Guiltless stillness

The merits of sonic and somatic minimalism in a time social and political unrest

You cannot pander standing still. Can you pander while standing still? Pandering is fawn response requisite of rapid frenzied movement, clapping, yessing—it cannot survive in stillness, in elegance. If you cannot pander, if you can stand still without the slightest feint of a lunge or fidget, can you sing, still? Can you swing low yet riotous, and be still? Can you saunter onto a very large amphitheater stage and stand in the center motionless before the microphone, beneath sweltering, exhaustive lights, and sing, still? Can you sing in place knowing the audience has paid good money for frenetic black singing, the kind desired by escapists who need regular exorcisms to get by?

Can you sustain a trembling, unapologetic somatic minimalism for one to two hours and call it a concert? Can you deliver music like a mime or mummy, save for the voice or instrument, play dead to isolate a sound? You may grin, fold your arms, sway or adjust your posture or the tilt of your stance, but you’re forbidden to dance or attempt even the most restrained routine movements. And you cannot enlist back-up to do that dancing for you, you cannot surrender to any pressure toward excess and dazzle from within or without. You must disappoint those who came to see you in search of distraction. You must withhold indefinitely, sober them, blaspheme promoters and hype men, give them nothing. Pretend you have nothing left to give, save yourself, defer your exertion for home, leisure, or nowhere, offer less and less effort to the stage, knowing you will be criticized, chastised, rejected by former allies and enthusiasts, then finally freed from the public domain to reinvent it as a space of deliberate, sometimes cruel abstinence.

Algorithms are flooded with footage from the Cowboy Carter tour, juxtaposed with hour-by-hour updates from the Diddy trial that still feel like gloss compared to the outrageous details covered in the courtroom each day. These two events spar with the occasional clip of Justin Bieber’s recent cameo at the Sza/Kendrick show. Fans suspect Bieber’s doing what is called a Fentanyl fold on stage as Sza attempts to soothe him with caress and eye contact; he bends and crouches as if in both existential and physical pain. He’s disoriented, near hysterics, fumbles lyrics, kisses his costar’s hand graciously, apologetically. Sza has to keep dancing, signaling competence and presence to deflect from his lapse and stupor, a metaphor for the black female performer in the face of the dominant culture’s malfunction. Beyoncé, in leotards and boots, has to keep dancing, sometimes wearing her nation’s flag as a garment while abroad, signaling her reigning American divaism/requiem, and her implacable stamina, though now her daughters Blue and Rumi share these duties with her. Her shows are three hours of incessant movement and spectacle, synchronized dances, frequent costume changes, flying over fans drenched in sweat and sequins, robot arms handing her drinks or voguing with her. Cut to another witness in the United States vs. Sean Combs. This woman recounts Diddy dangling her over a highrise hotel balcony, and the PTSD she incurred thereafter, the recurring nightmares she still has years later. Her credibility is in question because Diddy’s alias, Frank Black, was recorded in two places at once on the dates she accuses him of violence.

Cut back to Beyoncé. Rumi, seven, is waving erratically at the audience every performance until her handlers develop micro-gestures to temper her ever-so-slightly, not so much that they’re accused of compromising her delighted spirit to showmanship. She retracts a little enthusiasm from the routine, then reverts back, grows sassy, then reticent, petulant, bored. Diddy’s twin daughters walk out of the courtroom as an escort testifies to his years of deviant acts and violence. Beyoncé cries while performing the song “Daughters,” in the rain during the Chicago leg of her tour. Repentance for the crimes the song recounts, brutal against the ruthless beauty of her operetics and indirect threats. Cross me and I’m just like my father; I’m colder than Titanic waters. Who turned her into her father on the occasion that invoked this song? Her LED lit dress goes black like an alarm with an intruder’s gloved hands over its mouth, as she pauses to stall her tears.

This, the most moving moment of her show, is caesura, standstill, a gasp in which everything before and after it is reconsidered, sacrificed at the altar of confession. Forgive us for our tresspasses, the song whispers, and as for those who trespass against us... meet my father, my maker, yours. Bieber is back in fetal position. A photo of Prince’s dead body is rumoured to be making rounds on the Internet like a scream in the center of all of this suspicious exhibitionism. He was given counterfeit hydrocodone laced with Fentanyl— killed, culled, or called back to the creator in the middle of a tour to sing still. The day I write this would have been his sixty-seventh birthday, I’m sure he’d still be touring, refusing to pander, yet refusing to stand still, in trouble for wanting it both ways.

