Improvising Rage
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Date
2018
DOI
Open Access Location
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Publisher
Liminalities
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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Abstract
I keep coming back to “Strange Fruit.” I launch myself in other directions, exploring musical critiques of cultural politics through Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You
Talmbout,” through Lauryn Hill’s “Black Rage.” And, seemingly inevitably, I come back to reflecting upon the song voted “one of the darkest songs you’ve
ever heard” (reddit.com); one of the “Top 11 Most Depressing Songs of All Time” (spike.com); and “the first great protest song” (theguardian.com)—Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit.” I had initially intended to focus my attention only on Monáe (“Hell You Talmbout”) and Hill (“Black Rage”) in a discussion of protest songs that might be able to act as metaphorical anthems—or, act analogously to anthems—in helping to constitute a cohesive sense of group identity and a shared narrative that might articulate a collaborative project for the Black Lives Matter movement. My thinking about the role music might play in nurturing the idea that Black Lives Matter repeatedly returns to the following questions: What kind of improvisation is possible—and what kind is needed—in a social justice movement whose central demand has sometimes been framed as “I can’t breathe”? (And please, yes, do take a moment
to fully appreciate the victim-blaming absurdity of a dying man’s plea being characterized as a demand—one too radical for the status quo to satisfy.1)
1 These are the last words of Eric Garner, who couldn’t breathe as he lay dying on the
streets of Staten Island NY because he was being held in an illegal chokehold by a
member of the New York Police Department, 17 July 2014. He was posthumously accused by the NYPD of selling loose cigarettes, allegedly depriving the state of New
York of pennies in tax revenue. The officer was not indicted.
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Citation
Nicholls T. (2018). Improvising Rage. Liminalities: a journal of performance studies. 14. 1. (pp. 26-40).