Sound as Shelter
Portraits of Home in Black Music
“…as I began to get into the history of the music, I found that this was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people…the music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life…the music was an orchestrated, vocalized, hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, corollary confirmation of the history…the music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music. And that both were expressions of and reflections of the people!”- Amiri Baraka, Blues People (1963)
I spend a lot of my life trying to conceptualize what freedom can be for those of us who call the diaspora home. How do we become free in places we were forced to inhabit, on soil we may never have stepped food on if not for through force? Essentially, I’m trying to answer the question “what would home mean to me, without regard to whiteness, colonization, slavery, and its afterlives?” And then it clicked. Maybe I wasn’t asking the wrong question but thinking about it all wrong. Maybe home and how we conceive it is not tied to a physical place. Maybe it’s not the place(s) we were brought to, nor the conditions we’ve found ourselves in, that constitute what home can be. I don’t think there’s a singular answer to be found, but I did find a tool to think through it: music. Music is the tool we’ve used for centuries to both understand and communicate where we’ve been, where we are, and where (hopefully) we’re going. It has, both figuratively and literally, been the score for this journey we’ve found ourselves on. In the words of my best friend, music has allowed us to make places that were not our home, our home. It has allowed us to plant our feet where we are and capture what we thought was lost, time and time again. It’s our north star. It’s my north star.
i. Ascension
“Shouldn't I realize
You're the highest of the high
If you don't know, then I'll say it
So don't ever wonder…” - Musze
On the dance floor at my parents’ wedding during the mother-son dance I was notified of seconds before it happened. On countless road trips in one of my mom’s many Honda Accords (pick one: ‘94, ‘99, ‘07, ‘18), just the two of us. Her singing to me as I laid in the NICU after my entrance to this earthly plane came a few months earlier than any of us expected. In all of these moments, there were two constants: my mom and Maxwell’s breakout single “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder).”
The nucleus of my love for music is found within the five minutes and forty-six seconds of the song, released a month before I would make my surprise entrance into the world. I think the music of our parents, by nature of proximity if nothing else, has a particularly indelible impact on what will become our own music tastes. In this way, I am nothing if not my mother’s child. Whether it be Biggie, The O’Jays, Mary J. Blige, or Faith Evans, I took the music she exposed me to and ran with it. For reasons unbeknownst to me, Maxwell, “Ascension,” and the rest of his catalog, would bind us together like no other artists or song did.
The most commonly understood meaning behind the song is that of a traditional love song. And at face value, it absolutely is just that. Max has found himself in the remarkable position of discovering what could be lifelong love. Not expecting it, and not even remotely certain of what the future holds (I mean, she hasn’t even spoken to him), he dives in head first, making it clear to the subject that he is willing to take the leap and go all in on love. It’s the type of yearning that would become a defining characteristic of his music, and still is the heartbeat of his work 30 years later.
At its core, “Ascension” is about newness. New life, new relationships, new possibilities. It’s about embracing the unknown, the fear, and whatever is on the other side of this journey. I’m not a parent, but I’ve always imagined that this is what it will feel like to begin the journey of parenthood with my child, if that’s in the cards for me. We’ve actually never talked about it, but I have an inkling that’s what my mom was feeling the first time she heard “Ascension” after I was born. To a degree; she had far more pressing concerns, including trying to help keep me alive during my several month NICU-stay before finally coming home on Veteran’s Day. But I imagine that as scary as that moment was, she was also hopeful, and excited, and grateful. I think that’s what made her find us in the song, and what has allowed me to do the same at every juncture of our life together.
As the years go by, my relationship with my mom continues to redefine itself. Complete with all the natural ebbs and flows of parent-child relationships, what remains secure is the love we share for each other, and for Maxwell. Getting to see Maxwell live with her might be the live music highlight of my life. No matter what, she will always be my first and forever friend. In her kitchen, the same kitchen where I learned the majority of my cooking skills, my mom has a decorative towel that reads “Home is where your mom is.” Wherever she is, and wherever “Ascension” is playing, there is a place I can call home.
ii. Not Enough
“When I write it's for all of NC, call me the state pen” - Phontigallo, 2005
I wouldn’t see this world for another 12 months before Andre Benjamin declared to a booing crowd that “the South got somethin’ to say,” at the 1995 Source Awards. Thankfully, it didn’t take me much time on this earth to find this out. At every turn Black music has taken, somebody from North Carolina has been in the mix, making history. Rap music is no exception. The landscape of beats and rhymes would look very different if nobody from North Carolina ever picked up a mic or an MPC. That said, calling this place home is still a difficult cross to bear given the constant reminder I am here because my ancestors were forced to be, not because they chose to. Still, music has been one of the vehicles that has allowed me to embrace the fact that this is my home. The first music that was my own, that I truly felt at home at, was rap. Southern rap.
That said, it wasn’t the most familiar home. Southern is southern is southern, but anyone from the South will tell you that all South ain’t the same. While I felt at home with Southern rap, while it did speak to my life in ways that East and West coast rap didn’t, I didn’t grow up in Georgia, or Texas, or Florida. For as much as I loved and connected to rappers like Andre and Big Boi out of Atlanta, or Bun and Pimp out of Port Arthur, TX, they were never little Black boys from North Carolina.
Everything changed for me the first time I heard Phonte Coleman. Whether it be his work as a part of pioneering Durham-based group Little Brother (with Rapper Big Pooh and 9th Wonder), his solo work, or his R&B project, The Foreign Exchange, Phontigallo has been a mainstay and reminder of what the possibilities are for rap music in this state. For more than 2 decades, he has been a model for what honesty, vulnerability, and rapping about every day, real life shit can look like in a genre that’s far too often concerned with bravado, glamour, and a refusal to be honest about everyday life. Phonte was relatable before it was cool to be, and vulnerable before it was a marketing tool. For as much as I have loved rap music my entire life, so many rappers felt too far away to feel, too removed from my everyday life for me to really believe to be real. When Phonte rapped, I knew it was coming from a grounded place, a place that was tangible to me.
Listening to Little Brother for the first time in middle school opened my eyes and ears to the fact that rappers didn’t have to feel larger than life or out of reach to be dope. They also didn’t have to be from Atlanta or New York to be successful; they could be from somewhere like Durham, North Carolina. Rappers like Phonte and Pooh (and later Rapsody. S/O the 252) showed me that there was room in rap for someone from my corner of the world. More than that, they showed me that vulnerability and the full range of human emotions could exist in this space, a space I so dearly wanted to be able to claim ownership of and to feel at home in.
Sonic Freedom Dreaming
“I grew up a little girl with dreams, dreams, dreams…” - Solange Knowles
Music has allowed my world to expand when I didn’t have the physical means to venture outside of the corner of the world I found myself in. Music has been the vehicle for me to imagine new worlds and dream brighter futures, while also allowing me to engage and wrestle with my current realities and precarious futures. I know freedom is possible for us. Not only that, it’s imminent. It has to be. I know it because I have seen it. Phonte was right when he said, “dreams don’t keep the lights on,” but dreams do sustain us. Not merely as an escape from our current realities, but as a window into what is possible. Music has been that constant window for me, giving me the ability to visualize the future I wanted to see before I had the tools or access to make that a reality. Little by little, it's given me the strength and endurance needed to inch closer to the visions of home I conceived of when I realized other realities were possible, and the space to continue (re)defining what that looks like.
