I did not grow up going to church, and I am not a particularly religious person. A few days after the inauguration, I wandered into a nearby church and took a seat in the back pews.
I’d gone there right after the election. There was some time for anyone with anything on their mind to stand up and speak. If you need others to pray for you, just let us know. A middle-aged black man in a leather jacket got up and began telling us about an argument he was having with a friend on Facebook. It was about the election, but it was actually about the intractability of racism. He was getting frustrated while describing it to us, in part because he seemed to value being the cool and level-headed one. Plus he was describing the kind of argument millions of people were having on the Internet. “I just hope he finds peace,” the guy said. He paused, then put his hands on his chest. “On a lighter note, today would have been Jimi Hendrix’s seventy-fourth birthday.” He opened up his leather jacket to show everyone his Hendrix t-shirt. “I just wanted to say that, because he was just awesome.”
So I returned here, the day after marching through Manhattan with a poster that said “HOLD ON, BE STRONG.” I needed to be in a room that was powered by something other than hate–to be reminded of vision and purpose, even if they weren’t mine to claim. To listen to wisdom gleaned from a book I’ve never read, and pick and choose what I wanted. To hear others pour themselves into songs I never, ever sing along to. I wanted to steal their vibes.
Instead of a hymn, they passed out small pieces of paper with the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” This is not the type of church people come to for the music. The pianist started playing, and I remember thinking about how it felt like magic when I learned how to play those chords as a kid. I couldn’t believe we were doing this. We sang, tentatively at first, as though we could not believe these words in this space. Picture it: singing of “no heaven” and “no religion, too,” with humility and hope, inside a house of worship. It was like an admission that faith was inadequate. All we had was one another. “Imagine” is a song I’ve heard millions of times, the type of song that is so ubiquitous that we rarely bother scrutinizing its words, its vantage point, the possibility that someone wrote these words because he actually believed them. I sang along with a room of strangers, and we looked at one another, and, for the first time in months, I began to cry.
SOME VERSIONS OF THE NINETIES THAT WILL NEVER COME BACK THE WAY GRUNGE ENNUI HAS, BUT WERE SO POSSIBILITY-RICH TO ME BACK THEN Kicking Giant, This Being the Ballad of Kicking Giant, Halo: NYC/Olympia 1989-1993 Helium, The Dirt of Luck/The Magic City
LIKE MANY WHO LOVED “A STORM IN HEAVEN,” I OVERLOOKED THEM AT THE TIME Acetone, 1992-2001
SPEAKING OF THE NINETIES, LEECH MADE A MIXTAPE OF JUST THE FLOATY/DREAMY PARTS TAKEN FROM CLASSIC GOOD LOOKING/MOVING SHADOW SINGLES Leech, “Just the Liquid”
FOR THE COMEDOWN, DARK-ASS STUFF ASSEMBLED EXCLUSIVELY FROM SLIPKNOT SAMPLES Croww, Prosthetics
REISSUES, OR: WHEN I WAS A CHILD THERE WERE NO BETTER SONGS THAN THE ONES THAT PLAYED THROUGH TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE AND FOR SOME REASON THIS JOYOUS EP REMIND ME OF THAT SHEEN, THOSE HOOKS, THE PERFECT, THEATER-SIZED ECHO Om Alec Khaoli, Say You Love Me
BEST ALBUM-LENGTH METAPHOR FOR THE CITY, ITS LIMITATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES Wiki, No Mountains In Manhattan
SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE IT WAS DESCRIBED, JAMAICA VIA OUTER SPACE Equiknoxx, Colon Man
I LISTENED TO THIS ABOUT TEN TIMES, MY SENSE OF ENCHANTMENT GROWING AND GROWING EACH TIME, BEFORE REALIZING THERE WERE BARELY ANY DRUMS ON IT Mr. Mitch, Devout
YOU TRYING TO GET THE PIPE, TO PLAY IT, OF COURSE, AS PART OF AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPOSITION? Mary Jane Leach, Pipe Dreams
THERE’S A MOMENT DURING THAT BAD BOY DOCUMENTARY CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP WHERE IT BECOMES CLEAR THAT EVERYONE WHO WORKS CLOSELY WITH DIDDY EVENTUALLY TURNS TO GOD, AND IT WAS LIKE THE STRANGE OBVERSE OF Jay Z et al, 4:44 footnotes
