Due North

Field notes from this week in listening and paying attention

You cannot watch clips from the 2024 Grammy’s without contemplating grooming, both the intentional kind and the grooming that occurs as gleaning by association, as in being your mother or father’s daughter. The value of spectacle to a child is not in becoming the spectacle. A child commits to acts of witnessing to develop her social immune system, the germ of a cold is co-terminal with the germ of spectacle. But North West and Blue Ivy, under the rudimentary laws of nepotism and affinity, are loved as spectacle and inheritors of inevitably and if they also inherit the talent and dreams of the fathers and mothers, they cannot help but perform what they are given. They sing it, dance it, redeem it as contraband to be shared.

 Watching them in the act on stage this week, Blue beside her father accepting an award and North beside hers in a video for a song called “Talking,” in which she plays both his mother and his daughter, I cannot help but consider my own grooming. I finally published a piece of writing about my own life, in this case my early childhood, that implicates my own social munitions. You can read that here: canopycanopy.com/contents/love-is-war-for-miles 

I woke up with that Natalie Merchant song “Carnival” from 1995, in my head; have I been hypnotized, mesmerized, by what my eyes have found… at least that’s how I remember the lyrics. They send me on an imaginary road trip. Let’s go to Las Vegas as I did as a child, at least twice a year, to wear bright stage makeup and compete in national dance competitions. I won first place a lot, most memorably for a solo dancing to Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You.” Was I groomed? Was I in love? Was I easy to love because I’m beautiful? What did I know or comprehend about those lyrics at twelve? A lot actually, but was I mesmerized into that understanding? Black Ivory’s “You and I” which just repeats an eerie disembodied line you and I… have an understanding… in what feels like an interminable loop. Coercive or willing, there it is, the bridegroom disguised as omniscient song, the root of grooming, one pretending they understand why they’ve been placed at the mercy of another, pantomiming agency by calling it love or blaming love. Understanding is the best thing in the world, my father would sing. 

Fred called me from Savannah, Georgia last night, he had just spoken at a museum, and wanted to discuss why he loved that piece of writing I’d sent him, about my childhood. Because I claim ownership of it, horrors and all, flaws and all, eros and all, loss and all of its terror and lure. He told me about an exchange with his own father, wherein they formed and breached understanding. We discussed white people who want to be black, feeling alienated by their own, they turn away and see us in the distance and run up that hill. They bring Kate Bush, they introduce her to Stevie Wonder. Fred says there’s enough blackness in the world for them. Trust white people who want to be black more than white people who want to be white. I agree, then waver thinking of my mother’s desire, flexed sometimes as entitlement to black suffering or fetishization of it or vacillation, one minute exerting white privilege, the next appropriating back suffering. What if the white people who we think want to be black are just the best at wanting to be white, so good at it in fact that they know that in proximity to blackness they can retrieve their spurned whiteness. I think of James Baldwin’s writing on Sydney Poitier in Defiant Ones. He’s chained to a white man and manages to get away but then returns to save him, sabotaging his own escape. Is this what the white people who get close to blackness believe is at its heart, a desire to serve them at our own expense, to impress them with generosity of spirit and make us either sub or super human. 

Let’s move on, to Michael Jackson. I learned this week of him being a “castrati,” in the sense that his abusive father Joe tried to dose him with birth control (estrogen) in order to stop his voice from cracking during puberty. His high pitch was the family currency. There’s debate over this because some say it cracked anyways, that his speaking voice offstage was far less effete than the pearly tiptoe across words he offered when performing his speech patterns. I’m sure the truth is in the middle like most other lore about him, an addiction to his sound rekindled in the middle of a moralizing speech about virtue and purity. He did have a skin condition, he was also obsessed with whiteness, but maybe because he did not want to resemble his father and to discard any resemblance he would have to do away with a lot of his blackness. His masks and shape-shifting mannerisms were armor, he was groomed. He was mesmerized. And because he remained childlike all of his life, the grooming was endless. By the sad and distant texture of his eyes he looked a little like my mother. There’s enough sadness in the world for everyone. Enough blackness. Enough grooming, enough song. 

Tonight I’m going to see a black dance company perform Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. It’s a far cry from Las Vegas ballrooms full of adolescents in full glam. It might as well be spring. The epiphanies approach like bad music sounds great on a road trip through the desert to some mythic oasis in the background of a lifelong performance of the voice. Wyclef’s Carnival or Natalie Merchant’s, gully or gallant, we speak of love and happiness as if they are the only seasons left.