February 14, 2016

Pleasure/Liberation:

A Mixtape Experience

Curated by Kwame Phillips

+ Shana Redmond

+ Mark Anthony Neal

pleasure/liberation

text by Shana Redmond + Mark Anthony Neal

mix by Kwame Phillips 

What’s to matter, if no love?  What’s to Liberate if no Love?

I’ve always been struck by the fact that the last moments of Fred Hampton’s life were likely spent in the embrace of his lover.  We don’t talk about that much–like lovers are a distraction–but what is liberation but the chance to see the sunlight in their eyes, off their cheeks, on back bare, and soft, and softer by the light?  “If I should die tonight?” Marvin asked, Mama Gun’s gun responding as so many did before her, and even before Marvin asked the question–“rich as the night, Afro-Blue”? Nikki G, stating frankly, “if I was a poet…I’d kidnap you” or would that be liberate you?– “last night a DJ saved my life…”

To take Black love seriously, one must suspend what we’re told of Black life in favor of what we know to be true–those other dimensions of Black living illegible to news media and politicians. Roberta and Donny make it clear that “our time, short and precious” is nonetheless staked with urgent claims and love, for “if I lose you I’d be ruined forever.” The tragedy is that Mike Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Tamir Rice, perhaps never knew that liberation, though the warm embraces of a parent were the revolutionary acts that were as normal as our expectation of sudden, inexplicable, though absolutely explainable, death, at the hand of forces known and unknown, knowable and unknowable, perhaps like liberation, if liberation was something that we didn’t/don’t imagine and conjure in the smallness of the moment; in the quiet of the times.

Never be enough of that quiet now; the voices in our head now three-fold because of platforms social, intended connection that only brings the noise, and it ain’t like we don’t know noise; have created brilliance amongst the noise–plug that shit in Muddy; plug that shit in DJ; plug this shit in…

Times demand a new way to hear.  

This then is an ode to Black love–to the grooves that it digs and spins, to the challenges and pleasures it produces, to the melodies and other sounds that it inspires. As our Fantastic brother Richard Iton argued, the black love song “can be seen as one of the more familiar and available sites for the imagination of black political possibilities, radical and otherwise” (2013, 26). Black love is our “mission… Moses and Mumia, reparations…”; it’s “free hips–they don’t like to be held back… they go where they want to go and they do what they want to do”; it “perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the tread of tanks.”

That analog liberation mix don’t compute in the digital realm; that digital resistance drops and gaps and sputters in the analog; having a long conversation with That part my brain, with a lover of ideas perhaps, about playback errors, the Black ones. 

There is liberation in the messiness of it all, like a digital analog that don’t quite do, but don’t quite don’t and it is as it’s ever been: us, nearly all of us, scoping the quiet in the moment, afterthoughts as well as afterplay, cause it’s really that that we live with, in strife and struggle, and in the pursuit, now as much as then, as much as forever…of that liberation.