I’m more and more preoccupied with the role of performance in collective and normalized, ‘suffering and smiling,’ as Fela called it from behind his war paint. The only performance that cannot be weaponized against ourselves and all captive audiences at this stage of total cultural spiraling and collapse, is that which does not try too hard, that which refuses polish, replacing it with strict ritual or monastic impulses. No more dancing over an inability to sing or cry, or instead of singing, no more lip syncing with invisible body doubles, no more dying on stage and cloning the self as a disembodied mascot for the second coming, no more Britney in a conservatorship forced to perform hundreds of times in Las Vegas, injured or not, depressed or not, indentured or otherwise. No more grandiose costumes or shirtlessness of rappers whose lyrical ennui the spectacle of the body overrides. No more opiate addicted child stars sent out front to become tabloid headlines and preemptive obituaries, rigged for slaughter, enlisted in another celebrity church pyramid scheme, drunk on God and lean while remaining false idols themselves. No more perfection, desperate excellence, grooming of children to uphold the family image, brand, and empire. No more Beyoncé in leotards and glitter, we need her to stand still, to retrace her steps as she does in the song that renders her speechless with regret and forensics by forcing her to look back at who she’s been in private.

The talisman for the intervention I propose is a function of Johnny Hartman, arms folded, face whimsical yet anguished, singing Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” into what looks like a tangled nest of press conference microphones at a casual post-concert interrogation in some repurposed nondenominational chapel. It’s as if they asked him an inappropriate question about his life offstage or backstage and he didn’t respond. His mood begins and ends with that refusal. He stands virtually motionless, the video glitches and slides and stumbles over itself, but the dominant image sustains, his face under almost-warm, abrasive lighting, bracing against the contradictions in the music, which describes gallant misery after losing the love of one’s life, the leap into the abysmal that is drinking and partying the pain away, glamoring it with a lifestyle impenetrable to intimacy. But the song defiantly demands intimacy from that barren place, volatile with isolation and stillness.

When the performer is immobilized by emotion and concentration, even if casually, his audience has to stir and confront interior restlessness, he refuses to absorb the blunt shock of his lyrics for you. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is like this, a mutiny frozen in place so that when she announces the black bodies swinging in the southern trees, it’s the idle audience that is hung, swaying, while she is swaddled in lights and looming over Café Society’s elitist progressives like an undertaker angel. Marvin Gaye, some versions of Whitney Houston, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Sade, Laura Nyro, Johnny Hartman— those who still themselves for a moment or a song are antidotes to the use of music and cultural production as a drug or quick fix, or any kind of fix at all. As ridiculous as the contrast between disgrace and celebration is in these last and longest days of the last, we hope, monolithic ideological hegemony of Western aesthetics, as much as we aim to replace decay with stunning displays of decadence, and listening with singing along to anything catchy they wedge between us and our depth, performance halls would serve better as hushed introspective zones for the time being. Let them become places you go looking for a party and find your divas and stars praying they aren’t the next ones on trial during truth and reconciliation. Let us enforce an asceticism so deliberate it feels confrontational.

This persistence of gaudy commercial tours feels forced and redundant; when it’s time to dance full out in shiny outfits again, we’ll know, we’ll sense it, and it will be easy to resume those antics as if there had been no hiatus. For now, urgently, if we could just be quieter and listen for signs, gather ourselves, hush and see what erupts naturally from that void we’ve refused to allow much less enter and study. Ostentation has reached capacity, it all clones and degrades itself now. The noise we’ve made avoiding the inevitable will remain as psychic pollution, gunk that makes all expression both more shrill and more dilute, until we can be still for while and figure out how to transcend failing traditions. You think you need to go watch your favorite female vocalist turn her album into a broadway musical, enlisting every resource she can afford, that that will rescue you from apathy, numbness and disorganization; what you actually need is her most awakened and vulnerable stillness and a new concept of entertainment, a new way of life, spiritual annuity that replaces the temptation toward distraction, awkwardness where charm once was, and to learn what it means to be still and sing in a world that’s been too submissive to the contrived impulse to shut up and dance for too long.

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This season’s most important tour thus far is that being conducted by the Madleen, named after Gaza’s only fisherwoman, Madeleen Kullub, who picked up the trade at thirteen when her fisherman father became too ill to work. This ship, carrying twelve international workers and now some migrants rescued off the coast of Greece, is sailing to Gaza to break Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid that has lead to impending famine in the region. We’ll look back at the large-scale distractions put forth by entertainers and tabloids at this time in shame and disbelief, painfully aware of their hysterical demand for business as usual as an alibi in an era that calls for total reassessment of the uses and misuses of entertainment with mass appeal. It’s hard to pander standing still, alone, on stage. You become the sum of your secrets, recanting, singing, still, turning ballads of domestic dysfunction into protest songs the moment your rage starts to cry.