Hard Gospel: Blackness, Belief, Aesthetics (Morning) - April 22, 2026

Ajouté : 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]come up with Q&A. Whatever the program is order, >> good morning everybody.

[00:00:17]>> That's all y'all got.

[00:00:19]>> Good morning everybody.

[00:00:21]>> So great to have you here. Welcome to Hard Gospel Blackness Belief Aesthetics.

[00:00:26]symposium that explores a number of important uh topics both uh of contemporary relevance and of enduring concern. I'm Braxton Shelley, faculty director of the program Music in the Black Church. And I saved 15 minutes for remarks, but I'm going to take one minute and and just uh uh say to you, I was at a talk last Friday with the Canadian poet, playwright, essaist, um Norie Phillip, and she mentioned a moment when while watching Artha Franklin's funeral, she heard the Clark sisters sing, and uh she said, "When I heard that sound, I said, this is the sound they've been trying to kill >> since we got here.

[00:01:12]>> And that was an important um observation for me to hear because it related to the the topic of this panel, but also my concern last summer when the whole Norman Giani thing was viral. I had a question of whether or not uh doing this talk in in April would be too late. Like what the ideas have gone stale would look like an attempt to be uh trendy but too late. And so her talk reminded me that more than any other question we might actually explore uh about the black gospel tradition, this question, right, the belief that blackness is too much, that black singers, black musicians do too much is probably the safest bet in terms of a topic of enduring interest and concern.

[00:02:00]And so that's what we're here to talk about. Uh I'm going to very quickly bring up the panel chair for this morning. But before I do that, I want to thank a number of people um who have made possible this event. Certainly all the panelists who will be introduced and presented in their order. But I also want to thank the staff of the Institute of Sacred Music, Eric, Trisha, Liz, Ben, Caitlyn, Katya, Amanda, Craig, and Sachin for your help. And I want to thank all the team from Next Showcase, Reggie, Brendan, Mike, Kelly, Lonnie, and of course the great Mark Hubard for helping to make all this possible.

[00:02:40]Thanks to all of you for being here this morning, and thanks to everybody who's watching via live stream. I look forward to an exciting uh and riveting set of intellectual exchanges. So with that, I'm going to call for Professor Clifton Graanby, who is going to chair the first panel to lead us further.

[00:03:02]Good morning.

[00:03:03]>> Morning.

[00:03:04]>> It's a blessing to be here. I have the honor of being your chair for this first panel uh which will consist of uh three remarkable three notable scholars. First we have uh Dr. Joshua Lazard, a scholar of homalytics from Boston University, who will present on when Sunday comes, fugitivity and the sounds of blackness.

[00:03:28]Then we have Dr. Jonathan Howard of English and Black Studies uh from Yale University and the author of the widely acclaimed recently published Inhabitants of the Deep. Um and he will present on let's see here the lower room. Finally we have Dr. Adrien Emanuel Hernandez Acasta who teaches religion and literature here at Yale Divinity School.

[00:03:54]Um he has forthcoming work on the poetics of mourning and his talk will be on so beautiful on the complex aesthetic of Billy Preston's simple song. We will proceed in the order of the program and then we'll open things up for discussion.

[00:04:12]Join me in welcoming our our panelists.

[00:04:48]All right.

[00:04:51]Can I just do a quick test just to double check? We're good.

[00:05:03]Good morning.

[00:05:08]>> I don't want to bel labor the moment anymore. Can everybody hear me just fine?

[00:05:12]>> Okay. I don't want to belabor the moment too much. Um I bring greetings um from Boston University. uh and I want to thank everybody who has uh put this symposium together for the invitation.

[00:05:28]So for the brief time that we have this morning, I want to talk to you about when Sunday comes, fugitivity and the sounds of blackness.

[00:05:39]On the morning of November 10th, 2024, a sound, a murmur, a quiet roar simmered in the sanctuary of Chicago's Fellowship Baptist Church. Throughout the 8 a.m.

[00:05:52]and 10:45 a.m. services, there was a sound within the church's walls that petitioned for existential and ontological release. An energy that waited for the moment of eruption, fueled by their pastor, the Reverend Reginald Sharp, and provoked by the sanctified sounds of the church's Hammond organ. Rather than simply describing these words to you, it would it would be better for you to hear it.

[00:06:18]>> Satan can hear you.

[00:06:21]The Lord is my shepherd.

[00:06:24]It it really doesn't matter who's the next president.

[00:06:30]The Lord, the Lord, the Lord is my show. That that that ought to >> that ought to calm you.

