Clearly, I aim to draw parallels between Lamar and Smith’s visual aspect of their work. They are both part of a long tradition – from We Insist!, What’s Going On?, to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, Things Fall Apart of visual metaphors of black aesthetic that are seen as ‘incendiary’ by the establishment. Ashley Clark, ‘An Incendiary Classic’, The Guardian, March 11, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/11/kendrick-lamar-to-pimp-a-butterfly-album-cover.

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‘george bush doesn’t care about black people’

wadada leo smith expands his Community to include instruments, not as an extension of an embodied Self, but in their own ‘autonomous’ right.[1] ‘instruments in improvised music are equal – they are all equal in the creation of music’.[2] all instruments possess individual voices which, through their distinct character, all add new textures to the work-event. each instrument is able to add something which no other can. two violins from the same manufacturer will not sound identical. this position demonstrates a distance between smith’s views and western forms of logic and philosophy, which fail to acknowledge immanent meaning of any sound or sign at the point of execution, to creator or perceiver.[3] signs of any kind, here, are not independent operators, functioning freely of context, ideology, speaker, emotion, and a litany of exterior factors. smith’s assertion that the ‘sound-rhythms’ of improvisation are autonomous sits defiantly in opposition to hegel’s claim that ‘the single note [like empirical phenomenon] has its sense only in the … connection with another note and with the sequence of other notes’.[4] ‘critics [and by extension philosophers] have applied narrow concepts to this improvisational music so that they could easily write about and define it’.[5]

as for musicians, so for instruments. ‘the concept that i employ in my music is to consider each performer as a complete unit with each having his or her own center from which each performs independently from any other’.[6] i do not see smith’s insistence of autonomy in creation as contradictory to collective Community. rather, it is a corresponding observation from another side of the parallax. that is to say, the autonomy exists as expression of Self – one cannot improvise anything else. despite each improviser ‘only responding to that which he is creating’, they are situated within an ‘independent [of participants] center of the improvisation that is continuously changing’.[7] in other words, while only responding to Self, that Self is perpetually always-already being reshaped by the autophysiopsychic improvisational centre, necessarily defined through Community. music-making is the burden of the ‘collective mind of participants and non-participants’.[8] identity of improvisation is ‘absorb[ed] from its environment’.[9]

if people love – which is also a strange word – or if people hate- which is also a strange word – if people accept – which is a strange word – if people reject – which is strange – why am i saying that, because if you have heard or seen or been involved or experienced a work of art you don’t have a choice. there’s no choice about hating it or liking it or whatever because it’s part of your psyche for the rest of your life. and can never be erased. never. it’s already a part of you[10]

such an understanding of the orientation of Self within Community negotiates the tensions of the ‘social-economic-political systems’ of ‘western domination [the powerMAN]’.[11] Community is a microcosm for all societies – smith connected his music with balian, indian and islamic traditions – that, through open and egalitarian perspective of Self ‘will eventually eliminate the political dominance of euro-america in this world’.[12] transformation through music will incite ‘meaningful political reforms in the world: culture being the way of our lives; politics, the way our lives are governed’.[13]   

notes is an unashamedly utopian text.[14] heavily inspired by Addison gayle junior’s black aesthetic – a handbook of cultural nationalism, pan-africanism and universalism – smith aim squarely at the white-male dominant ‘euro-american’ networks of governance, epistemology and culture, all of which are historically and institutionally geared towards the oppression of anyone other than wealthy white men.[15]

nor was smith alone in his views. larry neal’s notion of a black aesthetic elucidates the same concept in more traditionally academic terms.[16] black aesthetic ‘has been aimed at the destruction of the double-consciousness’: the encouraged internal conflict experienced by subordinated groups within oppressive societies ‘totally bereft of spirituality’.[17] ‘music is something else’, neal also wrote, ‘it has always, somehow, represented the collective psyche …[a] ritual directed at the destruction of useless, dead ideas. it can be a ritual that affirms our highest abilities’.[18] similarly, carolyn gerald offers this reading of art as interpreting ‘reality in a non-analytical, non-intellectual way. art thus makes a direct appeal to the senses and calls forth a spontaneous emotional identification’ with others.[19]

but these are views expressed almost half a century ago and written oppositionally to a ‘white aesthetic’ as a means to recognise the ‘black man as a fully rational agent’.[20] What of now?

i don’t want to make a piece just because i’d make it. i want to make it because i find the meaning, the need and the urge to make that something become part of my reality and then … to have it become part of somebody else’s reality[21]

amid #blacklivesmatter, ideas of a black aesthetic are clearly still rife and lamentably contentious. think of chicago police union calling for a ban on beyoncé after a performance that evoked militant feminism and the black panther movement.[22]

This provides just one high-profile example, and one can still identify many of these problems raised in contemporary hip-hop. Kendrick Lamar on double consciousness, for example:

I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015

Once I finish this witnesses will convey just what I mean

…

I’m African-American, I’m African

I'm black as the moon, heritage of a small village

Pardon my residence

Came from the bottom of mankind

My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide

You hate me don't you?

You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture

You're fuckin' evil I want you to recognize that I'm a proud monkey

You vandalize my perception but can't take style from me

And this is more than confession

I mean I might press the button just so you know my discretion

…

Institutionalised manipulation and lies

Reciprocation of freedom only live in your eyes[23]

indeed, smith still addresses these issues in his music. ten freedom summers, recorded in 2011, was a finalist in the running for the 2013 pulitzer prize for music. smith cites the segregation of mississippi and august wilson’s charged the pittsburgh cycle as inspirations for the abstract expressions of the civil rights movement.[24] that ten freedom summers was begun in 1977 and completed and recorded in 2011 shows how strongly smith and other theorist’s concerns persist. the track list speaks for itself, with sections entitled ‘defining america’, what is democracy?’, and ‘ten freedom summers’. smith has said that the music was ‘triggered’ by the ‘imperative for an activist moment’.[25] demonstrably, it was something that still needed to be said.

it was to provoke a conversation about race. people are afraid of race. you should be afraid of it – it’s not a real thing…it’s an artificial marker. but you have to talk about it because everybody thinks it’s real[26]

still advocating Self through Community, ‘connection yet detachment’, smith’s music demonstrates that humanity is in the process of the ‘eventually’ he wrote of in 1973.[27]