Revuelta. Photo credit Inger Flem Soto. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm

Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal

“It is the philosophy of [Black] music that is most important.”

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Music

“You listen to it, the concept might break you.”

                                                            Eric B. and Rakim, “I Know You Got Soul”

An experiment: what would happen if a group of academics from fields as varied as, say, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, musicology, and dance–many of whom are professional or amateur practitioners of rhythmic artistic forms themselves–thought collectively about the problem of conceptual and theoretical work and its relation to rhythm? How does rhythm—and its attendant art forms—allow us to produce philosophical or conceptual thought? What concepts (ethical, political, aesthetic, or otherwise) emerge from music, dance, sound, motion, and vibration? What began as a series of questions, a collective conceptual and methodological risk, yielded results that could not have been anticipated: an ensemble of theories and insights, in and out of sync, harmonious and discordant.

As a category, rhythm names a sensory interface with the world, an entry point into temporal unfolding across scales: the rapid revolutions of electrons around nuclei, the immeasurably slow deaths of distant galaxies, the ebb and flow of human breathing, the seasonal migrations of birds, the steady build of a tropical storm. Rhythm implies cyclicalities, departures and returns, dramatic interconnections of bodies and systems. Artists who focus attention on rhythm—musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers—do so in ways that can draw receivers’ attention back to their own bodies, their own senses, their own perceptions of movements, changes, event boundaries.

To think and make through rhythm is to unsettle many of the philosophical inheritances of the imperial West—the atomized, liberal thinking subject divorced from dependency or human relation; the epistemology of the zero point, a thinking that emerges miraculously, without geographic or embodied context; even, and especially, conceptions of “the human” that presume a universal subject devoid of locational or experiential specificity; or, more accurately, implicitly demand accordance to a colonialist hierarchy that measures humanness by way of proximity to an imposed ideal.[1] With that in mind, the concepts that can emerge from a focus on rhythm promise engagements with people, environments, and their attendant histories, promise concepts that can defamiliarize and unsettle knowledge presupposing of a totalizing universal subject, if for no other reason than that they openly emerge from sensory experience, from bodies in and of motion. Rooted in and expressive of the particular—sensoria, situation, movement—such concepts reach for the kinds of integrative and provisional knowledge perhaps only available through relation: what Glissant once called an “open totality.”[2]

Inspired by multidisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar Michael J. Love’s concept of “(rhy)pistemology,” which he understands as “the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music,” this special issue aims to expand the labor of critical theory and philosophical thought to include embodied forms of knowledge across intellectual, artistic, and cultural traditions. Rather than taking rhythm, music, or dance as an object of theory or thought, we emphasize theory and thought that emerges from or through rhythm. Fumi Okiji’s work on “jazz as critique,” Alexander Weheliye’s commitment to “thinking sound,” Jonathan Leal’s “thought-forms,” and Maya Kronfeld’s notion of spontaneity as political concept are only a few examples of the transdisciplinary and trans-sensory lines of inquiry that inspired this collective conversation.[3]

Drawing together artist practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplinary positions and critical traditions—comparative literature and media, critical theory, philosophy, global Black thought, anthropology, Latinx and Latin American studies, dance, music and sound studies—this special issue pursues the promise of (rhy)pistemological inquiry. Whether through the temporal elasticities of beat tapes, or in-the-moment creative improvisations, or the slow arcs of dancing bodies in midair, or the linearities exploded by language artists, or the interplay of narrative storytelling and shot intercutting in film, and much more, we asked these scholars to consider what happens to extant concepts when stress tested against rhythms across scales, as well as in what concepts can emerge when we attune ourselves more fully to our contexts and, fundamentally, foreground that we always think from our bodies, one breath at a time.

The present collection of work is one result of a series of collaborations and conversations in which a broad, porous community of thinkers and artists have participated. Since 2023, the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab “Thinking Through Rhythm” study group–which includes graduate students and faculty from Comparative Literature, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, French and Italian, English, American Studies and Ethnicity, Roski School of Art and Design, Kaufman School of Dance, Thornton School of Music, School of Cinematic Arts, and Annenberg School of Communication–has met monthly to read and discuss scholarship on music and rhythm, eat and drink, and to listen to music together. We then convened a seminar at the March 2024 American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Montreal with colleagues from across the country. Yet another variation of the group met at Art Share L.A. in May 2024, where rhythmic performances met academic presentations. Each of these experimental encounters felt both subversive and joyful: presenters and members of the public remarked on the liberating experience of thinking with one’s senses, pushing back against the compartmentalization we often impose on our “professional” selves.

Indeed, each of the participants in this ensemble of thinkers has a unique, eccentric relationship with the conceptual work that often goes by the name “philosophy” or “critical theory” as well as dance, music, and experimental sound. Theorists and practitioners, writers, dancers, music-makers, and listeners, we share a frustration with the way that rhythmic art forms remain objects of study rather than being considered sources of knowledge or sites of conceptual work in themselves. In addition to those whose writing is included here, Natalie Belisle, Gabrielle Civil, Arne De Boever, Jonathan Gómez, d. sabela grimes, Stathis Gourgouris, Edwin Hill, Jane Kassavin, Kara Keeling, Leah King, Josh Kun, Fumi Okiji, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Mlondi Zondi and others have participated in prior and subsequent conversations and gatherings. At the Art Share L.A. event, we were fortunate to count on the participation of artivista Quetzal Flores and composer/pianist Paris Nicole Strother, who accompanied Alex Chávez, Maya Kronfeld, and Michael J. Love in their music-making. The interventions are both conceptual and methodological; indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of artistic practice and expression are laid bare through the troubling of the boundary between what is often categorized as “theory” and “practice.” Thinking through rhythm is necessarily performative, embodied, and transmedial, sonic, visual, and verbal, some of which will be captured through images and links to sound and video in what follows.

The first trio of interventions detail concepts mined from Black American improvisational and rhythmic music and dance: (rhy)pistemologies. In the lead essay, Michael J. Love introduces us to the term he coined to evoke and name the knowledge conveyed through material practices in the Black American vernacular tradition: call and response, active listening, and producing rhythms in real time (what often goes by the name “improvisation”). For Love, (rhy)pistemology—knowing through the rhythm—is inseparable from these traditions. It is also a practice of liberation: similar to Nina Simone’s recollection of brief instances of freedom while making music, Love theorizes the rhythmic, percussive-corporeal practice of tap as a mode of “getting caught up,” accessing a Black queer “elsewhere” (Nadia Ellis)—a utopian future that (as Kara Keeling reminded us in Los Angeles, citing the late José Esteban Muñoz) just might always already exist. Love’s duet with Maya Kronfeld—which they created for the May 2024 meeting—incorporates sampling and looping, improvisational rhythms and theoretical arguments.

Kronfeld’s “Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge” argues that rhythmic form produces concepts that are “inchoative knowledge,” drawing upon the work of Immanuel Kant, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis. This not-yet-knowledge does not drive rhythmic practices, but rather emerges from forms-in-motion. She takes Thelonious Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular in “Straight No Chaser” as an instance of Black experimental rhythmic practice that is “about to be knowledge.” Such insights do not necessarily negate concepts in the Western philosophical tradition, but rather shed crucial light on that for which this tradition fails to account, as well as that which it has violently eclipsed or suppressed. Kronfeld “puts it together” (Elvin Jones’s term for spontaneous composition) in her transmedial theorization: logical argument supplemented, displaced, and oxygenated by her own engagement on keys with the questions posited.

In “So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s),” Michael Sawyer, for whom Kronfeld is a crucial interlocutor, takes up Toni Morrison’s ekphrastic challenge—“how can I say things that are pictures”—by asking, “how can I write things that are sounds?” Drawing upon the ancient Japanese art form Kintsugi, Sawyer develops a theory of reparative “rememory” (Morrison) in Black cultural expression. Bringing together jagged shards of a broken whole—namely, the generative disruption of the blues in Sonny Rollins’s The Saxophone Colossus and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, themselves fragments of other broken, beautiful objects—Sawyer’s close reading of sound is at once shattering and restorative.

We tend to think of rhythm primarily in sonic forms; yet what happens when we are to consider images as possessing their own rhythms? Presented initially at the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association convention in Montreal, the interventions by Jamal Batts, Seth Brodsky, and Eyal Peretz evaluate rhythms of the moving image. In “Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing,” Jamal Batts advances a theory of sound in and as film, specifically, Black queer diasporic cinema in the final decades of the last century. Through close readings of Marlon Riggs’s short film/music video Anthem (1991), as well as the incorporation of poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Batts identifies Afro-diasporic, non-linear queer continuities in visual rhythm, sound, and voice. Drawing on Black experimental film theory (Michael B. Gillespie, Robeson Taj Frazier, Arthur Jafa), philosophy of Black music (Fumi Okiji), and others, he demonstrates the ways in which rhythms work to disrupt the violence of racialized representation, introducing gendered difference into the “unruly intramural sociality of blackness and queerness” which he understands as “entangled, relational, and stereophonic.”

Invoking Fred Moten’s fugitive, fleeting statement to Harmony Holiday about music’s genesis—“in the absence of time, we made rhythm”—Seth Brodsky’s “Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat” argues that Freud’s notion has been mischaracterized as a nihilistic death cult, suggesting that music points to a distinct dimension of the drive, beyond nihilism. Through a close reading of the music video to Brittany Howard’s “Stay High,” Brodsky highlights Howard’s rhythmic syncopation, a rhythmic displacement that is untimely in its time travel to past “happy” rhythms (Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” rather than his “A Change is Gonna Come”) and future bleak horizons: in its visualization of the rhythm and repetition of the workday, the music video would serve as consolation to essential workers toiling long hours in the early months of the pandemic. Yet Brodsky wants to insist upon something more complicated at work. Although the eye can only perceive one rhythmic fact at a time, the ear can process multiple elements of sonic information simultaneously: music fabricates, dilates, and sutures gaps. Brodsky’s theory of music as “a foundational practice of driven beings” exposes the fallacy at the heart of contemporary misreadings of the death drive, inseparable from the pulse of life.

Eyal Peretz’s “Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb” explores the activation of a new form of time in Christopher Nolan’s film. Distinct from Batts’ analysis of “queer cadence” in experimental cinema, and Brodsky’s consideration of the folding of image into rhythm in Howard’s music video, Peretz’s intervention focuses upon the formal elements of the 2023 film, what he describes as “rhythmic editing.” Identifying the activation of a new temporality set in motion by the conception and detonation of the atomic bomb, he asks whether the rhythmic editing of the cinematic image represents, extends, or interrupts this new temporality. What constative or performative intervention is carried out by Nolan’s arrythmias?

Naomi Waltham-Smith joins Peretz in taking up the relation between rhythm and arrythmia in “Deconstruction’s Hemiolas.” Presented initially as part of the “(Rhy)pistemologies” seminar at ACLA, Waltham-Smith’s essay evaluates the role of rhythm in the work of deconstruction. A scholar of music and philosophy as well as a musician herself, Waltham-Smith demonstrates how the concept’s arrhythmia can be “most passionately moved by” the labor of deconstruction. Indeed, deconstruction’s arrhythmias expose the anarchic concepts as always already more than one: deconstructions. Owed to its syncopated remarking, deconstruction bears affinities with decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, and queer thought. Incorporating a structure not unlike the 3-against-2 of musical hemiola, she advances a theory of deconstruction’s arrhythmia through close readings of five texts: Derrida’s Glas, Moten’s In the Break, Lacoue-Labarthe’s “L’echo du sujet,” Cixous’s “Le théâtre surpris par les marionettes,” and Bennington’s response to Nancy.

The two concluding pieces return us to the performative, rhythmic thinking tested in Los Angeles. Musician and anthropologist Alex Chávez opened the Art Share L.A. meeting with a performance and talk (“Sonorous Present”), the written component of which has been included in the present issue. During the live event, in conversation with Quetzal Flores and Jonathan Leal, Chávez explored the contemporary conditions of possibility for sonic mourning in a bordered world. Through multimedia performances of selections from his acclaimed 2024 album, Sonorous Present, Chávez elaborated on the rhythms of artistic and scholarly process, highlighting the necessary imbrication of (auto)ethnographic research and related music composition for the type of introspective and community-driven praxis he pursues. His written piece expands these ideas across its three sections—“break,” “qualia,” and “cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)”—using a poetics of grief to map contemporary logics of nationalist (American) containments, and in effect, to meditate on political and conceptual possibility. In doing so, Chávez’s work begets questions that resonate across Black studies, border studies, anthropology, and Latinx studies, as well as with the offerings across this special issue: what are the rhythms of our mourning? And how might focusing on them amid the repeating violences of nation-states lead to increased conceptual, political, and artistic freedom?

Finally, “Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound” documents a conversation held between Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill following Gallope’s drone performance, “Region.” Gallope’s electronic, multisensory presentation invited the public into a transformative experience of deep listening, a voyage through space and emptiness. Trained as a musicologist, Gallope has kept his scholarly and artistic lives largely separate until now. Yet the shift of focus from his first book to his second is significant: while the first (Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable), details philosophical reflections on music, the second (The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978) understands philosophy as emerging from music-making itself. After the performance, Gallope and Hill discussed what it meant for Gallope to perform for the first time in an academic setting, how disciplines and institutions allow for or foreclose the possibility of musical thinking, as well as taking up the central question of “(Rhy)pistemologies”: how are concepts fashioned through rhythmic practices?

Pursuing these questions—enacting this collective experiment across repertoires, methods, and disciplinary structures—has reminded us of the promise and urgency of humanistic inquiry at once artistically engaged and communally rooted. What if? What now, then? At each turn, the project has, in effect, foregrounded the conceptual possibilities of expressive forms that reach beyond insular, rarified knowledge circulation, centering instead those registers of criticism, theory, and multimedial expression that center bodies and minds in motion, alive to the sinew of experience. Our work together produced its own rhythms, its own cycles of affect and analogy, critique and convergence, and this, in its way, has been a reminder of what has long been the case in those increasingly necessary spaces where conscious relation is held in high esteem. Provisionally, then: to think through rhythm is to attend to relation and greet the world as it has been, is now, and hope it can be—at distance from those forms of thought that would deny the world.

Listen to it. The concept might break you.

[1] See Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Vijay Iyer, Fred Moten, among many others. For a recent example, see Iyer’s 2025 lecture at the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, “Musicalities: Scenes of Sonic Social Life.”

[2] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. (University of Michigan Press 1997), 171.

[3] In recent decades, scholarship in Black studies, cultural history, and music studies has expanded the conversation around these issues immensely. For a few immediate touchstones, see Fred Moten’s In the Break, Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies, Shana Redmond’s Anthem, Josh Kun’s Audiotopia, R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophes, Emily J. Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul, and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound.

“(RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM). Michael J. Love at Fusebox Festival (4-12-23) by Sarah Annie Navarrete. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

Introduction to a Term: (Rhy)pistemology

Michael J. Love

Introduction

(Rhy)pistemology. Noun. Knowledge and/ or knowledge verification through rhythm, especially through the embodied practice of rhythm tap dance (and related movement and music forms) in the Black American vernacular tradition.

I created the term “(rhy)pistemology” around 2019. It was, at first, just a mental exercise in etymology—a portmanteau I was trying out in my head. In a graduate seminar on performance studies led by Rebecca Rossen at The University of Texas at Austin, several colleagues and I spent an afternoon attempting to articulate our understandings of “phenomenology,” “epistemology,” and “ontology.” One colleague created a sort of mnemonic device, a silly song to assist us in that moment—we all indulged and worked to add gestures to the song. In retrospect, I can recognize how profound it was that we were using rhythm and movement to work our way through dense texts.

Engaging in this physical-intellectual exercise got me to thinking about my genealogy as a tap dance artist. I spent my adolescence gathering oral histories tied to specific passed-down routines and rhythms and learned tap techniques, approaches, and choreography through an active back-and-forth process of scatting, singing, and dancing with and to my teachers, mentors, peers, and eventually my students. My ongoing creative research and writing is deeply informed by this system of verifying knowledge that I have inherited by way of a lifelong dedication to rhythm tap dance. 

With this in mind, and for the purpose of framing the essays in this special issue of b2o, I want to state that (rhy)pistemology is about naming something that continues to be invisibilized: the complexities and possibilities of rhythm as an aural and embodied system of cultural knowledge and history. The fact that (rhy)pistemology is an idea that I have articulated through the rigorous practice of a Black vernacular form cannot be separated from the term, concept, or system itself. (Rhy)pistemology is about knowledge verified through Black American methods of doing, calling-and-responding, actively listening, and producing rhythms in real time.

Aptly, (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) is also the title of my current full-length work, the third installment in The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, my triptych of interdisciplinary rhythm tap dance performances. With (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY!, I lead an ensemble of collaborators in a process of mapping the foundational Black histories of techno and house music onto improvisation and choreography that envisions an “elsewhere” of liberatory possibilities. Tap artists Benae Beamon, Jeffrey Clark Jr., Kaleena Miller, Adriana J. Ray, Robyn Watson, and I work our way through an original electronic music soundscape composed and performed by rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr. and traverse a multimedia installation by anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson. With these components, (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! stands as an embodied testimony of the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music and the generative, life-giving potential available to those of us who engage in the labor necessary to honor and carry such forms forward. Ultimately, the piece has become about dropping down into the body and sitting in rhythm to eke out the “how” and “why” of the affective and intellectual opportunities that open up when my collaborators and I “lock in” together at one hundred and twenty beats per minute.

I first presented (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! as a work-in-progress during my time as a Princeton University Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts. The full version of the work premiered in April 2023 at Fusebox Festival, an international performance festival which takes place each spring in Austin, TX. My future plans for the work include a presentation of the entire performance triptych as well as an exhibition catalog. Additionally, I have begun work on an epilogue to the triptych, a performance installation with the working title, rhy/ntology (or, to be the rhythm). This new piece is a dynamic synesthetic engagement with video projection, sound capturing, and live-composition technologies that allow an ensemble of tap dancers, an electronic music artist, and I to arrange and play original house and techno music that is heard, seen, and felt by witnessers. During each presentation of rhy/ntology, our rhythms and melodies fill and shake the room and are displayed on the walls, floor, and ceiling. After each presentation of rhy/ntology, aural and visual remnants of our performance linger in the space until we return.

This essay is a sharing of some of my “field notes,” if you will—brief reflections on and references to some of my recent work and research to demonstrate how, after creating the term and conceptualizing (rhy)pistemology as a system of knowledge, I have put it to use. I include such notes, reflections, and references here beside stage directions, performance descriptions, and embedded videos to illustrate how I have presented on (rhy)pistemology and shared my work during the “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm” seminar, inspired by my concept and organized by Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal at the March 2024 conference meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Montreal, QC, CA and the two-day event by the same name in May 2024 in Los Angeles, CA which Graff Zivin curated in her role as director of the Experimental Humanities Lab at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at University of Southern California together with Leal. Below, I’ve included footage of the May 2024 presentation of these ideas which took the shape of a collaborative lecture demonstration I presented alongside scholar of literature and philosophy and jazz pianist Maya Kronfeld.

Track One

Throughout winter 2020 and spring 2021, I presented the first iteration of LIVE From The BEATBOX as a series of monthly virtual performances. The series consisted of seven total “livestreams,” each presented from my personal artist studio and rhythm workspace, a converted warehouse I rented from a small North Austin, TX sparkling water start-up at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

While I shaped livestreams “No. 001,” “No. 002,” “No. 003,” and later “No. 007,” to be presentations of my rhythm-based research on various popular media expressions of Afrofuturism throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, I used livestreams “No. 004,” “No. 005,” and “No. 006” to lean into, what I call, a “rhythm dreaming” of an inaugural commercial airline-like trip to a Black queer “elsewhere.” During these three particular livestreams, I wondered: what would such a trip feel and sound like? What might I find or encounter once arriving to this “elsewhere?” What would it be like to return to the present, collect my loved ones, and then transport them to this “elsewhere?”

