History can be sexy too

In a near impossible coincidence of good fortune, two of my very favorite djs/sound artists/musicians—two of my very favorite artists in general—played in New York City this past weekend: DJ /rupture and Moodymann. Their work has significantly influenced both my poetry and my thinking about poetry, specifically, how to create a moving and directly engaging poetry that also contains a built-in meta-/conceptual component allowing for lots of emotional and intellectual wiggle room. Let’s face it, much of the work lumped under the “conceptual poetics” rubric leaves me—and lots of other people—cold. As a grad-school educated person who participated in a world-renowned Poetics Program during the 1990s, I don’t think it’s a matter of me not “getting it” or not being sympathetic. It probably has more to do with not attending the correct dinner parties.

As a temporary blogger, I should also say that DJ /rupture—otherwise known as Jace Clayton—has the only blog I read on a regular basis: Mudd Up!. I have others bookmarked—Daily Kos, Status Ain’t Hood (farewell!), The Dizzies, and Artforum.com’s Scene & Herd is a kind of blog (which I enjoy reading, even if occasionally in wide-eyed horror)—but Mudd Up! is the one I check every couple days. Last Thursday night at the New Museum, DJ /rupture constructed a mix that included everything from an audio lecture, to indigenous African music, to classic and contemporary hip-hop, to Caroline Bergvall’s poetry, to Tracy Chapman (DJ /rupture has an ability to make Chapman sound even more plaintive than usual—same with Nina Simone). Clayton’s music and writing are all about transgressing geographic and cultural borders while also instigating friction and dissonance during the course of that passage. It’s anti-world music world music. Like some of the poets Mark Nowak has written about in previous posts, DJ /rupture’s sound spans the local and the global— U Sam Oeur, Emelihter Kihleng, and Linton Kwesi Johnson are not overly far from his approach. I have an essay on DJ /rupture’s work coming out in Thom Donovan and Kyle Schlesinger’s anthology of writings on poetics entitled On, a collection I’m curious to see. A great place to start is DJ /rupture’s Minesweeper Suite.
Moodymann (Kenny Dixon Jr), on the other hand, insists on the essential blackness of the music that interests him—soul, jazz, house, and techno. And while he djs around the world, his focus is on his hometown of Detroit. This isn’t unrelated to my previous post about the need for marginalized communities to preserve a sense of identity, though perhaps a better response is what Gayatri Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism”—which I’m guessing is closer to Moodymann’s view, whatever his “public” statements (from someone who doesn’t give interviews). Moodymann’s music combines deep house with soul and jazz elements, clips of children singing and talking, and excerpts from blaxploitation films. His set on Saturday night at Water Beach Taxi—an artificial beach along the East River waterfront with a stunning, albeit fenced, view of the midtown-Manhattan skyline—combined his own songs with soul and disco tracks. Given three hours in which to work, as opposed to DJ /rupture’s forty-five minutes, Moodymann’s set built more slowly and moved less abruptly (except when he had trouble with skipping needles). Moodymann’s brilliance is in creating dance music that’s one tick below a club’s typical beats per minute, and that isn’t afraid to take historical-conceptual detours. The result is a sound that’s sexy and romantic, that outlines a recent history of African American musical culture in which celebrating life is a form of resistance, and that isn’t afraid to make reference to racism in the United States. Moodymann’s Black Mahogani is an excellent point to begin.