Thursday, June 24, 2010
Scream of the Week
Here's a classic. The story goes (according to my formidable research skills applied to a 30 second glance at wikipedia.org and allmusic.com, anyway), that former boxer, soldier, and Tiny Grimes vocalist Screamin' Jay Hawkins had envisioned his 1956 hit "I Put A Spell On You" as a ballad to feature his operatic, Cab Calloway inspired delivery, but he got wasted with his band and recorded the classic version in a drunken blackout.
It's hard to justify this recording as a mistake, though, given the rest of Hawkins' career, and the creepy lyrics to the song. Hawkins gloriously presented himself not as a great singer, which he could have done, but as a character from any number of matinee horror/adventure b-movies. It's all there on the recording, and this television appearance just makes it obvious. The cheap, darkly lit, gothic set, the parody-horror of a 5-and-10-cent store pair of false teeth, and of course the trademark bone through the nose and skull-on-a-stick sceptre all evoke not true terror, but the mid-Century "horror" trope. A generation that saw the true terror of the Holocaust and nuclear warfare coped with the experience in better times by poking fun at the feeling and distancing true threats with humor and an artificial world. And Hawkinns, for all his convulsions and wide eyes and speaking in tongues, keeps the audience comfortable with a konked out hairdo. It's a neon sign glaring at the audience saying, "I'll creep you out for now, but I still spend hours at a time in a barbershop making sure I still look like one of you when I'm done with the act."
But boy, does Hawkins commit to the performance. Through all the humor and stereotype, his screams sound awfully real, and they come from the gut the same way Roky Erickson's would later (without the friendly winking). It's one thing to let an audience in on a joke, but it's another to welcome people in so they can hear what they might not otherwise want to hear. This song, and this performance, is all about control, and the need to live in a magical world outside this one to have any control.
Is it too much an extension of metaphor to say that "I Put A Spell On You" is about the nascent Civil Rights movement? Consciously, it probably is. But on one hand, it's not too much of a stretch to say that this song directly says in the lyrics, and indirectly says in the performance, "I can't get what I want in this world, but I am entitled to have it, so I'll just change the world to one in which I have what I want." A man who, due to his skin color and background, can only aspire to serve richer, paler people, can serve them by fantasizing a world in which he can kill them and put their head on a stick.
This kind of thing is hardly unique in African American culture, either, or I wouldn't be so quick to buy my own interpretation. While watching this clip this morning, I decided that it's time to start a series in this blog, profiling African American science fiction fans in music. That sounds a little silly until you seriously look at the list of folks to profile. Just off the top of my head: Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Anthony Braxton, Michael Jackson and Doctor Octagon come to mind without thinking too much, and I remember other examples like John Coltranes titles in his late career that frequently touch on outer space and astrology, and the opening minute or so of the seminal De La Soul album Three Feet High and Rising, featuring the creepily (and comically) intoned "Blood Sucking Freaks, just like yo momma." I could probably go on like this for weeks if I'm not careful, and I invite your suggestions for other examples. But they all, on a fundamental and occasionally explicit level, say the same thing: as a black man in America, I have to live in a world I don't want, but I can at least fantasize about a different world as an artist, and show you the power of which I am capable.
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I doubt that Janelle Monae is saying anything that starts "as a black man." More fundamentally, do you really want to say "African American science fiction fans in music ... all, on a fundamental and occasionally explicit level, say the same thing"? If you substituted "white" for "African American," it would seem obviously preposterous to suggest that David Bowie and Chick Corea were using science fiction to say the same thing. Why do you think African Americans are more limited in the ways they use that kind of metaphor? And why jump so easily to saying it's about race? I grant that this is clearly part of it for Ra and Clinton, but you're making this move too easily for a diverse group of artists.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a couple logical leaps from what I posted, Chris, and I attribute that to imprecise language on my part. I'm certainly not saying that "black people have to talk about space because they want rights." I am pointing out, though, that science fiction, horror movies and fantasy are a pretty historically consistent undercurrent in music made by African Americans, in a way that I haven't seen among other cultures or subcultures. In other words, there is SOMETHING about using sci-fi and horror that IS a real tradition among a specific group of people, and I want to work out why. It's interesting to me that you see that as a limitation, and I want to work out what in my writing gives that impression. If, as you suggest, I substituted "white" for "African American" in my argument, I'd have to substitute the rest of that sentece, too, and it might be something like "White painters all attach value and importance to the ability to paint pictures of fruit bowls, to the degree of giving such paintings the name of 'still life' and considering it a specific genre of painting." That certainly doesn't imply limitation to me, and also pretty clearly doesn't pigeonhole every white painter's abilities, opinions or politics to a person, either. What I wrote above is just a starting point, anyway - I want to explore this for a while. I think my argument of "what" holds water - there's something that ties extending science fiction and fantasy from literature into music in African American culture that you don't see in other cultures and subcultures. I posted a hypothetical "why" the other day, and I hope that the posts I do about this in the future will help me work with the hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely not trying to discourage you from pursuing that line of thought. But I do hope you come to see it as a problematic (which is not to say wrong) way of slicing things. Take George Clinton, for example. It's pretty explicit in a lot of the Parliament lyrics that he's using SF tropes as a metaphor for race-related issues, among other things. But is he using those tropes because he's part of a specifically African American "undercurrent"? Or is he using them because he's working at the same time as David Bowie, Chick Corea, Hawkwind, etc., etc.?
ReplyDeleteMy core point is that I hope you'll be careful about reducing the meaning of artists' work to the two most obvious things they have in common.