#frank wilderson

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation

From Afropessimism: An Introduction

Violence against the slave sustains a kind of psychic stability for all others who are not slaves.

What Orlando Patterson does is shows that what slavery really is, is social death. In other words, social death defines the relation between the slave and all others. Forced labor is an example of the experience that slaves might have, but not all slaves were forced to work. So if you then move by saying that slavery is social death, by definition, then what is social death? Social death has three constituent elements: One is gratuitous violence, which means that the body of the slave is open to the violence of all others. Whether he or she receives that violence or not, he or she exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability. This vulnerability is not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law, as in going on strike with the worker. The other point is that the slave is natally alienated, which is to say that the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and afilial relations—the capacity to have families and the capacity to have associative relations—may exist very well in your head. You might say, “I have a father, I have a mother,” but, in point of fact, the world does not recognize or incorporate your filial relations into its understanding of family. And the reason that the world can do this goes back to point number one: because you exist in a regime of violence which is gratuitous, open, and you are openly vulnerable to everyone else, not a regime of violence that is contingent upon you being a transgressed worker or transgressing woman or someone like that. And the third point is general dishonor, which is to say, you are dishonored in your very being— and I think that this is the nature of Blackness with everyone else. You’re dishonored prior to your performance of dishonored actions. So it takes a long time to build this but in a nutshell that’s it. And so that’s one of the moves of Afro-pessimism. If you take that move and you take out property relations—someone who’s owned by someone else—you take that out of the definition of slavery and you take out forced labor, and if you replace that with social death and those three constituent elements, what you have is a continuum of slavery-subjugation that Black people exist in and 1865 is a blip on the screen.

One of the points that Patterson makes at a higher level of abstraction is that the concept of community, and the concept of freedom, and the concept of communal and interpersonal presence, actually needs a conceptual antithesis. In other words, you can’t think community without being able to register non-community. ..This is the function that slavery presents or provides to coherence .... In other words, there is a global consensus that Africa is the location of sentient beings who are outside of global community, who are socially dead. That global consensus begins with the Arabs in 625 and it’s passed on to the Europeans in 1452. Prior to that global consensus you can’t think Black.

...And Gramsci began to theorize: between working class suffering and state violence and state institutionality there’s this thing called civil society which captivates the workers—in other words, induces a kind of spontaneous consent to the values of capital. Guild associations, schools—today it would be talk shows, but not this talk show of course [laughter]—and he began to theorize that what Lenin meant by hegemony, which is the domination of imperialist countries over countries that are trying to evolve into a kind of revolutionary dispensation, is different than what he needed to develop his theory of hegemony and so he came up with three constituent elements: influence, leadership, and consent. By influence, leadership, and consent he means the influence of the ruling class—not the influence of one person or another, but the influence of a class—the leadership of its ideas—which is to say the idea of meritocracy, which was a very bad idea for a Marxist—and the consent of the working class to that influence and those ideas. What he sought to do was to find ways to break the spontaneous consent to those ideas. Once he could break the spontaneous consent to those ideas, then the working class of a Western, so-called devout country like Italy would be able to see what Marxists think of as the antagonism between them and the ruling class. Then it would move from a passive revolution to a real revolution, which would be a violent overthrow of the state

Well, one of the things that Orlando Patterson points out is that any stratified society—by that he means for example a capitalist society—only comes into being through a kind of pre-history of violence—the violence that it takes to move from feudalism to capitalism. But once the state of capitalism is set up the violence goes into remission. But then he goes on to say that what’s interesting about the slave estate—the slave estate is actually a phrase from the Black feminist Hortense Spillers—or the slave relation is that the violent pre-history of the slave relation carries over and becomes the concurrent dynamic of the current history of slavery. And that is really, really profound. It is so profound, that it’s traumatic and painful even for Black politicos and Black writers and you see the pain of that coming through in slave narratives.

In Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, he’s negotiating between two dynamics: one is negrophilia—“I just love Black people, I love Black music, I want to sleep with them, I want to be around them…”—and one is negrophobia—“Yeah you can come over to my crib but don’t bring your friends.” And so, what he’s saying is that the psychic arrangement of the collective unconscious is manifest with the push/pull in the collective unconscious between negrophilia and negrophobia. It’s not important how that gets worked out. 