LIVE From the BEATBOX is a demonstration of my method of “mix(tap)ing”—a Black, queer, and feminist aesthetic-intellectual referencing practice which drives my performance-based research. As I explain in my 2021 Choreographic Practices article, “‘mix(tap)ing’ is a spiritual and tactical process of revisiting past times, moments, and temporalities to address current realities” (Love 2021: 32). It involves “tak[ing] multiple pieces, loop[ing] (or rhythmically repeat[ing]) them as distinct samples and layer[ing] them in configurations and understandings different from their original contexts” (32). When I “mix(tap)e,”

[I] use [literary scholar Nadia] Ellis’ concept of the Black queer diasporic ‘elsewhere’ to dream of a future time and space of Black sociopolitical liberation (Ellis 2015: 4–6). As Ellis joins Stuart Hall’s sense of Black diasporic aesthetic possibility with José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of ‘queerness’ as a mark of the space ‘between the ground on which one stands and a compelling place beyond,’ I use my work to research possible ways of moving beyond a present ‘insufficient’ for Black queerness to a future that is ideal for Black queer prosperity (3)… I often think about reaching an Ellisian ‘elsewhere’ through ‘getting caught up,’ as Marlon M. Bailey describes (Bailey 2013: 154)—an expression of the Ballroom concept of what scholar Jonathan David Jackson also calls ‘becoming possessed’ (Jackson 2002: 36). To me, ‘getting caught up’ or ‘becoming possessed’ is the type of transcendent, out-of-body experience necessary for accessing the ‘elsewhere’ Ellis theorizes. And most importantly, as Bailey explains, ‘getting caught up’ has to do with becoming entranced in repeated, layered rhythms (Bailey 2013: 154). Ultimately, I am interested in Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s idea of polycentricity (Gottschild 1998 [1996]: 14) as a guiding principle for layering theories, references of personal and Black collective moments, sounds, technologies and theatrical conventions as separate but connected rhythms so that I am able to have a healing spiritual experience. (Love 2021: 33)

Figure 1. Excerpts of my virtual performance, “LIVE From The Beatbox— Livestream No. 005” as presented outdoors at Ground Floor Theatre in Austin, TX in front of a small, socially-distanced audience on Saturday, March 20, 2021. During the performance, I dance to recorded music including selections from Larry Heard’s 1994 album Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One including, “Caribbean Coast,” “Midnight Movement,” and “One, Three, Five, Seven, Eight.”

Performance: “Caribbean Coast”—At this point in the most current iteration of this essay, as presented at “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm,” a two-day event at the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, I move from the podium and onto a small, paneled tap floor to present an improvisational rhythm tap dance performance to Larry Heard’s “Caribbean Coast”(1994). Throughout this short performance, I search for ways to bury my dancing between the layers of Heard’s composition by playing rhythms that lock in step with and counter the ticking, click-track-like hi-hat loop and the long, wavy, sustained notes of the tune’s melodic backdrop. I also demonstrate my own adaptation of what dramaturg and choreographer Katerine Profeta names “the Miles Davis turn” (2015: 88–138) by “spend[ing] a considerable amount of time facing upstage or towards either stage left or right” and playing phrases and movements “I can execute with my eyes closed” or with my gaze towards the floor so that my “focus can be on my rhythms and the music” instead of on and towards witnessers (Love 2021: 32–33). This is a tactic I use throughout my solo work to reconfigure performer-audience power dynamics and address the racist histories of tap dance and American performance (33). Once I have completed this short solo, I return to the podium.

Interlude

It was while working on and presenting LIVE From The BEATBOX, that I first developed a deep love for the work of house music composer Larry Heard. His mid-1990s synth playing and drum programming on Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One is otherworldly. There is an affective push and pull that is especially palpable—lots of potent, open space for tap dance improvisation with and against the various percussive layers, but also lush instrumental solos that weave an inherent jazz melodic sensibility through ever-present four-on-the-floor house rhythms.

On “Distant Planet,” a seminal track on Another Side, the 1988 album by the trio known as “Fingers Inc.,” Heard, Robert Owens, and Ron Wilson lock into a generative chant while sustained synth notes, twinkling melodic embellishments, echoing hi-hats, and a grounding, bass-heavy kick conjure up images of the exact type of intergalactic travel to the “elsewhere” I “rhythm dream” of:

“Life on this distant planet/ Far, far away from here

Where anyone can walk/ Without a thing to fear

Caring and sharing is a day-to-day chore

You can eat the fruit around you, you’ll hunger never more

On this planet/ Distant planet

On this planet/ Distant planet…” (Dennis et al. 1988)

 

Track Two

In September 2022, I had the incredible honor of being one of four subjects profiled by visual artist, filmmaker, and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden in the film portraits that anchored The Trace of an Implied Presence, her multidisciplinary installation at The Shed in New York, NY. As a “meditation on the living history and influence of contemporary Black dance in the United States,” Trace stemmed from McClodden’s extensive research on Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 1983 Dance Black America festival and her interviewing of and engagement with original festival co-curator and presenter Mikki Shepard.

McClodden invited me to present a performance as part of her exhibition and so, I shared “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere,’” a fifty-minute solo I used to layer recordings of personal phone conversations with close friends and loved ones and tunes by foundational and contemporary Black electronic music artists over my own live, improvised tap rhythms in an effort to, again, create a space for my own “rhythm dreaming” of a futuristic Black queer “elsewhere.”

Since presenting the solo, I have been thinking about one of the recorded phone calls in particular—a chat between curator and writer Jamal Batts, geographer Brittany Meché, and me, during which I found myself especially enchanted as two scholars I especially admire mused on the prospective spatio-temporal locations of such an “elsewhere.” From the transcript:

Meché: “It strikes me that both of us, kind of feel… like the making of an ‘elsewhere’ with things that we have at the ready… there’s something kind of material in the present that we… are sort of making our ‘elsewheres’ from…”

Batts: “There’s always been, like… this sneaking suspicion about the desire for space… Space that you have to pay a billion dollars to get to, at least in our moment… There’s a refusal in me to go to space…”

Meché: “We’re not going to space. We’re not going to space!”

Batts: “Yeah, we’re not going to space…”

Meché: “We’re going to work it out right here.” (pers. comm., August 2022)

Ellis’ concept of the Black queer diasporic “elsewhere” (2015) has continued to inspire and inform much of my thinking on futurity. My hypothesis was still that if I could manage to lose myself in the dance and the rhythms for and of the dance, or give myself to the physical labor of the dance, that I would be able to “get caught up” (Bailey 2013: 154) and eventually see the “elsewhere.”

Admittedly, as I gazed towards and imagined the “elsewhere,” I was a bit naive in my disengagement with Ellis’ assertation that such longing “is at its most potent when it is, so to speak, unconsummated” (Ellis 2015: 2). Or, as she writes, such longing “gives rise” to “a potential that suspends rather than resolves at the arrival at some new and satisfying space of exile” (4). You could say that by purposefully ignoring this aspect of Ellis’ theory—that the potential lies in the unreciprocated—I proved it to be, well, true. My own longing for an “elsewhere” distant from “here” has, so far, generated over four to five years of artistic and intellectual output. And, for all intents and purposes, I am still in the ‘here’ attempting to get to the ‘elsewhere,’ much to my chagrin. But, there is relief, even if only temporary, in the attempts.

Something about my phone conversation with Batts and Meché in late August finally made this all click. From the transcript:

Batts: “…I think that there is something… embedded in Black culture that is very much based in fantastical visions of an otherwise that are necessary and are grounded… and that do envision space, the extra-terrestrial… [as] a mode for thinking about how to do things differently here.”

Later, Meché adds: “And, Angela Davis saying, you know, ‘What does it mean to work towards something that… you may not actually… get to see,’ right? …Is it still kind of worth… doing the work if you yourself will not, benefit from it?”

Later, I say: “You know, obviously this is based upon, Nadia Ellis’ Territories of the Soul, right? And I think one of the things she says is exactly what you’re saying… um, babe… Where she’s like… it’s more productive… Or, maybe she’s quoting Stuart Hall, or… You know, but, one of the things she talks about is, the productivity in imagining the ‘elsewhere,’ right?… And then once… Like, actually reaching it… is not…you know… A: either not possible, or… B: just not worth it… actually?… Because, the project is imagining it, right?” (pers. comm., August 2022)

My focus has shifted since this conversation. In the Ellis metaphor of there being “a call from afar that one keeps trying to answer,” I am more attuned to the “potent[ness]” of what I identify as the between, the space that extends from the end of here to just before the threshold of there, or “elsewhere” (Ellis 2015: 2–3). I am more open to what I may discover as I try to answer the proverbial call from afar, what I may reveal to myself as I try to send out my own calls, and what my attempts to reach the “elsewhere,” and subsequently my journeying into the between, may produce.

Here—Between—Elsewhere is a metaphysical geography I am forming, a theory based on Ellis’ concept, that identifies the “potent,” area of “potential” after here and before elsewhere as a third space of productive exploration (2–3).  

I am interested in how I may join my theorizing of a third space with ideas around measuring and demonstrating volume and the presence or absence of matter in these spaces. With just a cursory knowledge of how beings in the natural world use processes of echolocation to navigate deep waters, I am embracing the use of echo and reverb, or the intentional delay of sound, in my artistic work to perform the vastness that may exist in this third or between space after here and before there, or “elsewhere.” To do this, I have begun using a delay pedal in certain performances. I spent many years experimenting with a looping pedal to build tap compositions in real time. Adding an additional piece of technology has enabled me to play and dance through abstracted, manipulated, and delayed loops.

I have turned to scholar Peter Doyle who theorizes on the use of echo and reverb in popular music by music artists and producers, to construct “sonic spatialities” and place different aspects of music recordings into and out of aural focus to offer lyric-narrative context, shape various affective moments, or fashion acoustic statements of self (2005: 4). Additionally, Doyle posits that echo and reverb in early to mid-century blues, country, and rock and roll recordings also tell of the conditions of such recording processes and therefore speak to access, class, and identity embedded in such recordings (6-7).

I am also sitting with theories of third space and ideas on how we may enter and traverse such space that I have learned from various Black poets, musicians, and performance artists. I often turn to two in particular. First, in video excerpts of Planet Rock: Techno, House Music, and Afrofuturism, her 2013 lecture at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, GA, DJ Lynnée Denise can be heard explaining some of the theoretical components of her embodied hip hop practice: “And then there’s this third space—I don’t know if you noticed that I was playing non-stop music, right? It was continuous. There’s a third space that happens when you mix two songs: that’s Afrofuturism. That’s another song that the producers had nothing to do with…” (2013). Second, in Blackspace: On The Poetics Of An Afrofuture, poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan writes, “Should we, ‘post-bondage,’ focus on the ways in which we’re free (free to move, free to buy, free to breathe) or the ways we’re not free (free to move but displaced and shuffled around, free to buy but within a capitalist system in which one used to exist as commodity free to breathe but in especial danger at all times)? Neither. In order to locate liberation, one has to locate a third space. This alter-space is not ‘outside of,’ ‘away from’ or ‘other than’ our present world. Instead, it is an intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality” (2020: 67–68).

Figure 2. An excerpt of my September 2022 performance, “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere,’” presented at the invitation of Tiona Nekkia McClodden as part of her multidisciplinary installation, The Trace of an Implied Presence, at The Shed in New York, NY. Footage courtesy of Tiona Nekkia McClodden/TNM STUDIOS LLC.

Interlude

Rochelle Fearon (publicly known as “Rochelle Jordan”) opens her 2021 song “All Along” with vibrant, ethereal piano chords that seem to be situated amidst a recognizable New Jack Swing breakbeat. But then, there is a shift. A house kick comes crashing into place as we also hear machines begin to boot up (or a rocket begin to take off). Suddenly, the sonic floor falls out from under us and Jordan’s audible inhale pulls us deep into an entirely unexpected context: A third space where a New Jack is Swinging and straight simultaneously—the two genres are somehow, comfortably and smoothly, thumping and bumping along together in the same space as Jordan glides us right into the chorus:

“Yeah, I did many miles (yeah, yeah)

Tell you what I found

That’s what it takes to know (what it takes to know)

Stop searching all around, oh

‘Cause I’ve been all over the world

Trying to find something that’s been here all along

You’ve been here all along

‘Cause I’ve been all over the world

Trying to find something that’s been here all along

You’ve been here all along…” (Fearon and Montgomery 2021)

 

Track Three

“An intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality.”

“We’re going to work it out right here.”

“Trying to find something that’s been here all along…”

I am committed to making a case for the deep study of the music emerging from contemporary artists who, I posit, have happened onto an aural/ rhythmic aesthetic that expresses a particular Black (woman) electronic-rhythm-and-blues futurism. This group of artists includes Fearon, Dawn Richard, Tinashe Jørgensen Kachingwe (publicly known as “Tinashe”), and other black women vocalists who are using R&B methods to engage in a high-affect layering of their voices before diffracting and wrapping their stacked melodies and ad-libs around the percussive-electronic whirring, zipping, smacking, popping, and banging of their male producer-collaborators. These women slink between genre lines, slipping into (and out of) house, hip hop, and techno (and related sub genres) that transposes 1990s rhythm-and-blues sensibilities into a distant future.

Jordan and Richard, in particular, have continued to compose such aural texts with white artists such as Travis “Machindedrum” Stewart and James “Jimmy” Edgar. I bring up identity here to consider how these texts may or may not be “multicultural” in the Gottschildean sense (1998 [1996]: 143). Can we consider these collaborations as instances in which separate cultures or identity contexts are equitably intertwined?

I am now studying how Jordan, Richard, Kachingwe, and others approach composing such texts. What makes these compositions feel so “of the ‘elsewhere?’” Why and how do they so richly illustrate a certain futurity? Is it in, or about, how these women build expansive environments between the layers of their manipulated vocals, send rippling and delayed echoes seemingly out into vast territories, or position themselves so confidently, comfortably, and wisely among the aggressive and cold sounds of the men who they work with? Or is it more about the ideas, concepts, and expectations that we project onto these women, their artistic personas, their presence, and their performances?

In November 2023, my friend and colleague, artist-scholar Benae Beamon, curated an edition of OPEN STUDIOS at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, NY and invited me to share some of these questions and ideas through performance as part of an evening of dance and film. I have since continued to develop an “embodied essay” format by experimenting with projecting my writing onto performance space walls, curtains, and screens while I improvise tap rhythms to, for example, process Jordan, Richard, and Kachingwe’s artistic theory-making.

Performance: “CRANK”—At this point in the most current iteration of this essay, as presented by the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, I move from the podium and onto a small, paneled tap floor to present an improvisational rhythm tap dance performance which employs “the Miles Davis turn” (Profeta 2015), this time to “CRANK” by “Jimmy” Edgar, featuring Fearon, or “Rochelle Jordan” (2021). As I dance and work to respond to the aural textures of Edgar and Fearon’s recorded performance, written portions of what I include here in this essay as “Track Three” are projected on the upstage screen. Once the music ends, I spend a few minutes dancing a cappella to play, revisit, and indulge in rhythms reflective of Edgar and Fearon’s aural textures.

Eventually, I begin using my delay pedal to layer sampled sound clips—the same bit of audio from the Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy-led 1983 film Trading Places that house music duo Masters At Work (producer-DJs “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez) have made ubiquitous throughout ballroom culture as the foundational “ha” sound and a brief moment of Dorian Corey’s outlining of the definition of “reading” from Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning—over my a cappella dancing. Each time I trigger these samples, I allow the delay pedal to regenerate and echo them until they loop and become distorted and unrecognizable. To end this performance, I disengage my delay pedal by turning it off.

This is where my (rhy)pistemological exploration, or my practice-based honoring of the complexities and possibilities of rhythm as an aural and embodied system of cultural knowledge and history, has led me so far. With each of these performances, including (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) (2023), LIVE From The Beatbox (2020-2021), “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere’” (2022), and current experiments such as my “embodied essay” (2024-2025) and rhy/ntology (or, to be the rhythm) (2025), I engage in a process of listening to, calling-and-responding, and making corporeal rhythms in real time to verify and employ inherited knowledge and demonstrate possibilities. The performances I discuss here are concerned with articulating theories of liberation through expressing a queer Afrofuturist aesthetic. Overall, my conceptualization of (rhy)pistemology deals with knowledge stored and encoded in Black music, sound movements, and vernacular traditions—specifically, rhythm tap dance. (Rhy)pistemology, however, is activated through practice and performance. The verification of ideas or the answering and refinement of questions can be done through personal social engagement (dancing alone or with others informally) and/ or formal presentation. In short, (rhy)pistemology is about using rhythm tap dance and the knowledge it holds to wonder and discover on a range of topics. I am excited to see where my own continued experiments lead me and what themes and questions others may be able to think through by employing (rhy)pistemology.

Figure 3. Maya Kronfeld & Michael J. Love: ‘(Rhy)pistemologies: A Duet’”. Footage of the May 2024 presentation of these ideas in the form of a collaborative lecture demonstration with scholar of literature and philosophy and jazz pianist Maya Kronfeld during “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm,” a two-day conference event organized and curated by Erin Graff Zivin in her role as director of the Experimental Humanities Lab at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at University of Southern California. 

References

Bailey, Marlon M. 2013. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Dennis, Harold and Larry Heard, Robert Owens, Ron Wilson as “Fingers Inc.” 1988. “Distant Planet.” Another Side. Chicago: Alleviated Records and Music.

DJ Lynnée Denise. 2014. “DJ Lynnée Denise Performance Lecture.” Vimeo. www.vimeo.com/110731119#t=311s (accessed August 31, 2024).

Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Duplan, Anaïs. 2020. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture. Boston and Chicago: Black Ocean.

Ellis, Nadia. 2015. Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Edgar, Jimmy. 2021. “CRANK.” CHEETAH BEND. Los Angeles: Innovative Leisure.

Fearon, Rochelle as “Rochelle Jordan” and Kelvin Montgomery. 2021. “All Along.” Play With The Changes. Los Angeles: Young Art Records.

Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1998. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT and London: Praeger.

Heard, Larry. 1994. Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One. Chicago: Alleviated Records and Music.

Jackson, Jonathan David. 2002. “The Social World of Voguing.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2: 26–42.

Landis, John. 1983. Trading Places. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures.

Livingston, Jennie. 1990. Paris Is Burning. Los Angeles: Miramax.

Love, Michael J. 2020–2021. “Livestream No. 005.” LIVE From The BEATBOX. Virtual performance, Austin, TX, March 20.

Love, Michael J. 2021. “Mix(tap)ing: A Method for Sampling the Past to Envision the Future.” Choreographic Practices 12, no. 1: 29–45. doi.org/10.1386/chor_00027_1.

Love, Michael J. 2022. Author interview with Jamal Batts and Brittany Meché, Princeton, NJ, August 28.

Love, Michael J. 2022. “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere.’” Tiona Nekkia McClodden, The Trace Of An Implied Presence. Live solo performance, The Shed, New York, NY, September 10.

Love, Michael J. 2023. “How to Rhythm Dream: An Embodied/ AuralVisual Essay.” OPEN STUDIOS – Benae Beamon. Live solo performance, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY, November 5.

Profeta, Katherine. 2015. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison, WI and London: University of Wisconsin Press. 

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal for generously organizing around these ideas at both the March 2024 conference meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association and the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab; Maya Kronfeld for engaging in an inspiring and formative collaborative process; and to my dear partner, Jamal Batts, for unwavering love, affirmation, and support.

