Liner Notes from Mendi + Keith Obadike
present Crosstalk – Bridge Records 9285
Crosstalk: Blurred Boundaries in American Speech
Music
One of the most surprising shifts in American music
and literature of the last thirty years may not be the rise and fall of high
level improvisation in the popular sphere, the dominance of digital tools, or
the boom in self-publishing but, instead, the unlikely prevalence of recorded
speech-based artworks between music and literature. Different nodes in this
field of activity have been called many things over the years, including
Òspoken wordÓ, Òtext-soundÓ, ÒrapÓ, and Òsound poetryÓ. How did we arrive at
this moment where a form of speech music (hip-hop) would dominate our popular
radio, films, and corporate advertising campaigns, while recording studios
would produce literature as influential as that produced by our major
publishing houses? Some say this is what happens when griots
go pop; others blame it on the avant-garde.
The centuries old practices of the griots are an obvious precursor to the best of popular
hip-hop. Meanwhile, another commonly repeated history traces contemporary
American avant-garde speech music to early twentieth century European Futurist experiments
with sound, which were developed in search of onomatopoetic utterances that
could invoke the sounds of war. Sometimes a tradition is traced to Hugo Ball's
search for "verse without words". But the early part of the twentieth
century also produced the musico-poetry of the
Negritude movement. In the US, the poet Langston Hughes not only created poetic
forms based on the moods and structures of blues and jazz, but also developed
his own talking music by performing with musical groups. In Cuba, Hughes'
colleague Nicol‡s GuillŽn
was collaborating with composers and creating a poetic form based on the Cuban son. He was also crafting language in
his poems to recall the sounds of African drums, a gesture linked both to the
Negritude / negrismo movement (in which writers in
the Americas were valorizing African sounds and excavating African roots of
European languages) and to the Spanish jitanj‡fora
movement (in which writers were making up words and exploring the possibilities
of poetry in the sounds of the language alone). Such overlap in the
experimentation with the music of speech has always come from a variety of
communities with different interests and investments in the experiments. We
call this overlap crosstalk –
after the term used to describe the bleeding of signals across audio channels.
The
proliferation of communities experimenting with speech and music in the United
States during the 1960s and 70s created an environment for more crosstalk. The
Swedish collective Fylkingen founded a
"text-sound" festival that generated a great deal of original work
that traveled as far as to the west coast of the United States. American
composers working in university-based computer music studios, such as Paul
Lansky and Charles Dodge, were using speech synthesis to investigate the
possibilities of spoken utterances in music. At the same time, there were
popular and avant-garde poetry ensembles such as the Last Poets and Watts
Prophets, and solo artists including Sonia Sanchez and Jane Cortez, who ushered
in new modes of performance and reinvented the role of the griot
in African-American culture. Ghanaian musician Koo Nimo,
(who studied as a member of the Asantehene's court)
brought his own form of speech music to the US in collaboration with the
Smithsonian institute in the 1970s, while King Sunny Ade electrified and
exported Nigerian talking drums to American shores. Meanwhile, Steve Reich
translated his phasing concepts from his early speech loops to drums and set
the stage for his later theater works. The influence of sounds that were at
some points in pop music parlance called "third world" and at others
called "world music" on the American music scene blossomed in the
1970s with innovative musical/literary works by dub artists Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka,
among many others. Whether the traditions were homegrown or imported, much of
the interdisciplinary work in the United States during this period originated
in collaborative communities, such as Chicago's Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians and the St. Louis-based Black Artists' Group.
This
period also produced criticism that blurred boundaries between speech and song,
or between literature and music, for a variety of reasons. For example, in an essay entitled "The Blues as Black
Poetry", critic Stephen Henderson argued that in the context of
contemporary black poetry, for which he found blues music to be a
characteristic element, "many of the usual distinctions made between
poetry and prose and poetry and song are often meaninglessÓ. In a related move,
artist one might argue that a work is "basically musical, but also
poetry".
In 1975, composer / producer Charles Amirkhanian and Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch records released
a ground breaking survey of American talking music entitled 10+2:12 American Text-Sound Pieces. 10+2
emerged just before the bloom of hip-hop and was coterminous with the
popularity of spoken songs by The Last Poets.
(This album was later re-released in 2003 with a brief introduction by Amirkhanian that mentions related forms of speech music
that had emerged since the 1975 release.) By the early 1980s, American talking
music had produced a few international superstars of its own, including Laurie
Anderson and Gil Scott Heron. This important work anticipated America's broad
acceptance of hip-hop – speech music's most commercial mode.
One of the goals of Crosstalk is to consider how our ways of
listening to American speech music across genres have changed since hip-hop
brought speech music to the mainstream. We began a conversation with other
artists who have worked with speech from the 1970s to the present about speech
music made in this era. Their musical responses to our request varied due to
their different relationships to speech music. While some of the artists on
this project might describe their work as hip-hop or closely related to it,
others were simultaneously working in older genres or parallel streams. Despite
some differences in origin there are a few common practices in the group.
One common practice is the doubling of the voice with other instruments or mimicry of the voice. In some works (such as "Morning Blues
for Yvan" and ÒRedemption Chant 2.0Ó), we hear
instruments mimic human voices. Conversely, in other works, we hear the reverse
situation; musicians ÒplayÓ human voices in the ways they might play some other
instrument.
A number of artists make use of repeated or reordered utterances to emphasize or change the
contexts for the meanings of a given word, or sometimes whole
narratives. In some cases, the repetition of entire narratives emphasizes a
specific aspect of the narrative (such as the rhythms or melodies in the
recorded speech), reveals more information about the narrative (by altering the
processing or the order of presentation), or simply encourages new
understandings of the original performance or text by allowing it to go by
again. The repeated performance of the text makes a judgment by enacting the
difference from everyday speech.
This difference is due in part to the third recurring
practice: the use of extended vocal
techniques. Many of the pieces presented here alter everyday rhythms and
melodies of our spoken language(s) by crossing the border from speech to
singing, by functioning primarily as rhythm, or by employing some other musical
mode, such as yodeling. In some works, these techniques estrange the text from
the everyday. When Hirsch holds on to the vowels or esses
in the language of "In The Basement", for example, she emphasizes
both the passion and the musicality within her spoken narrative. When the
drummer and sound artist Guillermo E. Brown rhymes in an invented language in
"ElectroPrayer 5.0", however, the familiar
vocal runs orient listeners and the emotional information translates where
semantic meanings cannot.
Perhaps the most common practice is the extrication of the meanings from the sounds
of speech. Most works presented here take as a given that sounds hold
musical information, and that the rhythms, textures, and melodies of speech
communicate whether or not the words in a spoken language can be understood.
Some works begin with obscured text that gradually becomes more legible, and
some begin with legible meanings that are eventually obscured. In both
directions, the practice of extricating meanings from sounds, or even reuniting
them, often depends on the use of other practices mentioned here: the pairing
of the voice with other instruments, the repetition or reordering of phrases,
and the extended vocal techniques.
There
are also practices involved in the making of these works that do not fit so
neatly with other artists' processes, and the common practices are no more
important than the uncommon ones. Ultimately, we hope that you let your ears
guide you through the linguistic and musical intersections and tributaries
presented here. It is our belief that by listening to speech music across genre
and generation we can come to a better understanding of this musical practice
in America.