Time and Sound: Jasmin Oya
December 17, 2019
“There's always a major shift in music and it aligns almost always to whatever major shift is occurring in the political realm,” says writer, educator, and scholar, Jasmin Oya. These words by Oya ring true both historically and contemporarily. For example, in 1970, Marvin Gaye began recording his seminal album, What’s Going On, which was released the following year in 1971. What’s Going On is an album made on the heels of the 1960s, filled with angst, and outcry against oppression. The album posits a simple, yet complex question. Marvin Gaye is critical of the the far-reaching hegemonic power of US militarism, racism, classism and passionately sings about environmental justice. It’s an album on the heels of the 1960s, filled with angst and outcry against oppression. What’s Going On is an attempt to understanding the social ills of the day.
As a follow up, in 1972, Marvin Gaye recorded his album You’re the Man. You’re the Man sees an even more pointed and radical Gaye. On the first song of the album, Gaye writes, We don't wanna hear no more lies/About how you planned a compromise/We want our dollar value increased/And employment to rise/The nation's taxation/Is causin' all, all this inflation. Gaye even advocated for a woman as President in the album, and instead of asking what’s going on?, on this album he asked where are we going?
The great tragedy of this album is not that Marvin listlessly recorded the album, or that it was poorly received; it’s tragedy is that no one ever heard the album. The album was shelved due to political disagreements with Berry Gordy, who feared Gaye would upset the largely conservative Motown fan base. Gaye’s most refined political voice was left unheard at a time when it was needed most. Fortunately, earlier this year, Universal Music Group released the previously unheard Marvin Gaye album, and oddly enough, the album still feels as relevant as when it was recorded. Gaye’s messages hold up against time.
In the third installment in the Time and Sound series, I talked to artist, author, and educator, Jasmin Oya. Jasmin and I had an exciting conversation about music in the decade, the relationship between politics and music, and we discuss a term she’s coined the “black shout.” Here’s our conversation:
Stanley: The decade has been filled with plenty of changes - technologically, politically, culturally, and more. Given these changes, how would you describe music in the 2010s?
Jasmin: It's interesting. There's always a major shift in music and it aligns almost always to whatever major shift is occurring in the political realm. These worlds are in constant reverberation with one another. It's all an echo. The transition from the 2000s into 2010 began with the presidential election in '08. Hope was contagious at the sight of the black President that perhaps we could move beyond the ghettos and blackness could be more accessible in the mainstream world. Hope requires an alternative. Alternative ways of looking, seeing and being.
The literal projects were being gentrified in a substantial way especially where I was raised in North Philly, a few blocks away and too close from Temple University. We surrendered our home to it in search of safety. We weren't the only family seduced by suburban security. Projects, literally began to change. White college students were replacing and displacing black families. While education was championed and encouraged (thanks to all that footage of black college students mobilized by the Obama campaign), I think brokenness, the projects, the ghettos, the socially deviant lost its mainstream appeal in this transition for the mainstream and blackness' assimilation into the White House.
This also meant abandoning the lack of interiority stereotypically associated with blackness. Though this could be now cherished as a radical display of black opacity (mumble rap, jazz, ragtime), I think in the beginning years of 2010s, social clarity was felt to be relational to progress. Because hope encourages abandonment, it also requires alternatives. So projects went alternative literally and sonically. Words like 'hipster' and platforms like Tumblr were on the rise and music was found in these neo-liberal houses. I'll name a few projects that displayed an alternative blackness, for me, and that arrived on the scene in the first half of 2010s. These works were The Weeknd's 'The House of Balloons', OFWGKTA began to make their presence known on the scene, Childish Gambino's Camp, and Drake's Take Care album.
Suburban blackness was on the rise at the same time that inner city neighborhoods were being demolished by gentrification. Lil Wayne had recently passed the torch to Drake and Nicki Minaj who were alternative styles to stereotypical forms of hip hop/rap on a mainstream level. Pop and Hip Hop were blending. Interiority was on full display. I feel like punk and hip-hop were becoming more visibly relational in this context through guys like Tyler, the Creator transcending all the way to 'trap' with folks like Lil Uzi Vert, Trippie Redd etc. Politically we were introduced to Barack Obama who represented this magnitude of blackness and succession that hadn't been previously exemplified through political acquisitions prior. Blackness could be worn beyond the skin. Difference/alternatives were encouraged. I think music in the 2010s were intense in political approaches to the deaths of 'the black body' (D'angelo, Kendrick Lamar, Robert Glasper) and were also intensified by strokes of vulnerability that nearly provided interiority to the matter of the black body and to really fill it with matter that would make that presence known and felt through forms of existentialism. I think there were soundtracks that the displaced leaned into for survival and others may have listened to for representation. I think there are folks who listened to both for both reasons. Those plights arriving often divergent from another but on the same coin.
But the music was good, often blending in and out of various genres like the obstacle of classism had become more transcendental sonically and politically. Like any gentrified neighborhood, there are dangers to this that lead to displacement and exploitation. I think we heard that moment in the notorious battle between Drake and Meek Mill. Meek coming from nothing, career beginning with freestyles on black-gum stained sidewalks in North Philly, battling against a Canadian actor-rapper with a 'diverse' fan-base who has that suburban and alternative or transcending language and community as his immediate resource. There was something remaining present in that classist strife that pointed to Meek's inevitable loss of confidence in that battle, and in that and lack of community support. The question, 'who is the rapper, going up against Drake? began to also sound a lot like, "who does this boy think he is, trying to speak in a room, now full, of white folk who took his tongue a long time ago??"