Image taken by author. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge

Maya Kronfeld

My collaboration with Michael J. Love (see video below) is an attempt to work against the all-too-common backgrounding of rhythmic forms and their epistemic contributions.* Rhythm in jazz and Black music more generally is often trivialized and denigrated even when it is being applauded – the proverbial “damning with faint praise.” Specifically, when the complexities of polyrhythm and swing are admired, they are increasingly treated as decontextualized, ready-made ratios to be labeled and then implemented according to some “cheat code.” Unlike melodic and harmonic virtuosity, the rhythmic language that takes decades of study to acquire, develop and master often does not even register as a zone of competence. Reducing or denying rhythmic knowledge-making and the central role it plays in the music has always formed part and parcel of the fear and control of blackness and black form, especially as jazz gains what Rey Chow calls “cultural legitimation” (Chow 2010; E. Davis 2025; Ramsey 2004; Lewis 1996).[1]

“One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison writes in her foreword to the novel Paradise, is “that it never produces new knowledge… It seems able to merely reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions” (Morrison 1998: xv).  In a photo from Morrison’s 1994 collaboration with Max Roach at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1994, one glimpses the new forms of inquiry that emerge from the interplay between verbal and rhythmic art.[2] 

I elaborate the literary dimension of my argument elsewhere (Kronfeld 2025), but I include Morrison’s critical observation here to clarify what’s at stake for Love and me in our artistic and scholarly practice and help us shake off some tired old binaries about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Jazz’s emphasis on the new emerges precisely in the context that Morrison describes: jazz and other experimental art forms are not inherently radical (a fact which is crucial to their radical potential) but rather contain the prerequisites for radical action and change, namely to be able to produce new knowledge, in contradistinction to self-replicating discourses. Not having had the luxury of resting well with conventional meanings, Black musical aesthetics continue to be necessary for clarifying the sociohistorical and racial contexts that make modernist crisises of referentiality so salient (Best 2018; Moten 2018; Gilroy 1995).

Elsewhere I have discussed the elision of jazz drummers’ epistemic contributions within the context of modernist aesthetics and critical theory (Kronfeld 2019, 2025). But as Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. reminds his readers in The Power of Black Music, “Rhythms… are not solely situated within the confines of drums” (Floyd, 2017: xxvi). Here I focus on the rhythmic contributions of pianists in order to de-essentialize the rhythmic imaginary while simultaneously emphasizing time’s primacy as jazz’s most salient text. These pianistic traditions can be seen as the afterlife of those “other percussive devices” named by Baraka in the wake of the criminalization of the drums and their communicative power (Baraka 1963: 27). In what follows, I draw on theorizations of swing by Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Georgia Anne Muldrow, and of the blues by James Baldwin and Ahmad Jamal.

It bears reminding here that rhythm qua aesthetic dimension provides space for the recovery of past forbidden, as well as the discovery of new, not-yet-available concepts, for past/future thoughts not yet thinkable (cf. A. Davis 1997: 163-64). This emphasis on process carries affinities both with Frankfurt School aesthetics (Kaufman 2005, 2000) and with Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s characterization of Africanist aesthetics (Gottschild 1996; Love 2021); but it also sets into sharp relief the divergences between these critical traditions. Angela Davis navigates this critical juncture between Frankfurt School and Black aesthetics in her Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, which remains ever salient: “My use of…the aesthetic dimension rejects its association with ‘transhistorical,’ ‘universal’ truths. I propose instead a conceptualization of ‘aesthetic dimension’ that fundamentally historicizes and collectivizes it.” (A­­. Davis 1997: 164).  In a section from her Billie’s Bent Elbow (2025) entitled “Aesthetic Form in the New Thing,” Fumi Okiji draws a distinction between aesthetic form and musical form: “aesthetic form is ultimately processual even when it is encountered in the objectified work thing” (84). Okiji continues: “Aesthetic form is as much the means toward our congregating in performance or rehearsal, practice, or listening as our (co)habitation of musical space is the means to aesthetic form” (85).[3]

The potentialities that swing encodes in jazz and Black music more generally are never finished being known, rendering them answerable to unforeseen future circumstances, as well as to past and present experiences that have been occluded from view by structures of oppression, domination and appropriation (Okiji 2025, Kronfeld 2025). As jazz musicians have always taught, the innovative spatio-tempo/ral building blocks of Black music are attuned to the now precisely by virtue of being historically saturated, encoding what Georgia Anne Muldrow calls “new paths of articulation” (pers. comm 2023; cf. Ramsey 2004; Floyd 1996). [4]

Think of the way that Thelonious Monk’s rhythmic phrasing disrupts racialized aesthetic conventions of beauty qua the “pleasant” or “agreeable” while opening new, disruptive possibilities within the beautiful, what Monk called “ugly beauty” (Monk 1968). It is, in fact, this capacity for disruption that is beauty’s philosophical legacy (Ginsborg 2015, Moten 2017).  In the process of his simultaneous rejection and illumination of the beauty ideal, Monk repurposes and radicalizes Charles Baudelaire’s postromantic metaphor in Les fleurs du mal  (Baudelaire 1994 [1857]).

It is crucial to theorize from what rhythm artists say and do before “applying” theory to them (Defrantz 2001:43). As Dizzy Gillespie maintains in Notes and Tones, the landmark musician-to-musician collection of interviews, the history of Black music in recorded form – the sound – ought to be the primary text of jazz studies:  “We are documented in records, and the truth will stand” (A. Taylor 1977:127). That primary text can be fruitfully interpreted and put into dialogue with any number of theoretical frameworks – if, that is, the sonic text itself has not been erased by being conflated ontologically with its transcriptions.[5] Increasingly, as musician-educators around the world can attest, jazz theory and even the widely-circulating jazz transcriptions of recorded standards and original compositions (e.g., The Real Book) not only pre-empt but often replace entirely the listener’s (and musician’s!) direct encounter with the musical text itself, cancelling out the epistemic interventions embedded within rhythmic, harmonic and melodic form.[6] This has created an unhappy correspondence between what Barbara Christian called “The Race for Theory” and the racist exclusion of the musicians from the study of the music (Christian 1987).

So what does it mean to theorize new categories from Monk, from Ahmad Jamal, etc.?

Let’s attune ourselves to the new forms of knowledge embedded, for example, in the first bar of Monk’s twelve-bar blues “Straight No Chaser.” One aesthetic theory perspective here might see Monk as producing inchoative knowledge (knowledge-in-process), or as engaged in a negative mimesis that encodes the violent attempts at the erasure of earlier Afrodiasporic rhythmic traditions of communication (Adorno 1997; for critiques see Okiji 2018 and Kronfeld 2019).[7] But does this sit comfortably with the epistemic theories embedded within Monk’s left hand and the traditions it both registers and transcends?  In contradistinction and perhaps even in challenge to the interpretive framework of inchoative knowledge that I have gestured at above, the term jazz musicians often use for what the music offers –without invoking the usual positivist-empiricist baggage – is information. More accurately, the positivist-empiricist connotations of the term are both ironized and re-signified. This is how pianist Fred Hirsch, quoted in Paul Berliner (1994) puts it: “A Charlie Parker tune like ‘Confirmation’ should give you information” (231). And Amiri Baraka explains, invoking a Black Music epistemology that dismantles the alienating distinction between life and art: “Music is a living creature…The sounds carry whatever information rests in those frequencies and rhythms and harmonies” (Baraka 1996:141).[8] As Monkish re-imaginings and critical analyses by contemporary pianists continue to attest, the beginning of  “Straight No Chaser” is replete with information (Jason Moran 2015; Eric Reed 2011; Fred Hirsch 1998).  On the 1960 recording of “Straight No Chaser,” there is a flat-9 (a B-natural in the key of Bb) in Monk’s left hand that destabilizes the later oversimplified popular reception of the tune (listen to the accents at 0:00, 0:02, 0:08 and 0:13). Monk sounds like he is playing a G, Ab and a B-natural – the kind of “closed-position voicing” with a minor-second interval on the bottom that Robin D. G. Kelley rightly characterizes as a Monkish signature (R.D.G. Kelley 1999). As I have described elsewhere (Kronfeld 2021), the kind of listening that jazz practitioners engage in often runs counter to what Monk disciple Steve Lacy once described as “the bad habit of thinking in chords” (Eiland 2019, 95; R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 291).[9] Now, I love chords as much as the next piano player, but I understand why they have come to represent a characteristically American paint-by-numbers epistemology.[10] The “chord” applied as a pre-conceived, static generality (as in “Oh, just play a Bb7 chord in the first bar of ‘Straight No Chaser’”) risks obscuring the singularity of these notes, these intervals and voicings that need to be given credence and discrete attention. A Monkish theory of knowledge warns against allowing a pre-determined category to co-opt or occlude what’s in front of us. It may not be too much to read this as an allegory against white supremacy that is embedded in jazz listening practice – and offered to all listeners.

Just as Monk’s harmony requires unlearning the “bad habit of thinking in chords,” fully internalizing his rhythmic language calls for acquiring a new episteme, even as this language in turn sets the terms for basic fluency after Monk. Prof. Thomas Taylor, who instructs his drum students to study Monk’s piano comping, describes the studious listening required for such language acquisition when it comes to Monk’s rhythm: “If you haven’t listened to this 200 times, you don’t know it. And 200 is actually really on the short end.” [11] Even Miles Davis famously commented that it took him ages to properly learn “Round Midnight”: “I used to ask [Monk] every night after I got through playing [‘Round Midnight’], ‘Monk, how did I play it tonight?’ And he’d say, looking all serious, ‘You didn’t play it right.’ The next night, the same thing and the next and the next and the next” (M. Davis 1989: 78).

In the piano intro to “Straight No Chaser,” before being joined by the rest of the band, Monk plays through one chorus (12 bars) of the melody (from 0:00 to 0:14).  Monk’s left-hand chord (a cluster more than a chord), with its modernist flat-9 harmonic intervention expressed as if it were a simple statement, alternately reinforces and plays off of the right hand’s melody by first accenting beat 1, then the “and” of beat 2, then beat 1 again, then beat 4, then the “and” of beat 4, then beat 2, then beat 2 again, finally landing on the “and” of beat 2. Thomas Taylor observes about Monk’s spatialization of rhythm: “He is a master at playing in unpredictable places. So unless you really know this version, you won’t ever put your left hand where he’s playing. It is as if Monk is doing an exercise where he plays every possible beat, but you don’t know which will come when.”[12] The spaces generated in between the accents are, of course, a crucial component of the rhythmic structure. John Edgar Wideman writes, letting his own elisions do the talking: “Silence one of Monk’s languages, everything he says laced with it… An extra something not supposed to be there, or an empty space where something usually is” (Wideman 1999: 551; cf. Sawyer 2025; Holiday 2023; Moran 2015). After this Intro, Monk plays the changes under “Straight No Chaser”’s melody in a more conventional way. But because we have become attuned to those dissonant clusters and accents in the Intro, now the expected itself sounds unexpected (T. Taylor, pers. comm. March 2, 2025).  

From a drummer’s perspective, Thomas Taylor criticizes the overwhelming tendency to flatten out Monk’s rhythmic concepts. Take Monk’s comping under Charlie Rouse in “Bright Mississippi,” for example. The bouncing right-hand figure that Monk plays high up on the piano in response to the melody is neither swung eighth notes, nor straight eighths, nor triplets. “Maybe they are triplets that get slower, stretched and straighten out,” offers Taylor. The drummer’s perspective demonstrates the inchoative, in-process forms that real rhythmic concepts take – as opposed to the cookie-cutter molds and oversimplifying labels that prevent such rhythmic phrases from being heard accurately.

The very idea that harmonic analysis can be pursued independently of rhythmic phrasing is one of the fallacies that we need to shine a light on, and it’s a deeply ingrained problem in institutionalized jazz pedagogy (Murray 2017: 118; Wilf 2014; McMullen 2021; Baraka [Jones] 1967). Monk’s swing is the refutation of the “straight” in his title “Straight No Chaser” – even and especially when the left-hand harmonic accent lands squarely on the 1 –akin to what Amiri Baraka calls a “negation of a negation” (Baraka 1996: 22).  Thus, it is not just that Monk swings what is straight, but rather that his rhythmic phrasing undoes the binary between swung time and straight time. As composer Anthony Kelley (pers. comm., May 6, 2023) pointed out to me, Monk’s composition “Misterioso” and its left-hand phrasing is an excellent example of the way in which the straight is also swung—is in effect reclaimed by swing as a parody of rigid conventionality. (Monk 2012 [1958]; A. Kelley 2024).[13] Monk shows the connection between rhythmic syncopation and harmonic dissonance. They operate in tandem. Rather than taking for granted syncopation as rhythm manqué (displaced rhythm; rhythm ‘minus’ something), Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular lays bare the distortion that results from the presupposition that something called “straight time” is primary. As saxophonist Howard Wiley suggests, the construct of syncopation itself is perpetually in the process of being freed by its practitioners, although, by the same token, this generates the ever-present danger that it can be “‘taken back’ [by hegemonic powers] at any time” (Wiley, pers. comm, 2019; Kronfeld, 2019: 35)[14].

Just as Morrison rhetorically asks in relation to Ralph Ellison’s novel—“Invisible to whom?”, one may ask about Monk’s fame for his off-beat syncopations—syncopated to whom?[15] In other words, what is perfectly logical, to quote Monk himself (Kelley 2009, 2020), only appears as a deviation when going out of one’s way to negate and ignore the epistemologies embedded in Black Musical Space (in James Gordon Williams’ terms; Williams 2021). Thus, contrary to popular belief, what makes jazz unpredictable is precisely what makes it a language (cf. Moten 2018 on Chomsky 1986). Monk’s unpredictability becomes the language one needs to know. Monk’s swing is the refutation of the “straight” in his title “Straight No Chaser” – even and especially when the left-hand harmonic accent lands squarely on the 1 –akin to what Amiri Baraka calls a “negation of a negation” (Baraka 1996: 22).

I center Monk in the context of this issue on R(hy)pistemologies because Monk’s rhythmic prowess on the piano has been vastly underacknowledged by critics.[16] To put it bluntly, Monk’s harmonic interventions have fit more comfortably within modernism as it is traditionally construed than has his sense of rhythmic groove, swing and danceability.[17]  In contrast, Robin D.G. Kelley offers a key discussion of the racial politics of “swing” and their impact on Monk’s conditional acceptance into the avant-garde (RDG Kelley 1999:52). Indeed, musicians have always emphasized the primacy of Monk’s time.[18]  James Gordon Williams writes that Monk “encapsulated Black musical space” (Williams 2021: 15).  Williams describes the profound impact of Monk’s teaching on the master drummers of his generation and after: “From Monk, [Billy] Higgins received observational lessons about space and time” (Williams 2021:54). Williams “view[s] African American improvisation as a deployment of oppositional spatial knowledge that reflects the material conditions and imaginations that shape Black lives on a daily basis” (Williams 2021: 9). Williams’ theorization of “musical place-making,” the improvisational mapping, even the “spatial insubordination” of Black music draws on Katherine McKittrick’s Black Geographies and bell hooks’ “radical creative space” (Williams 2021:6). The black sense of place reflected and generated in “African-American improvisatory and compositional practices” both indexes and calls into question the “spatial domination” and “hegemonic spaces that have displaced Black people” (Williams 2021:6-8).[19] Black musical space becomes especially salient in the context of policing and the racialized state violence inflicted on Monk himself.[20]

In his solo piano recording of “Evidence” (Monk 1954). Monk’s rigorous implication of the “one,” [i.e. beat 1], evoked via negation, becomes particularly salient.[21] A complete rhythm section unto himself, Monk breaks the silence on the “and” of beat 1, opening up the possibility of a half-time feel – the kind of implied time that evokes the clave and a whole past and future of progressive Afro-Cuban music. As is well known, Monk’s composition was based on the standard tune “Just You Just Me,” which he later retitled “Justice” spelled “JUST – US” – an ironic criticism of the Justice that is “just” for the racially unmarked (Edwards 2001; Leal 2023). His new title, “Evidence” takes apart rhythmically the feigned coherence of dominant evidentiary norms.[22]

But Monk’s use of time and rhythmic form, as we have seen, also points—both ways, as it were—to past and future transnational developments within Black American music from timba to funk to R&B and hip-hop. Here is Miles Davis in 1989:

 I think a lot about Monk these days because all the music that he wrote can be put into these new rhythms that are being played today by a lot of young musicians – Prince, my new music… a lot of his music reminds me of the West Indian music being played today”… You could adapt some of his music to what’s going on now in fusion and in some of the more popular veins; maybe not all of them, but the ones that got the pop in the motherfucking head, you could. You know, that black rhythmic thing that James Brown could do so good, Monk had that thing and it’s all up in his compositions (80).

Davis’ remarks toward the end of his life foreshadow emerging theoretical paradigms drawing on Black musical aesthetics in recent years to theorize non-linear, trans-generational temporality (Okiji 2017; Sawyer 2025). They also resonate with recent intergenerational jazz practice by contemporary drummers like Kendrick Scott, who during COVID organized thirty-eight drummers to perform a virtual communal version of Monk’s “Evidence” (Scott 2020).[23]

In my dialogue with Michael J. Love about this, inspired by Love’s own work on the marginalization of the rhythmic vernacular within contemporary dance, I shared that an issue closely related to Monk’s often misunderstood rhythmic syncopation are the “grace notes” that are often illegible because they are taken as mistakes and sometimes kept out of the transcriptions, rather than attended to in their complexity as being where the music is actually happening.[24] This has to do with the idea that the rhythmic vernacular is the core text; but as Love has shown, drawing on Brenda Dixon Gottschild, it is precisely this Africanist dimension that is repressed (Love 2021, Gottschild 1996). Love and I have both witnessed with frustration from the dance and piano sides of jazz performance that in mass culture, extensive, convoluted maneuvers are often performed to avoid acknowledging the existence of Afrodiasporic rhythmic intelligence on its own terms.

In his important but still underappreciated 1936 philosophical monograph on the music of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke writes that “jazz is in constant danger” from commercialization (Locke 1936: 174). In fact, this is one of the main preoccupations of his book on the Black music of his time (Porter 2002:45-47).[25] Locke quotes at length from Louis Armstrong’s own book Swing that Music, which was also published in 1936. Armstrong’s Swing that Music has frequently been mistaken for “mere” biography or memoir, rather than offering the radical theoretical and historiographical critique of the music that he in fact contributes in this work (Veneciano 2004: 272; O’Meally 2022). Armstrong writes: “The reason swing musicians insist upon calling their music ‘swing music’ is because they know how different it is from the stale brand of jazz they’ve got so sick of hearing. But in the early days, when jazz was born, jazz wasn’t that way at all… We can now look back [remember, he is saying this in 1936!] and see where jazz got side-tracked. We won’t have many excuses… if we let today’s swing music go the same way” (Armstrong 1993 [1936]:122, qtd. in Locke 1936: 110). Armstrong anticipates the critical stance Baraka takes as LeRoi Jones in his 1963 Blues People in the chapter “Swing: From Verb to Noun,” where the noun is the grammatical correlate of reification.  But already for Armstrong, “swing music” is itself the name of the attempt to wrest jazz back from the co-opting forces that dilute it and threaten its newness. Margo Natalie Crawford’s readings of “anticipatory, liminal” texts of the Harlem Renaissance provide an important context for Armstong’s observations. Crawford demonstrates that Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston “anticipate” (a technical notion Crawford imbues with both historiographical and rhythmic aesthetic valences) the Black Arts Movement in their trenchant critiques of black music’s commercialization (Crawford 2017).[26] Enriching the dialogue with the verbal art of his day, Armstrong draws an analogy in Swing that Music between the linear plots of pulp fiction and the commercialized versions of jazz. He writes: “I do know that a musician who plays in ‘sweet’ orchestras must be like a writer who writes stories for some popular magazines. He has to follow along the same kind of line all the time” (29). Armstrong continues: “[The conventional writer] has to write what he thinks the readers want just because they’re used to it. But a real swing musician never does that” (29).  He speaks here from the center of the Afromodernist call for experimental renewal, for a novel musical language that will continually resist the stultifying linear progressions demanded by white commercial markets.

After drawing on Louis Armstrong’s critical poetics of swing, there is another artist Alain Locke specifically identifies as being able to preserve his art in an unadulterated way – Jimmie Lunceford. In the 1935 recording entitled “The Melody Man” (Lunceford 1935) you can hear a syncopation that evades capture. Propelled by drummer Jimmy Crawford’s brushes, the tightness between the horns and rhythm section prefigures James Brown’s band. I take this to be an example of the swing under the swing that continues to inform contemporary creative practice.

 

Mama, You Can Bet! (2020); Denderah (2013). Written, produced, arranged & performed by Georgia Anne Muldrow. 

