Watch out for the riders

Liner notes for a video piece debuting at MOCA next week, on the occasion of rain gon' come

Presidential elections are the near death experiences of societies void of thrill and spiritual integrity. Every four years we’re told the precipice of fascism is all we have to fear as we live under technocracy and addicted to consumerism, as if a good date to the apocalypse prom could alleviate the interval of alienation insisted upon before, during, and after it. The USA wouldn’t survive its prolonged adolescence and fixation on hipness and image without the agonizing serenade of lies we receive from each faction of its duopoly every election year. It’s become the failed state’s pathological romance with incompetence, its delirium, what it does for fun, (it self-sabotages spectacularly for diversion, for asymptomatic pleasure or contentment), its parasitic need for disaster, which is used to nominate false heroes from the cast of cowards waiting to inherit your suffering as their currency and trade it, for votes or as a muse, for ballads and blues that can be traded for favor, or for the suspicious, internecine silence after a seance. Instead of raising the dead incorruptible, we harass them with the prospect of alternate endings until the only proof of any life is the bend animating their fresh, disembodied screams. 

This is the annotation of all that instigates the final scream before nature or resignation or usurp. The screamer is a black woman, screaming at herselves to rouse and calm them. She maintains composure to reenact the primal sophistication of her premonition— that she is condemned to be the last standing in a disgraced land. What will she do with her ability to transcend what ruins everyone else? Will she take the helm and navigate it to some lush daydream the spirit inscribes onto reality as music, or will she let it collapse and bury her alive beneath (through/beneath) her own sound? Is there a distinction between upright and submerged in the territory of violent revisions of the end of history? If there is, it is in their manner of ennunciating this yell or call for vindication and help and where it comes from, one comes from hell and the other from stage, one from inside the house, the other from the outskirts of a desecrated township. This is a falsified record of the fraught union between black entertainment and black sin, vice, or power.