[homonationalist]

Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory of more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta-aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true. If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structural inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hobbled by a meta-aporia: a contradition that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action—Black people are the wrench in the works. Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers' agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left—think Bernie Sanders—because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of social, political, or national redemption. This crisis, no, this catastrophe, this realization that I am a sentient being who can't use words like "being" or "person" to describe myself without the scare quotes and the threat of raised eyebrows from anyone within earshot, was crippling.

Frank B. Wilderson III from "For Halloween I Washed My Face" in Afropessimism (2020)

[yngsuk]

Aria Dean: Are there terms, programs, or movements that exist that can usefully absorb Afropessimist theory into their functionings? Maybe this can also be asked this way: Can Afropessimism commingle and be combined with other theories and programs such as Marxism, Poststructuralism, Accelerationism, New Materialism, etc. without being itself polluted and totally compromised? Frank B. Wilderson III: I think that commingling is happening and it’s the kiss of death. It’s like the demonstrations in places like Portland and Minneapolis: they start off as insurrectionist projects authorized by Black grammars of suffering and end up being about all kinds of other shit, like White suffering, White exhibitionism, non-Black immigration issues, and how to make the police accountable rather than how to destroy the police. They do to Afropessimist rage what White boys in the suburbs do to hardcore rap, what White folks did to jazz. They use the intensity of Black affect to mobilize the agendas of Human desire. When Professor Patrice Douglass was in one of my seminars, as a graduate student, she asked, “How do we keep Afropessimism Black?” I was so shocked by the question that I had to pause. I said, “We can’t because we possess Afropessimism no more than we possess our flesh. To paraphrase Hortense Spillers, we are always already beings for the captor. And the way of our intellectual labors will, ultimately, go the way of our aesthetic labors, which go the way of our flesh.”

— Frank B. Wilderson III in conversation with Aria Dean

[the-everqueen]

realizing that what bothers me about having boundaries convos with the colleague is it’s like reading wilderson: if i express discontent with the implications of what she said, she will argue that’s not inherent to her words, and actually i’m making up an issue to get upset about in order to derail her criticism. like a deflection of responsibility. except that the implications DO matter, esp. when they reproduce a gendered and racialized violence! i am not interested in arguing which of us is More Oppressed, i want you to treat me like a person and not a construct!

[fluoresensitive]

WE CUT HEADS, a reading guide to yah yah's sweeney todd retelling

Some books I've read/will be reading to help me write We Cut Heads! I definitely expect this this will grow, but these are the ones on my mind right now. The ones I've read already are italicized!

THOSE BONES ARE NOT MY CHILD by Toni Cade Bambara

WE REAL COOL: BLACK MEN AND MASCULINTY by bell hooks

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS by Franz Fanon

AFROPESSIMISM by Frank B. Wilderson III

TENDER IS THE FLESH by Agustina Bazterrica

NO LONGER HUMAN by Osamu Dazai

MACBETH by William Shakespeare

SONG OF SOLOMON by Toni Morrison

THE DELECTABLE NEGRO: HUMAN CONSUMPTION AND HOMO-EROTICISM WITHIN U.S. SLAVE CULTURE by Vincent Woodard

THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison

FROM HELL by Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell

THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair

[widefuturesss]

The Widefuturesss drive has just been updated with the following texts: The Future is Black (2021), Black and Blur by Fred Moten, Ontological Terror by Calvin L. Warren, Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson, The Position of the Unthought by Saidiya Hartman & Frank b. Wilderson and an anonymous text: Black Armed Joy - Some Notes Towards a Black Theory of Insurrectionary Anarchy.

[t4t4t]

I have much interest in Afropessimism, and only know Merricatherine through following her on Twitter in 2020 and seeing her takes on Afropessimism/BLM/being native/indigenous and black/etc. She hasn't posted much, a thing here and there, on her Medium, but not much thru anything else. She's probably on something I'm not aware of.

The piece "Introduction to the 4th World" didn't get much positive response, perhaps it wasn't argued well, although I don't necessarily agree with all it has to say, and I don't necessarily only post things that I agree with 100%. I find its further reading section interesting, it appears many asking for further reading didn't notice that section.

I have more fondness and interest in Afropessimism than 4th-Worldism, and the connection there isn't always made by either of them. I have more interest in Frank Wilderson than Merricatherine, but I have found her and her work interesting to remember and think about sometimes.