Georgia Anne Muldrow (b. 1983) is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose works brings together rhythmic and harmonic innovation, new epistemologies, and community-based activism. She recorded the 2013 album Denderah and the 2020 Mama, You Can Bet! as Jyoti, the pseudonym given to her by Alice Coltrane and reserved for what Muldrow calls her “one-woman jazz ensemble.” Here, as on all her studio albums, Muldrow plays every instrument. On Denderah’s fourth track, “Sup,” which echoes the BPM (beats per minute, or tempo) of “Melody Man,” listen for the drum language of the brushes – done on synthesizer. Muldrow is taking apart the syncopation even further. Peeling back the swing behind the (co-opted) swing, she layers her brushes over existing syntax of the 1920s and 30s, disclosing that era’s own repudiation of the commercialized “pulp fiction” music diagnosed by Louis Armstrong. Her brushwork on synthesized drums here illustrates the avant-garde reach of both past and present: “The syntax is there for you to be able to create a new path of articulation, but there always comes a time when it comes back to where it began” (Muldrow, pers. comm, October 30, 2023).

Georgia Anne Muldrow with Maya Kronfeld on keyboards as part of Justin Brown’s NYEUSI. 2018 Nublu Jazz Festival at SESC Pompeia in São Paulo, Brazil. Featuring Josh Hari, Chad Selph, Nadia Washington, Jaime Woods, Josh Hari. Photo courtesy of the author.  

This intergenerational focus on rhythm lays bare the shortcomings of critical discussions of improvisation that center exclusively on melodic instruments, rather than on rhythm section instruments (drums, piano, bass) in their rhythmic functions. These trends are related to the willful misperception that blues is merely jazz’s more simple precursor, an erroneous historiography that is all too often used to justify the exclusion of Black artists and teachers from educational spaces. Counteracting these tendencies, Rhonda Benin reminds us in her vocal performance course of the same name that “Jazz Ain’t Nothing but the Blues” (Benin 2024). Benin, a vocal artist-educator and member of the Linda Tillery Cultural Heritage Choir makes clear that Blues as avant-garde roots music is precisely jazz’s chief template for ongoing revision, mutation and innovation (Tillery 1999, 2014; cf. Hunter 1998).

In James Baldwin’s essay “On the Uses of the Blues” (1964), he argues that black music is engaged in a form of direct truth-telling that makes good on the very communicative function that hegemonic language has abandoned. Baldwin makes the surprising move of correlating blues singer Bessie Smith with fiction writer Henry James, arguing that both artists fulfill the promise of creating non-reductive, non-deadening knowledge in a dominant culture whose expertise lies in the “distinctly American inability (like a frozen place somewhere)…to perceive the reality of others” (Baldwin 1986: 14). This provocatively interracial, trans-disciplinary rewriting of the American canon is based on black music as the irreplaceable model for truth-telling (“information” in the language of jazz artists) in a culture of evasion and denial. Baldwin writes: “‘Gin House Blues’ is a real gin house. ‘Backwater Flood’ is a real flood. This is what happened, this is what happened, this is what it is” (59). Baldwin’s own rhythmic reiteration asks us to grapple with the idea that the blues song is a real gin house, rather than a reference to one—flying in the face of the sacrosanct use-mention distinction in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of language (Cappelen, Herman, Lepore, & McKeever, 2023). But we can correlate Baldwin’s astonishing claim (his subsumption of the mere mention of the blues to the uses of the blues) with an idea shared across Frankfurt School and Afro-modernist aesthetics that art works, particularly in social contexts of violent erasure, must embody rather than describe (M. Davis 1998; Kaufman 2005). Baldwin’s twist, however, is to insist on the primacy of these acts of artistic embodiment, claiming—from the standpoint of Black music—that the possibility of literal truth-telling hinges on such artistic acts.

The modernist trope of exhaustion with available descriptions is greatly clarified by its Black critique of referentiality. But this critique is only possible thanks to the complex legacies of Black rhythmic forms in the music itself, legacies which are still often feared by and excluded from academically-codified philosophical aesthetics (and we can argue, are not fully theorized even in Baldwin’s essay, where discussions of lyric and lyricization are most prominent).

Baldwin’s own use of “the blues” would have been invoking a holistic notion of the oneness of Black music (Wiley, pers. comm. May 15, 2009) that even now emphasizes the continuities among and between jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, funk, hip-hop and even those genres later coded as white, such as rock n’ roll and punk. Genre distinctions between jazz and blues are widely regarded among practitioners of the music as artificial, and too often marshalled to perform a colonizing function (Baraka 1963).  I’ve suggested that Black music according to Baldwin catalyzes the modernist critique of descriptive, propositional knowing. At the same time, however Baldwin also calls into question Kantian/Frankfurt School notions of aesthetic autonomy by insisting on the claim that in a coercive society, Black music is literal description. 

The salience of rhythm in the U.S. and other regions of the African diaspora is due not only to the textural – and indeed textual! – richness and complexity of Black rhythmic forms but also to the systemic racism that has prevented descriptive content from being encoded in other channels; for example, in the lyrics, as Tyfahra Singleton has shown (Singleton 2011). James Baldwin writes: Americans are able to admire Black music only to the extent that “a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it” (Baldwin 1951; my emphasis). And what is being protected, he’s saying, is the white sense of self. The sentimental in American culture, we might say, is a defense against the tragic and the critical. 

As a closing counterpoint, I’d like to offer an example from Ahmad Jamal’s album Happy Moods (Jamal, 1960). I’ve selected the track “Excerpts of the Blues” because we are often taught harmony on the model of a binary cliché between major chords as happy and minor chords as sad; but applying that false binary to the blues make the innovations of the blues form illegible (recall that Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” is also a blues!) The blues take us behind that notion of major as opposed to minor thirds, but more importantly, they take us beyond the emotional binaries that Baldwin diagnoses as so uniquely American, where “happiness” is a vapid, saccharine substitute for real joy. This is what makes Ahmad Jamal’s Happy Moods so interesting. In the piece entitled “Excerpts from the Blues,” Jamal demonstrates that major seven chords are part of the blues (whereas in codified jazz pedagogy, blues harmony is most frequently associated with dominant-seven chords). This then becomes a point of departure for other colors and hues, as when he lets C major 7 (the piece’s tonic or “home” key) get inflected by its minor 4 (F minor). Like Monk’s swinging of straight time, Jamal reclaims this major 7 sound not as empty optimism but as containing within it all the emotional complexities of the blues.  The form of the composition itself holds all that together: the A section is built on a 1 chord that is a major seven; then the B section is a traditional blues as we might expect it to be, based on the dominant sound.

Every bar of “Excerpts of the Blues” is a masterclass; indeed, it is sometimes observed that one bar of Ahmad Jamal contains within it the whole future of recorded music. I have created a two-bar loop out of the material from 0:11-0:14, which I have notated (imperfectly!) as a bar of 4/4 followed by a bar of 2/4. At the “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm” Conference, I improvised on the piano along with this six-beat loop, joined by Paris Nicole Strother, founder of the group We Are KING.[27] 

Along with trio mates Israel Crosby on bass and Vernel Fournier on drums (brushes), Ahmad Jamal expands existing concepts of rhythm and harmony, but does so out of a capacious sense of spaciousness.  The array of interlocking parts means that it’s never just one thing. There is 1) the relationship between the drums and bass; 2) the relationship between Jamal’s two hands at the piano (note the unexpected accent on the triplet in the left-hand chord just as the harmony darkens and deepens); 3) the change in rhythmic feel within a single line in the right hand, where Jamal’s melodic phrase switches mid-stream from triplet time (swung) to march time (straight), and back again. With Ahmad Jamal, you feel the “both/and” of it all. The trio is playing different facets of the blues simultaneously, just as Jamal himself is showing us so many different facets of the harmony and rhythm, all at the same time. 

Many thanks to Thomas Taylor and Tobin Chodos for help with notation-interpretation.

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Williams, James Gordon. 2021. Crossing the Barlines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi.

Wolfson, Susan and M. Brown, eds. 2000. Reading for Form. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 

Notes

* I am grateful to Erin Graff Zivin, Jonathan Leal, Michael J. Love, Paris Nicole Strother, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Thomas Taylor, Inger Flem and the participants of the “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm” conference at the USC Experimental Humanities Lab, and to Art Share Los Angeles. Special thanks to my longtime interlocutor, Michael Sawyer. Earlier drafts were presented at the 2024 ACLA in Montreal, and at the University of Pittsburgh, 53^rd Annual Jazz Seminar. Special thanks to Aaron J. Johnson, Michael C. Heller, and Yoko Suzuki. My discussion of Ahmad Jamal here benefited from “Ahmad Jamal: In Appreciation,” moderated by Dr. Michael P. Mackey with panelists Dr. Alton Merrell, Dr. Nelson Harrison, and Judge Warren Watson. November 3, 2024.  University of Pittsburgh Hill Community Engagement Center. I thank Stephen Best, Anthony Kelley, Philip Rupprecht, Davina Thompson and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable discussions and feedback. I would like to acknowledge my late father Amichai Kronfeld (ז״ל) for teaching me drum exercises before I could walk. 

[1] Guthrie P. Ramsey discloses “the ways in which blackness troubles the disciplinary boundaries among the subfields of music scholarship” (Ramsey 2004: 19). See George E. Lewis on “an ongoing narrative of dismissal, on the part of many…composers, of the tenets of African-American improvisative forms” (2002:216). My participation in Eisa Davis’ sound-based conceptual art work “The Essentialisn’t” informs my thinking here. For full text see E. Davis 2025 . See also https://www.jackny.org/whats-on/the-essentialisnt-5 .

[2] Audio available via Les Nuits de France Culture 2020; cf. Cobo-Piñero 2022; Dunning 1995; Kronfeld 2024.

[3] Recall that Amiri Baraka insisted that the term “Aesthetic” in the “Black Aesthetic” is “useful only if it is not depoliticization of reference.” See Baraka’s 1989 essay entitled, “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture” (Baraka 2009: 9-28). He writes, “The Blues is not even twelve [bars] necessarily, the insistence on that form is formalism” (24). Baraka’s notion of “functional music” has offered a key challenge to reductively formalist paradigms of aesthetic autonomy (Baraka [Jones] 1963). For in-depth discussion of Baraka’s explicit and implicit poetics, see A. Reed 2021. Kwami Coleman illuminates the “ostensible [and ultimately untenable] wedge” in jazz criticism of the mid-60s “between writings on the avant-garde that focused on the music’s design and writings that addressed its social politics” (2021:268). The deeper readings of aesthetic form offered by Okiji and Davis all too often fell out of view in formalist criticism of the twentieth century and beyond. Kaufman (2000) and Wolfson (2000) critique and correct this reductive reception.

[4] Guthrie P. Ramsey, following Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., writes: “The process of repetition and revision that characterizes these musical styles shows how black musicians and audiences have continually established a unified and dynamic ‘present’ through music” (Ramsey 2004: 36; Floyd 1996). See Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” (Jones 1967).  For critical engagement with Baraka’s influential essay, see Ramsey 2004: 36.

[5] See Berliner (1994), DiPiero (2021), Lewis (2002), Monson (1996), Wilf (2014) for critical perspectives on the dominating “paper-based” approach. See Prouty (2005) for an illuminating study redressing the limits of “prevailing institutionally based narratives of jazz education’s history.”

[6] For an illustration via divergent interpretations of Monk’s “Round Midnight,” see DeVeaux 1999, 223-24. See Baraka as LeRoi Jones (1964) on the racial and epistemological problematics of notation when it comes to Monk’s and Louis Armstrong’s solos (14).

[7] For an account of embodied knowledges and Afro-diasporic rhythmic form that denies the success of such attempts at erasure, see McPherson 2025.

[8] See also Fumi Okiji’s discussion of Muhall Richard Abrams (Okiji 2018).

[9] See also pianist Barry Harris: “Coleman Hawkins would say, ‘I play movements; I don’t play chords’” (Harris 2011).  https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/its-barry-harris-84th-birthday-a-link-to-a-2011-post-of-a-downbeat-article-and-several-verbatim-interviews-conducted-for-the-piece/.

[10] See Lewis (2002). See DiPiero (2021).

[11] See the unprecedented article by Taylor in Modern Drummer featuring trumpet and piano transcriptions from Kind of Blue rendered for drumset, “Comping With Miles and Wynton” (T. Taylor 2003) and his forthcoming book, It’s All About the Ride!: The Ride Cymbal and Snare Drum Book (T. Taylor 2025).  For further resources, see https://www.thomasdrum.com/teaching

[12] See Samuel A. Floyd: “In Monk’s playing, almost every event is unexpected” (Floyd 1995: 82)

[13] See Kronfeld, 2019. See also Kelley on his recent completion of Mary Lou Williams’ unfinished last work “History: A Wind Symphony,” performed by the Duke Wind Symphony on April 13, 2024. Interview in Walker, Khalifa and Shelton-Ormond, 2024

[14] For a major musical and ethnographic intervention in the historiography of swing, based on research at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, see Howard Wiley & The Angola Project, 12 Gates to the City, 2010, compact disc. See also Atkinson 2016.

[15] See Morrison’s challenge to Ralph Ellison: “Invisible to whom?” (Greenfield-Sanders 2019)

[16] In contrast, see Robin D. G. Kelley on Monk’s “rhythmical melodies” and his stride piano mastery, as heard from the perspective of Herbie Nichols (RDG Kelley 2009: 98-99).  And see Somers 1988, Haywood 1994-1995.

[17] See R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 46, 231-232 on Monk’s dancing reflecting his desired rhythmic pulse for the band; for further philosophical implications centering swing see Carr 2023.

[18] Jason Moran comments in a Downbeat Blindfold Test on Carmen McRae’s lyricized arrangement of “Straight No Chaser,” entitled “Get It Straight”: “The lyric that jumped out was ‘The time is a dancer’ because that’s one of the most important things about… Monk” (Moran/Alouette 2018: 98).

[19] See also Baraka on polyrhythm as a Pan-African “acknowledgment of several…‘places’ … existing simultaneously” (Baraka 2009: 23).

[20] See Robin D.G. Kelley for an account of Monk’s beating by police in Delaware: “According to Nica…one cop started beating on his hands with a billy club, his pianist’s hands” (R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 254). See also Art Blakey on Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Monk: “I watched… how they destroyed [Bird] and Bud and the way they’re destroying Thelonious Monk now” (A. Taylor 1979: 248).

[21] “The one” (i.e. the first beat of the measure or phrase) is the implicit temporal marker that serves as the point of departure for each rhythmic phrase and is loaded with metaphysical significance.  Pianist Jon Batiste describes Monk’s “Evidence” as exemplifying a technique he calls “the rhyming of notes” (Batiste 2021).

[22] Both Brent Hayes Edwards and Jonathan Leal have written brilliantly on Monk’s composition as making palpable “fragmentary evidence” (Edwards 2001; Leal 2023). Amiri Baraka’s earlier reading flips the script by stressing an Africanist epistemology: “Evidence, Monk says… [Black] life is meant, consciously, as evidence…Everything is in it, can be used, is then, equal  — reflecting the earliest economic and social form, communalism” (Baraka 1996: 21-22).

[23] See Kendrick Scott, “A Community Post: Thelonious Monk’s Evidence ” Recorded May 23 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9MKcem0tAs. For Scott’s latest release Corridors (Blue Note, 2025), see http://www.kendrickscott.com/

[24]  See citations of Ran Blake and Chick Corea in Feurzig 2011.

[25] See Eric Porter’s discussion of Locke’s ambivalence: “Locke’s optimism was tempered by a recognition that the popularity of jazz threatened the integrity of the music as a black expression”(Porter 2002: 47; Locke 2022).

[26] Crawford focuses on Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama, written after Newport Jazz Festival, where the speaker asks “What’s gonna happen to my music?” (Crawford 2017, 28).  

[27] https://www.weareking.com/about. See “‘We Are King,’ With Its Deep R&B Strategies, is a Musicians’ Album” (Ratliff 2016).  

Image taken by the author.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s)

Michael E. Sawyer

Toni Morrison, deep in the complexity of the novel Beloved, asks a question for all writers that is relevant for the thinking that I am going to present here: “…how can I say things that are pictures?” (Morrison 2004)  Voicing what Morrison has written, the author saying through the writing of “things” that are the images of the transgenerational and transsubjective mode of cognition, Rememory, that is the engine of Beloved, introduces the technology of sound that is the preoccupation the guiding concept here: Rhythm. This allows us to propose, a series of questions:

1. How can I write things that are sounds?
2. How can I make sounds that are pictures?

I want to begin again with the technology of shattering as a form of making that will serve as the common mode of inquiry for this exploration; adding a question to the ones that have begun to pile up: how can I say things that are broken? A text that allows us into this question is Makoto Fujimura’s Art & Faith where the artist writes:

Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art form of repairing broken tea ware by reassembling ceramic pieces, creates anew the valuable pottery, which now becomes more beautiful and more valuable than the original vessel. (Fujimura 2004)

This art form consists of, in the first place the search for a beautiful object, that then, in the second place, must be shattered, to serve as the beginning of a new beginning, when in the third place it is reassembled. Similar to the limitations of writing, Kintsugi is not a practice that can be presented in its totality—finding/shattering/reassembling—and it is only through the final movement that we can reverse the journey from caterpillar to butterfly across the temporal smear of the metamorphic journey. In the 16^th century, according to Fujimura, “Kintsugi is likely to have been refined out of tea culture … and the aesthetic of Sen no Rikyū.” (Fujimura) Rather than kill a servant who shattered a prized piece of tea ware, one of Rikyū’s acolytes had it reassembled, “using the Urishi Japanese lacquering technique with gold gilding.”[1] What all this means is “[t]hat Japanese kin stands for ‘gold’ and tsugi means to reconnect” but tsugi also has, significantly, connotations of “connecting to the next generation.” (Fujimura) 

Stitch 1

I want to be intentional here and in the first act of connecting broken and separated shards emphasize the connection between generations exemplified by these Japanese art practices to Morrison’s project of dealing with the crisis of the Middle Passage with Rememory. “And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else.” (Morrison)

Fujimura, in his text, visits his native Japan and finds himself at the 6^th Dimension Café to think with Nakamura-san, “a youthful Kintsugi master…in the midst of vinyl records.”[2] That afternoon, Fujimura, and Nakamura-san work through the dimensions in order to arrive at a definition of the Sixth Dimension, which is where I want to linger for a moment before, ultimately, proposing a Seventh. Fujimura writes:

We live, let’s say in the 3^rd dimension trying the best we can to deal with time and space. The idea of Kintsugi mending…perhaps is the 4^th dimension. The 5^th dimension…will be what Nakamura-san showed me next; an 18^th century teacup mended with early 20^th century fragments…Nakamura-san opened a 6^th dimension…it’s the Kintsugi master searching for fragments and broken pots, not for the purpose of mending them, but for contemplation. (Fujimura)

Following the logic of the space that Fujimura has presented for our thinking I want to turn attention to the vinyl records that line the walls of the 6^th Dimension Café. Out of that gathering I will pull two objects for our work in an effort to participate in the practice of existing in the 6^th dimension, mindfully, and its preoccupation with shards. Shard #1 is Sonny Rollins’ side The Saxophone Colossus that is itself a shard made up of jagged fragments of other broken objects. The particular part of the Shard of the album that allows us this practice is the first track, “St. Thomas”. A fragment that is made up of a rhythmic fragmenting and rupture of what I will call here the coherent incoherence of the undisturbed disruption of the rhythmic necessity of the Blues.

The second object of preoccupation is the recording that serves as the disciplining framework of this thinking, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue that I want to shatter further to focus our attention on the shimmering omnipresence of the bearable lightness of the darkness of something less and more than the most velvety shades of dark blue.

Shard 1: Saint Thomas

I want to be careful and in doing so explicit about the stitching together that is here. Morrison asks us about representation and the break between the thing and the expression of the thing. Fujimura regards his art practice as an act of faith that is informed by the art of pulling together the pieces of a whole that has been broken. Returning with never having ever left, it is Morrison’s cognitive realm of the recognition of the non-existence of the breach that is the weaving together of the break that is already full. It is the lack of faith of St. Thomas the Apostle, who probes the stigmata of the risen Christ in order to prove to himself, in a deficit of faith, that this figure is who he purports to be. St. Thomas is the ancestral home of the saxophonist and the tune of the same name that erupts for our consideration.

