Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity
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University of California Santa Cruz Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History of Consciousness by Jeramy DeCristo June 2015 The Dissertation of Jeramy DeCristo is approved: Professor David Marriott, Chair Professor Eric Porter Professor Gina Dent Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Dissertation Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: George W. Johnson and Phonautographic Differance: Blackness And the (Dis)figuring of the Human Voice 38 • Edisonian Reproduction and the Anxiety of the Human Voice 61 • George W. Johnson’s Phonography and the Cutting Hands of the Black Voice 76 Chapter 2: Bessie Smith and the Orthophonic Telepoesis of Electric Speech 106 • Bessie Smith and the Disputation of Technology and Technique 114 • Bessie Smith and the Poetics of Thingliness 123 • Orthophonics and the Electric Anatomization of the Black Voice 137 • When Talking Machines Make Their Masters Speak 148 Chapter 3: To Capture, Sound: Black Affective Soundscapes and The Legacy of the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet’s Sound 164 • “Sound Surfaces” and Surfaces of Difference 181 • “Ornette” and the Formal Gesture of the Proper Name 191 • Lyricism, Narrative and the Recording of the “Blues” (People) 200 • Blackness Ain’t Just “Blues:” The Little Suite’s Color Theory 205 • “Sound:” Improvisation and the Coalescence of Black Sonic Materiality 218 iii Chapter 4: Dub Aesthetics and the Work of Hassan Khan 226 • In the Studio 244 • Tabla Dubbs and the Sonic/Visual Echoic 250 • Blind Ambition: Dubbing with the “Acoustic Mirror” 264 Works Cited 271 iv Dissertation Abstract: Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity Jeramy DeCristo Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity is a critique of the tenants of the Western sonic avant-garde through black music. I engage African diasporic music as a critical site where the modernist distinction between human and technology is endlessly challenged and shattered. Early black recordings by George W. Johnson, Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Huddie Williams Ledbetter entered an epistemological nexus between the human and its mechanical double. The phonographic reproduction of black sounds: the prison blues, “coon songs,” simulated black lynching and early jazz recordings, was often enlisted to secure sentimental ideas of black inhumanity while affirming the prowess of sonic technologies. Yet, I argue that precisely through this impasse of the nonhuman, fugitive forms of black sonic experimentation were realized. I track how the emergence of experimental African diasporic musics in the 1960’s actually owes a dialogical debt to the recording conditions of earlier black artists. By mapping this experimental genealogy of black music I explore how black sounds bring to crisis the Eurocentric ideals of the human, the avant-garde and sonic technology. I examine the musical investigations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the 1960’s, the sonic experiments of Jamaican dub producers/engineers in the early 1970’s, and the contemporary sound art of African diasporic and post-colonial Arab artists, all of whom have reconfigured the racialized and colonial legacies of sonic technologies. Committee Members: David Marriott, Chair; Gina Dent; Eric Porter v For Charlene, my Mom (Marielena), Petey, Ollie and OG all your love, support and warmth vi Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity Then, there are all kinds of freedom, and even all kinds of spirits. We can use the past as shrines of our suffering, as poeticizing beyond what we think the present (the “actual”) has to offer. But that is true in the sense that any clear present must include as much of the past as it needs to clearly illuminate it. –Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same” It was the constellation of Mrs. Livingston’s voice from the other side; her hands knocking angrily against her son’s bedroom door, and the insistent hand of that 13 year old boy, Grand Wizard Theodore, pulling the record “Jam on the Groove”1 back and forth, back and forth that created the sound: the scratch.2 The “baby scratch” or just the scratch as it would have been known in 1976, involves pulling the record back against the record stylus, still in the groove, and then sliding it forward along the same groove at varying speeds and cadences to produce newly pitched or percussive sounds. Sounds that were in a way always there on the record, but were never heard.3 There are a set of forces, of energies; a set of relations of things in this story of Grand Wizard Theodore’s discovery of the “baby scratch” that are crucial to how we might 1 Listen to Ralph MacDonald’s “Jam on the Groove” from his first album Sound of a Drum, originally released as one album in 1976—when Grand Wizard Theodore is scratching it—and re-released in 1978 as a double album Sound of a Drum/Counterpoint. 