I wonder what 3rd-Worldists or MLs would say about Afropessimism.

[letters-to-rosie]

so I feel like I'll be wrestling with this forever

This pageantry of strike/counterstrike that ensues throughout Nancy Jane Smith’s interrogation betrays a proclivity to imagine political conflict, which is to say “affilial” (meaning, political and institutional) struggles, through filial (meaning, family) frames. Questions of citizenship and state power that would ordinarily be categorized as affilial dilemmas, questions of institutional power, are displaced onto questions that would ordinarily be categorized as filial, questions of family loyalty. The interrogation weaves a tapestry of articulations, “connections, transfers and displacements,” between affilial frames of reference and filial frames of reference in which the stability of the White family becomes hegemonic throughout the interrogation, while questions of political power (Nixon’s war machine and the scourge of capitalism) become secondary, at best. What this framing mobilizes is a deep unconscious saturation and naturalization of White family authority as state authority, wherein “characteristics of the family are projected onto the social environment” in such a way as to allow for “no disproportion between the life of the [White] family and the life of the [state].” (Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism)

[cosmicanger]

“white people are not simply “protected” by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.”

— Frank B. Wilderson III

“All White people are the police; and all White “civilians”—-if we can even deploy such irony—will continue to deputized their Whiteness to murder Black bodies at their own discretion and leisure.”

[notasapleasure]

Second time in a day I'm getting fucked up views on Irishness on my dash???

If you're tempted to believe the assertion that the discrimination against the Irish can be equated with the discrimination faced by Black people in the wake of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I recommend this article:

Here's the abstract if you don't like clicking:

Much Victorian Irish studies has followed the Americanist Noel Ignatiev's famous claim that the Irish “became white” upon migration to the United States, whereas they had not been in the context of the United Kingdom. This article argues, in contrast, that an emphasis on the undeniable racialization of Irish poverty and politics can distract us from an important truth: nineteenth-century Irish people, in Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, were broadly understood as white, and “Celticness” was not in any serious or widespread way treated as equivalent to Blackness, although that did not stop some nineteenth-century Irish advocates from drawing that misleading analogy. Drawing upon cultural and anthropological work of the mid-nineteenth century, from Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle, and John Mitchel to Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and the caricaturists of Punch to Frederick Douglass, this article proposes that the implication that nineteenth-century Irishness was cognate to Blackness—or the Irish experience a version of the Black experience—represents the epistemological and ethical error that Frank B. Wilderson III has called “the ruse of analogy” that we must interrogate more critically lest we, in Wilderson's formulation, enact a “mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness's grammar of suffering.”

A quote from within the article that gives a succinct idea of things too:

None of this should obscure the fundamental point, which is that nineteenth-century caricaturists, in both prose and image, turned to racist stereotypes of Black and other nonwhite people in order to mock whites who—for whatever reason—came under critique. After all, the deprecatory rhetorical alignment of the Irish with nonwhite people was frequently rather scattershot: the Irish-born (but London-based) royal physician James Johnson, giving an account of his early 1840s “tour in Ireland,” describes Killarney guides as “an amusing race” who “swarm about the hotels like the Hindoos and Mahomedans on the beach at Madras,” Cashel as “a city of wig-wams inhabited by Titanians,” and the “Hibernian” as “like a Mahomedan Cadi.” He declares that “the murders of this county [Tipperary] would disgrace the most gloomy wilds of the most savage tribes that ever roamed in Asia, Africa, or America.” For all of Johnson's racialized rhetoric, this is not a serious attempt at racial taxonomy but rather the deployment, in the interest of evocative insult, of whatever racist stereotype of nonwhite persons comes to hand. As David Theo Goldberg states more generally, “The charged atypicality of the Irish or Jews in the European context . . . is comprehended and sustained only by identifying each respectively with and in terms of the conjunction of blackness, (European) femininity, and the lumpenproletariat.” That says far more about the largely unquestioned ideologies of anti-Black racism than about prejudice toward, for example, deliberately disparaged subsets of whites.

[dizzymoods]

Jack Probiotic tried to infiltrate the pro-Palestinian DNC march and was spotted immediately. Jack is a right opportunist who is using the anti-israel sentiment to launder antisemitism and america first nazi ideology, like Nick Fuentes who is similarly marked as a right opportunist. Commies online have consistently warned about such people for reasons like this. So people either know not to interact with them or disrupt their disruptions. This is important work.