I want to go to Sonny’s second solo and examine how the artist breaks it and then, in the practice of sonic Kintsugi, puts it back together in an act of blasphemy in the shadow of the colossus. I want to point us to the moment of the breaking that preoccupies me here that is underscored by what I believe is a gasp of disbelief from master percussionist Max Roach. Sonny finally and belatedly disrupts the blues, approaching the resolution of the line from another direction to satisfy the need for completion that is only coherent because Roach knows the form and practice of that which Sonny has shattered for the purpose of reassembly.

I want to lay alongside this shattering a shattering of the shattering by putting back together what Rollins broke before leaving this object as Fujimura and Nakamura-san have allowed us to consider the implication and aesthetic value of its existence as sublime in its shattered nature.

Shard 2: Oh Ye of Little Faith

Third Citizen:  We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do; for, if he shows us his wounds and tells us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them.

Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 3

William Shakespeare

I want to first present at least two trigger warnings that will introduce my examination of the opening object of the canonical Kind of Blue. First, the album is in the wrong order. Second, Cannonball Adderley walks off with every solo on the album.

The first instance of blasphemy is exemplified by an ongoing conversation Prof. Kronfeld (Maya) and I have that has spanned over ten years and elaborates itself in a back and forth between us that trades objects and thinking. Here is one on this point.

Me: I figured out why I never really “got” “Blue in Green”. The order of the album should be “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “All Blues,” “Flamenco Sketches,” then!!! and only then “Blue in Green.” It slows down the pace and I just need to get to “All Blues” after “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader.”

Kronfeld: I really wonder who decided the album order. Would not be surprised if it was NOT Miles. And as usual your attention to temporality and it’s non-ornamental function prevails!! (pers. comm., 2024)

What this conversation implies is that Miles, or whoever organized the album, is practicing the same type of disruption of the resolution of the blues that we witnessed in the play between Rollins and Roach within the confines of St. Thomas.

As is clear from the title of this paper, I want to center the opening moment of the album “So What,” and think with and through it to unearth its relationship to the question of generative disruption, and re-constitution. I’m most interested in the way in which the first opportunity we have to live with the song unfolds by thinking with Miles fully mindful of his iconic and predictable admonition that if you knew what he was thinking you’d be him. An interesting improvisation of Descartes…I think like Miles therefore I am Miles. We will leave that to the side for now.

This reveals the primary point of separation for us to develop some way to suture the break(s), so to speak, between artist and listener. To this point I am most interested in the in the long durée of the song from its birth at an iconic recording session and the way it evolves over the next several years.

Careful attention to the life of Miles Davis reveals an anecdote. Miles never owned a car that was not constructed by Ferrari or Maserati. For my part, the opening of the version of “So What” on the album is resonant of Miles’s love affair with Italian automotive art.

The start of the original album version is exploratory. Miles has just picked up the car and walks slowly around it, his fingers, that normally are employed to tease notes from his horn, trail over the hand formed sheet metal before he finally lowers himself into the driver’s seat and turns over the engine that rumbles to life. There is an existential or perhaps even ontological gesture I want to mark. Ferraris are the product of an unbroken genealogy back to the art practice of the Italian Renaissance. Miles didn’t create the car, but he is in the position to appreciate, operate, and stress it to unearth its performance. Similarly, “So What” is the product of an unbroken line back to the foundation of the blues and Miles is a steward of that apparition.

The rhythm section here serves as the engine, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and the pistons in the form of Jimmy Cobb, on traps.

Stitch 2

Bill Evans helps us here with his liner notes to Kind of Blue that bind us to the framing we have been pursuing all along writing:

There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. (Evans 1959)

I am interested here in thinking about the breach between what we have learned about the series of unbroken lines I am attentive to here. In this instance the one between object, breaking, and repair that Evans wants to further blur by speaking to the need to produce the coherent line, without discernible breach between thought and performance. This analogy, pursued by Evans, takes us back to Morrison’s question regarding saying something about or that is a picture. Here the pianist wants us to understand that the album before us is a picture converted to sound; broken while at the same time seamlessly related to the larger form that provides the linkage necessary for proper translation and evolution that can be rendered coherent.

Miles has started the engine, and its note arrives in the form of Jimmy Cobb on ride who makes the cymbal shimmer, emitting a form of unbroken light that revolves around the groove… a lighthouse guarding a rocky and dangerous coastline. Cobb defines the contours of the groove while at the same time filling it to the point of overflowing and then, in an act of kenosis, lets the air out of it before filling it again. This is the back and forth of swing, the pendulum that flows hither and yon that allows me to take up the second instance of blasphemy.

What we know about the pendulum and its swing is that it loses power with each trip through the arc of its travel. In the world we inhabit this means that you can hold a cannonball to your nose, literally touching it, release the 300-pound piece of iron and let it swing and stand your ground because on its return it will be short of hitting your face. It has expended energy on its trip there and back so it will eventually come to rest. This is one type of swing and one type of cannonball.

This does not apply to the Cannonball otherwise known as Julian Adderley. I want to contextualize the praise I intend to heap on Adderley here over and above that I grant to the play of Miles, Trane, and Evans. Miles is eager to leave bop behind. Clap hands, here comes Charlie. Cannonball represents a shattering of the shattering of the project that Miles has insisted upon; playing with and thorough modes which the altoist demonstrates is the invitation to find the blues-based possibility in that problem. Miles is fly fishing. Cannonball is trolling the bottom with stink bait for catfish. He is pure soul and his insistence on anchoring Miles’s project to the vernacular of the blues is revelatory. It frees it and allows us to flatten the relationship between rhythm section and soloist blasting the hole in the blues that James Brown will fill. The relationship, no, marriage between Cannonball, Paul Chambers, and the metronomic Jimmy Cobb cannot be put asunder. Evans insists upon comping with the cords and here I mean cords not chords woven by Miles and these three collectively become the Third Citizen of Coriolanus breaking the bond, sticking their tongue in the wound and giving it voice. Clap hands here comes Charlie.

Shard 3: So What Now

Here we are: at some distance yet closer than ever to the vinyl we pulled from the shelves of the 6^th Dimension Café, we find ourselves years later in the past in Copenhagen. Cannonball has been told to lay out to the point of not making the trip and Bill Evans has been replaced with the symmetrical blues shouting of the sonic architect Wynton Kelly. Cobb and Chambers remain, forming the engine block that Miles intends to modify seeking not just more but a different form of performance. Now there is no need for the slow walk around the machine, it is already fueled and ready to go, and Miles snaps off the time to signal the breakneck pace he requires. They, the collectivity, understand everything there is to know about this thing and this tour is the angle quickest for flight for Coltrane, the event horizon of his trip to beyond. I am curious here about this process that is the mana of sonic art but the poison of literature: plagiarism, self or otherwise. So what?

These restatements of the case, over and over, night after night on this European tour are worth exploring in detail. “So What” becomes like a sea monster that has some parts of its body above water, recognizable, and others below the surface. All of them connected and labyrinthine. The version we are thinking with in Copenhagen witnesses Miles returning to the language of bop that he has tried to abandon. The modal complexity of “So What” invites or perhaps requires the rhythmic and harmonic intricacy of bebop. Clap Hands. Here comes Charlie.

In the other versions on this tour, Miles finishes his solo in his classic form. Laconic. Clipping off the final sentence leaving the listener to wonder if they missed the final farewell, never to hear from him again. Not here. He hangs around daring Coltrane to get rid of him by blowing him away on a flight of fancy that the crowd boos; sound that is edited from the recording. Trane is preoccupied with the line he is exploring; this is the tour that includes the iconic and revealing interview when he answers the following question from the too hip to be hip radio host:

Interviewer: Would you say, would you say that you’re trying to play everything you hear?

Artist: Well…

Interviewer: At one time, or something like that?

Artist: No, there – there are some set things that I know, some devices that I know, harmonic devices that I know that will take me out of the ordinary path, you see? If I use them. But I haven’t played ‘em enough and I’m not familiar with them enough yet to take the one single line through ‘em so I play all of ‘em, you know, tryin’ to acclimate my ear so I can hear.

I mentioned earlier that Cannonball had opened the portal between this improvisational form and the blues that is filled by funk. There is joy in repetition. The time is short, but I want to propose that the James Brown walks the road Cannonball paves all the while repeating the groove until he has exhausted it of its kinetic energy only after he has been able to acclimate his ear. Doin’ it to Death. When JB calls for horns, he is adding that to the groove to discipline it before it slips the tether and spirals out of control. Trane’s horn serves as warning to the possibility of opening doors that are hidden in the groove that cannot be closed. A shattering that can only be repaired with more breaking. These are the two paths that lead to the 7^th Dimension.

Conclusion

I want to return to the beginning in order to get to the end and truncate Morrison’s question, rendering it as “How do I say things?” Fujimura, along with Nakamura-san propose a method: Make the beautiful object. Break the beautiful object. Repair the now more beautiful object for the breaking. Recall the sixth dimension stops short here, using the broken object as the site of meditation and contemplation in service of the production of the new thing.

Morrison calls this Rememory, the encounter with a sufficiently shattered object with another sufficiently shattered object both of which mix the shards together so the separation, time and place of breaking, and the possibility of joining is lost to the point of mattering in not mattering.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” (Morrison)

Sonny is rememory-ing. We left unremarked his calypsonian reading of the blues or vice versa that itself is another shattering, a rememory that belongs to somebody else, but the Brooklyn born Saxophone Colossus has grown up with the sound of his Island ancestors all around him. How it arrives or who it belongs to or its situatedness in or out of time and place is the thing of the thing. He plays with the rememory of the blues and shatters it by failing to resolve it which becomes the object of confusion and upon reflection the practice of kintsugi by Max Roach who is determined to reassemble the tea set and is taken aback when Sonny steps on the already broken porcelain. And so what?

It is all more and less than the darkest shades of kinda blue(ish) because Miles is in flight from Bird only to find that it is swing that sung and delivered him to where had already always been. Clap Hands. Here comes Coltrane.

None of this is possible without Nakamura-san’s Sixth Dimension, the form, practice, and café. Recall it is the identification of the broken object for purposes of contemplation that is the stuff of the 6^th form. I want to propose that the 7^th Dimension is both a contemplative and active practice of working with objects that are properly broken which requires that we identify the component parts of the thing in order to identify where this ends and that begins.

“So What” exemplifies this because there is no melody per se. It has already distanced itself from the concept of song and in that separation the shards become the thing they were not meant to be: a song in the hands of other artisans.

Literature—the practice of writing—resists this generative technology. The journey from Morrison to Fujimura along with Nakamura-san, to tarry with Max and Sonny, to arrive at the limitations of the album version that only gets itself figured out by hundreds of acts of what writers and critics of writers would call plagiarism, is needed in this world so we can say things that are pictures.

References

Evans, Bill. 1959. Liner notes to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Columbia Records.

Fujimura, Makoto. 2021. Art + Faith: A Theology of Making. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Morrison, Toni. 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books.  

Marlon Riggs, Anthem, 1991, film still. Courtesy: Frameline. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing

Jamal Batts

Rhythm is as central to Black film as it is to the blackness of life. I’m interested in thinking about sound as foundational to what scholar Darius Bost terms the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, might provide a reading of works from this era. Here, I will take two paths toward a theory of sound in and as Black queer diasporic cinema. I will reserve my comments to two interrelated elements, rhythm and the voice. I will work to draw out how the filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s montage and poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in various experimental film works lay a rhythmic mark on the constellation of the varied labors referred to as Black film.

One unlikely source to begin thinking the itinerary of rhythm and Black queer film might be scholar Robeson Taj Frazier’s recently published book KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, about experimental L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Ben Caldwell’s astro-grounded aesthetics. Caldwell, the founder of KAOS Network—a media arts education center and performance space in historically Black Leimert Park—produces work that evinces an artistic hydraulics which moves across scales. In remarks delivered during the 1992 Black Popular Culture conference filmmaker, Arthur Jafa, Caldwell’s former student at Howard University, proposes an aesthetic agenda for the Black filmmaker—to transpose the tonality and movement of Black music into the making of Black film. In Jafa’s forward to KAOS Theory, he reveals that it is in Caldwell’s work where he first encounters what he terms a “fully realized jazz cinema” (Jafa 2023: 6). Frazier’s work guides the reader through the aesthetic maneuvers that visualize this improvisatory impulse in Caldwell’s visual practice, or what scholar Fumi Okiji might describe as “the play, the wrestling and cooperation, of disparate parts” that is the “fecund blackness” of jazz (Okiji 2018: 6, 4).  

In the 1980s, Caldwell co-founded the performance ensemble Hollywatts which included actor Roger Guenveur Smith, musicians Mark Broyard and Vernon “King Oji” Vanoy, and filmmaker Wesley Groves. Hollywatts employed video work, hip-hop, reggae, vocalization, theater, and musicianship in order to forge uncommon connections amongst distinct community formations. Their performances and Caldwell’s film works were projected on site via monitors controlled by Caldwell and Groves. Their projections were manipulated in such a way that they would tremble, pause, deform, and play in reverse—a live improvised rhythmic visual response to the sounds of Hollywatts’s musical performance (Batts 2024). Hollywatts’s practice gave presence to the always immanent liveness of the moving image. Caldwell’s and Groves’ skill as filmmakers and projectionists “enabled Roger to engage in a call-and-response with the videos; he would ask the screen a question, and Ben’s edited videos answered with an image or cinematic sequence. Then the image was rewound and reshown when Roger repeated the question or made a statement, he and the screen engaging in back-and-forth chant” (Frazier 2023: 178).

In this essay, I argue that much of the Black queer experimental film of the 1980s and 90s, considered in the most expansive of terms, utilizes both sonic and visual rhythms to challenge the racializing mechanisms that seek to submerge the queer potency of blackness across the Black diaspora. This work, resonant with Hollywatts’s extension of the cinematic via Black sonic methodologies (i.e. call-and-response), is conversant with Michael Gillespie’s concept film blackness, which seeks to “[suspend] the idea of black film by pushing for a more expansive understanding of blackness and cinema” (Gillespie 2016: 5).  Gillespie queries “What do we mean when we say black film? Black directors, actors, or content?…What does the designation black film promise, and what does it disallow?” (5). Part of the impetus for this line of questioning is to expand the objects and modes of study available for understanding how blackness becomes visible on screen and the variegated work its figuration performs. The avant-garde musical methodologies employed in experimental Black queer cinema offer a potent avenue for thinking the import of (Black) sexuality, in its filmic deployment, as a rhythmic-visual tool advancing a processual blackness.

Visual Polyrhythms

In his forward to KAOS Theory, Jafa describes a scene from Caldwell’s 1977 film I&I: An African Allegory that makes me see Riggs’s 1991 experimental film Anthem with new eyes. Anthem is an 8-minute short film/music video soundtracked by house music, punctuated pauses in the rhythm, and a whiplash sound effect. Riggs dances in front of a white tarp graffitied in memorialization to the late Joseph Beam, the progenitor of Black gay cultural production as the editor of the first anthology of Black gay men’s poetry and prose. Certain motifs flash briefly but effectively, punching through the frame and rhythmically playing as what could be termed imagistic beats interrupting the moving image. I’m most interested in the still images of drag queens and trans women, including the legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson, which work in the montage alongside Riggs’s image and stock footage of West African dance from the continent. Although, as Stuart Hall has argued, we always risk the flattening of Africa with the excision of context, the images of moving and leaping bodies conspire to both thicken and collapse our vision of time (Hall 1989). I would argue that this is accomplished through rhythm.

The house music that is played throughout is given a visual polyrhythm via figures whose appearance does not necessarily align with the metronomic back beat of the music, but form their own contrapuntal incision. This maneuver is heightened in scenes of dance filmed at Club Bella Napoli (the dancers are listed as the Bella Boys in the credits). The scenes give off the feeling of a strobe light, where vision oscillates between granular clarity and complete darkness. The metaphorical strobes do not align with the soundtrack, much like in Riggs’s experimental documentary from 1991, Tongues United, where still newspaper obituary photographs of those who have died from AIDS-related complications are flashed sullenly in and out of time with the sound of a heartbeat and then a fast-ticking clock, ending with a picture of the director himself in preparation for his own certain death. I would place the sound of (Riggs’s?) heartbeat in dialogue with the mimetic sound of the heart in another experimental short film/music video from the era; white filmmaker John Sanborn’s Untitled (1989), an impassioned exploration of choreographer Bill T. Jones’s grief for and memory of his late partner and collaborator Arnie Zane through dance, montage, and music. The video ends with Jones forcefully and rhythmically beating his chest, the sound and echo giving the impression of a powerful though slowing heart in motion as Sanborn gradually pans the camera away from Jones and the lights fade to black, leaving Jones in the otherworldly place of his deceased partner’s voice, which provides the background for the film.

In Anthem, as in Tongues and Untitled, it is as if the beat were a form of rhythmic visual accumulation. In Jafa’s elaboration of Caldwell’s film I&I, he focuses on “a sequence… composed entirely of black-and-white still images that triggered such a shift in my thinking, that I’m still working out its implications… There’s a staccato montage of images that demonstrated conclusively the possibility of imposing on cinema the feel and flow of black music” (Jafa 2023: 16). Caldwell’s mixing of photographer Diane Arbus’s imagery with Black representations leads Jafa to ask “How was it” then, “black cinema?” and Caldwell’s later work made Jafa question “Does cinema have any potential therapeutic value?” (7). I’m interested in this provocation to questioning because it speaks to Gillespie’s assertion that “black film is always a question, never an answer” (Gillespie 2016: 16). Potentially, a focus on the rhythm of film blackness, as opposed to the Black on film, can go some way toward keeping the collapse of racial “referent and representation” in abeyance (2). Other still images that Riggs calls upon to flash on screen are ACT UP’s slogan Silence = Death, the American flag, and the Pan-African flag in red, black, and green. At the end of the video, all of these images flash, waver, and visually layer as blues musician Blackberri sings “America” a cappella while Hemphill, looking directly at the camera, confidently recites in his deep voice, with a slight lisp, the words to his poem “American Wedding,” here an erotic suture to a mesh of moving imagery without certain confluence.

The film is, in an aslant way, conversant with Caldwell’s Hollywatts and what Frazier describes as the group’s use of certain “film/video images” and “audio cues” as “predetermined ‘constants [which] served as the groups collective metronome supplying them with the foundational indicators, cues, and steady pulse to perform and ‘play in time.’ It was within the gaps and breaks between these cues that they experimented, improvised, and cultivated new interpretations. Such improvisatory shifts were often rhythmic…” (Frazier 2023: 178). The use of improvisation as a technique in the cutting and editing of sound and video—a visual rearticulation of jazz improvisation—allows for readings of blackness as recombinant and always already in process as opposed to fixed (Linscott 2016). Thinking with Riggs’s Anthem as improvising with the prerecorded audio of Black queer house music, American and Pan-African visual and sonic iconography, archival still images of Black queer life, movement imagery, and stock and pre-recorded footage opens a new texture for considering the ways in which his work signifies an ongoingness, an enduring aesthetic and corporeal beat at some distance from the registers of mourning, melancholia, and political malaise and toward what Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman calls the Black ecstatic or “black queer… representational practices that punctuate the awful now with the joys and possibilities of the beyond (of alternate worlds and ways)” (Abdur-Rahman 2018: 344). Riggs’s non-linear, rhythmic, and arrhythmic experimental juxtapositions of video and sound picture compressed, dense, and compassionate relations out of step with normative scripts and clock time, allowing for dynamic, mutable, and vital interpretations.

The Black Queer Ensemblic

In the DVD extras from the Frameline distributed version of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied there is footage of poet Essex Hemphill practicing his narration for the documentary. Unlike the talking head footage featured in the actual film, here Hemphill’s head is for the most part faced down, looking at the pages from which he’s reading as opposed to the direct and straightforward glare he delivers in Tongues. When he does look up from the page, it’s an obvious look behind the camera at Riggs as if for approval. He looks to the director, a fellow Black gay man, for confidence as to his delivery. Two things stand out to me about these images. The first, is my own surprise at seeing Hemphill unsure of himself. On screen, both visually and vocally there is an assuredness to his posture and tone that did not prepare me for Hemphill in rehearsal for his part, in the process of steadying his body for the screen.