2 While there are numerous retellings of Theodore Livingston aka Grand Wizard Theodore’s original moment of the creation of the scratching technique—by now a hip-hop legend of sorts—I take my rendering here from the version as obtained in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. New York: Grove Press, 1999, 224-225. Also see most notably Jeff Chang’s Cant’s Stop, Won’t Stop. New York: Picador, 2005 and Hebdige’s Cut n’ Mix. New York, NY: Routledge, 1987, for much more truncated though similarly iconic renderings of the invention of the scratch. 3 Here I am reminded of DJ Jazzy Jay’s comments in an interview about sampling and cutting: “Maybe those records were ahead of their time. Maybe they were made specifically for the rap era; these people didn’t even know what they were making at that time.” Cited in David Toop’s Rap Attack: African Jive to New York hip-hop. Boston: South End Press, 1984, 54. 1 understand blackness, and by extension, how we might understand sound in modernity. As Grand Wizard Theodore narrates it, the birth of the scratch begins as much with the “modernist fantasy”4 of the individual black (child) genius—with “Miles” or “Michael”—as it does with the symbolic and sonic force of his mother, Mrs. Livingston and her voice. I used to come home from school and try to practice and try to get new ideas…This particular day I was playing music a little bit too loud. And my moms came and like [banging on the door] boom, boom, boom, boom. ‘If you don’t cut that music down…’ So she had the door open and she was talking to me and I was still holding the record, and my earphones were still on. And while she was cursing me out in the doorway, I was still holding the record—‘Jam on the Groove’ by Ralph McDonald—and my hand was still going like this [back and forth] with the record. And when she left I was like, ‘What is this?’ So I studied it and studied it for a couple months until I actually figured out what I wanted to do with it. Then that’s when it became a scratch.5 Grand Wizard Theodore also provides an appendix to this interviewer’s question: “So your mom invented scratching?” “Yeah, God bless my mama.” Grand Wizard Theodore’s narrative might initially be misunderstood as the kind of Newtonian fantasy of self-affirming scientific discovery that dominates the individualist and corporatist narratives of sonic innovation in the West and the Western avant-garde; the Kantian individual genus whose innovation precedes judgment and understanding 4 Here I have stolen the words of Hassan Khan, Cairean sound/text/visual artist. I will continue to steal his words, until he steals them back, and I know he will. I will discuss his work more explicitly in Chapter 4.. 5 Originally interviewed in Brewster and Broughton, 224-225. Additionally, it is worth nothing that Theodore repeats this narrative almost verbatim in the documentary film Scratch, replete with the “boom, boom, boom,” the onomatopoeias of his mother. Scratch. DVD. Directed by Doug Pray. 2002; New York, NY: Palm Pictures, 2002. 2 because they are simply part of the nature to which they return.6 Yet, Grand Wizard Theodore’s appendicle attribution of the scratch to his mother and his, perhaps more subtle, revelation of the sonic interchange, that is the ensemblic rendering of their sound—here onomatopoeticized in the “boom, boom, boom” and signified in his mother’s cursing—recognizes a profound materiality, a social materiality, through and against which black sounds are constituted. The audible dissemblance yet social resonance between Mrs. Livingston’s knocking and the sound of the scratch disrupts the anti-pedagogical, anti-social notion of nature from which individual genius is thought to emerge and to which it is thought to return. Grand Wizard Theodore and his mother cultivate a black sonic materiality that initiates the abolition of sonic innovation in the West as the singularity of genius. Through the normative materiality of Grand Wizard Theodore’s bedroom door and the indexical grooves of Ralph McDonald’s record a new materiality is produced; sound blurs the phonic and ideal borders of the bodies in the room and a new sound, a new materiality emerges. This black sonic materiality troubles the normative conditions under which the Western sonic avant-garde and its complementary regime of Western technological progress have been produced and theorized in terms of reproduced sound and composition. The contrapuntal nature of Grand Wizard Theodore’s narrative and its sonic force, which harmonizes and resonates with a whole host of sounds, words, gestures and operations by prior black musicians and artists: George W.