by Dr. Crank
“Eccentric performances are fueled by contradictory
desires for recognition and freedom” (8–9).
Francesca Royster
When I was twelve or thirteen years old, “Cream” by Prince was continuously played on Mexican television. It was on Channel Four, perhaps the most heteroclite and incoherent channel of national television (some say that Channel Four is the worst channel of Mexican television): in the mornings you could watch old American television shows, almost always portraying white men with cowboy hats and guns or pioneers attempting to survive somewhere that now I imagine as Kansas or Oklahoma or Idaho. Channel Four also broadcasted old films and modern American television series such as Step by Step or Home Improvement. Everyday, at perhaps two or three p.m., Channel Four uninterruptedly screened music videos featuring a wide variety of musicians and styles, including 4 Non Blondes, Mc Hammer, Inner Circle, The Police, Prince, and others. Thus, after school, it was common for me to watch Prince and his sensual troupe performing “Cream” at three p.m.
At first glance, Prince looked like a masculine wonder, a rock star making love to his yellow guitar, constantly surrounded by lots of hot white girls in negligees.
Something in Prince’s “Cream” suggested a path towards miscegenation or performative hybridity, apparently only attainable through the enchantments of sound and dance. That is how I was introduced to Post-Soul music in Mexico City, during times of political turmoil and constant public assassinations. And it was the eccentricity of Prince, his undefined and somewhat irreverent self-portrayal, what allowed me to imagine masculinity —and gender— not only in terms of rigid and traditional definitions, but also as a set of ontological maneuvers directed towards identity redefinition and social change.
Francesca Royster suggests that soul music is “the beat of heart and cock,” a gospel based sonic aesthetic that, Royster suggests, “claims its roots in the shared cultural memory of black history” (9). Indeed, soul music sounds to me as a call for political action and trust in the future, whereas post-soul music sounds more like an invitation to indulgence and individual confinement, either through sensuality or collaborative pleasure. However, Royster accurately suggests that soul music embodies a heterosexual sound and performance, while post-soul music breaks —or at least attempts to break— the boundaries of the dominant heteronormative rhythms and paces constantly shaping the energy of our bodies. Therefore, Royster invites us to listen to post-soul eccentrics as a proclamation for gender and sexual black liberation. It is the concept of the “post-soul eccentric” that I would like to focus on this essay.
Royster proposes that these eccentrics “have created a controversial and deeply historically informed response to the dehumanized black subject and stretched the boundaries of popular forms of music, ultimately shaping a new public dialogue” (8). Royster proposes musicians and performers Eartha Kitt, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Janelle Monáe as the eccentric objects of her study. Nevertheless, I would like to frame soul icon James Brown as a performative catalyzer of the aforementioned musicians and performers, specifically “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I feel Good” as performed in The Ed Sullivan Show in 1966.
At first, it seems that Brown is electrified, as his body meanders in its own orbit as the witness of an unprecedented corporeal freedom. James Brown is a dancing virtuoso and his body and the inner electricity fueling his performance are the sole witnesses of his virtuosity. Despite the band and chorus playing in the background, Brown’s body seems to perform in isolation, only propelled by an inner strength that will find its post-soul parallel in performances such as Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” or “Bad.”
Both James Brown and Michael Jackson exhaust themselves in their performances, as movement is accompanied in both by tension and a explosion of energy. Prince, however, does not exhaust himself: his body portrays a rhythm at times lethargic and at times gratuitously sensual. Prince’s performances are complex and collaborative mise-en-scènes where a multitude of bodies carousel under the influence of pleasure. In this regard, Royster suggests that “Moments of collaboration and contact are especially important for exposing and exploring the contingency of identity” (27). While James Brown literally sweats alone on the stage, without having any possible physical contact with other electrified bodies, both Prince and Michael Jackson – and generally the post-soul performers analyzed by Royster — articulate a continuous collaborative embodiment of liberation, whereas collaboration serves as the performative framework to suggest both difference and the social acceptance of this difference, at least within the confines of collaborative sonic formations. We could also look at performative collaboration, as displayed in “Cream” or “Beat It” or “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe, as means of disidentification.
José Esteban Muñoz establishes in Disidentifications that “disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides of punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (4). Muñoz draws from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality to propose a process of production, a mode of performance, and a hermeneutic (25). I identify in the collaborative mise-en-scène of both “Cream” and “Beat It” performative and sonic strategies that position the “eccentric” as a community-based subject that through collaboration acquires her social validation, even if it is in a marginal way. The eccentric, whereas we want to recognize her as a “radical and dissonant subject,” thus challenges the normative citizenship suggested by Muñoz.
In this regards, Royster proposes the following:
“The Eccentric performance includes an initial off-centeredness, the use of not-so-ordinary means and often seemingly conflicting methods of theatricality: the crossing of generic boundaries of form or the crossing of gender or racial boundaries through twice-removed actions… For musical performance, this off-centeredness is particularly important in terms of sound: falsettos, growls, shifting accents, gasps, shouts, tones that threaten to veer off-key, improvised lyrics, breaks in the ‘fourth wall’ — or silence” (28).
This enactment of eccentricity is evident in both Prince and Michael Jackson, but it acquires a radical theatricality in Grace Jones sonic and performative projects such as “My Jamaican Guy” & “Slave to the Rhythm,” where new notions of black sexuality and, furthermore, human identity are suggested as means of inter-subjective dialogue.
Soul music sonically materialized the black experience in the United States through the poietic transformation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a lyrical and instrumental re-discovery of the black body. But it is through post-soul sound and performance —as Grace Jones enacts them in her disidentified performances— that both black historical memory and the radicalization of afro-national redemption merges into the global stream of capital and neoliberalism. As a corollary, I would like to invite you all to reflect on the role of the State and its dominant axiological systems in the confection of such post-soul sonic postmodernity. To what extent is the eccentricity of such post-soul sonic artifacts a medium of political resistance or mere political neutralization? How does the post-soul aesthetics have shape your lives as postmodern American or global normative citizens? After all, as intellectuals —even if you happen to be an independent and public intellectual like myself— we are constantly confined within the discursive and institutional limits imposed by higher education institutions, even if it is only through the epistemological approaches publicized by university presses.
Furthermore, is the fact that we can theorize such relatively recent sonic and cultural phenomena the evidence of its political failure? As my answer to this final question, I propose that as we keep pushing to the margins and neutralizing cultural and biological artifacts that pose innovative approaches to current bio-political challenges —thus making invisible those disidentified communities—, our maladies and voices will remain weakened echoes of what remains unnameable within the boundaries of the most normative representations of citizenship.
Works Cited
Francesca Royster. Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era. University of Michigan Press, 2013.
José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Kimberle Crenshaw. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241- 1299.
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