“And I’m Writing This Review for You”: A
Review of Emily J. Lordi’s Donny Hathaway Live
By I.
Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Thursday, October 5, 2017.
Charting the importance of Donny
Hathaway to comprehend a soul (and post-soul) aesthetic is perhaps an
inestimable endeavor. When coupling this with the fact that almost 38 years
after his death, there had been no singular nonfiction monograph that outlined
his life and songbook, one acknowledges that such silence likely signifies that
there were precisely no words. That is until Emily J. Lordi chronicles
the politics of his performativity in Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury
Academic, 2016; 144 pages).
This
text—itself miniaturized, hence its inclusion in the 33⅓ series—calculates a kind of mathematics that the previous paragraph
already begins to deduce: can an author capture in a bound spine, even
fractionally, the sum of an artistic life that concludes with what may
have been an accidental, or purposive, flight (97-112)? Is there a pivotal difference
between the individual and the collective? How does a genius cultivate an
atmospheric product while simultaneously plunging the interiority of his
“black melancholy” à la Treva Lindsey (39)? And what is the love quotient
that so pervades the ear that listeners feel compelled to conjure a pianistic
paragon from a self-professed pear (26)? The fruitfulness of this book is that
one never hungers.
There is an
odd form of anxiety in attempting to explain what the book accomplishes because
training, both as a musician and scholar, suggests that formalism is the proper
foundation for discursive gymnastics. I venture to surmise that Lordi wrestles
with this dis-ease as well when she states in a rather parabolic manner, “The
conventional way to tell Hathaway’s story is not to dwell on this somber truth
[the “painful irony . . . that the stunning vitality” the Live album
“captures would be so short-lived”] but to move past it and end on a positive
note . . . But I want to linger in the matter of endings. Doing so is
instructive with Hathaway, because he was a master of them” (5).
Allow me to
make a tumbling pass: Musiq Soulchild has a lyric where he vocalizes: “But now that you’re gone/The story
begins/It’s the ending of the end/Of an endless end/”. As one of Donny’s
artistic beneficiaries, interpolating giving up in
the cause of you and me, he further ponders in the chorus that if you can’t have
the one you love, then whereareyougoing in your life? By internalizing this
musiqal provocation, I arrive, which is to say dismount, at the notion that by
beginning with endings, Lordi provides us with directions for encountering
comfort in the fulfillment of the unresolved (119).
As much a
prodigy as a prophet, Hathaway telling his grandmother at the ripe age of four
that he could hear the most beautiful music in his head (16) stunningly
foreshadows Stevie Wonder’s 1972 project Music of My Mind. That Wonder’s subsequent album, Talking Book (1972), is indebted to Hathaway
(112)—in part because he does a live cover at UCLA
of “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)”, one of two singles from the
mind music album (89)—testifies to how Donny changed the game through sheer
homage, wading in the great black pool of genius. At the same time, such an
(in)formal education further cultivates itself at Howard University and after,
more specifically in tandem with his comrade Roberta Flack (23; 40-7). What
kind of unresolved fulfillment do we witness when music majors steal away to
get their groove back under the “watchful eye” of administrators? (23)
The music
department as a crossroads for preparing the world for soundscapes that
soundtracked our lives is nothing short of serendipity; we resound en masse: Thank You Master (For Their Soul) (There). Donny
understood the complexity of formalism even as it took on a utility for his own
productivity. When he imparts to Victor Rice that American music is BLACK and
that European masters lack the SOUL that only black musicians can give (31),
his stance suggests that insofar as everything is everything, one could
simply replace such a ubiquitous category with the word BLACK, on either side
of the verb, and never miss a beat. Being able to recount these moments of
black genius not only solidifies Hathaway as an archival artist, but also
conceives Lordi as an archivist in her own right.
She is
immensely meticulous at engendering compassion while filling the rests and
stops of the cantata that is Hathaway’s life. The reader gains an exemplar for
how to be a fan critically. Likewise, she outlines the stakes of Hathaway’s
ethics and how they still hold sway today. This is made clear when she
deploys the idea of “getting together” (3), a politics of assemblage or Fred
Moten’s construction of the ensemble. What Lordi does, whether one perceives it
as subtle or overt, is lay bare the necessary ease of citation. In her
estimation, Donny always understood he was in conversation, in partnership,
with others, and not the passive receptor of brilliance to then actively engage
in improper naming (or none at all). She deftly conveys this affect when speaking
about Hathaway’s mental health.
The communal
enactment of I-we as a mode of honorific is commonplace. Lordi’s search for the
first-person singular concretizes the reality the some willingly give up their
subjectivity as a metonymic gesture; the transformation from the one to a part
of the whole is an object formation which proves that people who choose such a
social position can and do resist. This is what Lordi means when she concedes,
“Hathaway’s greatest success came through his recreation of other artists’
music [such that it] might reflect this broader history of interdependence . .
. submerging the ‘I’ and the ‘we” that was always his implicit theme” (103).
Donny’s work ethic surfaces when he makes the calculation that though “he
wanted credit and compensation for his work,” he also wanted “to ensure that
other artists received theirs” (110). Lordi’s constant signposting of him
promoting the genius of his fellow musicians throughout the text (60; 70-1;
111), often at the cost of his own livelihood, situates the blackness of his
music and his politics.
Getting
together, as in self-actualizing, is a precursor to gathering oneself in order
to be a participant in a get-together. Blackness in the pocket. In a real
sense, then, the Night that happens during the recording session when
Hathaway charges white people with stealing his music and sound (109) contrives
him as kindred with Moishe the Beadle. And as Lordi further opines: what one
diagnoses as “sickness” culturally predates the ill and, in this contemporary
moment, has yet to be quarantined (110). But wherearewegoing in our life
together?
If Lalah
Hathaway teaches us anything as the text draws to a close, it might be to
locate ourselves at the park for enacting the extraordinary (115). Lordi may be steering us toward something like the
experience of a live show to give life to the performer and get our lives from
him/her simultaneously. But if we can’t have Donny, the one we love, in the flesh,
I believe he offers us two options: a world that
gives us permission to get ourselves in gear, keep our stride, in order to sing
his greatest songs and keep going, going on; or to meet him in a dream.
That may be
all we have for all we know.
+++
I. Augustus Durham (ABD) is a
fifth-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University, USA. His work
focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.
Other essays from I. Augustus Durham:
How “Black” Is Your Science Fiction?
KING Me: Soul for a Black Future
Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the
Black(ness)