Stanley: A large part of your work centers Black music traditions, church/Gospel and popular music(s). In particular, you use a concept, the "Black shout", that speaks to the performance and expression of
resistant insurgency to silence, signaling a queering and ungendering that renegotiates binaries of the body.
I was hoping you could talk about the Black shout a little, and use this concept to describe the past decade in music? How has it evolved or remained stagnant?
Jasmin: For me, the black shout is without form, and thus without genre (and also with many). If we think physics, and the concept of quantum entanglement there are two things happening on two sides of the same atom. They can be divergent and separate in life, expression from one another. If we think this with blackness we can also lean a little into thinking about the ways that the gospel itself has been shout insurgent and resistant to the western church while also considering how it has assimilated into western church/culture.
Let's talk about Kanye West here. Kanye has been open about 'old Ye' in comparison to his changed and evangelized present self. Old Ye had a shout that was insurgent and 'queer' in the concept that he deviated from stereotypical ideals of blackness and hegemony in display and musical expression. Current Ye desires that same shout, this same queer difference that he began with is now magnified just on the other side of the coin as a way of assimilating into the western culture he once claimed difference from.
What curates this transition? Who knows the specific answer. But what context makes this transition possible? Kanye knows very well the power of blackness, black music, black tradition and expression. He knows its entanglement which is that blackness is a force that is already ungendered and queer because its social conditioning and historic pre-text. With this knowledge, Ye knows his shout can assimilate while being divergent. Black musicians know that because blackness has been stripped of everything we have everything at our disposal.
So you'll often hear this assimilation into a major house, like Jay-Z's assimilation into the billionaire capitalist house while keeping his hair intentionally uncombed and nappy, and it creates confusion because folks conflate progressivism with assimilation. When really progressivism is directly linked to abolition. I think in many ways music has done both: linking abolition to progress and progress to assimilation. If you listen to projects now, the artist is directly telling you which side of this entangled shout they're on and you'll see that transition pretty vibrantly.
Another thing about the black shout is that it also allows for artists to make gospel more existential which removes the black church from its attachment to the walls of the church into alternative worlds of expression. Frank Ocean is good for this in his entire lucid monologue, Bad Religion. We can also see entanglement in his work in Godspeed with Kim Burrell, a devout gospel singer who has publicly rebuked queerness yet sings with a queer artist. His music always read to me as that walk down the center aisle of the church to the altar for baptism, queerness in tow, a resistant insurgency yet a significant assimilation into and out of the western church/culture/ worlds. You're seeing artists who have been raised by the church, and neglected by its teachings, make it accessible in the worlds beyond its walls.
Stanley: What are your top 3 albums that were released this decade and a little about them?
Jasmin: Mainstream:
D'angelo — Black Messiah
Robert Glasper — Black Radio
Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp a Butterfly tied with untitled unmastered (Sorry!)
Honorable Mention:
Solange — A Seat at the Table
I think these were the most reflective of the interiority of blackness in popular culture and I think that was the subliminal task of this decade. To combine matter with that mystic matter in the flesh of blackness. I think these works made the greatest attempt at that and in many ways are soundtracks to the chant 'Black Lives Matter' and also having to face blackness/black life after the protests, the burials, and imprisonment-so the life beyond the surface celebration. I think intimate celebration and grief met so dynamically in this decade. D'angelo's project is not given the timeliness credit it should be given. It dropped literally in the midst of black reprisal, in the wake of the court's ruling against Eric Garner's justice where the non-indictment was announced about a week and a half before the project's release. The temporality of that album will always be memorable for me. Robert Glasper's Black Radio project is a classic and it came right on time as well ending Black history Month in 2012, in the beginning of a series of protests and acts of resistance that would inspire Black Lives Matter. Lastly, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is what nearly kept these protests afloat. I recall that release happening in time where folks were weary of resistance. This is most evident in the beginning of the song, Alright, where Lamar says, "Alls my life I had to fight..." a phrase heard in black cinema and relative to the reality of that time. This song became a protest song heard in the streets where chants were replaced with dance, fellowship, celebration.
Stanley: What do you think the 2020s will sound like?
Jasmin: I'm constantly rooting for the underdog so I am hoping that more underground rappers can receive more validation in their work and what their work offers. I think, though, in the effort for hope and all its abandonment, folks may generate forms of expression that absolve them from that task of interiority in order to assimilate into more mainstream sounds. I also think that, on the other hand, folks will assimilate into their own interiority more and absolve themselves from that social and political awareness. I like, though, to see how artists strike that masterful balance between this and these kinds of works are so entrancing to me.I look forward to hearing more of Quelle Chris, r.a.p Ferreira (ruby yacht), Alice Smith, Brittany Howard, Michael Kiwanuuka, Thundercat, Anderson .Paak, Moor Mother, Helado Negro, and SiR. I'm excited to where these folks allow their work to take them and what they'll do to underground and mainstream worlds. I really want to see more artists who come from nothing and how they build with that as a resource in their expression.