“NOT ANOTHER GOT MORE SEOUL, UNLESS YOU KOREAN” (CHILLWAVE REMIX) Mogwaa, Deja Vu
“THE TING GOES SKRRRAHH, PAP, PAP, KA-KA-KA/SKIDIKI-PAP-PAP, AND A PU-PU-PUDRRRR-BOOM/SKYA, DU-DU-KU-KU-DUN-DUN/POOM, POOM, YOU DON’ KNOW” Big Shaq, “Mans Not Hot”
LIKE FALLING ASLEEP ON THE SUBWAY, OR A TRUCK HITTING A POTHOLE AND SPITTING OUT A RECORD COLLECTION, OR HEARING A NANOSECOND OF BRAND NUBIAN THROUGH SOMEONE’S HEADPHONES AS YOU PASS THEM ON THE STREET, IT’S A VIBE Standing on the Corner, Red Burns
What’s up everybody? I hope the new year is treating you well thus far and Orange Julius isn’t bringing you down too much. Things have been busy for me over the last couple of months. I left New York at the beginning of December, was in Japan for the better part of a month shortly after that, and finally getting settled into our new place back in Texas. As some of you know I’ve made a ‘career’ change and have been literally seeking greener pastures… Last May I started volunteering at a farm in Rockaway and it changed my life. My goal now is to start my own farm that feeds and nourishes the mind, body, and spirit (more details soon). With that said I will be traveling across the country and staying at different farms learning different techniques and practices. If you have any friends doing similar work, please let me know. I would love to meet other like minded homies.
As far as everything else goes, I am still DJing a bit but my focus has shifted. I obviously can’t completely turn my back on my first love and will continue to make mixes that fall in line with nourishing the spirit. That said, God’s Country 003 (not religious, I promise) is now available for streaming. The series, as most of my recent mixes have been, is a break from the club. Something much more subtle & delicate.
PS: I’ve quit Facebook for the time being and will be limiting my social media use to IG, Tumblr, Twitter, and Line. Please feel free to share the mix and let’s celebrate life together!
this morning I went into manhattan to sell some old records and acquire some new ones. a not-insignificant portion of my collection consists of records bought to mark moments, good and bad, and the last full day of obama’s presidency felt a worthwhile occasion. plus the forecast said it would be nice out today.
I decided to listen to janet jackson’s ‘rhythm nation’ on my way there. at the time – middle school? high school? – its singles were ubiquitous, each one an event, and, at the time, I had no sense that they were part of a coherent whole, especially one that was all dreamy and utopian.
today it sounded so distant yet so vital. and I was reminded of an interview I once did with michael k williams (best known for playing ‘omar’ on ‘the wire’) where he talked about his early aspirations to be a dancer. seeing the ‘rhythm nation’ video changed his life. he said:
“Rhythm Nation” spoke to my brokenness. The imagery. I looked at what the lyrics were saying in the beginning—she’s talking about how we are a nation, bound together by our beliefs, we are like-minded individuals working toward a world with no color lines, I believe she says. You have Tyrin Turner, little young brother, you know, dark skinned, you know, big lips, big nose, nappy headed, much like myself. He was stuck in this damp dreary warehouse trying to find his way out. And Janet came in there to let him know, You are not alone. She pulled him out of that dark, damp warehouse. And at that time, when I saw that video, that’s what my life felt like. My life felt like a dark, damp warehouse that I felt alone in. I was trapped in my own head. When I saw that video, the type of dancers she used—it wasn’t like everybody was showing their body, it wasn’t about being the sexiest. Everybody was in black, it was militant, she had tall, she had short, it just said to me, If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, if you tired of being a victim, if you want to stand up for what you believe in: come join me. If you want to be strong: come join me. The whole thing of wearing black. It just looked so strong. It was the first time I saw myself where I could be myself and still be strong. I gravitated to it.
at the time, all I could muster in response was something to the effect of “dope beat, too.”