[00:06:49]>> I won't complain. I'm not going to complain about the president because you're still not king. You're still my shepherd. Still light in the darkness.

[00:07:00]Still a way maker. Still a truth in the midst of lies. Still peace in the midst of confusion. Still joy in the midst of sorrow. Still a breathing over trouble water. Still a million in the valley.

[00:07:11]Bright morning star. Way out of now.

[00:07:14]Rock we lame. Bread when I'm hungry.

[00:07:18]Walk when I'm thirsty. Wi-Fi when I'm disconnected. Google when I got a question. Tick tock when I need joy.

[00:07:25]Somebody bless him cuz he's still your God. The Lord is Can I ask you a question?

[00:07:46]This scene from that Sunday's 10:45 a.m.

[00:07:49]service raises a pair of questions that I have become preoccupied with in the context of black religion. How does blackness sound? And what makes sound black?

[00:08:02]In messages like Sharps, something more than a speech act of a sermon is happening. Something more than preaching is occurring. This celebratory collision of Sharps' words and the Hammond organs accompaniment is akin to what blackness sounds like on Sundays in so many congregations across the country.

[00:08:21]Reginald Sharp is just one of many examples that crystallizes the relationship between word and sound in the preaching moment. The sound of the sermon and the sound of the organ are locked into a reciprocal relationship that produces a surplus, an excess which takes the form of exhortation. But the pool pit is not the only place in which the exhortive expression of word logos and sound sonus reveal themselves. In the time I have today, I want to theorize a long-standing black religious phenomenon that I term as a logos sonic exhortation.

[00:08:57]Harmonizing the word logos and sonus, I understand logos exhortation as a combination of sound techniques and technologies that assemble weekly in that that assemble weekly in many black churches that materialize the Afropentecostal claim, won't he do it?

[00:09:17]As we attune our ears to the soundsscape of sanctuaries to hear expressions of the logoic exhortation, I will argue that it is not an aberant phenomenon within the black church, but rather an essential feature, an arrangement of word and sound that vents black resistance to the afterles of slavery.

[00:09:35]Therefore, when Sunday comes and one steps into a Fellowship Baptist church, it is an oral baptism of the modern sounds of blackness that rehearse radicality, fugitivity, and even anarchy. So for the brief time allotted to me this morning, I want to chart logos sonic exhortation across the landscape of black religion by forging a path through a fugitive sound, words of encouragement, and the mechanics of over sound before concluding with the anatomy of exhortation.

[00:10:09]Sadia Hartman and Steven Best are most helpful to my understanding of a fugitive sound as they suggest that there is an auditory signal emanating from fugitive practices, an oral existence that they name as black noise.

[00:10:24]Hartman and Best understand black noise as that which is inaudible and illeible within prevailing formulas of political rationality.

[00:10:33]It is a noise, a sound that escapes the gaze or in this case the ear of anti-blackness.

[00:10:40]Their notion of black noise resonates with my interest in black religious phenomena that exceed the conventional constraints of language. I contend that this black noise is featured commonly throughout African-American Christian spaces in ways that transcend media and sense. In other words, black noise can be easily as seen as it can be heard.

[00:11:02]For instance, black churches emit inaudible noise visually. The bright colored suits with matching shoes, the exceptionally large hats that may block someone's view from behind. Banners banners with Bible verses or even neon lights over a baptismal pool.

[00:11:20]Acoustically, the familiar sounds of music and amplified spoken words are supported by the illegible sounds of parents hushing their children, the rustling of candy being opened, the screams of anguish during a funeral as the family walks in.

[00:11:37]That is to say, black noises fugitivity lies in its ability to be heard. heard with the eyes, the nose, the tongue, the embodied rumble of bass notes from a Hammond organs's Leslie speaker through a wooden floor and pew and still retain meaning and resonance in black bodies.

[00:11:56]However, for today, I want to bracket the the mlange of heard and unheard sounds in black churches as I make a case for the logo sonic exhortation, a multivocal sound that arises from the relationship between sermon and instrumental sound. Take the Hammond organ for instance. It is an instrument that is well known in jazz clubs, on rock music stages, and R&B bands. But in the context of a black church on Sunday mornings, this ubiquitous instrument contains a sonic signature that is often hidden. It is made fugitive to those who are not culturally attuned to its sound.

[00:12:36]The piercing squall of treble notes and the low thrum of bass notes produces a sound that is often imitated in those same jazz clubs and rock music stages.

[00:12:46]But inside a black church, it is divinely heard as a black noise that can never be duplicated.