There’s much yet to be written on Hemphill. There’s that striking voice, its particular grain evoking the work it was put to across open mics, college campuses, bookstores, and films throughout his life. His voice is special. There’s a reason it was so often utilized. It’s the anoriginary Black queer vocal, strong and sensual, the erotic considering the pornographic, a vocal caress (Lorde 1984). It has the quality of leadership in its steadfastness, found consequential under a context of heightened premature death. His voice could also be read at the level of pace, the quality of his pauses and repetition. His masterful control of his instrument, from the page to film, is why hearing difference in that voice is so shocking; like when his voice cracks when facing his mortality as an ambivalent Person with AIDS at the Black Nations/Queer Nations? conference in 1995. His is also a voice that requested a complement. His live performance work was often performed in chorus. What would it mean to read that replayed instrument that is the materiality of Hemphill’s voice on film as music?

The second aspect of this footage that draws my attention is its focus on the sound of the voice. Hemphill and Riggs share moments of poetic dialogue, reciting poems meant to be read in tandem, that require their voices to layer and rhythmically meld. At one point in this behind-the-scenes footage, Riggs admonishes himself for forgetting to pause as Hemphill had suggested. His rereading of the text is lovely, varying mightily in tone, intonation, and texture as to communicate the anguish of silence and the multitude of inscriptions it bears. The intense focus on sound between two stars of the Black Gay Renaissance reveals a keen understanding of its import in this moment. In particular, the sound of Hemphill’s voice is a leitmotif in Black queer cinema. It is utilized in Riggs’s films Tongues Untied, Anthem, and Black Is…Black Ain’t (1995), Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Aishah Simmons’ No! A Rape Documentary (2006), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995), and as the narrator’s voice in a documentary on Black gay men and transgender women based in Philadelphia titled Out of the Shadows.

If, as Amy Lawrence has argued, the projection of the seamless convergence of sound and image that is film produces a “fantasmic body” which Mary Ann Doane refers to as a “unity, cohesion, and hence, an identity… holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference,” then it could be reasonably argued that Hemphill’s voice is an indispensable joint that holds together a Black queer body (in pieces) (Lawrence 1992: 179; Doane 1980: 45). I, of course, use the term “joint” here in reference to Brent Hayes Edward’s deployment of the term in his elaboration of the underexplored gaps between the politics and cultural productions of diasporic and Pan-African artists and organizers thought to be a cohesive body. As Edwards theorizes, “The joint is a curious place, as it is both the point of separation… and the point of linkage… Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture, because finally, in the body, it is only difference—the separation between the bones and members—that allows movement” (Edwards 2001: 66). I want to consider this difference as movement via the voice of Hemphill as it crosses the ocean between the United States and Britain in two films that feature his voice (as well as that of blues singer Blackberri).

Both Julien and Riggs highlight a number of Hemphill’s poems and share one entitled “Now We Think.” Julien, in Looking for Langston, uses the work during a sparsely decorated scene where a Black man sits while watching a pornographic film. Alone, Hemphill shares the well-known words “Now we think, as we fuck, this nut might, kill us” in a rather straightforward manner. The film pictures the Black man cropped in shadows, smoking a cigarette with close ups of his mouth. When the poem mentions the possibility of “a pin-sized hole in the condom, a lethal leak,” Julien cuts to a close up on his pursed lips with the slightest of openings. At the mention of a kiss, the lips reappear. When Hemphill utters “turn to stone,” there is a cut to the making of a statue. As with the majority of the film, the scene is full of potential associations and unanswered questions. Hemphill never appears but is gestured toward by imagistic substitutes. His voice is a specter, a potentiality for the image but not its dictation.[1]

In Riggs’s Tongues, Hemphill performs the work with his frequent collaborator Wayson Jones. The scene is embellished by a pig latin version of the line “now we think as we fuck” (repeated rhythmically by Jones in the background throughout) and quick visual fades between Hemphill and Jones that intensify in pace as the poem accelerates. For the majority of the poem Hemphill’s voice is contained and steady, but as his reading proceeds his voice becomes more brash and emphatic, ultimately leading to his sensual and panicked belting of the line “this nut might…” repeatedly in a crescendo that ends with his unexpectedly composed and quiet recitation of the words “kill us.” The scene concludes with Hemphill and Jones delivering shared orgasmic moans to the camera, mouths wide in ecstasy. The filmic rhythm of the poem is slowed and then quickened to enact an erotic intensity.

The scenes share an interest in the gaze. However, in Julien’s work the subject looks past the audience toward his own projected screen, whereas in Riggs’s work you are the desired, a direct interpolation into sensuality, the hoped for other to the “we.” There’s also an emphasis placed on the line “sucking mustaches” in Julien’s film not present in Riggs’s. The erotic intensity of these scenes, work with different vocal paces and volumes; they stimulate differing affects, punctuating and overlaying the deathly stakes of the AIDS crisis. They offer various direct and clipped orations and introspective muted tones, a Black queer ensemble under the influence of a singular voice.[2]

There are numerous understudied and untraveled pathways for thinking sound and Black queerness on film. The cacophony of sound and image that Black queer film instances may be the raucous band that forms the polyrhythm of blackness in and as what Okiji refers to as “sociomusical play;” here, around the terms of sensuality (Okiji 2018: 4). In the defiance of form located in the rhythms of jazz and house music, Black queer experimental cinema finds fugitive movements that refract and recompose the terms of blackness and sexuality in a moment of acute narrative constriction, risk, and crisis for Black life. Play and improvisation with the structure of visuality through rhythm provides lines of flight from the imperatives of racialized erotic restraint, punctuating convivial and unexpected relations across time. To focus on the sound of the visual, and the visual of sound might give us a peek into the unruly intramural sociality of Black and queer as entangled, relational, and stereophonic forces.

References

Batts, Jamal. 2024. “Toward a Black Alternative Media: On Robeson Taj Frazier’s ‘KAOS Theory.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 30, 2024. lareviewofbooks.org/article/toward-a-black-alternative-media-on-robeson-taj-fraziers-kaos-theory/.

Bost, Darius. 2019. Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carroll, Rachel Jane. 2023. “What Can Beauty Do?” In For Pleasure: Race, Experimentalism, and Aesthetics, 39–86. New York: New York University Press.

Doane, Mary Ann. 1980. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies 60:33–50.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text 19 (1): 45–73.

Frazier, Robeson Taj, and Ben Caldwell. 2023. KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell. Los Angeles, CA: Angel City Press.

Gillespie, Michael Boyce. 2016. Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film. Duke University Press.

Gilroy, Paul. 1998. “It’s A Family Affair.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 310–15. New York: The New Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1989. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Framework 36: 222–37.

Jafa, Arthur. 1998. “69.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 249–54. New York: The New Press.

Jafa, Arthur, Robeson Taj Frazier, and Ben Caldwell. 2023. “Forward.” In KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, 6–7. Los Angeles: Angel City Press.

Julien, Isaac, dir. 1989. Looking for Langston. Strand Home Video.

———. 1994. “Confessions of a Snow Queen: Notes on the Making of The Attendant.” Critical Quarterly 36 (1): 120–26.

Lawrence, Amy. 1992. “Women’s Voices in Third World Cinema.” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, 178–90. New York: Routledge.

Linscott, Charles “Chip” P. 2016. “In a (Not So) Silent Way: Listening Past Black Visuality in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.” Black Camera 8 (1): 169–90.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, 53–59. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

Moten, Fred. 2017. “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/Ings.” In Black and Blur, 86–117. Durham: Duke University Press.

Neumeyer, David. 2019. “Studying Music and Screen Media.” In The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard, 67–74. New York: Routledge.

Riggs, Marlon, dir. 1989. Tongues Untied. Frameline.

———, dir. 1991. Anthem. Frameline.

Sanborn, John, dir. 1989. Untitled. Electronic Arts Intermix.

Stilwell, Robynn. 2007. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” In Beyond the Soundtrack, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 184–202. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Notes

[1] Robynn Stilwell refers to filmmakers’ play with diegetic (a part of the story) and nondiegetic (outside of the story) sound as the “fantastical gap,” a visual-sonic in betweenness that allows for the subversion of viewers’ aural expectations. Rachel Jane Carroll notes Julien’s use of this technique with house music and the sound of the ocean in Looking for Langston as ways of probing identification and diasporic loss and connectivity. See Stilwell 2007. See Neumeyer 2019. See Carroll 2023.

[2] In much the way that Fred Moten in “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings” reads a productive and “sexual politics” in the disagreements of Black diasporic musicians who seek to exceptionalize the national character of their Black music and its genres (while disallowed from entry into the national family) the work of Riggs found strife in diaspora; critics who, including Julien, read an essentializing impulse in Riggs’s work in terms of racialized desire and masculinity. Instead of plotting Riggs and Julien as combative aesthetic forces, I read the way they rhythmically play with the same instrument, Hemphill’s voice, as a shared though tenuous desire in the making and positioning of difference as an unfixed commitment to new creative potentialities. Their relation is generatively posed as disjunctively choral due to the history and present of blackness and its spatial dispersion. See Moten 2017. See Julien 1994. See Gilroy 1998.

Screenshot of Brittany Howard, “Stay High” music video. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat^[1]

Seth Brodsky

1

Brittany Howard’s “Stay High” was the second single off her 2019 solo album Jaime, released along with the video that summer.^[2] I recall finding it cute and sweet and then forgetting it; in 2021 it won a Zoom Grammy for best rock song. By then, it had swooped back into my memory while driving regularly with my kid from the city out to the bird sanctuaries of greater Chicagoland in late March 2020. “I already feel,” I’d sing in relief and exhaustion, “like doin’ it aga-aaaaa-in, honey.” It became, not an escape exactly, but a suspension bridge between the present and a “beforetime” which was also miserable but differently so. By contrast, this bridge was built out of happiness. Or more specifically, a trove of musical grammars and signifiers of “happiness”, easy life, incipience, tender humor. “To me,” Howard told the Song Exploder podcast, “the music is sunlight.”^[3]

This would include Robert Glasper’s glinting celesta, its trills oscillating between old toy and fairy dust. But also the song’s complex semiotic register, a stylistic pastiche of distinct idealized chronotopes: the early 70s sound of the Muscle Shoals Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, not too far from Athens where Howard grew up; the unflappable falsettos of Curtis Mayfield and Al Green; but also the triplets, figures, and harmonies of 50s doo-wop, even the early Sam Cooke of the gospel quartets. It is as if the song’s basic message—that “everything is, everything is, everything is … wonderful”—was so provocatively delusional in 2019 America that it lobbed the music backwards a half-century, not to the anthemic Cooke of “A Change is Gonna Come” but the guileless Cooke of “You Send Me.” Howard’s voice meanwhile snakes through deep-pocketed grooves seducing, preaching, above all enjoying itself, autoerotic, pressing melody and letter onto lungs, mouth, lips, teeth. To paraphrase Maya Kronfeld on Marvin Gaye, Howard is syncopation, syncopation as rhythmic displacement, rhythmic displacement as being itself. One could say she “weaves [her] melody through the spaces between the beats [as] the rule, not the exception”—especially when she lands on the downbeat.^[4] Songs are always in part coordinated slips. They time-travel, teleport, render any particular time and place a brief everywhere-and-elsewhere. This song quite so: already sounding like “beforetime” the year of its release, in lockdown, that effect likely telescoped for millions of listeners.

The song is a work song, a song to help you get by, about grind in all its polysemy and how there’s no escape from it, but that’s OK, soon enough, you’ll “already feel like doin it again.” So: a nice chunky piece of ideology. Floating from its original position in a pre-pandemic spleen to a new locked down panic, its soul pastiche accidentally transformed what Emily Lordi calls “soul’s recuperative logic, whereby suffering is made to pay off,” into a balloon floating above terror and despair.^[5] “I would play this song to and from work everyday for 17 days straight before I got a day off working 16 hour shifts as a Covid nurse at the peak of Covid,” wrote one among more than 12,000 YouTube commenters on the video. “This song was so comforting. Now every time I hear this song it reminds me of those tough days.”^[6]

But let’s not do ideology critique. This is shooting fish in a barrel. One could, for instance, dive into how Terry Crews laundered his persona in the song’s video—he plays a line worker at an actual poultry feed factory, the Aviagen Feed Mill in Howard’s hometown Athens—into a TikTok ad where he stunts as an Amazon warehouse picker—“@terrycrews ##ad @Amazon has got gigs (and benefits) for days. So, check them out. Like now!”^[7] Or one could analyze Howard’s status, hardly her own doing alone, as a compromise formation symptomatic of liberal establishment culture’s crisis during the first Trump era, her ascent along the Tiny-Desk-Concert-to-New-Yorker-Profile pipeline an especially ambivalent expression of elite capture.^[8] But neither approach would tell us anything new about liberalism’s endless exploitation of pictures of good life to neutralize actual good future; nor would they tell us much specific about this song and how it works.

I want to do something both less and more ambitious here: a formalist reconstruction of aspects of this song that seem so generic as to go unnoticed as anything other than “music,” and at the same time a little pocket general-theory-of-music as an art and activity of making repetition—and with it, rhythm, period, time itself—possible. As such, I want to focus on what insists more than expresses here, does more than says, what is so musically generic as to almost pass by. The opening guitar chords, for instance: they are the song’s motor, steadfast throughout the track, strummed gently with the flesh of the fingertip, just two chords, a tonic A and then subdominant D, triplets with no accents. Bassist Zac Cockrell adds the hook, Glasper responds on celesta. Producer Shawn Everett outfits a heavily reduced drum kit with small pressure mics stuck on with putty to help drummer Nate Smith get a bathtub-sized back-of-guitar sound, tacky and fibrous and super DIY.

These little components are already more complex than what I mean; I mean more the conceptual-sensual sound-knots one might do worse than to call “impulses” or, taking a page from Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding’s recent book Alien Listening, “pieces”— “piece[s] of time,” woven by repetition into a Penelopean fabric, a warp-and-weft one generalizes as “musical” but also experiences only as “a particular configuration, making time uniquely present.”^[9]

Braided together by Howard’s voice, these little modules each induce and then enfold a gap. This gap-induction and gap-enfolding then produce a circuit which aims at—and gets—something which, in its getting, retrospectively reveals itself as not the aim. Repetition itself, this aiming and missing and aiming again, and the turning of that into a temporal circuit, a “time-piece,” becomes the thing. Each “piece” is hence the result of a kind of delayed activation, folding a gap into something which, because of that gap, retroactively becomes that something, helping weave a temporal fabric that expands in an almost fractal way. This process is most schematically laid out in Nate Smith’s drum track; note how its circuit, its “piece,” feels split between long-and-short—DAH de DAH de—and a solid triplet feel, marked by these sticky, gum-on-shoe ghost notes: DAH-ke-de-DAH-ke-de. The drums are an aural duck-rabbit, a thatchwork of two incompatible ways of hearing. But unlike the eye, the ear can hear both, if not exactly at the same time, then as a toggle for which the drums are themselves the rhythmic circuit. Music gives the duck-rabbit conundrum, not a solution, but something better: a tempo, a meter, an extracurricular enjoyment that laughs or dances at a cognitive problem. In this process, music installs a gap where there might otherwise be simply a tension, a confusion or impasse. It dilates that impasse, inflates it into something spaced rather then just smushed or stuck. But then music also fabricates, sutures even: it knits that gap into a larger sequence or cycle whose momentum and sustain suggest something other than circularity—a spiral, perhaps, aiming at and getting a kind of missing, on and on.

This fabricating expansion becomes literal in the video for “Stay High,” a process of medium-inversion: it is arguably not video that visualizes sound cues, but sound—these circuits of gap induction and enfolding—that musicalizes images. Everything the camera captures becomes music, which is to say, a Penelopean folding of gaps into time; time into repetition; repetition into pieces; and these pieces into an expanding social, cultural, historical, geographic tapestry. Factory machines become music. Poultry feed sloshing into bags become music. Push brooms, dust, punch clock and punched card. The way Terry Crews walks, his head and mouth, his need to sing even before he opens his mouth, becomes music. His old battered pickup truck becomes music, the door-seatbelt-gearshift montage its own little time-piece. And of course, driving is music: chugging cylinders, spinning wheels, snap conversions of a million years of liquified death into enough carbon to get you around. Parking lots, flatbed rims, loitering, supermarket aisles with wild kids and distracted parents: music. Cemetery tombstones and flowers are music; eager lines at Kreme Delite are music and so is their connecting network of streets and traffic lights. Wishful rapport between Black folks and white folks, citizens and police, strip and home, town and family. Music’s gaps enfold the living, the dead, and their infrastructure, issuing an elegant retort to Susanne K. Langer’s mantra that “music is our myth of the inner life.”^[10] Here music does not “play” or “run” so much as stick promiscuously to everything it touches, and make what it touches begin to stick together; it is arguably less expression here than adhesive, driving assembly, convening, spacing, building. Contrary to a Wagnerian-Nietzschean lineage that ascribes to music some originary force as the most immediate art, the only art that doesn’t dupe, a Faustian means of “binding the world’s innermost core,” music here is a portal or bridge between inside and outside. It affords an erotic weave of reality itself, and calls the bluff on a longstanding musical pseudo-formalism whose avatars—“tonally moving forms” and “purely structural relationships”—mask a fantasy of material immersion.^[11] “Stay High” proposes the inverse: a town, with all its residents and roads and parts, can be a tonally moving form.

On the one hand, song and video are pure pop: frictionless, easy, happy—again, “the music is sunlight.” And the video is an unreal picture of reconciliation, not just of people and peoples, but nothing less than family, civil society, and state. On the other hand, we end up in properly cosmological territory, Rumi’s place where “everything is music.” A speculative utopian mythology of music more proper to the Black radical tradition ends up underwriting the song’s otherwise pop-historical being. Underneath its easy sway, Anthony Braxton’s conviction that “everything is music in various densities and intensities”; or Cecil Taylor’s insistence that “music is everything that you do.”^[12] Behind the chuckling conundrum of Smith’s DAH-ke-de DAH-ke-de, Fred Moten’s constant citation of Cedric Robinson: “the preservation of the ontological totality” in the conceptual dissonance of the groove.^[13]

2

Drive is hard. It’s hard because sexuality, from which it is inextricable, is hard.^[14] Still, roughly a century after Freud’s now-canonical tanglings with drive—Trieb, infamously mistranslated as “instinct,” from which it signified a divergence—some things can be rehearsed more easily.^[15] Drive is not organic instinct; it doesn’t serve survival, of the individual or the species. It serves enjoyment. One could say that drive emancipates instinct, or better, perverts it. So the instinct to eat is not the drive to eat. The instinct to eat satisfies itself—which is to say, completes itself, brings itself to completion—by eating. The drive to eat originates at the intersection of instinct and speech, bodily demand and language. It is at this point that instinctual completion becomes impossible—as impossible as the final word, the final metaphor, the final meaning. It is at this point too that the instinctual object—in this case, food—recedes: it recedes into the infinity of language, metaphor, meaning. The instinct to eat satisfies itself with food, but the drive enjoys itself with unending objects: not just by eating, but by perverting the act of eating through language, enjoying the mouth but also enjoying using the mouth to order food off a menu; enjoying sucking, but also sucking all the air out of a room; devouring, but also devouring the competition, or digesting entire fields of knowledge, or drinking up every drop of praise.^[16]

Drives are sticky, promiscuous, matters of not of completion but compulsion—to go “beyond the pleasure principle,” to repeat and to seek satisfaction in repetition itself. Located, as Freud put it, “at the borderline of the psychic and the somatic,” drives seem to repeat (compulsively) that very borderline.^[17] Grasping for terminology and often coining it, Freud stumbles on the portmanteau Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational delegate,” to describe drives: they are nothing more or less than this savoring of the breach opened up between psyche and soma, symbolic and material, through the intervention of the signifier, which drives seize upon as a surface, rim, or limit to enjoy.^[18] Drives are hence neither mere flesh nor mere symbolic, signifiers taken for flesh or hardened into commodity or fetish. Unconscious, they nonetheless have no object of excavation. They are, as Tracy McNulty puts it, a matter of “ungivenness” and “the corresponding need to substantiate or construct it”^[19]—“mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness,” Freud wrote: “our mythology.”^[20] So drives are, strictly speaking, neither historical nor material. And yet a material history of capitalism is also a history of driven being. Not least as the historical interaction, dialectic, or even polyphony between two forms of compulsive labor or “endless work”—one coercively beating down collective human life from above, the other welling up endogenously from inside individual life.^[21]

And yet it does seem like the present long moment is in an exceptional place with the drives. One figure in particular, “death drive,” is in great circulation these days, legion not just in theory but in journalism and social media, often in response to US political parties—the “Republican Party Death Drive,” the “Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” “Trump’s death drive”—but also more generally: the “US death drive,” “Death drive nation,” “death drive capitalism.”^[22] Just before the 2024 US general election, Eric Reinhart warned of how the death drive, as a “compulsion toward destructive repetition,” remains “a basic force in not just psychic life but also politics.”^[23] Common to virtually all these accounts is a strange knot of conviction and despair: conviction that a primordial psychic force predestines humanity toward aggression and self-destruction, and despair at precisely this conviction. Simultaneously, the historical-material quandary of the drive is aggressively resolved: conviction, shaking hands with despair, receives as its consolation prize the consistency of a mass judgement whose satisfaction is incompatible with drive itself. We are here in the domain not of drive but of fantasy—that is, of drive’s emergent superstructure.

