Monday, December 29, 2014

Black Messiah

I had waited for years for D'Angelo's new record to never drop. For me, his 2000 record, Voodoo, was the musical equivalent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a work of such incomprehensible genius and Grand Canyon-like ambitions that it could never be replicated. Ellison worked for years on another novel but died before he could complete it. After his death, we were left with the unpolished Juneteenth, and I never managed to read it.
Of course, Voodoo was D'Angelo's sophomore CD; his first was Brown Sugar, a laid-back head-nodding ode to love, full of hip-hop swagger and R&B vulnerability. But Voodoo was such a leap forward, with many songs edging beyond the traditional 4 minutes. D'Angelo, influenced by Prince and many others, cooked up a musical concoction of funk, blues, R&B, jazz and rock. The sound was grittier and looser, yet still highly structured. The album was slightly out-of-control passion, contained just at the moment it was bound to burst free.
The first time I heard Voodoo, I was mesmerized. The CD had a hypnotic power tied to an irresistible groove, one that ebbed and flowed. It wasn't an easy groove. D'Angelo and Questlove, of The Roots fame, had crafted a CD that was off-kilter. The beats didn't land exactly where you thought they would land.
Two of my favorite songs on that CD were "Greadayndamorning/Booty" and "Africa." The first was a gritty ditty about perserverence in the face of the daily grind that dovetailed smoothly at the end into a funky jam full of joy at the sight of a dawn promising new beginnings. And the latter, fueled by soft African drumming, is a powerful song in which D'Angelo sings about the importance of honoring his African ancestry and ensuring that history is passed down to his son.
Continued listenings only confirmed for me how much of a classic Voodoo was and remains. And in the 14 years since Voodoo came out, I had vague hopes that D'Angelo would record another CD of  equal power.
Doubt built upon doubt as I read of his legal troubles and his drug problems. Rumors came and went that he was working on a new CD called "James River," named aptly after the body of water near our native Richmond, Va. But nothing came. Music came out in snippets and videos of concerts he did over in Europe. And still nothing.
Until mid-December, when Black Messiah dropped Beyonce-like on iTunes. That Sunday night, I downloaded the album and put on my headphones. I found myself transfixed, lost in music I immediately loved but couldn't quite grasp.
Most CDs these days are nothing but radio-friendly singles bound together into one pre-packaged commodity ready for mass consumption. Black Messiah wasn't that.
It was a religious experience, one that washed over me in waves. His voice was blues-tinged that every now and then rose into Prince-like falsettos. As always, you struggled to understand him, the lyrics drowned in D'Angelo's melodic mumbles. "1,000 Deaths" is particularly emblematic of this problem.
Other times, he is clearer. And sometimes, it just doesn't matter. It's as if D'Angelo finds an eloquence in speaking in the tongues of his Pentacostal youth. In the song, "The Charade," he sings that "all we wanted was a chance to talk, 'stead we got outlined in chalk." The chorus, likely written way before the protests that sprung up around the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, feels precient, the voice of those too long silenced screaming to be heard.
D'Angelo said in the liner notes that Black Messiah doesn't refer to him; he's no God. But we can all be the Messiahs for the world we live in, tapping into our own power to effect the kind of change we want to see. And the greatest power we have, I think D'Angelo is saying, is love.
Love infuses every song here in all kinds of forms -- sensual and romantic love, love for community, love for the wider world in which we all live, love for the divine.
It's all there in the grooves of the songs, just as loose as on Voodoo. But the songs are shorter, not as jammy, and it feels a bit more cohesive.
I can't decide yet whether Black Messiah is better than Voodoo or just in the same vein. I think it is.
The CD is a reminder for me that art doesn't mean much if it comes easy. Art is greatest when you labor on it, put the time in, make sure all the ingredients are there and thoroughly cooked. Art means you risk the people not loving it because at the end of the day you have to write the story you need to write, push out the truth of what you want to say in as naked a way as possible. Because your aim is not to be popular, not to be what's in, but to be the next thing, the thing that no one had ever thought to be until you put you into the world.
And that's why I love Black Messiah, for this moment in time. D'Angelo went through whatever he went through for 14 years and came back out on the other end to create something beautiful out of the joy and the pain, the dreams and the nightmares, the light and the dark, of his eternal soul.
This is resurrection music, revolution embodied in the notion that no one ever really dies, because resurrection happens all the time.