[00:12:55]Meanwhile, logos exhortation as a religious figuring of fugitivity's black noise also contains a pragmatic veilance. These sounds of blackness are intended to do something. To explain this, I turn to an unexpected place. The philologist Juan Carlos Eiglazius Zoo identifies the concept of battle exhortation by applying rhetorical theory to speeches thought to be given by fifth century BCE historian and general Thusidities.

[00:13:26]Zoo gives particular attention to the speech acts thought to be given to soldiers armed for an impending battle.

[00:13:32]Using this Marshall context to claim that the battle exhortation is a genre unto itself, Zoido observes that the orator, the general, directs his speech towards the future and tries to convince his listeners that fighting for the city is the right thing to do. Despite the vast cultural and historical diff distances between these traditions, I contend that the acoustic features nestled in the modern-day brush arbors of black churches can profitably be compared to the ortorial functions of Zordo's battle exhortation. Taking a cue from Zido, the black noise that instantiates itself in the sanctuaries of many black congregations is construed in a way that is future-facing and focuses on encouraging the weary listeners who face an antagonistic world outside of the confines of the gathered worship space on Sunday mornings. Within these churches, black noise logos sonically exhorts. Black noise that is produced and heard by these contemporary maroons is inherently battle tested and battle ready. These are observations I gleaned from my fieldwork with black congregants for my dissertation project on the sermonic afterles in Boston and elsewhere. I've observed that while an afroecclesiastical word and sound event is not preparing soldiers for a military battle with literal artillery, it is a sermonic event that intends to prepare African-American congregants for the existential and metaphysical conflicts they face outside of the safety of a worship service on any given Sunday. In a battlefield predicated on black death, logos exhortation lends encouragement to black congregants in the sermon and beyond it.

[00:15:29]Rather than returning to fellowship for my next case study, I analyze a more recent example that enacts logos exhortation in a manner that I call over sound.

[00:15:42]At Brown Missionary Baptist Church located in a Memphis suburb, I focus on the mechanical output of the Hammond organ that sounded over the senior pastor's prayer before his sermon. In the moments prior to the clip I'm about to play, the pastor of the church, the Reverend Bartholomew, mounts the pullpit to offer a prayer. Locked into the key of B flat, the band intensifies the excess of a previous praise break that is still fermenting as the prayer is designed to quiet the congregation. But the disembodied sounds of the Hammond organ proves too much as it over sounds the senior pastor in his own pullpit.

[00:16:24]Let's listen in.

[00:16:28]some folks have been going through for a long time.

[00:16:32]God, I pray that today will be a day of breakthrough, a day of good news, a day that you will give them release.

[00:16:44]Do it right now. We need a word.

[00:16:48]speak to us, strengthen us, use us, and God, may you give the glory.

[00:16:56]It is in Jesus name that we pray.

[00:17:00]Amen.

[00:17:02]Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:08]Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

[00:17:10]Yeah.

[00:17:18]Just one more time to stand. How many know about grace and mercy?

[00:17:23]Your grace and mercy, brought me through.

[00:17:31]I'm living this moment all because of you.

[00:17:40]Anybody want to thank him?

[00:17:43]Anybody want to praise him?

[00:17:52]From this clip, I am suggesting that the sounds of the organ over sounded not just the senior pastor as the designated preacher of the day, but relocated the pull pit to an immaterial space, a location only known in the corporate minds of the congregation. The focus of the congregation was no longer on the person standing in the pull pit, but found in the non-caporeal essence of the sound of the music. The auditory signal of the Hammond was so strong that the pastor had to give way. In the overound, I I detect the properties of logo sonic exhortation as congregants hear the familiar tune of a song such as the Mississippi Mass Choir's 1993 classic, Your Grace and Mercy. This evokes an auditory imagination in the listening mind of the congregation.

[00:18:48]Albeit a mechanical object that produces an electric pulse through tone wheels that are transmitted to the Leslie speaker through a six pin conductor cable. My theory of logo sonic exhortation conceives that the Hammond organ in fact preaches too. It too exhorts.

[00:19:10]As much as over sound is a transcendent sound, it is also a mechanical sound.

[00:19:16]The mechanics of the Hammond organ connected to its specialty speaker, the Leslie speaker produce what is known as distortion in the world of sound.

[00:19:26]Colloquially, us musicians, we just call it overdrive.

