In my time, I painted pictures. Were the colours
bright enough to hold the gaze of your first
impression?
In our time, I told stories. Did the plot
stray from the sincere path? And substitute undefined character flaws for a happy ending?
Life is in the blood, and the cup runs over. Love covers a multitude, and the pen still wonders.
January 20th 2021
Happy 50th anniversary to the song, What’s Going On, gifted to a nation and the world by Marvin Gaye and Renaldo ‘Obie’ Benson of The Four Tops. A timeless artistic statement that begat a song suite that moved the proverbial mountain. If it was a question without the mark in 1971, it is an unmarked question still being asked in 2021. Perhaps Amanda Gorman’s profound and timely words in her presidential inaguration poem, The Hill We Climb, delivered in Marvin’s home state, is an answer to the rhetorical question which will move the conversation forward. Whatever the case may be, What’s Going On is a mirror of the future that was yesterday and might yet be tomorrow. A perfect groove for its and our imperfect time. Prophetic in the slow drag of change for those who want all the smoke and more. How long it has been is easier to ascertain than how far. It has travelled 50 short years of joy and pain in repetition.
On one level, the title song and the majority of the album (5 of the 9 songs) is a duet with James Jamerson’s majestic Bass guitar playing. It is a fitting tribute to Jamerson and The Funk Brothers, the unsung heart of the Motown sound, and a fitting farewell to the Detroit era of the company that Berry Gordy built. Hard to believe that Marvin had to fight for it to get released. Berry, to his credit, has admitted that he (and his much lauded quality control) got this one wrong as hindsight has proven. The great melodies on top of The Funk Brothers’s dynamic rhythm section which Marvin affectionately refered to as the black bottoms were taken to the heavens by David Van De Pitte’s orchestral string arrangements. The strings are not required to soften the sting when Marvin speaks of institutional oppression aka police brutality (“trigger happy policing”) and wilful indifference (“send that boy off to die”) on Inner City Blues. The strings help to paint the soundscape of empathetic pity when he laments ecological apathy on Mercy, Mercy Me (“fish full of mercury”). The strings also heighten the intensity and sense of urgency when he makes a passionate plea for the children to be saved on Save The Children (“Who really cares to save a world that is destined to die”).
There is unselfconscious pride and joy in Marvin’s expression of faith when he exalts the love for and fellowship he has with God on track 5, God Is My Friend (“Don’t go and talk about my father”). It takes on even more poignancy when you factor in Marvin’s death by the hands of his biological father. As one who was and is informed by the Christian faith and doctrine, I felt a kinship with the Artist and the music on spiritual grounds conveyed in both the musical and lyrical sentiments. Right On and Wholy Holy are as elemental as John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme with its mantra, though I’ve since learned that it was actually Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew which was the notable Jazz album influence on Marvin’s venture into this unprecedented music, along with Lester Young’s horn playing. James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James was another album Marvin cited as an influence on What’s Going On.
The album’s universality is revealed in the layers and Marvin’s candid nature didn’t shy away from the autobiographical underbelly that underpins a song like Flying High (In The Friendly Sky), about the boy (old slang for Heroin) “who makes slaves out of men”. The plight of many soldiers who fought and survived an unceremonious war in Vietnam only to be unwelcomed home is given sensitively rendered and compassionate voice. Those letters his brother wrote to him about his experience in ‘Nam marked him deeply. It’s also no secret that Marvin had a long battle to the end with demons in the form of substances that poisoned his mind. But he felt God was at work during the What’s Going On sessions and was able to find temporary respite from psychosexual battles of his soul that many people who were raised in Church and exposed to both sides of the flipped coin of hypocrisy at home go through. Sexual healing takes on a deeper meaning. A duel of religious fervour and unrighteous idignation which betrays the spiritual integrity of the gospel message. The Adamic fall is no respecter of persons. We might not all have experienced the horror of a failed imperial attempt at conquest that was the Vietnam war but we all have our own internal wars and battles we fight daily in the seasons of our lives. Our own vices and ‘their’ devices wage against our sanity and soul. Marvin put the listener inside the mind of the slave of the ‘boy’. It’s a mini-masterpiece of personification.
Whenever I listen to What’s Happening Brother, I can’t help but shed a tear in my heart for the love and camaraderie that Marvin had for his brother Frankie, and his community. Three years after the passing of Dr King, It was both a personal message of affinity in acknowledgment of the black struggle in America and one that extended to his ‘brothers’ in a time when it really was about unity and brotherly love because all you had was faith, hope, and eachother against the tides of the times, the system, and the man. There were so many musical acts, writers and producers in soul music and the Jazz of the time that put out messages of brotherly (and sisterly) love. ⁷Curtis Mayfield. Aretha Franklin. The Staple Singers. Stevie Wonder. Donny Hathaway. Earth, Wind & Fire. Gladys Knight & The Pips. The Isley Brothers. The O’Jays. Gamble & Huff. The list is seemingly endless. It was a golden age of professed love in music, for sure.
