Devotion/Depletion

On the tradition of dying or collapsing on stage and what it says about the collapse of systems

The fugitivity is imminent in the thing but is manifest transversally¹

Tina Turner has collapsed. She’s in the middle of a performance of her version of “Respect.” Irony is pathetic and shrill, abject. A blow-up Santa has fallen in the Hollywood yard. I’m passing irony to get black. And who will bring satan back into Santa’s hacked huckleberry name, yard-range banter, the banter of black fathers in the front yard renaming their lane? Tina will be rushed to the hospital and told she’s dying of exhaustion and kidney failure. In a week or two, she’ll return to performing, working out her salvation with fear and trembling. Ike (she was still with him then), had a way of standing behind her on stage, like a brace for what he might do if his asset were to depreciate or a collapse again, like a black slave master, overseer, his face waxed as though he’d just had his makeup done at the funeral parlor but somehow escaped his casket. He might have been a demon in plain sight inventing his avenging angel in real time. He’s so easy to hate you almost want to love him enough to kill him for her. Or deflate him like the blow-up scene if he could just be punctured by his own desire to wound. But he is, and it isn’t doing anything, he’s still brutalizing with a chip on his shoulder. Put that miserable man down, his eyes part sociopath, part child destroyed by neglect and having retreated so far into himself all you see is the vacancy— borrow him for the orphanage in the sky, Lucifer’s dominion, some place where nothing is worshiped or disgraced— may there be peace.

Eventually, Ike dies in the hellfire of his own making, an overdose on cocaine, his rubber balloon bursts and gathers, but never too soon. Miriam Makeba collapses during a concert in Italy, in 2008; she is pronounced dead on stage. Whitney Houston whispers something to Brandy, interrupting a conversation the singer is having with Clive Davis to pass her a note. To this day no one knows what it said. I could write a novel just imagining. Later that evening Whitney dies in a bathtub, we’re told. There are some inconsistencies in the autopsy report, bruises, potential signs of struggle and distress, but her history of drug use and her erratic behavior in public earlier that day means the reports are plausible enough. She tours by hologram, biopic and documentary now, which is far easier than getting back into shape and being bussed from city to city to sing about how love lasts forever while still breathing its baffled exhaust. Good for her. If you shoot a arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.

Abbey Lincoln is performing at Yoshi’s in Oakland when she starts sweating out of her clothes; she has to stop singing and crawl backstage, a wounded tiger hunching through velvet light. She’s taken out of the club naked on a stretcher, but survives. We know Michael Jackson was trying to sleep so he could try to rehearse for a comeback concert series; he was administered some kind of merciful euthenasia-kill-dose of anesthesia and returned to forever. He was killed. Prince performed two shows in Atlanta a week before dying of a fentanyl overdose. Corrosive disbelief, it was my birthday in the year of or lord 2016, seventy seven degrees in Los Angeles, and I was climbing my holy mountain alone in the sun. Years later I’m hanging out with Esperanza Spalding and she interjects, you know who you remind me of…Prince. Maybe because all I think about is music and my charisma is shrouded in aloofness and quiet observation sometimes, plus I’m high yellow and petite but trained to kill in one comment. I can see what she means. I should go a little harder, not to prove it but to fulfill it, why we are a destiny. It’s as flattering as it is terrifying. Because part of that destiny means transcending the way performance and training can make us so poised with what is called ‘stage-presence’ that no pain compares to waiting in the wings, you get up there, you do what you came to do for hire. You need the resources, you need the moment, you need the redemption, you need someone to hear you sing, the applause gnaws at you like a lie and you blame them for being too easily impressed, knowing you could have done a little better, and trust no one. But you need them to teach you that.

