Dom'd and Choked Out
Every artist must question the influences that shape her work. Do we yield to influence because it is in harmony with our vision or do we yield because we are afraid to stand.
Read MoreEvery artist must question the influences that shape her work. Do we yield to influence because it is in harmony with our vision or do we yield because we are afraid to stand.
Read MoreI made her a mixtape yesterday but I didn't want to call it a mixtape. I couldn't legitimately call it one because I didn't put any thought into the order of play.
I just put a bunch of songs on two CD's and gave them to her so she could have something to listen to on her road trip.
Last week when I first had a notion to make this (non) mixtape, I thought about really getting into it. But that would have been doing too much. That would have been one of the grand gestures that I am famous for; grand gestures that never actually work out, that always end in disappointment.
Like I got this same girl a dozen and half roses or some shit like that for Valentines Day and she went ghost on me.
Too much. Too soon.
I just listened to the first few seconds of the tracks and made snap judgements as to whether to include them on the CD. I already new I liked the songs, they were my library and most of them play on our station. I just tried to figure if she would like them.
I hope she does. But then again--fuck it. Who cares.
I couldn't muster the emotional energy to do the work I intended to do yesterday. It should not have mattered to me that she was going out of town for a week. I go weeks without seeing her as it is. And we haven't actually sat and had a conversation in months.
But there I was, sitting in the corner making a fucking mixtape (not really a mixtape) so I could give it to her for her road trip. Like I don't have a station run, articles to write, money to get.
Just when I thought I had let go...I haven't.
She can't let go. She never held on.
I have to keep reminding myself why I am doing this. Who am I serving with the work that I am doing? What is the grind about? Why is important that my work be seen/heard? Why do I need to create anything?
I have been out of touch. I have been sequestered in the room where I am sitting right now for almost two full weeks. I forget the number of days it's been.
I forget that I am a writer sometimes and I forget to how to write more than a few short phrases at a time. If I go more than a few days without words on a page, I can feel the slippage. It hurts my brain to try to craft something worth reading.
Falling back from your work to refresh your ideas and take in new perspectives sometimes seems necessary. I don't know if it is. I don't know that you need to fully abandon a basic practice to find something new. Most people don't make it back from the break.
They just end up abandoning the work all together. Or half-assing it. The fruit withers on the vine. They forget who they are. Like I forget that I am a writer.
The return to form is uncomfortable, potentially destructive.
Maybe you can abandon something else. Maybe you can steal time for something else.
I forget why I started writing this post other than to say that I am back. And that I have so much new music to share.
Start here and get familiar with our current spotlight artists.
She gathered a blue satin wrap about her arms and shoulders, hiding what needed not be hidden. Her legs, two silky stretches of cocoa-brown, lay bare. Silky stretches of cocoa-brown entered my line sight two hours earlier at Union Station. We waited for the same last train out of town.
A stunning girl with a beautiful voice, she shared it with me in under-the-breath tones, a guitar resting on the brown skin of her thighs, the lavender tips of her fingers danced and clutched.
She sang "How can you love me, if you don't like me?"
Her equally stunning sister joined us. We three talked about Dilla and Chapelle and Dubai and hair and regimes and famine. We put each other on. They burned. I chilled.
Her sister retired.
A familiar chemical rush filled my brain.
Connection.
I had no aspirations but to sit and talk and listen.
But the night would be over soon. The night was over. It was morning. And I rested easy in her bed, she in some other corner of the house.
I woke up at the first light of day. The rest of the house would sleep on for hours.
Not ready to reflect on the night while I was still in the scene, I tried to cling to the remnants of time. Not willing to let our hours assume the hazy quality of memory, I wrote hundreds of words and threw them all away.
I am a master of the walk-away. I abandon possessions. I feel burdened by molecules. I would rather live through an experience and let the memory gradually fade than to cling to physical artifacts so that I can make feeble attempts to re-live the experience later.
I have tried not to be this way. I have tried to preserve and maintain, but I have little capacity to attach sentiment to physical objects. I forget.
The advice, "Don't forget where you came from?" is often a veiled attempt to hold you back. Forget where you came from; your past has no authority over your present.
It is hard to move forward when you are weighed down by monuments of past victory and defeat.
Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it? Those who obsess over history are eternally bound by it.
