shield your eyes

So, I asked Tate, the brother becomes bionic? They have to work. Either for themselves or for someone who might see you as a spectacle or a slave?

“Yes, it basically comes back to being an employee,” he said. “And as an employee, anywhere, you make things very hard on yourself if you alert your boss to the fact that you are smarter than him or even that you want things yourself that he doesn’t want.”

A few days after undun’s release, I met with a successful D.J. and promoter, who is white, who told me why he doesn’t like The Roots.

“I just think hip-hop is about making people dance,” he said. “Black people need to dance, that is how to deal with poverty, you gotta uplift yourself: Make jams, make a hit. It is all about hit-making, banging out the hits. Not talking about clichés like dying, your thoughts and all that sad stuff.”

How did black men dying become a cliché? I cannot help but wonder if this is not the Promethean nature of black Art, especially in relation to the criticism that surrounds it.

Dave Chappelle once said, “I want to make sure I’m dancing and not shuffling.” Here, Chappelle seems to leave out another key part of the equation, something that seems extremely important to it all, that the distinction between dancing and shuffling might lie in the biases and expectations of an audience, the critic, the eye that takes it all in. And that person, the critic, might be the one to decree that the “shuffling” is more viable, more “pleasurable” than the “dancing.”

The question is, who is it that can’t deal with the sadness of black life: the person living it or the D.J. boy who just really doesn’t care to hear it? When I ended my conversation with Tate, I went and made myself some dinner and ate it without appetite. I begin to feel a migraine coming on. Tate had mentioned that we were now living in the age of digital reproduction and YouTube was now the National Archive of African-American music.

I decided I wanted to hear something old. I found a song by Thompson’s father, in which he, like hundreds of other black doo-wop singers, is posed among a cluster of smiling, suited men. The song is called “Just Suppose.” They croon, “Just suppose nobody cared, would the sun ever rise and night falling emptily would echo with such goodbye ….”

Music crits: Start quaking.