Friday, September 05, 2014

Grateful

I am learning to make room for life because I have realized that life is grander than the limitations I give it.
Let me explain.
A couple of weeks ago, I celebrated a birthday. I invited a bunch of people to a place I was already planning to go anyway, a nice little spot that has a DJ every Thursday. At the kind behest of a friend, I created a Facebook event and invited some people and let other people invite themselves. It was a grand event. I danced and people bought me drinks to consume. The next day I was full of exhaustion and needed a couple of naps to get back to normal functionality.
But it was all worth it because life is grander than the limitations I give it.
Let me explain.
I live in fear of things going horribly wrong. It is irrational and I try to live by logic. But just because it makes no sense does not make the fear any less real. It is the kind of fear that creeps up at night as you lie in bed. It tickles at the edges of your thoughts and worms its way into the middle. You try to swap it away like some incessant fly but it keeps coming back.
I fear dying from a horrible disease. I fear a loved one dying from a horrible disease. I fear everything in my life falling apart. I fear that I will never find true love. I fear that once I find true love, it will hurt me beyond my imagining.
The good thing is I hide my fear well. I keep it tucked away. I look to my faith that in the end, I will be fine, that things will work out. I remind myself that my fear of what might happen does not guarantee that it will happen. I remember that a moment of bad does not equal the totality of what my life will eventually become.
But it is hard. That is where gratefulness comes in. That night, the night of my birthday celebration, I smiled at those who showed up. I had lots of hugs. I danced with beautiful women. I smiled that goofy smile of mine.
The celebration that night was a celebration of all the good things I had -- friends who pulled me through the tough times and listened patiently to my rantings, the roof over my head, the job that at times frustrates the hell out of me but I love nonetheless because it allows me to put pen to pad on a daily basis, the salsa dancing and the poetry and the joy of knowing and engaging with a wide range of really cool people.
I'm grateful for every hard shift of my life because it shaped me into who I am today. But I'm still learning to make room, to shed some of that fear because it is still there, keeping me from leaping full-fledged into everything that should be in store for me.
As open as I believe myself to be, I know that I have walls to keep some stuff out, tiny obstacles I subconsciously put into place to ensure some things don't transpire. One of my friends, the same one who urged me to put up that Facebook event, gently and lovingly reminded me of those obstacles.
Seeing yourself is a tough thing. You want to see yourself as always the good guy, the nice guy, the noble hero.
But the truth is you're not the hero of your story; you're not the villain either. You're you and parts of you are ugly and nasty. I'm not a nice guy. I can be an asshole. I'm capable of hurting people. We all are. It is what makes us human.
And knowing that makes me humble; it makes me grateful; it grounds me in who I am and who I could become if I just make room for life because life is so much grander than the limitations I give it. It always was.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Happy

Happy is hard. Happy is a journey and the smile on my face doesn't tell you the whole story.
It doesn't tell you the times I wanted to end it all, when I couldn't see tomorrow's sun through today's rain.
I remember when it was dark and I couldn't find a flashlight or a light switch. I wrote a letter to a friend and she called me because the words I wrote were so dark that she was worried.
I may smile today but yesterday I almost cussed someone out for no reason. I slammed my fists into the steering wheel of my car in the parking lot. I screamed until my throat was raw in my apartment.
You don't realize how hard happy can be until the twists and turns of life gut-punch you into some crazy sort of oblivion.
As a friend described it, things can get so hairy that you just stop and tell God, "Okay, let me watch you work all this out and just be entertained." Because that's when you reached the limit of what you can do.
I think happy is a choice you have to make every day because happy is an insane belief that even if you can't see the light, it's there, like a sun peeking behind clouds, like a rainbow appearing after a horrific storm.
The smile on my face doesn't tell you how scared I am of dying, of losing everything I ever had in one fell swoop, of having someone close to me die, of being consumed by so much pain and grief that you can barely get out of bed when daylight breaks.
Life is some scary shit, I tell you.
And happy isn't easy. But you have to push through. Feel the pain and come out the other end because there is another side.
I have lived at least long enough to see that storms are temporary and that you cannot view all of your life in the one moment that seems like the end. Because it isn't the end. You're still breathing. Your eyes continue to open. This is only a chapter to a much larger book in which only God knows the ending.
You're just here for the ride.
That's why I cherish the moments, whether loud with laughter or quiet and reflective.  I smile because the tears and anger and hurt made me who I am. I smile because I'm still standing and my heart is beating. And I choose to believe that despite all the bad news around me, all the horrific stuff I cover as a reporter, love wins in the end. Hate loses.
I choose to believe that happiness is the truth.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