[00:19:30]The overdrive on the Leslie speaker happens when the vacuum tube amplifiers are pushed past their limit, producing a distinctive sonic distortion that breaks through to the ear of the faithful gathered in the sanctuary. The overdrive of the Hammond organ is the material and mechanical trace of the over sound. The electric pulse carried through the tone wheels inside of the organs's wooden cabinet are a necessary component to evoke an auditory imagination in the listening mind of the congregation. The vacuum tubes inside the Leslie speaker that are overdriven by the electric current aid in conjuring divine imminence. Therefore, my theory of logos sonic exhortation conceives that the Hammond organ is an instrument that exhorts. Even though it is an electromechanical object, it produces a sound within the occupied frequency range of black noise contained in the bandwidth channel of logo sonic exhortation. To put it another way, this same Brown Missionary Baptist congregation probably would not have responded the same way if this had been done on the keyboard using the exact same song. And if I can park here parathetically for just a moment, as has already been mentioned, in July 2025, there was an episode of the Isaac Karice Show podcast where the gospel music producer Norman Johny made the claim that his production style was intended to quote break the norms. He went on to name his hearing of gospel music as a genre of people who quote sing too hard and quote over sing.

[00:21:16]While John Fee may function as an industry disruptor, his commentary misses how the overness of sound in black churches serves as an acoustic erupter.

[00:21:30]Lord, make me over. He's all over me and he's keeping me alive. My soul looks back and wonders how I got >> over for every mountain you brought me over. And even last night in the master class, we were reminded the angels keep watching over me, my Lord.

[00:21:51]So the overdrive of a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker is nothing more than the harmonic resonance of a gospel gospel soul was performing what Johny correctly observed the mechanics of singing over sound. The vocals trained in Gina Stewart's yes sir in the close of her sermon or the scratchy imperfections of Albatina Walker singing Lord Keep Me Day by Day at James Cleveland's funeral. That's exactly the point of it all.

[00:22:24]The over sound, I argue, is a chief quickening agent in a sonic calculus that results in the divine manifesting in the marooned confines of a sanctuary when Sunday comes. The connotation of eruption is key. Rather than an eruption that breaks out, the mechanical the mechanics of overound accompany a hard gospel that breaks through the contribution of overound to logos sonic exhortation as something that performs excess hears the overound as a fugitive sound of blackness. This sonic emblem of breakthrough stirs up the religious imagination of the believer in the pew. It provides encouragement to the weary soul. This encouragement from a spoken voice or even a mechanical voice is what logos sonic exhortation sounds like when Sunday comes.

[00:23:19]And finally, I hear the cultural logic of logo sonic exhortation as rooted in the black radical tradition. The sanctuary of fellowship or Brown missionary Baptist church like many other predominantly African-American churches assembles sound fugitively such that logos sonic exhortation becomes an expression of black noise. connecting exhortation with a logosic event directly addresses the way that the sounds of Sunday morning within many black churches be it embodied through one's voice or mechanically through an instrument is something that anarchctically interrupts disrupts and erupts to restructure a lurggical flow with the expectation that a breakthrough can also occur in the sermonic afterlife of the believer Monday through Saturday exhortation is not emotional escape. It is not compensation.

[00:24:14]Rather, exhortation grounds a religious imagination that understands reality in an interworldly perspective. The value of fugitivity as a critical lens rescues religion from merely being an escape and treats religion as a resource. Black religion, heard fugitively, then reflects the will to process in the face of the world's most emiserating evil.

[00:24:39]Through exhortation, typical demarcations of what qualifies as a sermon or who or even what qualifies as a preacher are erased like a fresh wave on what Danielle McCrae recognizes as the shoreline of homalytics.

[00:24:54]In a longer version of this project, I hear exhortation as an anarchctic practice. Let's listen to a very brief example of what I mean.

[00:25:16]Uhoh.

[00:25:22]What are you doing?

[00:25:24]What are you doing for you?

[00:25:36]This man, I want to be clear, has lifted himself up after preaching for about 45 minutes.

[00:25:43]So, in this clip posted by at Timothyville Jr., I hear and see the apotheiois of logosic exhortation, the fugitivity of black noise, where word and sound break through anarchctically. At Greater New Zealand Baptist Church of Oklahoma City, guest revivalist Marcus Cosby has modulated 10 semmitones. That's 10 keys from Eflat all the way up to D flat. The Hammond organs Leslie Speaker is throwing out floor rattling rumbles as if to force Cosby from his seat, even if he didn't want to. The organs squall is answered by Cosby's own erruptive nonverbal squall only to ask the exact same black question that Regginal Sharp did at the beginning of this presentation. Won't he do it?

