Читать книгу Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now - Andre Perry - Страница 11

American Gray Space

1

“Nigger music,” he said.

He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “That sounds fascinating. I’ve got to come see that sometime.”

San Francisco hipsters filled the corners of the dark apartment. Outside, a light rain came down around the city. Conversations oscillated between fashion and music. I could have talked to so many people but I had chosen this skinny musician who had tried to French kiss me earlier. In that moment, he seemed like a true artist to me—someone who created, revised, destroyed, and rebuilt in an effort to understand the world. And, he played nigger music. Was it a travesty or a triumph that this skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed white guy had so comfortably described his band’s style of music to me, a skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed black guy, as none other than “nigger music”? He apparently didn’t know what else to call it. He said that his rock band, Mutilated Mannequins, constructed lyrical diatribes on racism, pairing them with gripping art-rock freak-outs. He was so sincere, calm, and honest. His eyes homed in on me, his confidence unwavering. His philosophies unfolded: “We are doing important shit, man. Rethinking the whole world. The whole fucking paradigm.”

He went on describing his music. After some time his words echoed listlessly like the distant pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill. I thought about punching him in the neck. I was in a state of existential shock. Lifting up from my body I considered that I needed to spend less nights like this: 26 years old, going to work, making music, barely sleeping, and then going out just to hear someone talk about nigger music. The enduring question lingered: would it ever be possible for a non-black person to throw around the word nigger in a non-malicious sense? Does the weight of such a word truly vary with context or is it a shotgun shell whenever it gets fired into the air? And, damn, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out how they’re shooting. Former NAACP representative Julian Bond said that the 2nd Civil Rights Movement will be harder because the “Whites Only” signs have been taken down. Yet their shadows remain firmly placed to doorways and water fountains. How do you challenge a ghost when you can’t even touch it?

I visited the University of Virginia when I was 19. I was a freshman studying at Princeton but I joined some friends for a road trip. The campus stood as a memorial to Thomas Jefferson— political leader, slave owner, and sexual violator. I stumbled down fraternity row, drunk and foggy, beneath a warm blanket of Gentleman Jack Daniel’s. I had chased down the whiskey with half a case of Natural Light. Then I had lost my friends at the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house. That was the place where they tossed couches from the second-floor balcony when they got bored.