But there is a curious relation here. Drive, as a breach that gives way to fantasy as both its defense and employment, here becomes fantasy’s idealized device: drive as a paradoxical “object of desire,” of the kind mapped out in Anna Kornbluh’s recent critique of immediacy as a cultural style.^[24] As with many fantasms of immediacy, a neutralization of agency is rendered enjoyable, if not pleasurable, but at a significant cost; collective power denied us at every turn is redeemed as panoramic doomer-vision—gothy vitalism in the sheets, political paralysis in the streets. Reinhart’s essay, admirable in its commitments and exhortations, nonetheless continues this preemptive knee-capping logic: politics yes, but only after we sustain the fatalizing wound of humanity’s innately suicidal program. In this and countless other cases, it becomes the grim legacy of psychoanalysis to throw us into existential debt. We get caught in a bad bootstrap paradox, where any attempt to save our species first pays an impossible tab: we don’t want saving and are wired for losing.

This fatalism’s lure is understandable. It provides a pit orchestra for the present’s operatic disastrousness, characterized by so many drive-like logics now raised to highest values or greatest vices. It compels the larger construction that we live in an “age of the drive” defined by narcissism and autoeroticism; vibe, energy, compression; a corresponding hatred of fiction, mediation, infrastructure; intensity and pressure without break; inescapability; entropy; headlessness; and above all repetition, which seems to bind all the above into its juggernaut. This repetition already marks countless bodies as the cortisol shot after another instance of suicidal gun terror or extrajudicial murder by police; another political obscenity, sham ruling, ban, or broken promise; another round of neo-imperial saber-rattling and nuclear brinksmanship; another a Boschian vision of genocidal or ecocidal hell; another reminder that history repeats. After October 7th, 2023, death drive all too predictably becomes a conceptual concession for the Israeli genocide in Gaza: Zionism, ethnostate, Netanyahu, all death drive incarnate, all repeating themselves into preordained oblivion.^[25] Humans are just that way.

It is true that what makes all these forms and modes of repetition difficult, or more properly, impossible, is their disruptive intensity, how each iteration paradoxically feels like the end of the world. One could, after Anahid Nersessian, think of the mediations such repetition takes today as “calamity forms,” the present’s rehearsal of what early 19th-century lyric poetry registered, without being able to yet articulate, as an “‘apocalyptic rate of change and nature-loss’.”^[26] Alenka Zupančič gets at this end-looping with her sharp warning: “The world will surely end, but that won’t necessarily be the end of our troubles.”^[27] But these repetitions are also impossible in how they undo the very work of repetition, its binding of the otherwise sundry into greater consistencies, what Freud might call repetition’s erotic energy. Repetition today appears as an unbound energy in service to disunity, degeneration, contraction. There is a stultifying arrhythmia, a cadential havoc to repetition now, a hole in its pocket. One could formalize this as a double paradox: each repetition dooms like the last and shocks like the first.

Current drive discourse repeats, not so much Freud, but the same defense by which late Freud and some of his followers resorted to biologism: the dream of an unriven, selfsame material consistency operating with absolute exigency—all Sade, no Kant.^[28] This is a perfect inversion of how Jacques Lacan theorized drive in his “return to Freud.” There is, he maintained, only one drive, all drives are death drives.^[29] But this one drive is itself constitutionally partial: incomplete, self-split, nothing more than this self-splitting. This is why Lacan stressed Freud’s use of the phrase Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational delegate.” In this model, drives are not propulsive bodies that break into immaterial psychic life like headless beasts. They are rather the delegates themselves, which is to say missives mistaken for body; in a brilliant phrase, Joan Copjec called drives “traitorous delegates,” delegates who “betray [their] mandator.”^[30] In other words, “faithless electors” who, instead of sealing the deal of proper signification, get lost along the way, play hooky, get hooked on hooky. In this simple point Freud recognized language and letter—human fabrication, the nature-culture split, the metabolic rift—at the core of drive creation.

In so much death drive discourse, this difficult knotting of letter and body is conveniently covered over by biological fantasy. That fantasy is now writ large as grand-guignol destiny and given a material consistency perfectly at odds with the unnatural montage of the drive, its inorganic, undead self-inconsistency. Its surreality too: Lacan compared the drive to a “surrealist collage”; when you think of the drive, don’t think of pitiless, heaving throb, think instead of a mad contraption, like “a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap” in which “a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful.”^[31] Copjec similarly recalls the director David Cronenberg marveling: “What if you were born with lysergic acid as part of your metabolism?” It is, she insists, “no weirder than our actual circumstances” vis-à-vis the drives: “as humans, we are all born with the signifier as part of our metabolism.”^[32]

It is this bug of original absurdity that renders drive so resistant to theory. Drive is not a theory. It is instead a terrain, a topic, upon whose surface one traces the traitorous delegations of the signifier as it gets hooked on something else, some other satisfaction. This applies to conceptualization too: what after all is satisfaction without completion, energy without entropy, demand without end, mechanism without function, repetition without rhythm— “no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall” as Lacan put it; for Freud, an anti-biological konstante Kraft, “constant force.”^[33] Leon Brenner points out that instinct can be modeled by frequency, the rise and fall of the sine wave; drive, by contrast, is a straight line—a novel way of understanding Freud’s assertion that “the death drives are essentially mute.”^[34] Nowhere is drive theory more koan-like then when it comes to rhythm and time: the double conundrum of constancy without frequency and punctuation without period. What conceptual vandalism! And yet: what an elegant articulation of the fact that drive does not “add up”—that drive is not a concept but a kind of theoretical frottage, enjoying rubbing up against the rim of any concept that tries to clinch it. No wonder then that a culture already thick in ecocide might not want to struggle with these abysmal riddles, instead turning the clock back to Nietzsche (with the help of Foucault) and insisting that “there is only one kind of force”: power.^[35]

The Freudian-Lacanian legacy of drive is opposed to precisely this. Drive, as a self-splitting force, generates tension, teeming, life. Drive tries to close; it tries, paradoxically, to obey the pleasure principle: tension extinction. But its mechanism is the signifier, the ideational delegate, and signifiers don’t die, don’t know how to die, indeed, only know how, not to live, but to persist, insist, repeat. One could put it this way: the death drive doesn’t have it in itself to die, doesn’t have the guts. This weird alloy of strength and weakness, durability and incapacity, ultimately means that death drive persists because it fails, and it fails because the being through which it persists lives. Death drive is not suicide, it is failed suicide. It is, as Kornbluh memorably puts it, “the accumulation of the failure to die”; or as Aaron Schuster writes, it is the record of the human organism’s “failure not to be born.”^[36]

What this entails is not fate, program, agency, struggle, decision, but rather something small, partial, radically local and mobile, not building, not destroying, but repeating. And not repeating in service to others big and small but to no one. It is thus a kind of first, asocial sublimation, a sublimation for this no-one, the template of sublimation itself—“not something that happens to the drive under special circumstances,” as Copjec puts it, but “the proper destiny of the drive.”^[37] That’s a very drive-y way of putting it: drive’s destiny is its exile from fate. From nature and culture too, as Todd McGowan writes, which is our subjectivity “rather than an unfortunate condition we must overcome”; only through the drives are we “alienated into equality.”^[38] Or at least the “ungivenness” of equality, and “the corresponding need to substantiate or construct it.” Drive is, as such, the negative condition of possibility for fantasy and fantasmatic life generally, for the fabricating work it does, helpful and harmful. This is partly what it means to say the drives are “our mythologies.” And this is why drive harbors promise for a theory of rhythm and music more generally: as a form of impossible repetition, it is also a kind of un-time, a temporal ungivenness that, like a vacuum or undertow, gives way to time as its influx. Musically, one could call drive the unending anoriginal rim shot that trips us into a rhythmic being for which even the downbeat itself is already syncopation. “In the absence of time,” Fred Moten tells Harmony Holiday, “we made rhythm.”^[39]

3

The song did not return to my mind in March 2020 just as a simple sunlit “promise of happiness” during a difficult time. It also returned, of course, as something symptomatic, a way of preserving that difficulty in a more bearable, admissible way. Song and video aren’t just an escape into wish-fulfillment: say, the wish to be able to “work hard and grind all day” and, “at night,” still feel like “doin’ it again.” “Stay High” is also a quite self-conscious attempt to replace torpor with grind—to sublimate an unbearable repetition, a repetition of the impossible, with a repetition that at least makes sense, that makes possibility possible. In this sense, its sublimation is economic in nature: to substitute one economy—of desire, the pursuit of the unobtainable—for another: the economy of drive, the pressure of the inescapable.^[40] “Stay High” really is a “work song,” but a utopian one: its utopia is that good work is still possible, that work can still be and feel good, that grind is good.

One thing the song is not is—drive. No music is the drive, or rather: all music, any music, is precisely not the drive. A song, with its little teleporting circuits of extracurricular self-satisfaction, is still not a drive. The dictate that a drive toward self-destruction lies at the root of our civilization, or that we now inhabit an “age of the drive”: these are also not drives. What song and story each are, psychoanalytically speaking, is a fantasy. They each manifest a distinct register on which the psychic capacity for fantasy—for fabricating fields which transform drive’s inescapable pressure into desire’s pursuit of the unobtainable—can do its dilating and transpositional work. But a song and a conceptually derelict story of civilizational suicide are two very different kinds of fantasy. And their difference reflects back on the drive in an illuminating way. It points us toward something general—a theory of music as a foundational practice of driven beings—and something particular: a critique of the contemporary deployment of psychoanalysis in service to fatalism, and an argument for its alternate tradition, as a discourse and practice of human freedom.

If drive, in its aim-inhibition, is a first asocial sublimation, music might be considered a second, inherently social sublimation, worldly even in its cosmic departures and flights of abstraction. But it is a strange sublimation, as incomplete as the drive itself, a sublimation that remains aimed at, even fixated on, the drive it leaves behind—music as the drive’s angel of history, or Orpheus turning back to Eurydice; in any case happier and certainly more flush with enjoyment. This leaving behind one could imagine as music’s leap from drive into desire, from drive’s ineliminable intensities into the fugitive domains of representation and language. But music gets caught up in this leap, goes only halfway, stays suspended in air, its vibratory forms hovering between what cannot be avoided and what cannot be grasped.

At its most basic, music could be considered an inevitable consequence of being driven, a dialectical response to living with drives: the ongoing “work song” mediating the drive’s endless labors and the world’s unending coercions. More specifically, music becomes a mediation of the drive’s temporal ungivenness which preserves that ungivenness. A mediation, and a corresponding act of substantiation and construction—which nonetheless insists on gap and repetition. Music substantiates and constructs the drive’s own arrhythmias as rhythm; its impossible repetitions as possible; its flatline as frequency; its constant pressure as punctuation, perforation, ebb and flow. This isn’t just dreamwork, condensation and displacement, but something stranger: a Penelopean erotics whose weave neither escapes nor disavows the silence of the drive but rather induces it through frequency, putting that silence to work as gap, not a missing link but a linking through missing. Paraphrasing Freud on dreams as “the royal road” to the unconscious, Mladen Dolar has proposed the voice as “the royal road to the drive.” One should widen this infrastructure and imagine music tout court as such a royal road: not the drive itself, but a less impeded conceptual pathway, diminishing what keeps drive otherwise so unconscious, unimaginable, disavowed, “at bay.”^[41] At the least, music is Eros-work that refuses to antagonize Thanatos-work. It rejects the Manichaean contest of life and death, abstains from making drive’s immortal movement its mortal enemy. It makes a partner of drive, folds death into its vitality, makes nihil the spectral support of its peculiar brand of presence. “I just want to stay high … with you …”

Nothing is farther from our “age of the drive,” whose entire project could be better understood as an aggressive deployment of fantasy in order to plug up and smooth out the drive’s ineliminable negativity and disruptive tension—a cultural style. Fantasies are ambivalent, ambidextrous constructions, always aimed at transposing the drive from which they originate into some unreachable horizon. But in this case, fantasy wages a full counterinsurgency against the drive: the fantasy is a wishful dream of having eliminated the drive that induced it, not least by a kind of theoretical gaslighting that defines the drive as the very opposite of what it is. 

Such counterinsurgent logic against the drive ultimately spans from the annihilation of the conceptual gap to the annihilation of surplus populations. This annihilation of the gap occupies the entire political spectrum, and can be achieved as much through anesthetic disavowal or sweaty repression as through blatant aggression and sadistic arrest. Its primary mode is imaginary: an alternately rageful and tearful patching, stuffing, and collapsing of time and space into consolations and cruelties that brook no “absence at the heart of the address,” as Willi Apollon put it.^[42] A desperate, ultimately despairing exercise in fabrication, it is deeply related to music’s Penelopean erotics. But it is done as a hatred of music, a refusal of address, a rejection of the fragile act of listening itself. Repetition’s hegemonic forms today—shooting, streaming, scrolling, vibing, driving, capitalizing—could in this sense be understood as forms of music-hatred, or at least as fulcra where a mutual hatred of drive and of music meet. These forms practice repetition not to affirm it, but, repeatedly, to make it stop.

What we instead have in the Freudian-Lacanian legacy of drive is a singular account of freedom: a mythology of human destiny as exile from fate, the saving incapacity to not-sublimate, the comic failure to not be born, the inability to not-queer the libidinal aim. Such a mythology need not deny human history as a seemingly transhistorical struggle to overcome precisely this constitutional openness through the ambivalent, often reactionary power of fantasy. Drive is, again, radically promiscuous; drive drifts. It attaches itself even to dreams of its liquidation because the drive can enjoy anything. But precisely this is the best evidence of its freedom. And this freedom, this promiscuous incompleteness, must not be coopted for a tragic account of human fate. We cannot do our enemies’ work for them. Music provides one dialectical model, one royal road, toward reaffirming the freedom of the drive in an era that finds that freedom unbearable.

^[1] Deep thanks to the wonderful participants in the exploratory ACLA seminar that led to this essay, and especially to Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal for their generous work and guidance making it happen; thanks also to Tracy McNulty, Farah Bakaari, Nathan Gorelick, Mladen Dolar, and my Drive/Music seminar students Hiro Cho, Nathan Friedman, Juan Rivera, Yesha Shukla, and Alex Tripp for invaluable responses to previous versions; thanks finally to Anna Kornbluh, steadfast interlocutor in all things drive.

^[2] Brittany HowardVEVO, “Stay High,” YouTube, published July 16, 2019, accessed November 3, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI.

^[3] Thao Nguyen and Brittany Howard, “Episode 168: Brittany Howard, ‘Stay High,” produced by Hrishikesh Hirway, in Song Exploder, Sept. 18, 2019, podcast, MP3 audio, 18:33, https://songexploder.net/brittany-howard.

^[4] Maya Kronfeld, “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm,” Radical Philosophy 2/5 (2019), 43.

^[5] Emily J. Lordi, The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Durham: Duke, 2020), 8.

^[6] See comment from @143Chriztophur, accessed Nov. 3, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI&lc=UgyFJE44B78RnbLY7-V4AaABAg.

^[7] See the ad at https://www.businessinsider.com/terry-crews-amazon-ad-video-2021-11. See also a fine analysis of the song and video’s contradictions from David Yearsley at https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/13/joie-de-job-staying-high-at-work/.

^[8] See “Brittany Howard: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert,” filmed on Oct. 15, 2019, and posted on YouTube on October 23, 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyW5Zz0w1zg&ab_channel=NPRMusic. See also Amanda Petrusich, “Brittany Howard’s Transformation,” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/brittany-howards-transformation.

^[9] Daniel K.L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2021), 191.

^[10] Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1957), 245.

^[11] See  Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer (Oxford: Oxford, 2018), 41ff.

^[12] See “Anthony Braxton on the Radiance of Standards, his Search for Charlie Parker & the Forces that Divide America,” at https://www.grammy.com/news/2021-anthony-braxton-interview-12-comp-zim-quartet-standards; see also “Cecil Taylor on Music as Life/Life as Music,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFyvPAWuug; both links last accessed Nov. 3, 2024.

^[13] See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 168; see also Fred Moten, among other writings, “Criminality and Uplift,” in Stolen Life (Durham: Duke, 2018), especially 128–38. I thank Derek Baron for connecting Moten’s thinking here to Diedrich Diederichsen’s notion of groove as preserving the dissonance polyrhythmically rather than resolving it harmonically. See Diedrichsen, Freiheit macht arm: Das Leben nach dem Rock ’n’ Roll (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993), 109.

^[14] On the specifically contemporary “difficulty” of sex, see among others Gila Ashtor, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (New York: Fordham, 2021), Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke, 2014).

^[15] See especially Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 109–140; and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Standard Edition 18, 1–64. Standard Edition abbreviated below as SE.

^[16] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 167.

^[17] Freud, “Instincts,” 120–21.

^[18] Freud first uses this phrase in “The Unconscious” (1915), in SE 14, 176. I take the substitute translation “delegate” (instead of the traditional “representation”) from Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), 37. For an exploration of Freud’s struggle with language around drives, see Rolf Flor, “On the Very German-ness of Freud’s Trieb,” in Dan Collins and Eve Watson, eds., Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2024), 43–52.

^[19] Tracy McNulty, “Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive,” differences 28/2 (2017), 88.  

^[20] Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1930), SE 22, 95.

^[21] For two distinct but systematic approaches to problems of drive, labor, and the history of capitalism, see Samo Tomsiç, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 1913) and Adrian Johnston, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (New York: Columbia, 2024).

^[22] There are too many examples to list here, but for a wide selection, see: Ben Ware, “The Death Drive at the End of the World,” e-flux 134 (March 2023), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/134/525929/the-death-drive-at-the-end-of-the-world/; Patrick Blanchfield, “Death Drive Nation,” Late Lite 1 (Nov. 2022), https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation; Liza Featherstone, “The Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” Jacobin, June 12, 2019;

https://jacobin.com/2019/06/democratic-party-climate-2020-presidential-debate; Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021). For a withering critique of this trend and a formidable list of further examples, see Anna Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Parapraxis 3 (Dec. 2023), https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/we-didnt-start-the-fire. All accessed Nov. 3, 2024.

^[23] Eric Reinhart, “Confronting the Death Drive in Trump’s America,” Jacobin, Oct. 27, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/10/death-drive-trump-freud-liberalism.

^[24] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2024).

^[25] See for instance Neve Gordon, “The Myth of Israel’s ‘Most Moral Army’,” Al Jazeera, Oct. 16, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/16/the-myth-of-israels-most-moral.

^[26] Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 3.

^[27] Alenka Zupančič, “The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119/4 (2020): 844.

^[28] For the best recent critique of Freud’s biologism, see Dan Collins, “Debunking the Drive,” in Critical Essays on the Drive, 1–39.

^[29] Lacan’s most complete account of the drive comes in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 161ff.

