All posts tagged: music

Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations

Published by IVC Author

By Patrick Sullivan Funk is neither an essence nor a Black metaphysics but rather should be seen as a complex musical and aesthetic form that was created by Black artists to respond to and mediate Black experience at the end of the Great Migrations (1916-1970). Beginning in the early twentieth century and lasting through the postwar period, waves of migrating Black people left the South to urban centers of the North and West Coast, fleeing racism and pursuing economic opportunities. Their movement changed the demographic landscape of the United States. By the 1960s, this social movement began to wane. The promises of mobility were short lived. Black Americans who had come to northern and western cities faced racist economic structures: White flight, deindustrialization, limited community and educational resources, and the decimation of urban neighborhoods through expansion of the highway system. The decade’s series of riots index the social and economic disparity that Black Americans endured. Cities that once offered dreams of freedom became nightmares of social constraint. The end of the Great Migrations embodies a …

Black Studies in the Digital Crawlspace

Published by IVC Author

By Darren Mueller Featured image: I won’t be quiet so you can be comfortable, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. Let our rejoicing riseHigh as the listening skies,Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.—James Weldon Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”1 Listen to pianist Jaki Byard. About seven minutes into Charles Mingus’s lengthy 1964 performance of “Fables of Faubus,” Byard’s solo emerges out of the slowly decelerating ensemble. He jumps from the dramatic to the playful to the playfully dramatic through quotation, interweaving a number of quick ascending scales between melodic fragments of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Dannie Richmond’s snare drum echoes Byard’s revolutionary invocation (7:30). Rather than the expected resolution to “Yankee Doodle,” Byard instead seamlessly transitions into “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Despite his hymn-like recitation, he dwells in restlessness. A few virtuosic flourishes travel into the highest range of his instrument (7:55) as if echoing the first stanza of James Weldon Johnson’s poem: “Let our rejoicing rise / High as the listening skies.” Eventually, Byard transitions back into a halting, even …

Forgetting Remains: An essay-review of Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Published by Christian de Mouilpied Sancto

Dropped a day before Halloween, four days before Trump and Biden faced off at the polls, and amid a worldwide uptick in Covid-19 cases, Daniel Lopatin’s ninth studio album as Oneohtrix Point Never landed at a scary moment in this scariest of years. Magic Oneohtrix Point Never was born during lockdown—Lopatin recorded it in his Brooklyn apartment and an Airbnb cabin in Massachusetts, his home state—and although 2020 might have spurred his longstanding interest in dystopia, instead it occasioned introspection and retrospection. “I realised I’d wanted to make an album as a kind of projection of my life; of my life of listening,” he told The Guardian.1 The protagonist in that life of listening is radio. Lopatin’s nom de plume derives from Boston’s Magic 106.7, a soft-rock radio station he grew up listening to, and reuniting his handle with “magic” implies both a consummated homage and an identity statement characteristic of self-titled albums. But in tying his identity statement to radio, Lopatin intertwines his “life of listening” with sonic culture’s broader historical shifts. Throughout Magic, …

Indigenous Futurisms

Published by Alicia Inez Guzmán

A mix tape opens with a NASA countdown. It transitions to the words of John Mohawk, journalist, negotiator in regional and global conflicts, and Indigenous activist of the Seneca Turtle Reserve. The beats that follow are ambient, rhythmic, and transient; each fragment of a song, speech or manifesto morphs into the next without abating.

“Run to the Hills?” – Representations of Native Americans in Heavy Metal

Published by Christopher Patrello

In “celebration” of Thanksgiving, American heavy metal band Mastodon (pictured above) released a controversial limited-edition t-shirt [fig. 1]. The T-shirt’s violent imagery and seemingly celebratory attitude towards genocidal atrocities polarized Mastodon fans and fans of heavy metal more generally. In response, the band issued a statement of Facebook clarifying their position and intent. Regarding our thanks giving (sic) shirt, whether you choose to believe or not, the American Indians were massacred by the white settlers who became the Americans we are today. this (sic) shirt represents this atrocity and celebrating in the face of this atrocity is chilling. We may have a sick sense of humor, but we are far from being “Racist” as some of you who might not get it are calling us.1 Ignoring the fact that sarcasm and irony are not necessarily the most appropriate means of addressing issues of racism and systematic acculturation, both positive and negative responses to the shirt largely ignored the question of gender and sexualized violence.2 The feather in her hair, the short grass skirt, and the buckskin …

La Orquesta Sinfonica Infantil de la Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez

Published by Alicia Inez Guzmán

“My name is Angie. I’m eight years old and I am playing the bass violin. The bass violin has four strings. It’s a really big violin that can be used to do this,” as she demonstrates by playing. This is the first captioned line of a short documentary in Spanish titled Cornflakes: Desayuno en Juárez (Cornflakes: Breakfast in Juárez). In the scene that follows, we see Angie, Cornflakes’ protagonist, sitting against a green wall holding the bass violin, taller and wider than her eight-year old frame, telling us how many strings the instrument has. She looks down with concentration to pluck each with the petite fingers of her right hand. With each sound, she offers a description: “One is called ‘Sol,’ another ‘Rey,’ another ‘La,’ another, ‘Mi.’” The scene ends with Angie’s pronouncement: “that’s how my life began” [Fig. 1]. Angie is one of 195 youth musicians in La Orquesta Sinfónica Infantil de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (UACJ), the Children’s Symphony Orchestra of the University of Juárez. Over the course of an academic …