An Enormous Bliss

Prayer for a new folk revival in music

I historically belong to an enormous bliss of American death. – Frank O’Hara

In 1912, Louis Armstrong fired blanks from his stepfather’s pistol into the air on New Years Eve, at the intersection of Rampart and Perdido Street in New Orleans. He was eleven years old, and despite that promptly arrested and taken away to a juvenile detention center imperiously called The Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. It was while detained at this home that he encountered his first music teacher, Peter Davis, and the trumpet carried his messages through the air thereafter. Music and violence are co-conspirators in the U.S.A., each seducing the other back and forth in a perpetual loop so that without an inconnu young boy’s casual public gunplay, the history of jazz trumpet would be abridged or rewritten sans its most charming prodigy, ambassador, saint. Violence is so ambient and woven into the collective temperament as sublimated virtue or distracted affection turned vicious, that music becomes the territory of testimony and reenactment, incarnadine without the bloodshed. Then the rage surpasses a known threshold and the sound has to change to accommodate newly blasphemous levels of carnage and apathy.

On day one of the year of the snake, 2025, a man drove a rented Ford F-150 Lightening into a crowd on Bourbon Street and then opened fire, killing at least fourteen people, wounding dozens of others. A few days later the street reopened and locals report tourists taking photos of the crime scene and pilfering flowers from makeshift memorials as they went about their right to inebriated, unchecked leisure and consumerism as it coincides the right of the dead, to be forgotten. The shooter, who could be a sleeper agent, a patsy, an authentic home-grown extremist radicalized by global injustice, or a disgruntled lovelorn divorcé, who knows, it’s been less than a week since the incident, is dead, shot by local police after firing at them.

In my coldest assessment, as we are part of a society that encourages us to be enamored with our suffering and trauma and suffering and trauma in general, to enhance and embolden it, emphasize it as indicator of potential for virtue and grit and guile, we are also complicit with society that manufactures crisis and cataclysm intermittently to fuel this sentient disaster capitalism in personal and political spheres. We all become crisis actors in these moments, opportunists internalizing what is not but nothing but our own pain and dread, so that when catastrophe is incited and incessant as it is now we are a mass of easy-to-rally bots and warm data points beaming with contrived thoughts and prayers™ until the carnival resumes. What is it about a celebrating crowd that attracts a lone gunman other than this choreographed, well-coordinated dance between the seemingly arbitrary ritual sacrifice that mass shootings have become and the crisis junkie ready and waiting to come undone on the rotating mourners’ bench in the wake of yet another tragedy and its inevitable media frenzy. The serpent’s year makes its theatrical debut and we don’t know which parts of the plot are scripted and which to improvise, nor do we have any grasp on the difference between distraction and our human need to respect the lives of others to keep our souls in tact. Nor can we resist cannibalizing the present with our anxieties and denials. What would it mean to overreact? Would we be sociopaths if, feeling emotionally manipulated by both reality and its simulations, we delayed all reaction and made songs and study our priority and refuge, or ferociously recited Psalm 91? Is it sensational, dysfunctional, or decadent to care or not about the cavalcade of homicidal events now masquerading as normal daily life?

Do we expect no inflections of the barbarism the US funds abroad to reach our amusement park cities? Yes, we expect this impunity, feel entitled to it. Airguns that shape-shift into trumpets for every disgruntled American. Do we make music so frivolous, patriotic, or despondent and full of subterfuge that such an expectation is ridiculous? Yes, that too. New Orleans is the city my dad escaped to from Mississippi as a teenager. He was signed to the local Minit Records alongside Bobby Womack, and Ike & Tina Turner, to make his first sides. Thus began his music career and that of so many other black singers, writers, and sidemen from his generation. The stories he would tell about those sessions are minted deep in my family’s private mythology of the come-up and the get-on, and the this-is-how— a label small enough to make you feel larger than life, a will to exceed and exalt your environment, stories to tell and retell, a melody in your heart that refuses to be diminished by impossible odds. My dad made his combat fetish as lyrical and unattainable as sirens. Only he could sound and threaten like him. Today, I feel no nostalgia for any of it, and watch it in slow-motion sepia in my mind, like rewinding to the scene of a movie I enjoy and leaving before reading the credits, I don’t intend to romanticize and objectify the past anymore, I want to integrate it through sober understanding. It might be fair to say the American myths are ran-through, exhausted, contrite? Migration, we get it; return from exile to do it again, we get that too, and yes, we can sing you through every displaced forever we encounter along the way. These vicarious memories just aren’t adequate exonerations of the state’s karma for turning black and rural and working class and underclass and unamerican, American pain into such profitable spectacle it needs to manufacture more and more of itself and double down and rewire the apparatus with terror and risk so grandiose it forces singers to enact the vengeance on themselves that popularity ultimately is, to die in the glare of a nest of spotlights, comeback to life with a stage name, some heirs, some horrors, some despair to transmute into darker songs.