I have always found Isaac Hayes’ twelve-minute version of “Walk on By” entrancing. It carries a sense of tragedy that the lyrics don’t warrant–and it’s irrationally long. At some point I learned that Hayes had recorded it after taking a year-long hiatus early in his career. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination–which he almost witnessed first-hand–had drained him of any desires to create.
It’s not that I began hearing Hot Buttered Soul as an elegy but it made sense to me that this album full of unusually long, meandering, beautifully redemptive songs had been produced under such awful circumstances. And then I remembered that a sample of “Walk on By” (and Hayes himself) provided the spine for “I Can’t Go To Sleep,” one of the Wu-Tang Clan’s most paranoid songs. Ghostface sobs; the record gets spun back, violently, as though trying to return to sometime else; Hayes is spectral, a guiding star. And there was King, too, in RZA’s half-lunatic, half-prophet verse: I can’t go to sleep, I can’t shut my eyes They shot the father at his mom’s building seven times They shot Malcolm in the chest, front of his little seeds Jesse watched as they shot King on the balcony Exported Marcus Garvey cause he tried to spark us With the knowledge of ourselves and our forefathers
Anyhow, both are songs I listen to on MLK Day (now that it’s way too creepy to listen to Bill Cosby’s “Martin’s Funeral”). Here are a few pages of a talk I gave like ten years ago where I tried to enunciate that sense of history and aspiration that I heard in “Walk on By”:
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“Walk on By” is the lead track off Isaac Hayes’ 1969 album Hot buttered soul. There is something unnerving about how long it is, by how it manages to be so deeply anguished and pained, yet how it manages to avoid feeling overwrought. There are no wasted gestures over the course of these twelve minutes, nothing that doesn’t sound completely and utterly essential to the full logic of the song. Perhaps this is why “Walk on by” has been sampled so frequently by hip-hop artists big and small, for it expresses so much in its shuddering organ riffs, swan-like glide of strings and shrapnel blast of guitar.
In the late 1960s, Hayes was a highly successful songwriter for Stax, the famed Memphis soul label which was the only real challenger to Berry Gordon’s Motown empire. While the label was never, like Motown, black-owned, Stax was a beacon of multiracial cohabitation, at a time when such a thing was still unusual, from its staff to its integrated backing bands, and they all toiled away in a tough, tough town.
On the afternoon of April 4, Hayes, who was primarily a songwriter, was on his way to the Stax studios to work on a Sam and Dave recording session. He had initially planned on fetching Sam and Dave’s sax player, who was staying at the Lorraine Motel, on the way to Stax. But at the last minute, his wife needed to use their car, so he called a cab instead and instructed the sax player to do the same and just meet him at the studio. Hayes heard about King’s assassination in the cab on this way to the studio. When he arrived, he heard the news. Devastation. That night, a curfew was imposed in Memphis, but those who were already at Stax were allowed to work through the night.
For his part, Hayes lost his ability to work at all. “It affected me for a whole year,” he later explained to the historian Rob Bowman in Bowmans’ remarkable Soulsville USA. “I could not create properly. I was so bitter and so angry. I thought, What can I do?”
Hayes took an indefinite hiatus, toying with the idea of retiring altogether. In 1969, after thinking about how becoming a successful artist would empower him to make a difference, he returned. But he did not pick up where he had left off, with the tepid jazz-inflected soul of Presenting Isaac Hayes, his 1968 solo debut. Rather, Hayes’ comeback album reimagined the process and craft of soul music, as well as the possibilities of the soul economy. Stax, as with all soul labels of the time, relied upon the seven-inch vinyl single. Soul albums were generally cobbled-together collections of previously released singles.
Hayes shuddered at the idea of constraining his craft to the two to three minute song form and he created an album which flaunted the convention of the single. Released in the summer of 1969, Hot buttered Soul featured Hayes and the Bar-Kays on only four tracks: an eighteen minute version of Glen Campbell’s 1967 hit “By the Time I get to Phoenix,” a twelve-minute version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By,” a nine minute track "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” and a five minute track by his musicians called “One Woman.”