[00:26:33]Hearing exhortation as an anarchctic practice builds on Jay Cameron Carter's recent work on the anarchy of black religion. My work carries Carter's ideas to the sonic shadowlands of exhortation by intervening in what Carter terms as black religious study, attending to that which is quote practice under the sign of black religion and the blackness thereof. Chief chief among which are quote the practices of blackness as anarchctic insurgency.

[00:27:02]While the corner of black studies that attends to religious figures are often preoccupied with well-known individuals afforded civil rights era bonafides such as Martin Luther King to gardener Taylor. I ask what about the thousands of black preachers that mount pool pits and strip mall storefronts or one room churches in rural areas whose logo sonic exhortation is just as worthy of comment. And this I agree with Eddie Glaude's call for the African-American for African-American religious studies to quote give more attention to this as opposed to that.

[00:27:38]There is an everydayness, an ordinariness to the religious mood of black noise heard in the marinage of black sanctuaries. My case studies are ecclesial examples designed to move away from a few titular archetypes and to ground my analysis in deeper engagement with sound. This allows me to forward a paradigm that enables scholars to join congregants in hearing the expressions of black noise that offer encouragement to those that attend black churches every week. Beyond the sermon through the listening ear to the hard gospel of a Hammond organs over sound, when Sunday comes, the black religious routinely engage the anarchic practice of word and sound, providing encouragement to the gathered congregation by means of logos exhortation. Thank you.

[00:28:58]No, just >> good morning.

[00:29:17]Um, my name is Jonathan Howard. I am an assistant professor of English and black studies. And it's good to be with you all up the hill uh this morning. It's good to be a lowly literary scholar in the company of some theologians. And what I'd like to do today is to think theologically about some literature that's dear dear to my heart. So, uh, my comments this morning are titled the lower room. What does the hold sound like?

[00:29:48]So I wonder if sometimes in our idealization of up with climbing higher and higher up Jacob's ladder for instance or with Ezekiel's will way up in the middle of the air or with heaven somewhere but nonetheless somewhere certainly up above our heads. We can neglect and even disparage down.

[00:30:15]As for instance, when the psalmist asks, "Why are you downcast, oh my soul?" Or when Mary J. Bllye sings in throws of in the throws of heartbreak, "I'm going down." Or when we speak of the internet being down or powering down our devices.

[00:30:34]In each of these instances, down respectively serves as the locust of despair, relational forsakenness, malfunction, and complete nonfunction, and does so not merely in itself, but relative to an implicit up that would be the positive resolution to these negative conditions.

[00:30:56]For where but back up do we desire our downcast souls or the internet to be?

[00:31:04]This idiosyncrasy of our language, sacred and secular alike, is perhaps enough to intuitit a general cultural logic whereby up generally operates as the domain of the positive and down generally operates as the domain of the negative. Such a logic may even seem natural or true. An aesthetic valuation backed by physical and even metaphysical reality. There is a common sense according to which up just is good and down just is bad. After all, we grow up and go down to the grave.

[00:31:46]we go up to heaven and down to hell.

[00:31:53]Nevertheless, I want to propose that the logic whereby we tend to venerate up and denigrate down is no more true or natural than the analogous and I would argue related logic whereby the modern world tends to venerate white and denigrate black.

[00:32:09]You may have heard it said because the modern world constantly renews and reproduces itself by saying that white is right. The black American writer Ralph Ellison speaks to this aesthetic regime of valuation. In his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. Early in the novel, the anonymous narrator, the titular invisible man, then a student at an all- black college in Alabama, drives a distressed and faint trustee, a white northern financier and philanthropist named Mr. Norton to get a drink at a bar called the Golden Day.

[00:32:48]There, the pair encounter a shellshocked war veteran and former medic who, though institutionalized himself, ironically diagnoses the pair as quote poor stumblers who quote cannot see the other. Mr. Norton views the campus and by extension his student escort as his quote destiny, while the narrator conversely views Mr. Norton as a kind of god.

[00:33:15]The veteran then tells a by now offended Mr. Norton that the invisible man quote believes in you as he believes in the beat of his heart. He believes in that great false wisdom taught slaves and pragmatists alike that white is right. I can tell you his destiny. He'll do your bidding. And for that his blindness is his chief asset. He's your man, friend.

[00:33:45]Your man and your destiny. Now the two of you descend the stairs into chaos and get the hell out of here. I'm sick of both of you pitiful obscinities. Get out before I do you both the favor of bashing in your heads.