I had already listened to the song Inner City Blues on a compilation CD that came with an issue of Vibe magazine in 1995, when I was 14. I still have that CD for keepsake. The title song, and the What’s Going On album came into my life when I was 15 or 16 (depending on the the month). Up to that point, I was predominantly a Rap music fiend. Nas. Jeru The Damaja. The Boom bap kind of lyrical rap and pretty much anything I could get off the radio from DJ 279 on the Friday Nite Flava. I also listened to The Lady Of Soul, Jenny Francis’s show on Choice FM. I was in love with her speaking voice. She played all the hot and cool R&B. Midtempo to slow jams. I listened to her show for years with a blank tape in the deck for recording whatever captured me. So many hours of listening pleasure. I watched Top Of The Pops and enjoyed the diverse pop and dance music of the time. But one afternoon, What’s Going On would change my world and open me up in a way I had never experienced before through sound.
I remember being magnetically drawn to the What’s Going On album cover when I saw it on display in the record store, Our Price, on Kilburn High Road. Not coincidentally Marvin was once a Kilburn resident for a very brief time. Our Price has gone the way of a lot of record stores and the Dodo. It only exists now in fading memory. I often stopped by there on the way home from school to check out the latest R&B and Rap music releases. Or just to look at and sometimes listen to records I couldn’t afford to buy. Compact discs were so expensive in the 90s. Most of what little money I had after I separated my tithe, went on cassette and sometimes CD singles, so buying a whole album was always a big deal for me. I had to be sure. In Our Price, people were allowed to listen to a record they wanted to hear before purchasing and even if one didn’t make a purchase the staff were cool about it. They supplied the headphones. That afternoon I listened to the whole 35 minutes and 38 seconds of What’s Going On in the store. Fortunately nobody else was cuing to listen to anything, so they just left me alone and I lost or rather found myself in the music. I remember that wave after wave of colours saturated my mind and body. Seeing and feeling colours. I didn’t know anything about Synaesthesia at that time. Purely in terms of colour, the sonic experience was intensely emotional. I was overwhelmed. I’ve never forgotten the way it made me feel that first time. It was the beginning of a great and enduring love affair with the album and soul music. I went on to immerse myself in everything I could find going back to the Doo Wop era, from music to books and film. It was the chief inspiration for me to want to write songs and make music. I didn’t know how but I was compelled to try. It remains the most impactful experience I have had as a music listener and lover.
I was almost born on Marvin’s birthday. I came to learn that I shared some uncanny parallel experiences with him when I read the posthumous biography that he was working on with David Ritz before he passed. Maybe there is something more in the connection that explains the experience I had that afternoon in Our Price with What’s Going On which remains as strong today.
Blood is only as thick as the cake mix added and stirred with it. You can put blood in the spotlight but it won’t dance on command. The blood howls. Its lashes out. It bites. Its unruly. The splatter is our history. Maybe blood will not reconcile with blood. Maybe they will find sacred ground and tread lightly around the pain. At a distance they might greet cordially and in their small talk they might reveal things they will not explicitly say about how they feel. That cake mix is not going to hold together the fragility and mistrust. Time won’t cast lots and aspersions to see who surrenders a position of advantage on a Chess board. But a thousand words in a photograph knows all too well that it won’t matter in the end. Who was right? Who was wrong? Did she hold you firm? Did she kiss your cheek? Did she brush your hair as your helpless torso rested on her lap? Did she watch you crawl to her when she returned from work to a cold appartment shared with hangers on? An abode of drifters taking refuge with a half wanted child and a mother who stayed the course, when the river pulled at her hem. Mothers and daughters and the waters between them….
Painting by Piyali Muni
Covering the half that doesn’t speak. I know people who fear Spiders more than death. The half mask adorned with eyes to lie in bed unwillingly with questions like lingerie.
Once upon a time I presented this painting, ‘The Deep Thinker’, as a gift. It was turned down because the person who it was gifted to, said the face had no eyes. And that it was tantamount to bad luck. I’ve never dealt in charms but I graciously took back my painting. It seems the only eyes we recognise more often than not are the peep holes for our iris to take a snap shot of what we percieve in surreality. In real life as we term it, we are blinded by sight or rather blunted. The optical illusion of the vision is only equaled by the delusion of what we choose not to see in plain sight. We are all complicit in the great deception and visionaries will burn at the high stakes of our unseeing eyes.
The Deep Thinker
Acrylic on canvas
Clementine kisses you on the nose. Rose button drowned in your eyes. I drank your milk of kindness through my lies. Red wine and coke, you must play through the madness. Best thing you ever heard in your blindness. Muted tongue on pause bites the lip that feeds you. I remember what mama told me. And I remember you. Oh so tall in stature till they bent you over the bullsweat. They have teeth to match your fangs. And tongues of fire to heat up your secular soul. It burns just as hot on the outside of the inn. Keep it. She’s a keeper said nobody but your gentrifried mind. The flame dies but twice. Let it burn like the bushes of vanity, skin deep and heart swept feet off the ground, you put the foot in the mouth but forgot to bite down on it. Deep dead on it. Liver for the thrill. Killer of sheep you ran through the mill on a goose chase for the ages. Bronzed behaviour patterns after laughter and the clock is tocking.