Hayes explains: “When I did Hot Buttered Soul, it was a selfish thing on my part. It was something I wanted to do. I didn’t give a damn if it didn’t sell because I was going for the true artistic side, rather than looking at it for monetary value. I had an opportunity to express myself no holds barred, no restrictions, and that’s why I did it. I took artistic and creative liberties. I felt what I had to say couldn’t be said in two minutes and thirty seconds. So I just stretched (the songs) out and milked them for everything they were worth.”
In a very basic way, “By the Time” and “Walk on By” were characteristic of the trends of the time—most soul records at the time featured cover versions of songs one might today consider schmaltzy or safe—anyone who has browsed sixties albums knows of the ubiquitous funky cover of “Wichita Lineman.” But Hayes’ choice to make half of the songs on his comeback album these covers was bizarre, as was their expansive sitcom-length. What Hayes and the Bar-Kays did to these songs was an act of creative destruction. The songs were torn apart, note-by-note, limb-by-limb, and in place of the quotidian pop heartbreak of “Walk on By,” we are left with a nine minute exorcism that smolders and writhes, an epic mourning of a lost love supreme.
Hayes explains: “What it was, was the real me. I mean, okay, the real me had written those other songs but they were being written for other people. As for me wanting to express myself as an artist, that’s what Hot buttered Soul was. Although I was a songwriter, there were some songs that I loved, that really touched me. I wanted to do them the way that I wanted to do them. I took them apart, dissected them, and put them back together and made them my personal tunes. I took creative license to do that. By doing them my way, it almost made them like totally different songs all over again.”
Again, Hayes describes the songs as attempts to communicate something about form. These songs were a radical departure from mainstream R&B at the time, and Hayes essentially created the idea of the modern soul album, the hourlong statement of purpose-slash-dream world, with Hot Buttered Soul. These liberally defined “covers” swabbed these safe recognizable tunes in a historical moment of depression and longing, of a profound kind of heartbreak far grander than what most young lovers might recognize.
Drawing back, Hayes’ statements nest within a larger context of black and white ownership, for mere days before King’s assassination, Stax had been finalizing a deal to sell its assets to a Los Angeles corporation called Gulf and Western, which already had diverse holdings in the film and music industries. In the aftermath of King’s assassination, Hayes observes that he became more “rebellious. I was militant. When Dr. King was killed I flipped and I just did a lot of reevaluating…” Hayes spearheaded an effort to hire more local African Americans and to improve the working conditions of longtime Stax employees.
And implicit in all of this, I think, is a rejection of the trajectory of pop music as it then existed. The final instrumental breakdown takes five minutes—as long as two sturdy pop singles—and Hayes’ own vocals are probably the least memorable ingredient of the song. Instead, one is stung by Michael Toles’ savage guitar in the first ninety seconds, and haunted by the way Marvell Thomas’ triumphant, almost rapturous organ solo over the song’s last five minutes tries unsuccessfully to vanquish the song’s darkness. The song ends with a whimper, Thomas seemingly collapsing at the keys and Willie Hall banging out a stiffly efficient drum break that rattles to a weary close.
The history of culture is made solid through objects, records, books, speeches, but the image of a band in a recording session, that vision of democracy, of a struggle triumphant, is where the recovery of King began for Hayes–when depression was not a force that crippled but rather one of possibility, a pause for patient yet forceful deliberation.
Over the previous twelve minutes, Hayes and the Bar-Kays had poured themselves into the moment, and “Walk on By,” was an act of formal resistance smuggled within a safe pop title, changed everything. It imagines the possibility of resolution, partly because the song is allowed the space to meander and veer off path, to deal with both the beauty and hostility of the moment. There is the logic of the music itself—the interlocking of notes, the tightness of the rhythm section, the texture of the melody. And then there is the sense one gets, as a listener or as someone who has played in a band, that everything just feels right.