[00:34:03]In the years since Ellison's novel, perhaps we better apprehend White is right as a great false wisdom. Although the aesthetic order of our world continues to suggest otherwise. Indeed, this great false wisdom and its anti-lack corollary, black is whack, is arguably what's at issue in the recent controversy surrounding one music executive disparagement of black gospel music and its tendencies toward what he's what he dismisses as quote overs singing or quote singing hard and quote doing runs. On their surface, these derisive comments make no explicit mention of race. They even come from a black man. Yet in them, the vocal stylings of black sacred music are coded as excess, a singing over and hard relative to a vocal norm of praise and worship and contemporary Christian music that by contrast is coded white.

[00:35:03]Beside the great false wisdom of white is right, however, we have also to consider the related wisdom whereby we similarly believe that up is right and tend to affirm the top to the complete disavow of the bottom. In so far as this belief may also be perceived to structure and organize our world, this wisdom is arguably just as great as white is right and moreover just as false. For heaven, literally speaking, is no more up than hell is down. What does conform to this vertical logic, however, are the heavens and hells that humans create right here on Earth. The prophetic partitioning of our own planet, for instance, into what decolonial and anti-imperial theorists have delineated into a prosperous develop global global north and an exploited underdeveloped global south.

[00:35:59]This domination, it begs mentioning, is part of the conditions of possibility for Mr. Norton's philanthropic relation to the all black college in the first place. Even if he helped found a quote beautiful campus on quote barren ground, the barrenness of that ground is due to soil exhausted under the monocrop agriculture of slavery. Given the economic interdependency of North and South, the exhaustion of the land is entangled with Mr. Norton's wealth accumulation as a northern financeier.

[00:36:30]Moreover, although he is interested in his destiny rather than labor, his investment in the southern campus nevertheless reproduces the extractive logics of the plantation. Indeed, after their ordeal at the golden day, the invisible man conspicuously deposits Mr. Norton in a building resembling quote an old plantation manner end quote.

[00:36:54]In the vertically arranged heavens and hells we find right here on earth, I find urgent reason to query not only the seeming rightness of the great false wisdom that up is right, but also its historical entanglement with the affforementioned great false wisdom that white is right. Indeed, what does it mean that web deo's color line maps perfectly onto onto the partition between the global north and the global south? that in that partition, what the boys outlined in the souls of black folk as the quote the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men end quote is made flesh. Moreover, what does it mean that in his book after the plantation, Jarvis McKinnus speaks not merely of the global south, but more specifically of the global black south. There is, in other words, not merely a racial, but more specifically an anti-lack logic that informs the dominance of north over south, as well as our generalized cultural veneration of up over down.

[00:37:59]This racialization of space we perceive in the global north and the global black south is likewise attended by a corresponding spatialization of race.

[00:38:09]Consider for example France Fenon's classic account of black ontology or the impossibility thereof in his book black skins white masks. Fenon writes quote there is a zone of non-being an extraordinarily sterile and arid region an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell.

[00:38:43]A spatial logic undergurs Fenon's conception of racialized ontology whereby blackness constitutes not merely a zone of non-being but more spec specifically a declivity and even more to the point of our consideration today of the demunization of black religious practice a real hell. It also bears mentioning here that black ontology also registers for fennon as a kind of excess whose vector is not over as in the case of over singing but under. We find then in the metaphysical realm of ontology the same racial spatialization that we find physically everywhere on earth.

[00:39:24]Yet, however much defined by negation and objection as a zone of non-being and a region described as sterile and arid, this naked declivity nevertheless also represents for Fenon the possibility for a quote authentic upheaval. That is the connotations of up notwithstanding the possibility not for blackness to be restored to the high ground. It is after all a naked declivity with no prospects for ascendance, but rather the possibility for the upending of this onlogical structure altogether.

[00:40:02]I'm interested in this authentic upheaval first for how its location of possibility temporarily interrupts the reliable vertical logic whereby we associate good things with being up and bad things with being down. In this respect, down in its conflation with blackness becomes the privileged sight of possibility and not merely a sight of aberration or objection.

[00:40:28]In this we find cause to revisit and reconsider the vets's parting words to Mr. Norton and the invisible man in the golden day.

[00:40:38]What if we understand the instruction to quote, "Now the two of you descend the stairs into chaos." What if we understand that instruction not merely as a threatening insult but a kind of prescription as perhaps even an institutionalized doctor is want to give a pair of unwitting patients given the drunken riot taking place down those stairs in the golden day. This possibility may seem far-fetched, but consider how their descent of the stairs into chaos mirrors Fenon's description of the black man's descent into a real hell. and read and read through the lens of the latter, the former might reasonably be suspected of harboring the same potential for an authentic upheaval. What after all is chaos but an upheaval and potentially in this case of the racial problematic that precludes Mr. Norton and the invisible man from truly seeing one another.

[00:41:38]But the primary sense that has convened us today is not sight but sound, not seeing but hearing. And in this case, a particular mishing due to the logics of antilackness of what's been demonized as hard gospel. And I really mean demonized in the sense of an aberration from the spiritual sonic norm and ideal of singing it straight. We might even think of the excess of black spiritual vocalization, over singing, singing hard, and an overabundance of runs as the sonic equivalent of a perhaps more familiar demonization of the excessive movement of black spiritual practice. An extension of spiritual anxieties about the unregulated and ecstatic movement of the black body that white Christianity has long interpreted as a sign of sinful disorder and indeed chaos.

[00:42:32]Recall that we might describe Recall that we might describe in less derogatory terms as what? I don't know what I meant to say here. Let me let me figure this out.

[00:42:46]Got it. Recall that. Recall that what we might describe in less derogatory terms as the athleticism of the voice is materially rooted in the vibration of the vocal cords which move more actively and intensely in runs and so-called hard singing. Indeed, part of what may inform the demonization of hard gospel is how such movement draws unwanted attention to the embodiment of voice, tainting what some might prefer to consider the purely spiritual activity of praise and worship with the dangerous activity of the flesh. According to this anti-lack theologic, the vocal cord should mimic the unelaborated stiffness of the frozen chosen. their flesh, their fleshiness must decrease so that the unadulterated work of the spirit, the wind blowing through our throats and mouths might increase.

[00:43:43]This anti-black theologic at issue and the demonization of black gospel sound brings me to a second reason why Fenon's authentic upheaval interests me. For notwithstanding the interpretation of the exes of black, the ecstasies of black vocalization as a sign of spiritual lack or worse, depravity, the propensity for authentic upheaval, which Fenon attributes to blackness in on in which Fenown attributes to blackness in ontology's basement closely resembles the activity of the Holy Spirit. What if not upheaval do we witness in the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Acts chapter 2? Quote, "And when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then they appeared Then there appeared to them divided tongues as a fire and one sat upon each of them and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues as a spirit gave them utterance.

[00:44:55]If the anti-black theologic we've been tracing conflates proper spirituality with rigid orderliness, the activity of the Holy Spirit in Acts two is by contrast rather disorderly. So much so in fact that some even suppose that the saints at Pentecost were full not of the spirit but new wine.

[00:45:15]In further disruption of the anti-black theologic we've been tracing, the work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is also deeply fleshy and fleshy at precisely our point of concern this morning. The tongue which together with the vocal cords, throat and nose gives expression to such vocal phenomena as over singing, singing hard and runs.

[00:45:39]Judging from the witness of holy scripture, both here in the spirit's manifestation as tongues, as a fire, and elsewhere as a dove at Jesus's baptism, it would appear that the third person of the trinity shares the second's penchant for incarnation.

[00:45:54]The spirit's fleshy embodiment puts pressure on any theologic that requires or idealizes the absenting of the flesh as a prerequisite for spiritual power.

[00:46:05]Instead, much like the human voice itself, the work of the spirit in Acts two is figured as the cooperation of spirit and flesh. That is, not just as a mighty wind, but also as tongues.

[00:46:19]For these reasons, we might recognize the activity of the Holy Spirit in Acts to be of a kind with the authentic upheaval of black ontology and perhaps even the chaos of the golden day. Since not unlike the saints at Pentecost, the patrons of the golden day not only seemed but were in fact full of wine. I understand I risk sacrilege by relating the sacred event of Pentecost to Fenown's authentic upheaval or worse a riot in a bar. neither of which have any explicit or confessional relationship to Christianity.

[00:46:54]What I'm unwilling to risk, however, what I fear the Christian witness has risked enough already is any sense that the work of the spirit is and should be a genuine upheaval.

[00:47:07]There is nevertheless one significant difference between what I would have Christianity recover as the authentic upheaval of Pentecost and that which we otherwise perceive in black ontology and the chaos of the golden day. That is the former famously transpires in the upper room while the latter occur in two manifestations of what I propose we might alternatively call the lower room.

[00:47:35]But somehow I suspect the Holy Spirit doesn't mind the trip downstairs, or at least didn't when the Holy Spirit visited the lower room of a slave ship in the middle of the 18th century.

[00:47:50]The only firsthand narrative account of a slave ship's hold from the perspective of one made to inhabit it is recorded in the interesting narrative of the life of Olauda Ecuano.

