teaching research shouts community ab home

if you want the official version, click here for a cv

cerebral and silly, outgoing and hermitish, a little melancholy and a lot of joy, it's all about the range with me. with all that contrast goin on, you might wonder which ab you'll get at a given time, but i'm actually halfway consistent with mine...

born and raised in cleveland, ohio, educated in cleveland public schools, more slow jam than hip hop, but some of that, some blues and some jazz too, a committed teacher, in love and hate with writing, and enjoying the struggle. vernacular like langston and juke joints, idealistic and abstract too. convinced that donny hath is the most compelling artist of the whole soul era and that we still don't give stevie and etta enough love.

i can show you better than i can tell you though...a few samples of my flow, both academic and nonacademic fill the rest of the page under the pic. most of the joints connect up with music somehow--that's not all i write about, but since soul is the theme for now.....

(i'm notorious for avoiding the camera--i might get another picture up here one day)

"finding The One: or, havin the nerve to argue for unity in complexity" (from the introduction, click here for a longer sample)

To say that one must play fuller, richer chords, and leave individuals more room for improvisation both with and against those chords is not to say that there is no music that can reflect their collective energy and aspirations. To continue the music metaphor, African American rhetoric is what might be called a “rhetoric of The One.” Funk music, and particularly that made by Parliament/Funkadelic in the 1970s, articulated “The One” as the concept that guided the genre. The concept, basically, is this: members in the huge bands that made up PFunk could do almost whatever they wanted in most of the measure, but they always had to come back on “The One,” or the first beat of the measure. That first beat was always heavily emphasized, in contrast to the two-four iambic pattern to much American music, and that first beat set the structure that members would respond to and against during widely varying solos, leads, and harmonies. African American rhetoric has embodied this concept to me because Black people and the rhetorical texts and forms they produced have always come together, one (figurative) nation within a nation, under a groove, in moments of urgency, of struggle toward that transformative access. While there is no political or rhetorical utopia that allows all voices to be heard, African American rhetoric has, through a tradition of debate and dialectic, made sure many varying views received a hearing leading up to and following those moments of urgency. Its study now can honor those traditions and continue the struggle that has often been the source of its production.

 

"designing freedom into the technology" (from chapter 5, "through this hell into freedom: slave quilts and an african american rhetoric of design")

It is imperative that African American Rhetoric address design issues not only because design itself is rhetorical, but because the history of design has been so exclusive and done so much to enforce the very exclusions written into the kinds of codes that run the nation and its technologies that it is as important a space of struggle as schools, ballot boxes, and police practices.

In spite of design’s exclusions and its active role in enforcing racism, Black design traditions that challenge and counter these roles have been difficult to chart. So difficult that architect Melvin Mitchell argues in The Crisis of the African American Architect that Black architects—perhaps the most visible of the miniscule presence of Black design professionals—have yet to articulate a specific African American-inspired approach to architecture to address these problems. Mitchell does point to potential sources for an African American architecture. The history of Black architects, taken with the story of African American quilters offers a framework for developing an approach to design that is both transformative and cognizant of the underground nature of much the work of African American design. This African American rhetoric of design examines the work of designers who used their work to aid some sense of collective struggle as working on both sides of transformation: providing the signs and sign systems to lead people to freedom, and planning, designing, creating spaces in which Black people, once free, can live, work, play, worship, and communicate as free people. The two strands that make up this approach can inform the design of technologies, texts, ritual, and physical and virtual spaces informed by African American histories and cultural practices rather than concede them as resting somehow outside of a designer’s concerns.

 

A Short Social Political Economic Cultural
History of the Black Presence in the United States

black clubs in hating hands blaze in
white flashes smashing young skulls.

young skulls and brown hands behind
black wheels uninsured, license
suspended, temporary tag yellow-gray,
two months expired.