The Words I Leave

I can't really remember when I discovered the magic of poetry but I like to think it happened in the wrinkled pages of Dudley Randall's anthology The Black Poets. There in those pages is where I found Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown and Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, who was searching for the sacred words to prevent destruction and usher in resurrection. Truth is his words, the ones I recited out loud at night in my dorm room at the predominantly white university I attended, were the sacred words that saved my life. Literally saved my life, and I'm sure the lives of many others in years before I existed and in years after.
I had already devoured James Baldwin and because of him, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But poetry? I didn't quite understand it. Couldn't get my head around it, though I loved Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Frost. But I was trying to sing my song and I was searching desperately for voices that could harmonize with mine.
Baraka was one of those poets whose voice I tried to sing until I could sing on my own. I relished his words coming out of my mouth because they felt beautiful. They felt like love.
And I was looking for love. I was looking for black love in a white world that felt cold sometimes on that campus, a place where when I spoke, things came out discordant to others and I ended up confused. I was trying to speak my world to those who denied my world even existed.
During my sophomore year, I attended a lecture. This was a time of great debate about political correctness and multiculturalism. One of the other black students had tried to petition for a black studies major on campus. And here I sat, the only black student, if I remember, among a sea of white faces, listening to a white guy whose name I can't remember talk about the wonders of Western Civilization. He was saying something in the way about how teaching black history would just make black people angry and institute victimhood and how white males had been pilloried and debased in the ongoing debates about multiculturalism. I found it ironic that he was accusing black people of playing the victim card while playing the victim card himself. I also found it strange that he could find no place in his intellectual argument for the contributions of black people. Our literature wasn't good enough, he seemed to be saying.
Whatever because I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew I came from a history of writers because I knew Baraka. So I went back to The Black Poets and other things and sought the beauty in the language, our language, the language I wanted to be a part of, if I could just find my voice. Harmonize.
I wanted to be a poet.
The years I first discovered Baraka, I also discovered people like Jessica Care Moore and Saul Williams and I wanted to grab hold of the stage and spit fire like they did. But they weren't me and so I typed up bullshit on the computer right before an open mic and dared to call it poetry.
I took a creative writing class and wrote self-righteous rants and called it poetry until a poetry friend of mine told me to read Langston Hughes a little more closely, see that he wrote out of his own experience, that his power came not from how much he shouted but in how much he found joy even when there was pain.
I wrote poetry on and off for much of my adult life, some of it good, some of it awful. I kept writing and I kept reading tons of anthologies and I would read Baraka's poem, "Ka'Ba."
I could say that I was drawn to Baraka for his anger but he wasn't just angry for anger's sake. He was an artist who cultivated his anger to make work that was powerful. He was trying to say something in the way of things in a way that we could hear. Because he wanted us to hear.
And I heard.
Baraka was a complex man, one whose views I sometimes disagreed with. But I think he loved a world that could be better. He left behind words I cleave to because there's love tangled in those words.
I am a poet. I can say that now, after years of pretending to be something else. And I've found my voice, after years of singing with others, and now marching out on my own.
I think, like him, I'm trying to use my words to paint a better world, leave things a bit brighter than when I got here.