Showmanship itself might be a fawn-response and what is called the diva or divaism, (the false apotheosis of commercial success for entertainers who wanted to be artists), when describing a woman or androgynous type or freak of nature who refuses to apologize or make disclaimers for her own vision and the attention and commitment it demands, refuses to settle, might just be grandiose people-pleasing disguised as conditional withholding. The diva as archetype is turning to soot as I write this, a dim mask obscuring the human being. All the types are. I saw one of the last specimens of straight-ahead divaism on short videos all over the internet this week and was so stunned I couldn’t even cry at the tragedy of it. It was Mariah Carey touring her Christmas music. Big American propaganda and we need it because, by day, the people’s favorite American divinity is Luigi Mangione, an alleged murderer who looks beautiful in orange and sublime rage. His fellow inmates gave him a taper fade for his public extradition from Philly to Manhattan a few days back, to signal to the prison guards and cops that he’s protected, don’t beat him or a riot will ensue, he’s an asset, paraded around like a multi-directional threat to both the law-abiding and the lawless.

His perp walk with the mayor and dozens of officers, looked more like a cat-walking cover of his future album where his escorts are the villains, the clowns, and he’s sonning them with a downcast radiance so obvious everybody marvels and swoons, looks away in bashful approval. Like Prince and Michael and Tina and Whitney, Luigi was in pain before he succumbed to divaism’s underworld, metal screws in his back sharpening his bones and resolve like ten of swords in the tarot. He’s been betrayed. Crime became his medicine and coping mechanism, instead of music or opiates he chose pure unmitigated revenge. I see what he means too. He too wanted to do anything meaningful no matter what it cost him, this was his retrieval of dignity, madness made into form. He knew he was entitled to feel good in his body and that homeostasis was taken away from him. He blamed insurance and sacrificed all of his ostensible privilege and sanity to make a symbolic and real statement about pain, killers, pain making us into killers, CEOs being silent killers. Painstakingly clear about it, and no matter who agrees or doesn’t, he is now free, his mission complete even if he dies tomorrow. Criminalize avoidable pain before the last American divine ones and idols become mimic assassins, a vocation that’s easier to train for than singing whistle notes outside in heavy beaded gowns and heels on New York winter nights, or touring all year and ending up backstage alone with your drugs and handlers miming your wants and needs.

Mariah appears to be trapped in quiet discomfort in all the videos I’m seeing of her, disembodied. Her hair and dress and shoes and makeup are perfect but when she tries to move, her walk is so stiff and measured each step might be a stifled howl. She has negative-agility, it seems like standing still is even a slight torture for her, and she’s focused on some target in the back of her mind telling her to hold it together, her inner-fawn pretending agony is big fun. I see what she means too. She means so much to versions of us you once knew. She maintains composure, holds some notes, blunders others, scoots, with the help of guards and entourage, down into the audience to greet fans. Rihanna is in attendance, the most animated person in the audience and the only one not clutching a phone as if it’s a prayer candle. Mariah finds her and autographs her breast in red sharpie. RiRi grabs the mic, Mariah Carey is signing my tit, this is iconic.

The only diva/singer who seems to be enjoying herself is the one who quit, refuses to perform or record, and is more captivating as a spectator than her peer on stage in full glam. The other satisfied diva emptied a clip in his perceived oppressor, and merrily, his spirit was liberated. We cannot be voyeurs without becoming what we observe. Mimesis is inevitable because what we revere reveals us to ourselves and haunts us until we let it have us, give ourselves away to become what we are. I’d like to surpass the version of success or achievement that is false enough to ask that we make spectacles out of our own pain to access and heal it, or that suggests pain is the first symptom of real love and God’s favor, tricking us into the pursuit of suffering. If Charlie Parker had killed the first ten white people he saw he wouldn’t have played a single note, Amiri Baraka wrote. Parker died laughing at late night television on a Rothschild’s couch in Manhattan. He had an audience and was in the audience until his very last act. What if it’s when we stop playing, refuse play, and invent stages on corners and boulevards, for performances meant to wean us off the stupor of entertainment, that we make our best songs? ²

1. From a poem by Fred Moten read in his voice here

2. I’ve been vacillating between using the word depletion and the word exhaustion here but went with depletion because it suggests a force pulling energy out of someone or something while exhaustion feels more self-contained and voluntary as if the one experiencing it asked for it.