Festivals and Funerals / After the end of the world

It can be both too easy and to difficult to pick out what is world historical amidst a barrage of doom, defeat, and pessimism, the constant absorption of shock as a new norm. It now seems that the pandemic rolled out in the middle of what we can now understand as the Trump era: first as tragedy, then as tragic farce, the two elections of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Last night, as the US presidential election took place, I had a fever dream that I lived in the DDR, experienced, my dream notes say, as “a benevolent but spirit sapping simulacrum”, everything soundtracked to ‘Holiday for Strings’, which I think I heard the Sun Ra Arkestra play this weekend. 

In the waking world, yesterday, alongside the election result in the US, in Germany, a terror plot to establish a Nazi state. In Gaza, in Lebanon, the mass slaughter without end. In a talk on the Society of Black Composers, before the results of the election had come through, Harald Kisiedu opened by discussing the recent rise of the AfD in Germany, while noting that, in 1967, a survey suggested that seventy per cent of white Americans thought Civil Rights reforms were taking place at too quick a place. Sixty years on, from Trump to Björn Höcke, ‘remigration’ is the trope of the day. As Kisiedu suggested, the creolizing influence of Black music within German culture fostered during Weimer was one of the first targets of the newly legitimized Nazi regime, part of the creeping force of ‘degenerate art’. Today culture perhaps plays a less obvious role as target of fascist discourse. What musical culture do contemporary German fascists have? Schlager for days. Disco hymns to tolerance with their lyrics re-written to fascist ends, sung on holiday islands. That’s the fascist festival. Celebration of sadism. Celebration as sadism. At his rallies, Trump picks and choose any number of songs as if distinctions of genre or sound or tone have no real meaning, dances alone, as if dance itself were not a communal form but the disconnected moves of a man exercising a form of arbitrary, illogical power. “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. [sic] Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”

An email I received the other week asks whether, in such times, music is “spur for revolutionary consciousness” or instead for “self-preservation”? What kinds of community does it create? The music that claims--or perhaps, no longer even claims--to be the most revolutionary plays to the smallest audiences, and the music for mass audiences turns even the images of mass politics, mass resistance, into spectacle, colludes with dictatorial regimes, covers over, keeps up the charade of democracy (Julius Nyerere: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”) Here music is both powerless and, in a time of culture wars and the apparently serious use of the term ‘cultural Marxism’, (left-wing) culture is at once endowed with a seriousness and an impact it has not seemed to have for years and turned into a kind of hollow charade, a parade of within the increasingly totalized culture industry.  Thinking of Trump’s victory in the election, and the parade of stars, from Beyoncé to Cardi B, who came out in support of Kamala Harris, Harmony Holiday writes: 

I believe that, in a final assessment, when it’s all underground or sea, black music will be one of the only redeeming elements of this empire, the poetics of inevitability black music insists upon, so much [...] It is black music that governs the US, that gives it a legible pulse and makes it a real place and not a full time amusement park for disaster capitalism, but when that music grows too shallow and ‘popular’ to face its own heartbreak, and change, [it] starts pretending to be hard and declaring itself a winner of a race everyone is losing and limping through [...] You thought this was a party and not a funeral.

Festivals and funerals, the two terms on which Jayne Cortez’s poetry collection of that name turns, thinking of the funerals of leaders, of activists, of musicians she’d attended and witnessed and absorbed in the years of assassinations at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s: Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Coltrane. How to turn the funeral into the means for organizing, the spur to continue, rather than the dead end of grief, as Jackson put it shortly before his death in Blood on My Eye. 

People’s war is improvisation and more improvisation [...] Improvising on reality is the key principle underlying the building of a united left and raising the consciousness of the people. Even funerals can be used as an issue, since there will be so many of them. . . . [They] should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by. 

Today no one even speaks of people’s war, or of a united left for that matter, though improvisation is still an issue. But the question remains: how to prevent the funeral parade of American death and its global export from being presented as a festival, a celebration, ringing hollow as the last vestiges of this latest failure to prevent a Trump presidency are cleared away, the memes and tropes, Brat Girl Summer and the rest, and then how to prevent the reaction from sinking into a simple despair or a simple numbness, a seeming inevitably, each time a shock is felt its impact less keen. And to reckon with the fact that, for all the lies and manipulations, Trump’s election to power is token not simply because of election-mongering, voter fraud, the entire atmosphere of intimidation and violence, the billion-dollar power of right-wing tech bros, the Elon Musks of this world, the official and the unofficial media alike, not simply because of the crushing force of the oligarchy and the latter-day robber barons and their running dogs, but because people, voters, actively and sadistically desire these people to be in power, because people hate women, because people hate migrants, because of the sadism of that desire, whether on the part of the rich who vote in their own class interest, the feeling of strength in what is in fact classed and raced and gendered strength, or the illusory feeling of strength from those who vote against their own interests, the feeling of strength in what is in fact a condition of weakness, even at the cost of their unfreedom. How to fight that? How to go beyond it? If we are now living in what is, essentially, a fascist world, what do we do? These are both new and old questions.

When a US flag was flown during an Archie Shepp performance at the Donaueschingen Festival in the late ’60s--thus implicitly positioning Shepp as avatar of jazz as US imperial export, of Willis Conover or Nicholas Nabokov, of the Congress on Cultural Freedom, rather than that of his own politics, deeply opposed to US imperialism and domestic racism--Peter Brötzmann tore it down. And, as John Szwed recounts, during a concert in Central Park Ra’s Arkestra gave in Central Park: “At one point [...] the Arkestra hit a screaming space chord, and the large American flag stretched across the back wall of the band shell fell down. With that, Sonny abruptly ended the concert.”

As Ra famously put it, “it’s after the end of the world...don’t you know that yet?” After the end is where to begin. The end of history. The end of the idea of the end, that we have somehow transcended or gone beyond both the fascisms of the past and the freedom dreams of the past, those forbidden black and red dream of communism and socialism and abolition. The radical tradition, the continuity that preserves memory even in its transformation.  

A few days after the Brexit vote and a few months before the first Trump victory in June 2016, Sean Bonney wrote:

Nothing stops. Nothing speaks. [...] Now, a couple of days after the referendum, it looks like [the civil] war has started. It won’t be declared. Every declaration, every sentence spoken by every public figure has been a lie. [...] We’re deep inside the apocalypse now. 

What’s needed,

a collective effort to get us through to the other side. No sleep. No dreams. Just a grim determination to defeat those fascists who would murder us, to cast them intact into the hell of worms.

After the end of the world, within its ending. After the end, in the beginning.