Jackson Hinkle, who worked as an intern for Nancy Pelosi and for Tulsi Gabbard, a former member of civilian outreach team 351 CACOM FxSP and currently head of the literal US pysop 440th Civil Affairs Battalion has been identified as a federal asset to (initially) make communism seem like a reactionary white supremacist front but recently post 7 Oct to associate pro-Palestinian sentiment as white supremacist by using anti-imperialism, Marxist concepts, etc with veiled anti-semintism (globalist, elitist, Soros, ZOG are his favorite words; hangs out with Alex Jones). His rise as the biggest voice for Palestine on twitter was obviously astroturfed. His useful idiot puppets Infrared Haz (aka the MAGA Communism guy), Midwestern Marx, and their joint operation the American Communist Party have been identified and as such and all major us commie parties are aware of them.

Commies have dedicated twitters to expose these people's grift. And there are commies who occasionally interact with these fed's tweets to demonstrate how they're are bastardizing Marxist concepts, selectively quoting passages, and so forth.

I say this to say, that this is what principled, organized, serious people do. They state their aims clearly and purge/ostracize elements that of right opportunism, chauvinism, and fed co-optation.

So is it a surprise that the afropessimists, whose message rhymes with empire's anyway, are engaging with clear hasbarist accounts? That lay people who retweet hasbara accounts also retweet afropessimist accounts.

Which isn't to say that feds/hasbarists are paying the afropessimists to be like that. But rather that AP is not a serious movement bc they arent doing work to separate themselves from imperialist co-optation of their lil anti-black concept.

When we say that AP is reactionary this is what mean: it's comfortability being used as imperial propaganda. Frank Wilderson says his mission is to skewer the sacred cows of the left, Palestinian liberation being the fattest, is academic posturing though should nevertheless be understood as a real intention. Especially given how hasbarists, who get paid by engagement, recycle and repackage AP talking points and the APs are not demonstrating this process of co-optation. Some are actively, positively engaging with the content (like datelinefam, an account made in oct 2023 which posted a black elder talking dumb about Palestine).

Empire will try to take anything to steer the conversation toward a radical liberal re-stating of the status quo in progressive even revolutionary terms. So it's not that AP is being co-opted. Communism has been co-opted. But as I laid out earlier, communists have worked since 7 october to identify, expose, and root out these elements.

[realistian]

Pleading the Fifth Element: Disaesthetics and Hip Hop as Black Study

[homonationalist]

At one point Sameer spoke of being stopped and searched at Israeli checkpoints. He spoke in a manner that seemed not to require my presence. I hadn't seen this level of concentration and detachment in him before. That was fine. He was grieving. "The shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body," he said. Then he added, "But the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew." The earth gave way. The thought that my place in the unconscious of Palestinians fighting for their freedom was the same dishonorable place I occupied in the minds of Whites in America and Israel chilled me. I gathered enough wits about me to tell him that his feelings were odd, seeing how Palestinians were at war with Israelis, and White Israelis at that. How was it that the people who stole his land and slaughtered his relatives were somehow less of a threat in his imagination than Black Jews, often implements of Israeli madness, who sometimes do their dirty work? What, I wondered silently, was it about Black people (about me) that made us so fungible we could be tossed like a salad in the minds of oppressors and the oppressed? I was faced with the realization that in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people. What they share is a largely unconscious consensus that Blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim. At one moment Blackness is a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon; at another moment Blackness is a sentient implement to be joyously deployed for reasons and agendas that have little to do with Black liberation. There I sat, yearning, in solidarity with my Palestinian friend's yearning, for the full restoration of Palestinian sovereignty; mourning, in solidarity with my friend's mourning, over the loss of his insurgent cousin; yearning, that is, for the historical and political redemption of what I thought was a violated commons to which we both belonged—when, all of a sudden, my friend reached down into the unconscious of his people and slapped me upside the head with a wet gym shoe: the startling realization that not only was I barred, ab initio, from the denouement of historical and political redemption, but that the borders of redemption are policed by Whites and non-Whites alike, even as they kill each other. It's worse than that. I, as a Black person (if person, subject, being are appropriate, since Human is not), am both barred from the denouement of social and historical redemption and needed if redemption is to attain any form of coherence.

