The other day I was cooking breakfast/brunch and the TV was on. I was whisking my eggs, and nibbling a bit on the salmon I planned to fold into the omelet I was making. The TV was tuned to something on MTV, the kind of bullshit I like to watch when I’m wasting time. And I heard something about “there are some relationships that you just never get over”, and my mind turned to my own “never get over” relationship. I knew automatically what that relationship was for me, tasted it right on the pointed tip of my top lip, and wished for it as I flipped over my omelet. It’s probably no coincidence that I had begun obsessing over Aretha Franklin earlier in the week as I read a chapter on her in Craig Werner’s “A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America”. Peter Guralnick reports that on the day “I Never Loved a Man…” was released, “People were dancing on the frosty street with themselves or with one another and lining up at the counter to get a purchase on that magic sound as the record kept playing over and over. It was as if the millennium had arrived”. Kinda like being in love right? You don’t notice the cold air or anything natural, you’re just busy, sometimes frantic about, capturing that feeling forever. You want it so bad, you’ll live off putting the joint on repeat or flipping the record back over and over.
I started thinking about the title song of that album, and how I feel that it is at once one of Aretha’s semi-forgotten performances, and one of the truest exhortations to holdin’ on I’ve ever heard. I started listening to it today on repeat, and I felt as though I might as well be singing:
“I would leave you if I could/I guess I’m on tight/And I’m stuck like glue/Cause I/ain’t never/I ain’t never/I ain’t never, no, no,/Loved a man the way that I/I love you…” I wondered if she ever got over him, if there was a him in the first place, and I wondered the same thing about myself. How does one get over a “love hangover”?
There are a lot of songs by black artists that paint the pain of movin on with great intensity. Just off the top of my head I’m referencing Diana Ross’ breathy sexy performance on “Love Hangover”, The Ojays’ “I Guess You Got Your Hooks In Me” (this phrase also shows up in ‘I Never Loved A Man’), Lenny Williams’ classic “I Love You”, and Marvin Gaye’s entire “Here, My Dear” album. When I start thinking about how many songs there are about the “relationship you never get over”, I got to seriously thinking about black people, the soul aesthetic, and the watershed moments of the 60’s and 70’s. Perhaps we all complain about the apathy of our youth, the ineffectual actions of black leadership, and even the so-called “un-originality” of today’s black artists because the 60’s and 70’s have “got their hooks in us”.
The history of black people in America started when the first Africans arrived chained on these shores. We had no history that we could hold onto with any real certainty. The brutal cultural erasure process of slavery and colonialism took care of that. And afterward what we did have was our pain, rage, anger, and search for self. In the 60’s and 70’s we found US through music and other art produced during that period. We became revolutionaries, soul kings and queens, the undisputed progenitors of the rhythm of this nation. It was, in fact, our golden age. It was, as Aretha Franklin says in an interview, when we started “falling in love with ourselves…”
That love affair ain’t hardly over. But like all good affairs there comes a time when the original vapors start to settle and it becomes time to build something real. We all want the euphoria of that time. We define ourselves by this experience, it has added an unmistakable narrative of power and magic to the story of black life in the United States. The 60’s, and 70’s is the history we created, not the one we were given or forced into. These decades were about choice and the unabashed expression of freedom, rage, and cultural capital.
But now what? Today, people argue that black folks are in something of a downward spiral. When I think about our lives right now I recall one of our contemporary soul singers (I refuse to ever use the word “neo-soul”, for the record), D’Angelo. His “Voodoo”, a much slept on album, shows D caught up in the throes of some unrequited love shit, some lounging in the house in your underwear thinking about that woman or man that was so right but wrong shit. When folks remember this album it’s probably the image of a naked brown and fine D’Angelo flexing on the “Untitled” video that endures. But Voodoo is about so much more than that. Its about being under, its about realizing the end has arrived but still holding on, “done worked a root that will not be reversed /and then I go on/go on my own way even though it hurts/surrounded by mojo/left my mojo in my favorite suit/she left a stain/left a dirty stain on my heart that I cain’t refute”. I don’t want to refute the 60’s and 70’s, but when will we “go on our own way even though it hurts”? It is hard indeed to walk away from those things that have defined us, made us the people that we are today. I won’t say that our post-70’s generations haven’t created any type of enduring legacy or contributed anything to the advancement of our culture. We need only to look toward hip-hop to understand that fact. But the trouble with that, and perhaps the trouble with any relationship after “the one you’ll never get over”, is that its complicated and forever linked to that defining experience in ways both obvious and innocuous.
I thought that I would have an answer by now and I do not. I can’t pretend to have any wisdom on what to do because I haven’t done it. I’m still under myself, still reeling from the root. Parting from my golden age, college and my first love, is proving to be harder than I ever thought. Those were the times when things made sense, when objectives were clear and not muddled with the past that I have now made. I feel like D’angelo again: “Tell me what will I do/Send it on back to you”. The truth is, that the past provides comfort in ways that the future never will. Thinking about new ways to love, new ways of being, or in the case of black folks—new revolutions, is difficult. It involves being truthful about the ways that we have been strengthened and about the ways we have been broken.
“Sometimes we don’t what else to say but hmmmm…”
~ D’Angelo This is a whole different ballgame and we have to accept it. We live in a different time and how we react to its problems and triumphs have to be different. The American culture we live in right now is controlled by images and their resulting apathy. The art and personhood we create is easily marketed and consumed by a waiting public. This complicates anything we do. It makes creating an organic movement somewhat impossible. I think a great deal, maybe too much, about using our burdens as our song. This is what D’Angelo does on the Voodoo album, and what we have always done. In a Vogue magazine article on visual artist Wangechi Mutu she speaks about her use of images from the magazine to create commentary on the abusive affect these images have on women. When speaking of the paradox she says, “I obsess on it. I hate it, and I love it. I ignore it, and I pay too much attention to it. Placing my work in that context will show how much I distort the raw material that I get…” Wangechi’s artistic dilemma describes the status of our affair. Our current identity is a mixture of nostalgia, re-creation, synthesis, and confusion. The problem with our identity is that we can’t decide, and in many cases are robbed of the autonomy, to determine what it is. For the hip-hop age are we 50 Cent or Common? Are we Crunk or Conscious? Can we venture out of these structures even and become something different, something more hybrid? Inside these questions we end up lost somewhere in the divide.
The past and the present are our raw material. They are what we have right now to move on, to get to our next golden age. If piecing it together is what we must do then so be it. I’ll keep going, crying when I need to, holding up my new pictures to the negatives of my old ones and comparing. But I no longer want to be hung over. I don’t want to be sick. I’ll send it on back to you, and when I get it back I’m gonna remix it, but then again that’s what I’ve been doing all along.