Survival of this phase of the rapture is, to me, soon to be contingent on unapologetic tenderness, a weapon that when used correctly is more lethal and gleeful than a firearm, it tortures those who seek the caustic and hyper-casual or noncommittal, who cast vulnerability as cringe and would rather bend over with Casamigos and twerk it away every time, no exceptions to the will toward dissociation or dilettanteism, disinhibited by numbness rather than self-realization, or worse, the phony half-hearted ones who air heart thots-and-prayers and trample the funerary flowers in the next gesture to negate themselves and save their reputations as careless pseudo-demons of empire. The belly of the hourglass where the past, present and future meet does not have to be ulcerated grieving that feels both illicit and compulsory until the history of our music is a record of euphemisms and cover-ups for a psychic danger that would inevitably be unleashed on us. To have the safety of every symbolic or spiritual homeland undermined by siege, to be eager to disavow what cannot be consoled, is haunting our waking days, like leaving a crying newborn on the doorstep of our year to fade out into a rotten shrine silences. And there we had it, day one, some trumpets, a lazy dirge.

—

If I had my way, Nina Simone once said, I’d be a killer. Wendy Williams would ask her live audiences to clap if they’d ever wanted to kill someone, and an uproar of affirmation and heaving head nods would follow without coaxing, the faces appeared relieved of some sacred burden of civilization. You kept on thinking, you were the only one, too busy thinking love is a gun, Sade writes, in her song “Bullet Proof Soul.” Where would love come in and undermine or enhance these bloody un-valentines? Which is it? Do we love crimes of passion, or shame on them? Does it depend on the actor? I believe that the new celebrities are emerging as a cast of famous criminals and actual crisis actors playing roles assigned by we do not yet know who, sometimes divine delusion, others some more sinister and mortal puppeteer, and perhaps the artists brave enough to face this new archetype and integrate it into making. There’s no solace without acceptance that we’re lugging around dead paradigms in a narcissism of small differences and we will either give up their ghosts or be taken to limbo with them.

I fantasize about a folk revival. The first one came about during and after 1950s Mccarthyism, there was a whole group of songs called Appalachian Murder Ballads, serene unflinching confessions efficient salt-of-the-earth to crimes. Here’s Nina Simone staying on brand and gorgeously covering one, “That Ballad of Hollis Brown.” They often chronicle a man or woman taking the softest vengeance on a series of unfortunate losses, unrepenant, walking up to fate with a cryptic grin that is the song itself. Beyond just keeping a forgiving record of working class criminality, folk songs became protest songs, then folk rock upon going electric. They had real lyrics and told stories and listed demands and Joan Baez, and Richie Havens, and Bob Dylan, and Odetta. There wasn’t much glamor till extracted later and through making some of them rock stars. Real rock music arrived and displaced the so-called revival, but folk music had intervened at a crucial moment and injected humility into the gestalt of a country nauseous with hubris and self-congratulation, it had slowed things down in the middle of industrialization, it made less of a stain and more of a glow in its absence, a little sonic halo between eras of aggressive grotesque star-making.

The closest I’ve heard to something approaching what I mean is more internal than communal, the singer and guitarist Daudi Matsiko from the UK by way of Uganda. His voice holds a torch to his soul’s ache and lets us listen as if by magic stethoscope. There’s a hope inside of me, it’s somewhere that I can’t see, he speak-sings in a hushed tone. The new folk music, in my vision, would be a music-concrete mix of spoken archival samples, poems, and improvisations, with an electro-acoustic Detroit sound between Dilla and Moodymann in the speaking voice of Sade or Georgia Anne Muldrow or Alice Coltrane. It would not be whitewashed or gleam with media training. It would not be readily commercial but it would surpass the other stagnating genres through innovation and careless love. The dominant subjects would be crime and protest and would displace the obsessions with lighthearted broken-spirited modern romance that now run through most popular songs in any form, to maybe ascend toward a future for true, uncompromised love. It doesn’t exist yet, this utopian auditory antidote to obscene unrelenting conflict. I am shooting my hope for it into the air, in a crowd, during a ruined party, to temper more shattering impulses, and less imaginative valorization of the past, that the hope may land as unheard verse dug out by necessity. It’s an emergency, the music is too aligned with the false world, it’s overproduced, excessively merchandised, and often uninspired or meant to inspire indifference and indulgence, both, and both in aspects at odds with vision. If captivity is more conducive of music than maritime and freedom, the hourglass has shattered and we are its surrogates and the noise the sand makes escaping what it was always-already looking through, a folk form, a new irreverent grammar of rupture and serenade for new fugitives who can no longer mimic the cadence of our fathers’ footsteps. ¹

1. A song my dad co-wrote, which feels in a titular sense relevant to the out with the old in with the old spirit of the thinking here