Frank B. Wilderson III from "For Halloween I Washed My Face" in Afropessimism (2020)

[yngsuk]

[I]f Afropessimism can do anything that is not diagnostic [...] it gives people permission to be iconoclastic with their imagination. And I think that’s really important. Because it gives us permission to burn down police stations and treat it like a pagan bonfire. Back in the day when I was a teenager, Weather Underground criticized the Black Liberation Army (BLA) for killing a police officer. Before they fled the scene the BLA danced around his body, and that for me, even more than the assassination of the cop, is the Afropessimist moment: is the moment of the joy of dancing around this cop’s body. And it was precisely that which turned off the White Left. “How gratuitous!” Well, I say, no! Or maybe it was gratuitous, but so what; the dance brought unfettered joy where the White Left would want no more than the realpolitik of dealing with the pigs—a rational undertaking that killed a racist cop while simultaneously catalyzing the death of Black desire.

— Frank B. Wilderson III in conversation with Aria Dean

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #21: Andrew Mbaruk

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

I’m Andrew Mbaruk, a Black poet living in Vancouver, Canada. I make "literary lo-fi rock rap," drawing from my diverse reading of poetry and classic literature for the "literary" aspect; – it’s "lo-fi" due to the imperfect sound quality, "rock" as the music predominantly features electric guitars, and "rap" because, if I had to use just one genre to categorize it, it’d be rap–I’m obviously rapping in the songs.

On one of my songs I describe my style as “assistant-professorial and janitorial”--it’s a blend of literary, academic, and philosophical elements with a touch of real-life experiences, viewed through my postmodern/modernist collage aesthetic.

Some of my recent albums are Why I Am Not a Painter (a 2023 song anthology), Black Squirrel: A Memoir (an autobiographical album through Extraordinary Rap), and Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album (centered around birds). Collaborations include Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence with Rhys Langston, Papier-Mache Chalet with Th’ Mole, Ultraviolet Flamingo with Vellum Bristol or Jouquin Fox, and Hip-Hop, With a Twist of Lemon with Mantis the Miasma.

Currently, I’m working on a series of lo-fi rock rap albums, each titled Abolish Canada. Abolish Canada [1] and Abolish Canada [2] are already available on my Bandcamp page.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I write whenever I’m awake and in the mood, which is often at home. This could be in the middle of the night or just as frequently in the afternoon. Currently, I find myself in the writing room...surrounded by books... On my desk are three old dictionaries and a book of selected poems by Wallace Stevens, alongside an energy drink can and crumpled papers... Scattered throughout the room are various poetry books, and books on theory and philosophy, from Marx and Hegel to Frank B. Wilderson III and David Marriott... These books are mostly on a couch doubling as a larger desk, and atop an old synthesizer from the 1980s... On the floor stand an electric guitar and amp, alongside pedals and tangled cords at my feet... Two walls are giant windows, one of which is usually open even in winter (I’m often smoking). I’m undisciplined, though I still write almost daily – though there’s the occasional lapse, like these past few days...

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

During 2017-2018, I primarily used pen and paper for my writing. But, since then, I’ve transitioned to typing most of my raps on a computer. Occasionally I’ll compose a verse while walking, relying on my Android. The inconvenience of keeping verses in my head until I can write them down...that’s a problem I face during work shifts – cleaning Vancouver’s streets, e.g....and one song I crafted mentally while washing dishes at a burger bar. Using a recording medium like paper or a word processor is best though – it allows me to carefully consider connections between different parts of a verse, because I have the entire composition visible on a page or on a screen.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I used to have a more disorganized writing style, especially in the first few years of this rapping project... Initially, I didn't even see my work as a part of rap. It was only when I started collaborating with other rappers and producers that I began to structure my writing in bars.

While there are still moments when I write in a more formless manner, I stick to a more regular form these days, lines that last four beats. Typically, I'll create four lines that rhyme (using slant rhymes) entirely parallel to each other:

(e.g., “abnegating dactylic hexameter his vacation, a trip with dead passengers the Latin pages of literate Sapphic verse as the painting's acrylic red flags ablur”),

followed by another set of four, or maybe a couplet or two

(in this case, “as heroin mixed with the China White terror, his literary dynamite exposing the Pindaric champion; explosions, the thin shards of glass in him”),

and then another quatrain or couplet, or sometimes a set of six or eight rhyming lines, or sometimes more...and so on.

