By I. Augustus Durham | @IMeansWhatISays | with thanks to NewBlackMan
(in Exile)
Thursday, May 07, 2015.
The Super Fly
soundtrack is a classic for the genre of funk/soul music, and a benchmark for
the black cinema score, akin to Isaac Hayes’s Shaft or Aretha Franklin’s
Sparkle. Therefore, when perusing his track list, Curtis Mayfield could
have chosen any number of songs as Soul Train “fare” for his January 6,
1973 appearance—blue-light special “Give Me Your Love (Love Song)” (my JAM!),
funk-laced “Pusherman”, or “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”. Instead, Mayfield performed, understandably,
the title track, “Superfly”, and the first single “Freddie’s Dead”, the soundtrack’s most melancholic offering.
Even Wikipedia suggests, “[t]he arrangement is driven by . . . a melancholy
string orchestration.” But the most intriguing aspect of the “Freddie’s Dead”
performance is that regardless of its accouterments, young, gifted and black
folks—natural-haired and crop-topped—dance! Collectively bopping. Rhythmically
isolating. They dance to the funeral dirge sitting in the pocket.
Surmising what to say here amidst the occurrences in Baltimore, I kept
arriving at Mayfield’s Zodiac twoness (during the Soul Train interview, Jennifer Boykin asks Mayfield’s sign: Gemini!), which could easily be considered prophetic,
and the melancholic genius of his episodic B-selection from the vinyl’s A-Side.
Having heard the full interview, one presumes that if she theorizes Freddie
Gray’s death, then Baltimore becomes the milieu for the Mayfield interview’s
intelligibility. Although The Wire never conjures glitter or gold, the
Baltimore televised during those five seasons elicits (post)modern double
consciousness insofar as perhaps viewers never took seriously that serial life
is not but a dream for Freddie, his kith and kin, even on HBO where a
high cost is charged to telecast what many deem “low living”.
Nevertheless, the song’s melancholy emerges through lyrical inversion in
Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher”. Mayfield sings, “All I want is some piece of
mind/With a little love I’m trying to find/This could be such a beautiful
world/ . . .”. Erykah reconfigures Curtis: “I am known to stay awake/A
beautiful world I’m trying to find/I’ve been in search of myself/A
beautiful world is just too hard for me to find/Said it’s just too hard for me
to find/I’m in the search of something new/Searching in me, searching inside
you (and that’s for real)/What if there was no niggas only master teachers?/I
stay woke”; Curtis echoes “dreams”. If one staged an intervention around niggas
(and authenticity) via R. A. T. Judy (1994) to address why Freddie(Gray)’s
dead, death by eye contact maps a long history of the “nigga” as “badman”:
“nigga is misread as nigger. . . . The nigga of hard core blurs
with the gang-banger, mack daddy, new-jack, and drug-dealer, becoming an index
of the moral despair engendered by a thoroughly dehumanizing oppression, and
hence inevitably bearing a trace of that dehumanization” (Judy 217).
If the exegesis is correct, as “the eye”/I. sees it, Freddie was “asking
for it” by daring to even look at “the man”: treatment like a rag doll enfolded
upon itself; doubling his back as a do-over of the double bind; boxing him in
crateless as Brown, Henry rethought; breaking his neck, but not like Busta,
because one’s life is the ultimate cost of his encoding as a “nigga”,
even if the aggressor meant nigger. All the while, many never
interrogate whether the people who read Freddie as such, vis-à-vis Nas, require
decoding themselves.
But is this our newest obstacle, which honestly and melancholically finds
its rehearsal again here: have we always and ever misread the victim instead of
convening a reading circle about the “victor”? The perpetrators, and others
like them, that led to Freddie being dead never conceive of him as a master
teacher because they consistently enter bastions of power deeply invested in
civilizing “us” through what James Cone calls, via lynching, “public service
announcements”, whether one of “us” attends UVA, plays with a toy gun in a
nearby park, experiences (black) social life with her peers only to be shot in
the head, or, by stunning subterfuge, encounters “the machine” that publicly
boycotts any hint of its attachment to fostering “authenticity”, even in the
face of a historicized apparatus set up by “dem” to capture “we”—a noose—, by
suggesting that such a hateful occasion was “a result of ignorance and bad
judgment”, only to proceed in publishing an open letter from the “victor” where
his salutation is not even addressed to aggrieved community. It is quite
amazing how the powerful protect the very ones who continuously ruin their
brand . . .
I digress.
Freddie’s death has awakened in many that they are sick and tired like Fannie
Lou, and as much as it was a small minority of the “minority” who broke with
the “black protest tradition” and “looted”, according to the always
“truthful” media that “keeps them honest”, the perpetrators utilize that same
rhetoric to qualify the badmen who do not know how to properly serve and
protect, thus creating all things “equal”. Freddie as master teacher gives us
the opportunity to listen anew to Curtis and Erykah making musical decisions
that signal mastery: for Curtis, the key change; for Erykah, the newness after
the count. This is to say, maybe Curtis chooses to perform “Freddie’s Dead”
because he comprehends that the black aesthetic tradition, at its best, turns
mourning—our collective melancholy—into dancing, trades in sackcloth and ashes as the grave
clothes you wore during the work week only to put on joy and gladness when your
humanity was affirmed by your brothers and sisters once every seven days, even
while tripping the light fantastic.
This twoness is blackness, which is to say humanness. And yet, the sobering
conundrum left in the wake of Freddie being dead is: if Freddie is a Baduian
master teacher, how many more teachable moments have to be convened on black
bodies before our peers in the classroom called society stay woke? Truly
everything depends on that awoke-ness because that is indeed the difference
between the makings, or breakings, of us all . . . namely you!
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I. Augustus Durham is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work
focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.