Endangered Musics
Some thoughts on the risk of saying nothing.
To repair the web of time where it had been broken — Chris Marker
Repair is too near to reaper or repast, like digging up then eating the error in time, letting it become a part of you so that in assuming the error and its impending rot and rebirth, the process of repair endangers you. Engenders? Endangers. You might be the break or divot in the web of time that makes the beat at once possible and wrong and addictive and terribly wrong, and too huddled with itself in egoistic wrongness to notice how crowded it is. Like botched teeth bulging the mouth this botched blot of noise in disrepair cropped in your body as organ, makes a nest whose perimeter you keep to out of habit. That nest is about to snap like a gently unfurling snake and bite your tongue off.
Endangered as a concept is easy to confuse with dangerous for the anaphora that governs some intellect. They’re close enough, black cousins. Those things and people who are in danger are often also called dangerous because this slander makes it easier to justify endangering them. We afflicted them so they would not afflict us, we tell ourselves. We silenced them before their murmur created irrevocable disturbance in our echo-system. We’re in danger, we’re endangered. Music that wants to sound dangerous usually just sounds melancholic instead. This is true of people too. The real dangerous ones are those who think they are content and sweet and then one day realize that’s been a method of teasing the ego into function, and that misery and grief and numb lurk beneath the veil of ease and contentment. Those sounds and persons (where a per/ son is one who comes forth through sound) are liable to murder you to avenge their own self-discovery, they are criminals in waiting.
Mobb Deep’s “The Start of Your Ending (41st Side)” from their 1995 album The Infamous, is the epitome of a dangerous song. Its direct threats and nothing-to-lose delivery make it so. Way past vague premeditation, these lyrics come out and confess intent to kill with a subdued but obvious relief, like it’s something they’ve been meaning to tell you and finally figured out how. Eerie piano like a mobile that should be above a crib found stranded in a vacant parking lot instead, accents the intensity with flutter. I’m finna kill you, they insinuate, in a raw and relaxed cadence, and they tell you how and who will help and I’m on some bullshit. I think of Slum Village’s “We Be Dem,” which echoes this commitment to ghettofabulous bullshit in 2010. Jive is dangerous, bullshit is earnest. These sensibilities are dangerous and endangered because all of that bravado begs for retaliation and endless war. In this way it possesses the elements of a song about unrequited love, it is seeking attention and engagement, in fact it’s seeking intimacy through combat, creating it through testimony. It believes it wants to kill what it wants to forgive and embrace. This song came out in an era before all aggression had been fluffed into uniform one-key outrage. Grudges then were still personal and specific, not media induced circuit training in rage but real murky interpersonal issues resolved with guns and fists when tears were inaccessible or too soft.
The danger of unchecked gangsterism does not exceed that of unchecked obsession in romance, however. Miles Davis plays ballads dangerously, like passion is endangered. Love like that translated to the flesh and sustained could be the substance of fatal attractions, it’s too tender, it can be sliced in half with one blow. And all those guts when they spill sound like his electric era, like Bitches Brew (1970), with its erotics of restless desolation. He moved away from steel-toned slowness into vindictive uproar. If they were gonna make me famous they would have to pay for it, Amiri Baraka once said. Miles made them pay for the notoriety he suffered by forcing a new archetype on the scene when he was supposed to just look pretty and play pretty and take the controversy obediently until it stifled him and made him a relic and they could export his decency as an ‘American’ commodity. Black pain, made beautiful and radio free in the USA. When he refused to be used in this way he was dangerous, we were in danger, tenderness endangered. Now we are addicted to him. Love has to feel Kind of Blue to feel like anything. If his sound is disappearing, love is disappearing.
If a word is disappearing, what it describes is disappearing. If his voice is disintegrating, his heart is retracting its blueprint. If you cannot disagree with your friends and survive it, you have only enemies. If language is policed into absentia, meaning is policed into absentia. Morning bells. Meaningless drills. It all becomes vocabulary, not music, a daily quiz to communicate, all reductive. Train bells. Trane hissing between melted solos. My father’s scream again. His laughter. The chipper phone voices of widows. Casual vulgarity, the underground, slap or rustle of skin on skin in a basement, perfectly toxic and radiant. Being wrong on purpose, don’t wanna be right. The cacophony of dissent or elegant reluctance is better. Gospel music at home in the morning while we clean, lazily at first, then brightly as the praise until every surface shines like a fresh altar.
More important than danger, or being on the verge of some artificial extinction, is the aspect of danger I want us to keep alive and active— risk. Can we take risks in music that we fail to take in life? Will risk aversion create antiseptic risk averse music? Are we ashamed of risk now, or criminalizing it in our hearts? Is our music predictable, even its poignance formulaic? The language that I thought was expanding in the etheric/digital world is now shrinking into a narrow lane of propriety so alert to when it strays and so tidy and so nervous that it will walk off a cliff before it will veer from the new impossible rectitude. It won’t be long before the music is all commercials for this disappearing language and a collective amnesia sets in about what it means to create meaning that diverges from popular opinion. It's the start of the end of meaning. Poetry will be the last currency standing, endangered, in danger, threatening disappearance in order to announce its eternal quality. The radio will continue to betray us with dangerous omissions, some words and ideas will become more and more forbidden, some poets will, some songs will, and the protest music will be mumbles and teeth gnawing through gag orders to reinstate the gold standard.
There are sounds I miss, but I don’t need them back, their quality and their value relies on them missing and being missed; they populate the void with howls and fugitives, and fuel my adrenaline. What’s endangered is the will to invent and release unapproved noises, and to force language to bend to that will rather than force tone to tend to the broken nervous system of late capitalism where everyone is always offended by unvetted sounds and waits to be told what to like and what to loathe. Long live the thought crimes and crypt dictions and haunted notions that turn into lawless music that everybody protests because they love it so much they long for the experience of yearning for it. While we’re so concerned about what the environmental disturbances tell us about potential human extinction, I think it’s plateaus in music and language and sound that tell us it’s over unless we stop outlawing cries for help that come in words and sounds that we are only allowed to explore in secret, underground, where everyone real went to be unseen.