Grief Fatigue, BET Fatigue

Vanished cadence of a secret world

What if every great song carries a disincarnate soul taking refuge in its notes as that spirit awaits its inevitable return to the flesh or forever. The light in the song is borrowed and burrowed and not ours, a soul tie with the dead made audible, and each time we play or sing the music that luminescence is shed on us like an advance on a debt we have to pay back in increments of novel lyricism many never come up with until hell is the act of dying without a song to carry you, the thud of silence after a lifetime of abusing music, using it to bypass or extract instead of become the frequency it demonstrates. This is just to say that music is haunted, black music especially, and as you extract your daily fixes from it in a numbed-out ritual of radio play, be careful to make offerings back or you’re encouraging ghosts to haunt you forever. It’s too late for most of us; we owe that silent mafia our lives. Some of us know this because we are the ghosts, haunted and haunting back, and we speak of it openly, and you hear our beauty ahead of our truth and miss the point.

Ward your name

Missing the point as a collective, we pay frantic tribute to the dead who live in songs they themselves made, and blaspheme them in our feeble attempts to honor them. I watched the BET Awards last weekend like the characters in A Clockwork Orange, as if being subject to a gimmick aversion therapy, eyes held open by a speculum. I just wanted to see how they honored D’Angelo, as a matter of research and love for him and his family. You don’t watch something like that Viacom-and-black charade expecting it to be profound, you just hope it’s not a vaudeville of opportunism and obligation masquerading as love. It was a vaudeville of opportunism and obligation masquerading as love, a dazzling commercial break wishing it was an epic, and tacky, save for his kids, Michael, Imani, and Morocco, who announced the performance, and the footage of D’Angelo himself reappropriating his tone before it was maimed with good intentions by some of his living peers. George Clinton was there, but his presence didn’t ground the fidgety switching between singers each whose name was announced by the previous as if a talking AI marquis was the only coherent thread. All of this is fine, however, if we understand that tributes to singers who die in their early fifties with unfinished albums and pending dreams are preemptive failures, shrill attempts to talk over or past the tragic before it’s even done landing and announcing itself. How do we let the catastrophe speak louder than our premature clapping and grappling at it?

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The next day, Clive Davis’s funeral was held in New York. The forensics of attendees was like a list of suspects and their too-polite accomplices. Dionne Warwick, the opener, who looked petulant and a little relieved at the pulpit, Stevie Wonder (he’s been at every industry funeral since Marvin Gaye, I think it’s just an old black habit, his addendum to The Secret Life of Plants), Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson…and others. At the BET awards, a brave influencer-reporter asked Ray J if he thought Clive was responsible for the death of Whitney Houston. Ray J mumbled an incoherent platitude that did not amount to no and continued his red carpet walking blues. The J here is for jester or be killed. That manchild always seems like he’s in danger and like he is the danger he’s up against, a threat to his own survival. A few months ago he announced his impending death, but he remains on earth as if condemned to this role until he slips and tells us something true, as if his whole life is a failed interrogation of a would-be whistleblower or broken-hearted patsy. On Tuesday, testimony insinuating that Charles Manson was a CIA asset under MK Ultra. And so it goes.

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Reconciliation

The music at the televised funerals of musicians and their handlers is almost always better than the music at awards shows. We’ve outgrown the need for those shows but not the need for the public funerals. The music at private funerals and vigils is what matters most. We’ve outgrown the need for death as the other side of what Sun Ra laments is the obligation to be born, which he says is naive and obsolete, by which I think he means, if we could just be the song for a little while longer there would be no separation and all life would be devotional unbroken chords with just the right amount of tension on them, liberation. And what of being born again in this life, renewed, visited by the spirit in the song. D’Angelo’s lover’s tear fell on my fingertip last week; it slipped past her retro white-brimmed glasses with purple-black lenses and her thank you was a bruise going from blue to yellow back to the golden brown of my own goose skin. I had the chills, the post-exertion thrill and calm. I’d attempted a tribute, my sacrilege, my brutal need to unite word and deed seamlessly if I am to speak at all, and we found ourselves remote-viewing one another from the close-up of a real embrace. More on that later and more literally. As a hypocrite I can be a better poet and critic and artist and untitled beyond category song-spirit in that I submit myself to traditions I imagine us all transcending together.

If the only way to honor the dead is with songs that also violate them and every song is such a violation and an altar, singing and dancing are less and less generous and glamored, more and more like acts of divine entitlement or penance, distended folklore. I feel better just admitting this. Our song is confessional but not effusive, the dance a Dunham waltz down a street in Port-au-Prince that becomes a street in East St. Louis where Miles plays “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and that longing is not exaggerated; that we all go through a period of wanting to be rescued is why it’s okay our music is so tender, violent, irreconcilable, inconsolable, jubilant, on a roll, no pictures, that too broken is better than too perfect in this tradition where we are never finished grieving, never finished singing, and doing both a little wrong on purpose.