^[30] Copjec, Imagine, 37.

^[31] Lacan, Seminar XI, 169.

^[32] Copjec, “Editorial: Montage of the Drives,” UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1997): 11.

^[33] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 164–65; see also Freud, “Instincts,” SE 14, 118.

^[34] Leon Brenner, “Autistic Rims and Their Vicissitudes,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis 9/1 (2022), https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/autistic_rims_and_their_vicissitudes/. See also Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE 19, 46.

^[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968) 432.

^[36] Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”; Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016), 15.

^[37] Copjec, Imagine, 30.

^[38] Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (New York: Columbia, 2020), 176.

^[39] Harmony Holiday (@Harmony_Holiday), “In the absence of time we made rhythm. — Fred

Moten,” Twitter, August 13, 2023, 9:40pm, https://x.com/Harmony_Holiday/status/1690810634240446464. Cited with permission.

^[40] I am paraphrasing Jodi Dean’s distinction between drive and desire; see Dean, “Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive,” new formations 80 (2013): 139.

^[41] See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5, 608; see also Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006), 157.

^[42] Willi Apollon, “Psychoanalysis and the Freudian Rupture,” trans. Tracy McNulty, differences 28/2 (2017), 16.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb

Eyal Peretz

Clip 1. Opening of Christopher Nolan’s Memento. 

Christopher Nolan’s breakout film, Memento, opens with one of the paradigmatic images of Nolan’s cinema, namely one of those primal images embodying his obsessive conception of the image as such, around which everything else revolves. A decontextualized hand is holding a photograph showing a room, its walls splashed with blood, likely belonging to a man lying on the floor, his face unseen.

We have been given no context, so we cannot say when or where the event depicted in the photograph happened, what its place in a temporal and spatial order is, or whether it is the inauguration of a chain reaction that will now begin or whether it is already the result of a chain of events hidden from us. Most importantly, perhaps, we cannot say who is responsible for, or guilty of, this stain of blood on the wall, which we can designate as enigmatic, that is a stain that does not yet have a meaningful place in some contextual order.

Read allegorically, and doubtless too quickly due to our time constraints, we can say that the photograph itself, a technological product — namely something that emerges not in relation to any natural given order but out of something we can call a cut in existence, or perhaps existence as a cut out of any given order — here shows, in the stain deprived of recognizable meaning, something that haunts the very being of the photographic image as such: the fact of being cut out of any meaningful order. This stain, I suggest, can thus be understood as the inscription of the technological cut as such.

We can think of the photographic medium which is film, when understood as an artistic or poetic medium, as that which revolves around the creation of images that are fascinated by the technological cut, that is, images that — as opposed to regular images, which are interested mainly in the content given in the image rather than in the being of the medium — revolve around the exploration of the very fact that what is seen on screen always emerges first and foremost as a cutting out of a slice of the world from any spatial and temporal continuity and order. The cinematic-photographic medium as projection emerging out of technological cutting is, in this sense, when used poetically, that which is both the activation of, as well as the fascination by, what we can call a withdrawal from any specific temporal and spatial order and context, that is, fascination by mediality as such as something which is beyond any specific time/place and meaningful context, and thus beyond any determinate content (which is always in a specific time and place), a beyond out of which all possible contents emerge, and which is thus itself withdrawn from all content.

We can thus say that when used poetically film can be understood as the withdrawn (namely that which is grounded in a cut and that as such is in excess of any order and thus meaning) that is dedicated to exploring the very dimension of withdrawal, and the enigmatic stain itself — namely something distinguishable from a figure, that which has a meaningful place in a context — can thus be understood as a paradoxical content, the coming to appearance, indeed the memento, of the medium as the non-meaningful withdrawn in excess of all determinate content.

As the withdrawal from any specific temporal order, the medium as such can also be understood to carry with it the mystery of an excessive time, or something we might perhaps call pure time, a time out of joint and out of order, a time in excess of any recognizable and determined temporal organization. In this sense the stain, as the coming to paradoxical appearance of the withdrawn medium, is also the inscription of excessive time.

Since the enigmatic stain in this opening image is a bloodstain, it immediately connects us to the question of the wound — both bodily and psychic — and that of violence, which is to be thought of as the decontextualizing excessive event of disturbance to an ordered or organized formation. Such violent disturbance manifesting itself in the stain can be understood as the bringing about of an exposure — i.e., that to which one is subjected unwillingly — to the dimension of the medium as such, understood as pure excessive time.

The wound, then, in its most fundamental, call it psychic or mental aspect can be understood as the suffering of a violent exposure to pure time as such in excess of any specific temporal organization. What speaks most powerfully in the wound in Nolan’s cinema, the wound inflicted from its psychic aspect, is guilt. Guilt is the affect belonging to the wound-memento of the withdrawn medium, the excessive dimension of pure time that one suffers an exposure to.

This pure time of the medium expressing itself in guilt can be regarded as a fundamental, uncanny foreignness that haunts existence from outside, so to speak, precisely to the degree that, as in the case of the ghost (a prominent question in Nolan’s Interstellar), it cannot be placed or located in it, even as it is somehow present. This is the case since the medium, by definition, is foreign, or Other to, or outside of, any content emerging from it. The placeless enigmatic stain can be understood, then, as the inscription of this ghostly foreignness. The time that is out of joint, the pure time of the medium as such, is that which haunts existence as a fundamental foreignness, manifesting itself as guilt inscribed in the enigmatic stain.

We can say that this pure time, the foreign time of the withdrawn medium, a ghostly time in excess of any determined temporal ordering, is the condition for the possibility of the emergence of an infinite multiplicity of different temporal orderings, some of which will be actualized by coming to characterize the content that emerges out of the pure medium and that will populate the screen. From Inception onwards, Nolan’s cinema has increasingly been fascinated with the exploration of the co-inhabiting of a single cinematic work by a multiplicity of different temporalities. Perhaps the term to use for this multiplicity of temporalities is Bergson’s famous durée, in the sense that such temporalities are to be thought of in relation to an excessive openness that each expresses differently rather than according to a homogenized temporality in which all of them are ordered equally. These durées — for example the differentiation in Nolan’s Dunkirk among the time of the foot soldiers, the time of boats, and the time of planes — do not stand in a hierarchical relation to one another, precisely because their emergence out of pure time, out of the cut, expresses the very fact that there is no originary ordering.

If pure time, the medium as such, is to be transformed into different temporal organizations that will characterize the actual content emerging out of the medium and populate the screen, it will require a mediating agent that possesses, so to speak, two faces: one inscribing the ghostly outside of pure time as such, the other becoming that which a singular organization begins to gather itself around. We can call such a mediator a sovereign beat. The sovereign beat can be understood as a representative or messenger of pure time or as an inscriber of the openness of the medium — hence the epithet “sovereign,” since the medium is the background power upon which the emergence of anything depends — that becomes an axis around which a singular ordering of time, thus a specific way of expressing the medium, is called to gather, and to gather in such a way that each singular ordering can be said to be a specific activation of time. This singular organization around the sovereign beat is what we usually call rhythm. As representative of pure time, the time of the pure cut to which we are unwillingly exposed, the sovereign beat is a foreign agent (namely the agent of the foreign medium) in excess of our will and to which we are unwillingly exposed, and thus subjected. Possessed of two faces — one directed toward pure time, the other toward a singular organization of time as rhythm — each beat, as in the paradigmatic case of the heartbeat, is always under the pressure of the foreign excess of pure time which threatens it with arrhythmia and an attack, exposing it to a fundamental guilt.[1]

Since each rhythm is a singular organization emerging out of pure time that is also always under internal threat of foreign arrhythmia (or perhaps of a syncope, the missing of a beat, to allude to Nolan’s production company, Syncopy, a name that plays on this term), we can say that, always, a rhythm testifies to there being no ultimate One, in the sense both of one guiding hierarchical order, one sovereign beat, that will be the whole’s grounding medium, and of an occupant of the medium, one of the durées or rhythms emerging from the pure cut, which can be considered a fundamental unity, an atom, fully itself and thus not subject or exposed to the cut. Strictly speaking there is no fundamental atom, nothing that, as the word’s etymology suggests, cannot be subject to the cut. Every atom is subject to a cut and a split, every atom is subject to fission, exposing it to an explosion (the ex-, as in exposure, marking the presence of an ex-cessive outside that is pure time as the force of dissolution of any order) that has inscribed within it a fundamental guilt. 

Clip 2. Opening of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This clip is not yet fully available online. This particular clip unfortunately covers over the soundtrack with Nolan’s narration. 

We might say that Nolan’s Oppenheimer revolves around three interrelated questions: 1) What is the atomic bomb and how are we to think of its historical and philosophical significance?; 2) What exactly is the nature of the guilt inscribed in Oppenheimer’s biographical adventure — a question that dominates the film’s final part, consisting of Oppenheimer’s hearing before the security committee, presenting in many ways the film’s central enigma, namely Oppenheimer’s voluntary agreement to these proceedings; and 3) What is the cinematic medium’s relation to these questions? 

The opening scene immediately brings these three interrelated questions to the fore, orchestrated in relation to all the issues mentioned above. We cannot delve fully into the complexity of this scene, but there are a few things I would like to highlight, starting with the visual component of these images.

In what is undoubtedly an echo of the opening of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film begins with a vision of a decontextualized surface of water on which raindrops are falling. The lack of context means that everything that strikes the surface, every drop, arrives enigmatically, that is, as inscribing within itself the mystery of the withdrawn medium. As such, each drop already contains something of the nature of what we have called a stain and is therefore not experienced as a fully meaningful figure within a particular context. In this sense each drop is already a source of what we have called fascination, acting as a messenger of the withdrawn, the medium, which we have also associated with pure time. Because each drop carries the withdrawn and is not a figure in a context or in a unified whole, it also immediately acts as a singular member of a multiplicity or plurality that cannot be brought under an organizing One. Thus, much like the organized soldiers on Nolan’s decontextualized Dunkirk beach, who, upon the arrival of a plane from beyond the screen, from an empty sky without orientation and thus from the direction of the withdrawn, start to disperse and fragment, no longer part of their formations, here each drop, arriving from a sky not experienced as orientation, expresses the fragmentation of the forming One. We can see that as singularities without the One, each inscribing, indeed we might say expressing the withdrawn medium or pure time differently, each drop striking the surface of the water can also be said to be characterized, at least to a degree, by its own singular rhythm, its own durée expressed in the manner of its expansion into differing circles upon hitting the surface. Thus one aspect of rhythm that this scene in particular, as well as Nolan’s cinema in general, will be interested in is what we can call (very inadequately) material consistency. Even though each drop of water possesses its own distinct rhythm, we can nevertheless talk perhaps about the rhythms of the rain, and later of fire, gas, or, elsewhere in the film, wind, earth, dust, etc. Such a differentiation of rhythmic consistencies increasingly fascinates Nolan and is evident in his cinematic experimentations with relative temporalities.

Having opened with the question of the multiplicity of temporalities and singular rhythms implied in the dissolution of the One brought about by the technological cut and its decontextualized surface, the movie continues to explore the question of rhythm and temporal organization through its bringing the question of the cut to the forefront, most importantly via the question of the way that the cut, most essentially here as an editing cut (though a cut between the visual and the auditory as well, something we won’t be able to explore), implies the emergence of a series, a series of cuts.

I have started to suggest that the question of the pure time of the cut is related to what I have called a sovereign beat, that representative of pure time around which singular organizations of time start to emerge. At the heart of a sovereign beat is the activation of the cut, thus of pure time, but if it is to become rhythm the cut must be part of a series. Only when becoming part of a series do the editing cuts start to function as sovereign beats, namely as inscriptions of the pure medium — that which cuts out of any order —  the forming of the relations between which establishes a specific way for a temporal organization to emerge out of pure time.

However, the dimension of the poetic, we saw, involves the fascinated exposure not to this or that rhythm, or not only, but also, and most essentially, to the dimension of the medium as such, its being as pure cut in excess of every specific rhythm emerging out of it, even as it is the beating source at the heart of all these rhythms. We might thus say that the medium as such can only be opened to via the tension of the differences between singular rhythms, the tension in between the singular drops, so to speak. As such the poetic dimension will always have to activate the double side of the sovereign beat, that of the excessive medium beyond any specific rhythm, and that of the series that is the source of characterization of everything that emerges in relation to the pure medium. This means that the poetic dimension always needs to circulate around an a-rhythmia, or a syncope, namely around the tension between the emergence of rhythms and the excess of the pure medium, a tension also internal to every rhythm insofar as it is exposed to pure time. The dimension of the poetic is always on the verge of a heart attack or a fainting spell due to a missed beat.

Thus, following the opening image and its singularly differentiated raindrops, we experience an editing cut, the film’s first, indicating an exposure to the medium emerging out of the differences between singularities. Out of this first cut Oppenheimer is born, so to speak, into the world, his eyes opened to it, causing him to be fascinated by what he sees: the decontextualized, singularly differentiated raindrops. Oppenheimer is a fascinated watcher to the degree that, being sensitive to the fragmentation of the One into the differences of incommensurable singularities, he is exposed to the cut, the pure medium as such. This fascination, of course, immediately echoes our own fascinated look, namely the look of those in whom a poetic cinematic watching opens due to the cutting exposure to the medium.

This fascinated look, born of the first cut, will also be characterized by the exposure to a series of beats that immediately follow this cut, as if these beats were marking the opening of the world according to the question of rhythm. Yet this series of cuts/beats that follows, which rhythmically characterizes Oppenheimer and us as well, is irregular, since each segment’s length and breath is different. Thus exposed to a series of irregular beats — an irregularity at the heart of his vision, characterized by sensitivity to the differences between singularities and to the excessive pure medium, due to the collapse of the regulating One — Oppenheimer’s existence, and our own existence as cinematic watchers, opens under the sign of an a-rhythmia, a syncopated fainting, even a heart attack. We might mention that later in the film, at the moment of the Bomb’s explosion during the Trinity test scene (with “Trinity” already announcing the mystery of the split in the one), as the rhythm of the music keeps increasing in intensity and changing, Oppenheimer says that these things are hard on your heart. We might also mention that Emily Blunt, one of the film’s stars, has described the film as a three-hour heart attack.

If the dimension of the One implies the dimension of a Whole, the encompassing of existence in its entirety and its placement under the sign of what has been called a cosmic order or rhythm, then we can think of this opening scene, which exposes us to a thinking beyond the logic of the One, as introducing a cosmic a-rhythmia, an entropic decomposition, to be distinguished from the harmonious and proportionate music of the spheres. We can also think of the film, and the irregular series of its cuts that expose us to a cosmic arrhythmia beyond the logic of the One, as itself being the activation of a fission, in the sense that every dimension of unity — including the most basic, the atom — is split. The film itself can, in this sense, also be understood as an ex-plosion (the activation of a pure outside, the ex, that decomposes and fragments the whole), which at its extreme limit we can characterize as atomic.

In such a cinematic-atomic explosion, as this opening scene already demonstrates, each fragment, each segment emerging in between the irregular cuts becomes decontextualized. We do not know how one segment refers to the next, and all become enigmatic stains filled with wounds and guilt — hence our scene ending with the question of judgment — in an a-rhythmatic cosmos bereft of all unity and order, a cosmos where God plays dice.

In this explosive, a-rhythmic, and polyrhythmic cosmos we are increasingly exposed to the pure cut, the medium, in such a way that time is fully out of joint and out of order: nothing is in its place and no thing has a given place, not even a clearly marked before and after, there is a constitutional non-linearity. It is therefore unclear whether this fragmentary vision, this cinematic ex-plosion following Oppenheimer’s introduction is something that has already happened or is something that will happen, or perhaps it might only be a hallucination of someone collapsing amid a heart attack, as seemingly suggested by the view of Oppenheimer’s face almost sinking into the enigma of the watery surface. It is the atomic bomb itself, which this scene in a way already is, that expresses in this sense the extreme limit of this out-of-jointness and rhythmic decomposition. In splitting the cosmos into decontextualized fragments, sub-atomic particles in a way, it is no longer clear whether the Bomb has happened, will happen, or has always already happened in a time out of time, in a Big Bang.

This temporal out-of-jointness is most powerfully expressed in this opening scene in the auditory dimension, which I do not have time to elaborate upon, especially in the accelerating beats that toward its end arrive seemingly out of nowhere and interrupt any formation of regulated rhythm. Only much later on, in a logic of aprés-coup that structures much of the film, in a scene following the Hiroshima bombing, will we, in a way, understand these accelerated beats. They arrive almost as if they were attacking Oppenheimer at the moment of his utmost guilt, where he seems to realize, in a hallucinatory moment on the verge of collapse, the significance of the Bomb he brought into the world. The accelerating beats, as if they were leading up to a heart attack, thus mark both Oppenheimer’s explosive guilt and, through the first scene’s highlighting of their decontextualized nature, the non-place and non-time of the guilt associated with the Bomb, an existential guilt that has always already happened, way before its actual explosion, and that perhaps is what is responsible for bringing it about.

Yet here is precisely where we can start to glimpse the difference between the Bomb’s explosion and the cinematic medium, itself developed by Nolan, as we saw, according to the a-rhythmatic logic of the explosion, the bringing to its limit the logic of the One, a logic we can call also metaphysic-theological. For if film as Nolan develops it marks the explosion of the logic of the One this does not mean that it is without some mysterious new unity that allows the whole to cohere, a unity that has to do with our never losing sight of the withdrawn, the medium, in excess of all the fragments and all the singular durées emerging from it. The film achieves its unity by being guided by the medium in excess of all the explosive fragments. It is the excess that unites, in that, though not consisting in any ordering or completion, it nevertheless functions as that which allows all the fragments to communicate, to share in existence by being exposed to one another through the irregularity of their beats, in a new way[2].

We can call such communication through excess, and indeed of excess and thus of the medium itself beyond any specific rhythmic order and contextual meaning, music, perhaps atonal music, which, as we heard, opens the film before we encounter any visual image and in many ways holds it together. Music as a poetic medium — which is not limited to any specific sensory modality since it is the activation of a fundamental aspect of a general logic of temporality — is the communication of non-meaningful excess achieved through the exposure of multiple rhythms to one another at their a-rythmatic limits. In the film’s second scene, in an essential encounter with Niels Bohr — the pacifist physicist who will refuse to join the project to develop the Bomb, opting instead to try to keep the post-Bomb world together so that it does not annihilate itself – Bohr tells Oppenheimer: “Algebra’s like sheet music, the important thing isn’t can you read the music, it’s can you hear it? Can you hear the music, Robert?” Oppenheimer responds: “Yes I can.” Yet there are reasons to suspect that the Oppenheimer we encountered in the first scene, subjected to explosive a-rhythmia and fragmentary vision, cannot fully hear the music, since he is too much under the sign of stain and guilt, if we understand guilt not only as the affect of the exposure to the excessive dimension of the withdrawn medium or pure time, but as the desire to bring the fragmentation of existence entailed by such exposure back into the fold of the logic of the One, in the manner of Hamlet’s desire to restore the Father. In this sense, the development of the Bomb is not simply the expression of the insight into the new a-rhythmatic cosmos but the attempt to restore the theologico-metaphysical One at the moment of its radical annihilation or nihilism. The Bomb is the ultimate extension of nihilism’s logic and attendant will to power, its desire to restore a lost One through the will, and this perhaps accounts for Oppenheimer famously naming the first bomb test Trinity, unconsciously sensing the relation between the Bomb and the desire for the theology of the One. If we do not want the Bomb to be the ultimate result of the discovery of the a-rhythmatic cosmos, the film suggests (and thus do not want, as in the opening of Tenet, for the concert to be replaced by destruction), we need to go beyond guilt and move toward the condition of music (as the musical therapy recommended to Vertigo’s Scottie, haunted by his guilt, seems to point to). Rather than succumbing to nihilistic destruction, it is in attempting to be such a polyrhythmic, a-rhythmatic, and atonal musical communication that this explosive movie relates itself to, as well as distinguishes itself from, the atomic bomb.

Notes

[1] https://suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2023/09/cardiac-arrest-guilt/

[2] Gilles Deleuze has famously characterized such logic connecting in a new way unity and dispersal as a disjunctive synthesis.