I never thought I'd become so formal or strict in my approach. I've always been inclined towards poetry that adheres to (for example) Charles Olson’s "projective verse", but surprisingly, weirdly, this structured approach is working for me now.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

It’s different with every verse and song. Sometimes I’ll finish the entire thing and throw it out/delete it. Usually some part of the aborted material returns in a new form. I work in a "collage" style and see my rhymes as Deleuzian rhizomes, so I can easily connect my rhymes like Lego... It’s totally acceptable within my project to incorporate disparate fragments – unless the lyrics are focused by a constraint, as on my album about birds (Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album) or the one about the Iran-Contra scandal (The Iran-Contra Project).

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I’ve written poetry, fiction, a screenplay... The rapping basically grew out of my experiments with print poetry – I started making poems called "phonotexts," recorded poems, in 2014... I made a spoken word album called Phono=textual: a novel in mono... It took about three years for these "phonotexts" to become rap songs.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I try to edit as I write, then I'll record the thing, sometimes using some instrumental that I'm not actually going to use – just to hear it, so I can edit it some more. Then I record the song immediately. It usually takes a few hours or an evening.

Sometimes I work on a song for a few days.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I begin with the words and a rhythm usually... I write lyrics, then I make the drums, then I record the verse or verses, then finally I'll add guitars and synthesizer and whatnot.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

I usually begin with one small idea, just a line or a few words, and I grow a verse or verses from the one idea through free association, playing with meaning and rhyme. I’m often propelled by chance, but just as often propelled by a thematic goal, and this can change midway through writing.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I’ve sneaked sonnets into my raps, and I’ve invented something called “rhyme chiasmus” (a rhyme scheme where two rhyming sounds are repeated in a chiastic pattern for many bars) but I’m usually freer.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

The song "Electrons," track 01 of Abolish Canada [1]...though it goes on a bit too long I think, the bit right at the beginning is very good maybe. That song, and in fact the entirety of Abolish Canada [1]... That’s where I’ve most closely achieved much of what I intend with my words.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

My lines make their meaning through the relation to other lines. So, my favourite passage in my writing – "the human soul stuck in your body / fluent in post-structural ornithology” – is shaped by what surrounds it.

The song is called "Under the Oiseau=text." It’s about reading and about birds. And about reading birds as signs, an ancient practice.

I thought of these words because a bird, a pigeon, rose flapping before me as I walked along Commercial Drive in Vancouver. I decided to make an album about birds in that moment, and began writing "Under the Oiseau=text" as soon as I got home. Here’s the lyric in its context:

sans serif, these words upon my gravestone bearing the withered flower tossed - the Baudelairean inner albatross, the human soul stuck in your body fluent in post-structural ornithology . . .  . . .his words draw you a map of the geographer perched upon a branch in the binoculars, this scholar of math as it pertains to flight, the neurographer mapping the brain with light

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I shorten lines and always try to do verses in a single take.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Afropessimism, John Ashbery’s poetry, nature, the congressional report on the Iran-Contra scandal, and the letter N. Also, I collect and read dictionaries.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

Some of my stuff I dig especially, other stuff I’m okay with, most of the stuff I don’t like no one can hear anywhere. Grand Lunatic I’m not crazy about, Andra Mbalimbali I’m not crazy about, Neuro=textual: a novel of ideas is not my favourite of my albums. From late in 2022 and throughout 2023, that stuff I like – though I’m on the fence about some projects like Black Squirrel and The Iran-Contra Project. The earlier stuff evinces potential realized by Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album and Abolish Canada [1]... That’s how I see things.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Rappers who depend less on rhyme and just say really interesting shit, like AKAI SOLO or my friend Jouquin Fox, I can’t do that. I tried using a little less rhyme on The Iran-Contra Project, my concept album about Iran-Contra, and I’m sure I can’t do that. The constraint of rhyme is essential to my style.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

Yes, I am trying to communicate many things to the listener. I am saying nothing specifically, and consequently saying many different things. (Any one of these different things I could write about at length, but it has been recommended to me that I just leave it at “I am saying nothing specifically, and consequently saying many different things” – nice and succinct.)

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: unknown (hit me up)

[deadtothefuture]

“Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a ‘program of complete disorder.’”

– Frank B. Wilderson III, "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal"