What They Want, What They Need

“James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need.” – Sun Ra
Mixtape on Firefly Frequencies

Mike Kelley remembers the exchange in the collection Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals. He has seen Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival and finds his way backstage afterward. Somewhere nearby in memory is James Brown: another bandleader, another extraordinary spectacle, another way of organising bodies through sound. Kelley asks Sun Ra about the difference. Sun Ra answers with what sounds almost like a joke, or a boast, but also like a theory of aesthetics: James Brown gives the people what they want; Sun Ra gives them what they need.

Memory complicates the story. At the 1974 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile, Brown and Sun Ra were in fact programmed on the same Friday-night bill, though Kelley’s recollection appears to fold together different years and different performances. But perhaps the confusion improves the story. It produces a festival that exists partly in history and partly in memory, a night on which James Brown and Sun Ra can be imagined confronting the same problem from opposite ends of the stage. What does it mean to lead an audience somewhere? Do you take people where they already know they want to go? Or somewhere they could not have asked to go because they do not yet know that place exists?

Start, then, with the Night Train. James Brown calls the stations. The rhythm moves. The groove knows where it is going. There is something magnificent about this certainty. A good groove creates its own necessity. Once it has begun, the next beat seems simultaneously inevitable and desperately desired. It gives the body a future it can anticipate. Not an abstract future, but one perhaps no more than half a second away: the kick, the snare, the return, the riff coming round again. Yes. There. Again. Leadership can work this way too. Name the destination. Establish the rhythm. Get everybody aboard. Night Train. Next stop. There is nothing wrong with knowing where you want to go. But what about where you need to go and don’t know it yet?

This playlist begins with the proposition that sometimes you have to establish the groove precisely so that you can break it. Disorientation only matters when there was first an orientation to lose. Noise is different when it interrupts music rather than simply declaring itself against it. A rhythm must become inhabitable before its disturbance can register as an event.

Getatchew Mekuria and The Ex give us Musicawi Silt: propulsion held together by something that always threatens to exceed it. Repetition does not close the music down; it creates the conditions in which something else can happen. Horns push against the rhythmic frame. The groove becomes not a rail line but a terrain. You still move, but the question of where becomes less certain. And this uncertainty keeps spreading. All Scars. uKanDanZ. Drill for Absentee. The titles themselves begin to sound like directions received from an unreliable navigation system: Introduction to Humanity. Tchuhetén Betsèmu (ጩኽቴን፡ብትሰሙ – or “If you listened to my shouting”). This Process Will Make Chicago Wave Its Little Hand. Follow the instructions carefully and you may end up somewhere other than where the instructions appeared to point.

This is not simply a progression from accessible music toward difficult music, as though the purpose were to punish pleasure for having enjoyed itself. Quite the opposite. The groove matters. Pleasure matters. What Sun Ra’s remark opens up is not some dreary distinction between popular gratification and avant-garde virtue. Afterall James Brown’s music is far too strange, excessive and inventive for that; Sun Ra’s far too funny, joyous and swinging. Both know how to move a room. The more interesting difference is between two relationships to desire. One gives desire an object. The other interferes with desire long enough for it to discover that it might desire differently. Build the groove. Then put something in its way.

Perhaps this is one way into what Fred Moten calls being in the break. The break is musical, certainly, but it is more than an interruption of an established rhythm. In In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Moten locates black radical aesthetics precisely in this internal and interstitial space: in syncopation, improvisation, ensemble, in what he calls an “anarchic organization of phonic substance” (85). The break cuts into form, but does not simply negate it. It is a refusal of closure that keeps reconstruction going, an improvisation within and against what has already been given. The groove is not destroyed so much as opened: made available for other relations, other movements, other ways of being together.

So perhaps what matters here is not build the groove, then destroy it, exactly, but build the groove, then break it open. Moten’s break is a caesura one might need to linger inside: not the empty interval between one thing and the next, but the place where another possibility gathers before it has acquired a name. The disruption matters because it changes our relation to what came before. We thought we knew where the rhythm was taking us; now we have to listen again, and to one another, differently. The break becomes a necessary dislocation of sense and sensibility: not departure from the ensemble, but the place where the ensemble can be improvised otherwise. What seemed like breakdown might instead be the opening through which something we did not yet know we needed can enter.

Circus Amok’s channelling of Sun Ra’s Watusa can still dance while refusing to behave. Dog Faced Hermans can take John Henry, one of those foundational American myths of labour, machinery, strength and death, and make the inherited materials come apart in your hands. Fire! lays down something heavy enough to walk on and then asks, Would I Whip (Without Noticing), as if the pulse itself might conceal forms of violence precisely because we have become comfortable inside it. The danger of a groove is also its promise: you stop having to think about it. You know where the one is. You know what comes next. You know what everybody else is doing. And then something happens.