It dawned on me this week that its been 20 years since I’ve been writing songs. Over that time I’d like to think that I’ve learnt a few things about music composition and myself. I’ve always loved creating and over the years I’ve enjoyed painting, sculpture, and various genres of writing, but nothing has been as rewarding as seeing the germ of an idea travel through the universe of my heart, mind and soul into a song. It is a thing of wonder. At one point in time I was meticulous in keeping records of my work. Dates and places. Not so meticulous about equipment. I’ve worked with a variety of keyboards on the low bracket and three guitars. I’ve worked closely with one songwriting partner for a period but mostly alone. The gift and the curse is that an idea can take over your life. You persue it, in or out of pocket, whether its affordable to dream it into reality or not. You dream about what a song can be when given its wings. I’ve studied the work of many songwriters, famous and obscure, but when I create, its from the blood of my soul. This year I had the pleasure to complete the recording of a song that meant a lot to me at this stage in my life. I had to wait almost two years to get the artist I wanted to breathe more beauty into what was already the apple of my eye. I still can’t say I’m done with it but the journey is its own reward. I feel fortunate to have written it and the hundreds of others. I am also grateful for the people who have helped me in collaboration. Musicians and engineers. Friends and hired hands. The inspiration has come from every conceivable thought, memory, feeling,…all corners of the human experience. I thank God for my inner ears and the organs that work together with the spirit in me. Curtis Mayfield is one of my many teachers, and I know I wouldn’t have become the songwriter I am without the lessons I learnt from the craftsmanship of masters like him.
July juxtapositions strangers and life is an exercise for eyes that lament the unanswerable. Streams of thought drown out the intrinsic fear to ask of who they are and what they know. I often wonder about what they have seen when they gaze at the wind or the silence that screams their middle names out of view.
A man wrestling is a man whistling.
Do you always see ghosts and tell of their whereabouts? Hiding places are the low tide. I never question the voices unheard in the storm of ones incoherence. Or the certainty of the unbelievers in the masquerade. What burden of proof will you wear today? And how will you dress down your despair? Welcome is a mask without a face to invent. I wear every doubt you’ve ever had about me with pride. Shameless like you wouldn’t believe. But then again, most of us were reborn naked. Some of us will die that way
Curtis’s hands were important. Not more than his heart. When he recorded his last album he had only the use of his neck and the head attached to it which housed his genius mind to do the work of breathing out hope into a world that had tasted too many losses to inhale the optimism extolled through music. His heart still functioned effectively and the evidence of soul and spirit was still audible. Lying on his back he recorded one short phrase at a time. Phrase by phrase, a word became a line of lyric. Phrase by phrase, a line of lyric became a verse. And then a chorus. And then a bridge. Curtis’s hands remained still and silent through this process. The eyes watched and waited for something that the hands knew would never happen again. Curtis could not find feeling in the physical form of hands that had mastered a style of guitar playing that was unique to himself. Hands that shaped sounds for Hendrix and Marley to study. Hands dramatically and unwillingly put to rest. And this is why those hands are a great teacher. In their absence of use he martialed the figurative hands that survived the destruction of his body, from the neck that shouldered the weight of his head, with a voice which expressed his deepest feelings in song. A lifetime’s worth of wisdom and openess to the mysteries of life. I remember listening to New World Order and being humbled by Curtis’s generosity of spirit, and in awe of what he accomplished in terms of sonic life affirmations in such desperate circumstances. The testament of the spirit when it intersects with the divine is all one can hope for when one puts in the work of exhalation. Curtis Mayfield’s musical soul holds the hands that raise up the weary hearted head of hurts. Unbowed.
Today is a wedding ceremony. A marriage of possibilities. My cousin has exchanged vows and time will study and tell what it has seen, heard and known under God. Black life like black bodies have long been a surrealistic feast for the voyeuristic eyes of fetishists and fantasists. Joseph Conrad could not open his eyes even behind the safety of his pen, to straddle his imaginative reconstructions of the monolithic burden bearers in the heart of darkness situated in the continent of his mind’s perception.
Baldwin generously invested the deformed and fragmented faces of exotica with the unusual idea that they were worthy of being depicted as fully human, even in a foreign land. The continent is not a country. And a country in this context is not a geographical destination. The poetry of Baldwin is not merely the words sentenced to a page but rather the lives affirmed by his words dancing to the tune past the margins of hate and redeemed by love. In his writings love is the great pacifier even when it sets fire to our expectations and challenges our notions of who is worthy of grace, and the horrors that transgress the invisible inhabitants who are generational custodians of a manifested multifaceted curse with wings.
Barry Jenkins painted the poetry of James Baldwin beautifully in ‘If Beale Street Cold Talk’. Next week lovers around the world will serenade each other with cards, gifts and kisses flavoured with wine and chocolates. Babies will be conceived. Lies will be ever more creative. Truths with be earnest and unsparing. Death will still be in business. Card or no card. Life will go on. Love in its bittersweetness covers the multitude and will endure the fall out. A torn page is the pity that a chapter can afford to lose.
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
– James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Napoleon Dozier's Dabbler's Hand 