliation is imagined because whites too have voted for a black president—seemingly there is no need for redemption. The long arc of justice (let’s not forget that in Judaism the messiah was often imagined carrying a sword) has been reached. But what about 2Pac? Lamar asks for his response to the caterpillar/butterfly analogy, but gets no response. If the messiah will come when he is no longer needed, as Kafka’s quotation which serves as an epigraph for the essay says, then 2Pac’s silence proves we’re still living in the hope of his arrival.