Love for Sale/I'm Thankful

Holiday discount at Black Music and Black Muses

I’ve been writing songs — Abbey Lincoln

Material expressivity requires a home, whereas music, you can carry it on your nervous system. If you hear somebody sing a song it just goes into your head. But with a drawing or a picture or something, it’s got this material dimension—you have to have somewhere to save it.

For all of the reasons a few of my muses outline subliminally or otherwise in this footage, creative freedom is one of my highest ideals and priorities. Within it there’s infinite room to improvise and expand, to focus and complete projects, to escape and think without stalling. Without it, writers especially are beholden to structures that might stifle us at the root, in the dark internal zone where ideas and characters come to us and need us to have a conversation with them, to recognize them outside of language before they lend us the words to enact them as poems, essays, stories, songs, films, silence, systems. Often these creative sparks are too early captured by institutions where they stiffen into familiar forms before they have a chance to breath and spasm into anything beyond what we know or expect from language and storytelling.

As I become clearer on what I want, to write the work my friends and I need in the world, creative freedom comes to mean having those conversations I have with myself, after I’ve realized their meanings, with readers, and before the material they produce is part of a book or magazine or catalog or album or exhibition or worse, lost or traped in the discursive and nauseating cleverness of Internet culture. I’ll be spending more time here in structured and spontaneous ways so that I’m answering to my favorite gods and monsters, and not overly concerned with the ones that need me to think like them to prove I’m a believer.

Happy holidays and I hope you’ll join,

Harmony