 

turn out the lights so i can see: the last true black music

The image of young love—intense desire, mostly innocent, and no knowledge of what to do with it anyway—in the basement of somebody’s house party might be too easy a place to start a tribute to black folk and the tradition of the slow jam. Even if all that nervous energy in the dank corners too near somebody’s washing machine is the hallowed ground where many of us were initiated into Experience. It’s just too clean—the slow jam is so important because of the range it covers—from first love tolast lay to the pain of being too far from either and a need to hold and be held. And let go of everything that we hold too tightly. Love, lust, want, need, shouted pain and silent joy—the slow jam is holy because it is pure and it is funk. It is the one place we take off the mask.

As powerful as other traditions are in our music—Bre’r Rabbit himself lives in the genius and the game of blues,jazz, and hip-hop—the space of the black love song is different. Just as Bugs Bunny colonized and sanitized ourfables, mainstream America has found ways to live in almost all those other traditions. The gaze that makes the mask hasfound some of that genius. The slow jam is different. People could learn to jitterbug and break dance here at home, and even slow dance, but still not come close to that place we go when the lights go down. As commodified as all our other music has become, even abroad, we knowthey ain’t playin Creepin’ or slow draggin to Reasons in the clubs in France—and we know the French used to love themsome things Negro.

But even more, no matter who remakes it, no one else canstep inside—or even claim to—this part of our music. Try as much as you want to get up under or into Donny Hathaway’s (or the Temptations’) version of A Song for You. The depth is too vast, the pain too close to that jagged edge others have taken from our music and gone. You can’t steal Donny, or Black Moses, or Aretha. Or Sam Cooke or Minnie or Marvin or Patti. Or the Isleys or Prince or David Ruffin. Not even D’Angelo’s young funk. Cover the lyrics, copy the notes, rip the chord progressions all you want and leave with an empty musical bag if that space has not been your home.

Of course, much of the same holds for all black music. It never was the whole blues that Hughes’ cultural criminals slid into their swing mikados. But the tradition of the slow jam has somehow remained insular, even while Bootsy sells pizza and Dre sells Eminem and white boys cram blues conferences claiming knowledge of the origins of our music and argue for an “autonomous white blues tradition”. Now, love never offers safe space. But this insularity has made the slow jam the place of engagement in black music. The place where we could gather up our pieces and give us back to each other whole.

No matter what madness is going on in the rest of our music, no matter how we hide our wounds from the rest of the world—and sometimes reveal even more in the hiding—the reconstruction starts in the love song. I guess having your mind blown is good for honesty. The unaffected cool that Miles gave birth to is in us somewhere, but not here. The hoochie coochie man and his grandson the Playa have been dropped, even if only for a while when Eddie Levert is shoutin "I'm caught like a fish...". The baaad blues woman is still around somewhere, but not here. And the ice-flossin, donut turning Willies and objectified, booty-shakin dancers of the videos are definitely gone. But the slow jam deals with all of the pain, complexity, and so-called reality that these genres are given so much credit for examining. Whatever postures we develop, we’re forced to come correct in the slow jam. We gather up the pieces of who we really are, or who we really want to be. And we give them both openly, freely.

That is why it is holy. And probably why we always talking about God and Sex on the same albums, on the same sides, in the same songs. But sanctified spaces don’t help much when they don’t last, or when somebody else is posting settlements in them. Even more impressive about this space is this: the slow jam, the slow drag, the intense ballad spans the almost the whole tradition of our music and still hasn’t been touched. Black music has been jacked and stripped down in all kinds of places in American and world culture, but this remains. Singularly. Ours. It lives in the blues, in jazz, in soul, in r&b, in funk, in hip hop. The divas sung it, the bluesmen and women cried it, Barry begged it. Even wannabe crooners put aside sappy visions of pie in the sky romance and got down into it too, as we all know Marvin did. Aretha came out of the church and made us feel it. And of course many made them their calling, their special place in the music, like the early “Lufa”.

Maybe that basement house party is the right place to start, with that love that came before the mask. As long as we add the jook joint, the nightclub, the back seat of somebody’s car, the park, the other woman’s and the other man’s house, and the payphones where we beg, talk, love, go, come, hate, break up, get together, tear ourselves up, and make each other whole again.