Subhumans call it Evolution, although evolution does not necessarily know where it is going either. It proceeds by deviation, mutation, accident, adaptation. Liev Tuk’s Rom Sue Sue (Dance Soul Soul) brings the body back in: dance as knowledge before explanation, a repetition that could become trance, ritual, insistence. Then James Chance issues what might be the manifesto for the whole sequence: Contort Yourself. Not express yourself. Not discover yourself. Contort yourself. Take the form you’ve been given and bend it until another form appears. Chance and the Contortions understood that funk could be attacked most effectively by people who loved it enough to know where to insert the knife. The rhythm section gives you something to believe in while guitars and saxophones behave as if belief were a problem. This is why the gesture differs from mere negation. You cannot contort something without maintaining a relation to the thing being contorted. The groove survives its deformation. Sometimes it becomes more present because of it.

This Heat’s Makeshift Swahili pushes further into unstable territory. Systems loop and rupture. Repetition becomes claustrophobic, then suddenly opens. The familiar machinery of rock remains visible, but pieces have been removed and reattached in the wrong places. By the time Gang of Four arrive, the groove and its critique have almost become indistinguishable. Natural’s Not in It. Bass and drums insist that you dance; Andy Gill’s guitar appears determined to stop the music from becoming comfortable with itself. Pleasure becomes angular. Funk learns how to argue.

This is perhaps the crucial point. The destruction of the groove need not abolish the groove. It can make the groove conscious of itself. It can reveal the architecture supporting it: repetition, expectation, discipline, desire. What seemed natural turns out not to have been natural at all. And suddenly we are talking about leadership again. There is a familiar conception of leadership modelled on the Night Train. The leader knows the destination. The leader calls the stops. Leadership consists of clarity: establishing direction, aligning people behind it, removing obstacles, maintaining momentum. There are situations where this is exactly what is needed. Sometimes you genuinely need to get to the next station.

Creative leadership begins from a different problem. What if the destination cannot be known beforehand because discovering it is the purpose of the journey? Then the leader who confidently announces the route may be the person preventing everybody from getting where they need to go. Another form of leadership would have to produce conditions for getting lost. Not abandonment. Not confusion for its own sake. More like the dérive: a deliberate loosening of the routes that ordinarily organise movement so that other attractions can begin to exert their force. You establish enough form for its deformation to become perceptible. Enough rhythm that departure means something. Enough collective orientation that disorientation can remain collective rather than becoming simple isolation. Public Image Ltd call it Swan Lake: something elegant inherited and then dragged somewhere danker, stranger, more repetitive. Crass encounter Walls. DNA barely grants the song enough coherence to be dismantled before Egomaniac’s Kiss starts dismantling it. By this point the playlist has travelled very far from the Night Train, but perhaps not in a straight line. The train tracks have been pulled up. Someone has built an instrument from them.

There is always a political temptation to mistake knowing what people want for knowing what they need. Sun Ra’s formulation is dangerous in exactly this respect. Who gets to decide? The enlightened artist? The leader? The teacher? The revolutionary cadre? It would be easy to turn the aphorism into the worst kind of avant-garde paternalism: the audience wants pleasure, but I possess the difficult medicine that will improve them. But that cannot be where this ends. The most interesting reading is not that Sun Ra knows what the people need. It is that his music creates a situation in which nobody entirely knows. Not even Sun Ra. The difference is crucial. To give people what they need does not have to mean secretly possessing the correct destination. It might instead mean constructing the vehicle in which another destination becomes thinkable. The role of creative leadership then is not to replace somebody else’s desire with your superior knowledge. It is to disturb the structures that make certain desires appear inevitable.

A groove. A break. Another groove. Another break. What emerges is not freedom from form but a capacity to make and unmake forms together. Which is why the playlist has to end with Sun Ra, and why Sun Ra’s answer to the Night Train is not no train, no rhythm, no collective movement. It is the spaceship. Space Is the Place. A destination presented as a proposition rather than an itinerary. Space is not somewhere the established railway can take you. There are no stations because the route has not yet been laid. You require another mode of transport, which means another technology, another mythology, another band, another way of organising people.

James Brown gives us the Night Train. Sun Ra gives us the spaceship. But perhaps what we need from both of them is the movement between the two: the groove strong enough to gather people together and the break strong enough to prevent gathering from hardening into obedience. Give them what they want. Give them the beat. Give them somewhere to stand. Then move the ground.

Mixtape
James Brown – Night Train
Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex – Musicawi Silt
All Scars – C,  From Introduction to Humanity
uKanDanZ – Tchuhetén Betsèmu
Drill for Absentee – This Process Will Make Chicago Wave Its Little Hand
Circus Amok – Watusa
Dog Faced Hermans – John Henry
Fire! – Would I Whip (Without Noticing)
Subhumans – Evolution
Liev Tuk – Rom Sue Sue (Dance Soul Soul)
James Chance & the Contortions – Contort Yourself
This Is Not This Heat – Makeshift Swahili
Gang of Four – Natural’s Not in It
Public Image Limited – Swan Lake
Crass – Walls
DNA – Egomaniac’s Kiss
Sun Ra – Space is the Place

Kelley, Mike (2004) ‘Some Aesthetic High Points’, in J.C. Welchman (ed.) Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 40–48, at p. 42.

Moten, Fred (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.