On Handlers (1)

From Porgy and Bess to Ye's Dentist

One of the sonic refrains ticking inside my mind as metronome is the sound of Julius Eastman’s voice when he declares, during the preamble for a performance at Northwestern University, of course there are 52 niggers. I’m paraphrasing from memory here. Maybe by the time I publish this I will have looked up the recording to verify its exact syntax. His cadence to assert this was the blackest mix of oracular and exasperated as though he was silently muttering to himself, of course these squares haven’t counted the archetypes instead of sheep while they fall asleep at night. He goes on, the one great and grand nigger is the field nigger. Of course. Popularized by Malcolm X in ‘60s, in the current era, one variation on the field nigga is the hustler, pimp, debonaire conman at the heart of the fantasies that become our most punishing stereotypes. This man extracts from his own as retaliation for what’s been extracted from him. His domination is low stakes because, being weak, he chooses those weaker or more vulnerable than him to trap in codependency. Both parties are belligerent. The field, gone from a place of servitude to a place of rebellion and refusal, is now governed by we who work it. Sometimes this encourages divine justice and others it perpetuates the sabotaging tendency. If you burn it down you’re taking everything you love with it, but you’ll be liberated from the temptation to reanimate barren land. 

Porgy, from the Gershwin-penned jazz standard which really belongs to Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis for their brutalist-romantic interpretations of the ballad— Porgy is one of the great 52 in the field. Porgy is the preeminent handler in this American(‘s) songbook. And therefore Porgy is the center, the bullseye, the interlocutor between oppressing ourselves and outsourcing that oppression to industry and technocracy. We are hunted and haunted by Porgy. I love you Porgy/don’t let him take me, the song opens, begging in commands, a woman trapped between two opposing imperatives, love and illicit desire. Nina Simone’s version is the hauntingest, especially live, because the opening declaration tilts upward for her, toward the interrogative, as if she’s asking who she’s been forced to love, as a hostage is this the script I’m meant to recite to get my ransom and safe release. Then, audibly again, don’t let him handle me and drive me mad. Porgy’s foil, the primordial handler, hard r in the field with the sun in his mouth, conquers the psyche with the perverse allure of danger. Is it perverse? Erotic friction, roleplaying reluctance so the ultimate surrender is sweet and swarming. Or is this our first lyric insight into the handler as an archetype? 

The handler, a trusted traitor who tempts, taunts, tempers you. You are a transaction, a mercy for him, where the root of the word mercy is tied to a reward or gift you receive from a market or the reward or gift that the market itself is. There’s a market for the hardship at the end of bliss. Porgy will be your chaperone there as you’re sold and returned, sold again. You are a lucrative client, you are a woman, or an entertainer. Your image sells myths called ‘units,’ merchandise, and so you are given sweet luxurious surveillance, the kind that mimics companionship. The cruelest kind which looks at you all the time so that you must look away, drift, just to the peripheral of yourself where you appear as if distracted and oblivious to your position in this broken gift economy for which you are the currency. You learn quickly that not all watchers are admirers. We move on to the second lyric in this archetype’s yet unnamed path to surfacing, “All Along the Watchtower,” The Jimi Hendrix version because you can feel optimistic rage in it where the original by Bob Dylan is a bit like a lullaby for doomsday, or a submission to the trance of it, beautiful, but complicit in the problem it defines, one with it. Hendrix finds that song and maims it as if to demolish the conditions of the tower, its azure-ivory gaze, its indulgent vigilantes. The thief he finally spoke, the song reveals, and you look over your shoulder for a voice only to discover it’s your own. “Thief who Stole My Sad Days,” the third song, a Moodymann gospel. The handler enters through your desire to be handled, to be seen (scene), saved, jubilant,  held (hold me, in the hold), stolen, returned.

I lack Eastman’s resolve here; I don’t know how many handlers there are in the field with the real niggas, tricking us out, but sheepishly, Ima be counting. At first in crude approximations that will also seem precise because they are honest: All the divas’ husbands but especially Nina Simone’s, Aretha Franklin’s, Whitney Houston’s, Billie Holiday’s (the distant relatives of the man who made sure she died for him still collect the revenue from her estate, we are her only heirs, my family and some of the others, and only in the sense of running with the baton that might have been used to strike you otherwise). Handlers besides the divas husbands— those deadbeat managers who make you think you need them to make it to gigs, all fake friends and jealous lovers of those dying of fame, anyone who believes a sex party can solve the crisis of sensuality, Clive Davis, Sean Combs, Ye’s dentists, the silent billionaire backers of artists, the shady curators who answer to the backers, all the PR teams of those dying of celebrity, most of the people on any celebrity’s payroll. The handler champions and enables your simultaneous desires to overcome and sabotage yourself. His job is to make sure that you do both consistently and harrowingly. Become the high triumph of high tragedy, confuse us about whether or not you are in trouble or performing catastrophe so that your comeback will seem more miraculous. Mercy for those being sold on the market as the market, as dilute versions of mercury the god and the metal accused of causing madness in the mouth. Let’s touch on the mouth now. No one who is not a worthy muse would attract a handler. A handler wants his hand or fist in the mouth of the muse, cranking and culling. The black muse for our purposes here. The black muse or black music. The black muse is the one whose tongues the culture speaks in, vogues, and the handler was invented to lure her toward silence by inciting her to sing in excess or demanding that she does, for supper, for thankless audiences at the carnival where carnage follows a good show. 

Death to the handlers. God save the queens. If we trace the tradition of the handler into its doomed future we might find the corpses of some of our favorite artists. And then what? Then we will have learned to count in tongues, in a code only we can decipher, one that undermines the overseers with the restoration of their muses’ speech. Mercy mercy me, the 4th song in the handlers’ relay. A finish line blues. Things ain’t what they used to…And Marvin Gaye’s father, and Michael’s, Beyoncé’s. Anyone who, the thought of them coming to rescue you feels like a threat and inspires you to beg against it like Bess to Porgy, if you can keep me, I want to stay here, and where you are is in hell’s safe mode, but it’s still better than tour, the road, with your handler. Has black music pitched its best capitalists and parasites as prince-charmings and saviors and what damage has this done and whose tongue is in the world’s mouth singing our spirits to sleep before we speak out against it?