Baby, you're a lost cause

And Beyoncé can't save you

It’s the scapegoat’s job to pretend not to notice as she’s siloed into that position, so that any opportunist naive enough to keep trying to trade her energy for undeserved favor, will fall into a bottomless ditch when she moves out of their way. In the case of the hideous, genocide-denying presidential election of 2024 AD, black music and culture have been the scapegoats for the unapologetic insincerity of the democratic candidate. When that failed, we were told to worry solely about our abortion rights, after having been made to watch babies and mothers bombed and displaced almost daily for over a year in Gaza, with help from U.S. tax dollars, while said candidate was incumbent Vice President. We’re asked to dissociate so that our so-called freedoms become more important than divine justice. When we refuse, we may be villainized by the exact type of neoliberal identity politicking shill who would fear real integrity, the one that might benefit from us pretending we don’t know how to think in complete sentences, or contradict ourselves on purpose to get closer to universal truths. It’s important to watch this fail; internalize some of the shame. I hope it’s the final effort at coercing and infantalizing black people to such a degree that arts that should be sacred are outsourced to utter minstrelsy.

“Send in the Clowns” (baby they’re here), is the perfect lyric for all of it, slurred out through the pink and green sweat turning Sarah Vaughan’s makeup into a lush hysteria of color and powder. She delivers the lines with dejected triumph, and why they’re so winning and haunting, is because nothing about the demeanor of her when she demands these clowns be summoned and banished, is smug. In fact, she seems to harbor fondness for those fumbling so helplessly it feels almost romantic. We could have that grace for the democratic agenda reliant on semantics and race-baiting, Cardi B, Beyoncé, Meg, GloRilla, Usher, Jay Lo, all paraded out as if under trance or part of a two-way humiliation ritual. I don’t remember one moment of wholehearted conviction about anything coming from Kamala, but she mined the convictions of unassuming decent people who took her greens-in-the-bathtub approach at face value and thought they were going to get a free Beyoncé show as consolation for self-delusion. Now when Kamala concedes and the spell lifts or buckles, faint and pseudo as it was, will those who pretended there was passion behind this charade feel it was worth it to lie to themselves about what love is? Do you love yourself enough to admit when the demagogs are lying to you, not even in a pretty way, in a futile, frivolous borderline personality disordered way?

I believe that, in a final assessment, when it’s all underground or sea, black music will be one of the only redeeming elements of this empire, the poetics of inevitability black music insists upon, so much that if it’s used to propagate deceit it will self-destruct and take the deceivers down with it. Now look. One tweet smirks : Diddy’s never getting out of prison now. Elsewhere on the Internet there are suspicions he’s on a secluded island while a body double or ghost serves his time. Your brother the king, sold you to the ghost, Amiri Baraka reminds us in a poem about African complicity in turning black slaves into the capital that made America possible. We can carry all the blood in the world and still be ourselves, we don’t disappear, Abbey Lincoln adds, in a poem she recites on the black public access show “Like it Is.” It’s as if the system is rigged in favor of the secret heartbeat it’s running on, hijacking, and people are silly enough to think they can tempt it toward catastrophic arrhythmias, that the faux prestige of a first black woman president is enough for us to trade and abuse decades of black beauty, to forget who we could be or as the candidate put it, be unburdened by what has been.

It is black music that governs the US, that gives it a legible pulse and makes it a real place and not a full time amusement park for disaster capitalism, but when that music grows too shallow and 'popular’ to face its own heartbreak, and change, so starts pretending to be hard and declaring itself a winner of a race everyone is losing and limping through, the music becomes Legba, the trickster god turning the ritual into a theater. We tricked you, or were you the trick? You thought this was a party and not a funeral for the sound you can never access again, the sound of one of those weirdos with a pure soul. Hush, now.