For all of us who miss something...or someone that's close by, but out of reach...
This song is for all the people who want to be together but are far apart. Particularly mentally... Particularly sexually...
Though not exclusively sexually. It could be a friend or a relative. It's just someone you love dearly, want to share with passionately. But for some reason, or some reasons, that isn't always possible. No matter what you do, there is always some thang. Some thang in the way of that metaphysical connection we call relating. Love and understanding are too often two different things...
So...Happy Valentine's Day to Miss Thang, and to everyone else we are forever missing...
This week on the 'Is Black Music' radio show on Resonance FM we explored the theme of Casual Sex.
Casual relationships, non-monogamous relationships, hooking-up, friends with benefits... This is rarely talked about directly, or used in art. Perhaps that's cause they're too busy doing it...?
On the show we wanted to isolate the concept of pure casual sex, and see how it works in and through black music. So songs like Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get It On' were omitted because the characters appear to be in a pre-meditated dating situation. 'Sexual Healing' was also not chosen, because again the protagonist's relationship seemed to have a history.
The archetypal casual sex encounter is improvisational and spontaneous by nature. We chose Gaye's under-rated composition 'After The Dance' instead, because there you have a situation where the singer has clearly just met the girl for the first time at a dance.
We also omitted songs that were about infidelity, cheating or polyamory.
Casual Sex to me is when two people just have sex. That's all. That's where it begins, and that's where it ends.
We play and refer to a lot of music that is from the Big Apple on our radio show.
New York has consistently been a central focus for underground and subversive art. It was where the Harlem Renaissance nurtured the undiscovered African American artists of the 1920s. It was where much of the European Avant-Garde fled to escape the rise of Nazi fascism in the 1930s & 40s, and it was where experimental musicians, writers, & visual & conceptual artists created the Downtown loft scene in the '60s.
Speaking with Daniel Chavis on last night's show helped me realise that these "scenes" in New York are often disjointedly connected.
The Chavis brothers came from North Carolina in the late '80s, to a New York City that was not sure how to relate to Black musicians performing music that was not easily recognisable as 'Black Music'.
Like many of the artist who have come looking for a home in New York, the brothers Chavis' experience was unexpected and incomparable.
For many Black Americans, it was a Where were you when you first heard the Last Poets moment…
The Last Poets were the most militant sounding thing we had ever and never heard before. It was beyond our middle class Martin Luther King I had a dream dreams…
Abiodun Oyewole (The Last Poets)
They sounded scary!
Our reaction was - they sounded like they wanted kill all the white people. They were talking about revolution. They were talking about bringing down the government...
And then they used the N word on record. They said it! We couldn't believe our ears! This was before Richard Pryor. We all used the word affectionately with each other in the streets. But you didn't use it around the general public. Especially you didn't spray it all over your record.
Don Babatunde (The Last Poets)
There they were, on the front of the album with their Dashikis and Afros looking fearless and dangerous. Not scared of nobody, the Government, the CIA. the police, the FBI…Yo Mama, The KKK, the president…
They would say anything on their records. And they were the first to put the lyrics on the inner sleeve. Which was weird to see. Nobody had done that before them. It was like they wanted to make sure you knew exactly what they were saying.
Umar Bin Hussan (The Last Poets)
Hip Hop was to arrive 10 years later…
Eventually, rapping in an assertive, confident, irrepressibly aggressive manner would become the pervasive fashion. But they were there first. Their home-style recordings came out before anyone's. Gil Scott-Heron, The Watts Prophets... They stepped out first, from the corner of Harlem to your living room.
Don Babatunde, Umar Bin Hussan, Kunga Dred, Abiodun Oyewole
They were performing on the South Bank, and Kunga Dred brought them over to the Resonance studio so we could reason together…
Has it really been this long since I was in the underground?
I forgot how freaky London can get. Maybe it's something about the heat.
But any city can get funky like that. From Madrid to New York. Here we have all kinds of folks.
When I first came to London, I was fascinated by "The Underground". The whole concept of an unseen esoteric thriving culture was so attractive to me. And to have a transport system with that same suggestive name just beckoned my imagination, when I read NME articles about all those Post-Punk bands.
So when I arrived in London from LA via NY (via Napoli, via Dusseldorf, via Paris, but that's a different blog) in 1983, I couldn't resist making The Underground my second home.
I was squatting on The Front Line in Brixton at the time, and The Underground seemed like space travel to me. We had nothing like it in LA. and it was free! In those days, none of the stations had barriers. You could just walk thru, cause they rarely checked your ticket.
Eventually I collaborated, and did sessions in London with many of the Post-Punkers whose stories and music had inspired me.
But still when I hear Iggy say "Things get too straight, I can't bear it", I hear Russell Thompkins Jr whisper discreetly in my ear, "Go underground young man".
Imagine 3 young black
teenagers who are feeling restricted by conventions, sitting down in a
theatre to watch this Woodstock film that we had heard of. We expected
to see a bunch of blonde hippy girls on the screen, and other people
that looked nothing like us. And the first musicians we see are these
totally funky brothers sitting, not standing but sitting down on the
stage, blues funking some folky roots soul stuff. And seriously making
it sweat! Not playing some loud guitar solo, but playing acoustically,
like they are stuck inside a mobile freak-out located somewhere between Nassau and Harlem.
If
Woodstock was the landmark event of 60's culture, it was Richie Havens
that announced and proclaimed the event, gave the initial spark, by
being the festival's opening act. His dignity, and humility gave validity
to the word 'hippy'.
You hope when you die you go to the same place that he is.
I'm riding the train to hear my old mate Billy Gould play bass with his
band Faith No More. I've known Billy for over 30 years. At the age of 19
I was the elder in our musical network, in late 70's L.A. He was the
youngest, still with 2 years to go in High School.
In some ways he was the coolest and most adventurous of us all. He
was the only white kid in a band of black dudes, called The Animated. I
was originally in a different band called Pending Spectrum that shared a
guitarist with The Animated (Stew, later of The Negro Problem), but I started
playing with The Animated when Pending Spectrum's bassist Jon E.
Edwards fled the West Coast for Manhattan.
I wasn't that tight with Billy. We would see each other at rehearsals and
gigs, and we would hang together as a group socially. We didn't do a lot of one on one bonding, but things were
always cool with Billy. For a sixteen year old he was incredibly hip.
It was 1979, the time of Post Punk (though most of us in the US were so
late on the bandwagon that many were still having their first taste of
Punk).
Billy eventually graduated High School and left L.A. to study in
Berkeley. I later left the States completely to dodge Reaganomics, and find
out if it was true what I had heard about arty Europe.
Billy and I rarely saw each other, and just kept in touch through mutual friends.
By the time his band got big we had lost touch. Then in 1998 I
phoned the Brixton Academy where Faith No More were playing, and left a
message backstage, not expecting for it to reach him, or for him to be
able to respond to it. 20 minutes later the phone rang.
I’m from L.A. but now hang in London. My first album just released is titled ANUTHA KINDA BROTHA. My thang is songwriting. I do alternative music that is not what you expect from a Black Musician.
Indeed, I produce and co-host a radio show titled 'Is Black Music?' on Resonance FM in London every Tuesday at midnight, that features trippy Black artists that don’t fit into industry stereotypes. We play a lot of Black country, folk, and avant-garde classical music. My email is atter@gmail.com