I am visiting my mother's home. On the walls of her bedroom is a photographic record of my life: a recount of my fractured and complicated family situation, representations of accomplishments; of days that I should remember but don't.
The real story was not captured in these posed portraits.
Portraits are often full of shit, stories told about us by strangers.
Maybe I feel this way because I take pictures and capture video, and I know how powerful the techniques of photography and cinematography are in shaping perception.
If I manage to live a long life, maybe I will wish I had more articles as touch points of my past. When I am not able to experience the people and places that matter in my life maybe I will wish I had taken more care.
For now I try to work; aware, but unencumbered by the past. My work can tell my story.
My path may lead to loneliness and isolation without the comfort of precious things. Or it may lead to freedom from the need to find comfort in things that can be taken away.
My history and destiny are both encoded in playlists like these, raw, unfiltered emotional energy, transmitted through sound and a few choice words.
Sounds like this loop through my mind long after the music stops.
I don't remember any of them having any rhythm. Not a single one.
They were just on display, vaguely keeping time to foreign music. They would have moved differently if there was something that sounded more like home blasting through the speakers.
But there they were, on stage for me to see. Young bodies of various shapes, clad in ill-fitting lingerie; young bodies heavily perfumed to mask their musk; young bodies smuggled, were now for rent.
I try to imagine the conversations that led them that club. What lies were they told? Who sold them out? Was this arrangement what they expected it to be? Was this the price they were willing to pay for a chance to make it to the promised land?
The music in the club was for me; it was out of context, sometimes gangsta as fuck. That they tried to dance to it was absurd.
I came from slaves, now I sat, an abettor of slavery.
I was the distinguished gentlemen in the room, inspecting flesh for its fitness to the task. They moved; I judged and drank.
Could love emerge from such a dark place?
Love was her only hope. Breath-taking beauty with sad eyes, she tried to sell love in exchange for a fresh start.
If I could love them...if I could love her, could she forgive me for her bondage?
The scene felt like an alternate reality. The only thing that anchored the experience to earth was the music.
As dark as the scene was there were authentic moments of shared joy. That's how I saw it at the time at least. But how could I know; maybe hers was a sadness without reprieve.
Even if the girls...the girl, didn't know how to move to the music, sometimes it moved her. And that moved me.
It was in the music that both enslaver and enslaved found, for the briefest of moments, escape and humanity.
If you ever find yourself in a place this dark, I hope you recognize it for what it is and quickly reconnect with your humanity.
Today's playlist starts with a bounce reminiscent of the early 1990's. A reinterpretation plays gangsta lyrics against a Jodeci-esque R&B instrumental. The journey eventual shifts into a dark and strange place; a rebirth into parallel plane where you have to remind yourself that love still exists.
Inspiration is like a drug; we can become addicted to it.
Under the influence of inspiration our aspirations are grand. Our vision expands and we can see ourselves achieving great and wonderful things. We build cathedrals and monuments and grand art that we hope will inspire or strike awe in others.
Awe is the most powerful form of inspiration you can breathe in. Awe is the aim of religious art and experience; it arrests you and imprints your psyche .
But what happens when the imprint of inspiration fades and you are stuck in your day-to-day where the actual work and the living happens?
Along with the tales of awe and wonder that fill religious stories are the stories of discipleship. Discipleship is about life in the middle; about living between the miracles.
Discipleship is the work that happens when the light is dim and the inspiration has faded. When all of the energy and excitement has left the room. The spark has flamed out and you are left with the task of bringing something new into the world.
It is in these moments that you have to grind. Keep doing the work of art.
The work of art has little to do with inspiration, more to do with discipline: the discipline to work out the problems that arise in inspiration's wake rather than sitting and waiting for the next dose of inspiration.
(Maybe you can get a tiny dose to hold you over through these sounds)
The next inspired idea may be for a phase of work you are not prepared for (because you have been bull shitting) or it may be for a totally new thing. Inspiration follows engagement. If you are not engaged and invested in your work you end up with a life littered with incompletes.
A life like mine; a series of beautiful beginnings, of best intentions, of works in limbo all tugging away at my conscious.
The work of art requires that you inhabit the present moment and attend to the task at hand; to stop pretending you don't know what must be done simply because you don't feel like doing it.
The work of art is more grit than glory and you have to fall in love with THAT part--the solitary part, when it's just you and your discipline. So that when inspiration returns it won't be wasted on yet another beautiful beginning.