The territory shall be the universe
A meditation on broken recording contracts and their fallout
Contracts are the petit conspiracies against black expansion here, and their terms claim infinity. My dad signed so many recording contracts, he couldn’t read. Since he’s been away I read his contractions, his pangs of finitude and compliance, back to him like instructions for who and how to haunt and notice my voice in fetal position by the time I reach their poetic of rabid expansionism, their mode of proliferating on him, a demand: the territory shall be the universe. Handed down to me to read aloud screaming let him out. When he died he didn’t stay dead, resurrected as the field of language that owned him and his likeness in perpetuity.
Leaping to Lee Perry and the Black Ark—we watched a producer set his studio on fire to escape the social contract of casual opulence that had metastasized around him like a disease, eating him alive. He is my father too.
Leaping to Amiri Baraka, when he runs for his life he takes a part of me with him. Picture him, just home from Cuba and in a frenzy, writing Dutchman, a play that kills off his middle class black bohemian aspirations, and then fleeing to Harlem to join the revolution and leaving his Jewish wife and their children in bohemia— he did love them, he did leave them. He is my father too.
And then to Sun Ra, who rewrote his origin story to teach us the never-ending and fractally compounding frequency of rebirth and its mythic de-territorialized universe. His Arkestra is a repatriation of abandoned regions in the spirit. He did what the philosophers suggest and died in this life to come back as himself. He is my father too.
Now, to go nowhere far from there, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who seeking to expand and destroy contracts that would not let him out, set himself on fire, a refugee from false privilege, and alienating the entire power structure to reveal that territory that owns him, which shall be the universe unless he uses certain terrible terror words. I want to situate him in the tradition of fathers looking up at the sun until it burns their eyes out and returning from that trance with so much untranslatable vision their only hope now is a lie they cannot apologize their way out of, a lie that makes them forever exiles.
The trauma of contracts, of getting smaller so industry expands, is breaking us apart and into units of universal territory, of speechless speech, of dread and threat, of pornographic and angry agony. If you see me making excuses for crazy men just know it’s the men who write the contracts who are really insane, not those trapped in them shouting into voids, rapidly deploying music and rubber shoes to run out their clocks. Brutal words to smash time into new increments.
By the time dad became the phoenix, I was in his place, looking for someone to read my own contracts back to me, owned by the same endless territory, and always ready to torch it if it gets in my way.
The territory shall be the universe
I remember hearing Chapelle mention, in one of his recent stand-ups, something pertaining to the "universe" in his contract when doing the Chapelle Show. It amazes me HOW these people, propped up by the illusion of "corporation", can get away with this, not only thievery but, the colonization of one's expression ..... smh.