Clive Davis is Dead

Notes on what time it is in the wake

Living on borrowed time the clock ticks faster — MF DOOM

Clive Davis died on Katherine Dunham’s birthday. On Octavia Butler’s birthday. Katherine Dunham and Octavia Butler share a birthday on the day Clive Davis died. I love the absurd symmetry of the dumbfounded earth, its rituals of rebirth and accounting, how ruthless we are when done being hunted and handled, flattered, flattened into numerals and revenue goals—cosmic backlash as an act of love or interstellar repentance proves we’re finished with our infancy as minstrels, as bitter ends meeting. I love the coming true of Tupac’s tirade on “Hit ‘Em Up” (I’m jumping ahead, the fish rots from the head). And the knee jerk respectability of boomers, etcetera, glad-handing gatekeepers of the old death cabal order, who will pen obituaries of respectability using the mask of linear time and bad faith decency, his alibis, an ear and eye for talent as keen as any slave catcher’s. They’ll claim Clive was a great hunter, a benevolent devil. He was the president of Columbia Records when Miles went electric; it was his idea, his parlor trick to make a jazz musician with the charisma of a rockstar into a rockstar on the bill with Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix and richer than jazz had ever made him. It was Clive’s plan to make Janis Joplin his would-be hard r conquest-maybe-lover-signee, though he was queer, that would come later, after trips to Studio 54 with Lou Reed, after nirvana or going on his nerve. He would make his own label Arista when ousted from Columbia, he would sponsor Diddy’s Bad Boy Records, he and Diddy would make transactional lust into a lifestyle, star-making apparatus, and blackmail ring and keep the surveillance videos as collateral against canaries in the minor coal of their coalition of benevolent devils.

Many will recall the 2012 Grammys eve, when Whitney Houston died at the Beverly Hilton and Clive Davis hosted his gala downstairs the same evening “in tribute.” He told an interviewer he never even considered canceling, a ritual of assuredness with the scent of a sacrifice made plain. And in delivering her eulogy melodramatically, he gazed up toward the heavens with contrived wistfulness in his eyes and a hint of glee as he pondered her commitment to touring in the afterlife, and barely concealed delight at this conquest shrouded sadness. Not to accuse him of malice, but to accuse malice of becoming him in his pursuit of black spirits.

He was a Harvard-trained lawyer before he was A&R, his innate repertoire was black suffering as law and lawless asset, as if Janis Joplin worshiping Bessie Smith was him as a woman, his feminine animus, and in launching himself into the belly of black music through “discovering” her at a festival it became his conscious or subconscious mission to siphon and kill off anyone who might be onto the grift, from Janis herself, to Aretha, Luther Vandross, Clive and his well-groomed affiliates knew what combination of suffering and beauty could turn a profit whether the artist in possession of it or possessed by them was dead or alive to witness it. Early death was often more lucrative, made them martyrs and more popular that way. Clive inflicted the kind of psycho-spiritual havoc on black sound that ricochets into gimmick and then wink and then cold hard mercenary stare that will never train itself away from its victims willingly; he initiated an ongoing war from within, appointing Diddy as the general, but there are other officials for whom retreat will never be a strategy even in death. They collect black souls at their altar and attempt to reenter the earth through them. Let’s see who shows up to his funeral in tears and lace(fronts). We have to ask ourselves, and confirm, why it’s ever flattering to be discovered and repurposed by monsters with slender serpent eyes, beyond the getting rich and famous part, do we enjoy being eaten alive by a system that tries to deem us unworthy of love, knowing their taste for our sound defies their commitment to arrogance and hate so well they’ll make us their business. Their only business. The last business before the fall of empire, what Margo Jefferson called Ripping off Black Music. The only American culture that sticks as global export, the excuse and shock-absorber for all the rest. Clive’s heirs will likely receive a bounty in the coming season, and maybe one is positioned to carry on his legacy of finding we who are darker than blue and turning us green. Whitney’s daughter died in a bathtub like she did, leaving the singer with no heirs, no tangible justice, just us. In tribute, in the gallantry of seeing fake love for what it is and death as a trick it plays on the victims to borrow time.