[00:48:04]It details what Fenon might describe as a descent into a real hell. Quote, "At last," these are Ecuano's words. "At last, when the ship we were in had got all her cargo, they were made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck so that we could not see how they managed the vessel."

[00:48:30]But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow.

[00:48:33]Now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate added to the number in the ship which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself almost suffocated us.

[00:48:54]This produced copious perspirations so that the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathome smells and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died.

[00:49:09]The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

[00:49:19]End quote.

[00:49:21]One wonders if Fenon had Ecuano's account of the hold in mind when he characterized black ontology as a descent into a real hell. For in the hold, Fenon's zone of non-being is made flesh.

[00:49:35]Black studies scholar Frank Wilerson has even called it quote the black's first onlogical instance end quote. But what potential energy can the hold of a slave ship hold for any authentic upheaval, let alone one that might be said to be empowered, as I am suggesting, by the Holy Spirit.

[00:49:56]Where is God in this hell on earth?

[00:49:59]Toward an answer to these questions, I want to call attention and speculate about a critical detail in Ecuano's description of the hold. I want to ask, what does the hold sound like?

[00:50:13]What are the stakes for instance of Ecuano's account of the shrieks and groans that constitute the hold's sonic environment?

[00:50:24]I would not have lied the fact that for Ecuano these shrieks and groans render the hold quote a scene of horror almost inconceivable end quote. But in both this and every slave ship hold, I also wonder about what must have also been true of this hard, if not quite singing, then sounding. During his forced march to the West African coast, Ecuano explains that quote, "All the nations and people I had hitherto passed through resembled our own in their manners, customs, and language, but I came at length to a country, the inhabitants of which differed from us in all those particulars."

[00:51:04]I was very much struck with this difference.

[00:51:08]The shrieks and groans of the hold then were likely not only indices of terror, but attempts to communicate across linguistic difference. For there were dwelling in the hold Africans from every nation on the continent, Ebo, Ashanti, Euroba, Fan, Mind, Funlani, Congo and more.

[00:51:35]In her article, Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, black studies scholar Natasha Tinsley writes of, "The emergence of intense shipmate relationships in the water rocked no person's land of slaveholds created a black Atlantic same-sex eroticism. A feeling of feeling for the kidnapped that asserted the sensience of the bodies that slavers attempted to transform into brute matter."

[00:52:03]What if in the shrieks and groans of the Africans in the hold, we likewise apprehend a listening of and listening for?

[00:52:13]And what if this is how the spirit visits the lower room in the hard communication of the hold, enlisting every nation in a hard song called blackness.

[00:52:25]By arguing for the lower room, I do not mean to supplant the upper room. Rather, I've stopped by here to remind us that Jacob's ladder is a two-way street. Its traffic goes not just higher and higher, but lower and lower. This is perhaps the unique insight of a gospel imagination to invoke Braxton Shel's phrase that for all of its veneration of up is also acquainted is also well acquainted with the ministry of down. Be it down by the riverside or down at the cross or go down Corey Henry's goown.

[00:53:02]You have heard it said that White is right that the spirit visits us in the upper room. But I say unto you with the witness of the Africans of the whole that the spirit is just as want to visit the lower room. So do not denigrate us when you hear us over singing. We are in the lower room telling of how we got over. Do not disparrage us when we sing hard. We are in the lower room and the road has been hard. Do not deride us when we run. We are in the lower room and we've got places to go and plantations to flee. Thank you.

[00:54:52]Uh, good morning.

[00:54:54]Um, I want to first uh give thanks to Professor Shelley for the invitation and for all of you for coming out on such a wet and cold cold day. Very usual for the area. Um, when I first accepted the invitation, I wondered about what I could contribute.

[00:55:11]And uh, knowing that the event is uh about such a wonderful artist, Corey Henry, I did some preliminary research and realized that uh, Billy Preston is one of his major influences.

[00:55:23]And so I thought that I would write about one of Corey Henry's um own own superstars.

[00:55:30]So I offer those uh remarks um as preliminary meditations and I hope that um we can get a conversation going.

[00:55:46]Who doesn't know the song? The pining gesture of its solo keyboard intro. the raspy grain of its cruning vocal entrance, the supple tempo at which its ballad form unfolds, not to mention the increasingly lush bed of sustained strings over which its rocking lyrics roll when the loose AABA form repeats.

[00:56:10]And of course that cracking falsetto queuing the final retardando just like that.

[00:56:20]No wonder Joe Cocker's cover of the song You Are Beautiful is a guaranteed heartwormer, a tearjerker, especially when Luly Wed's first sway to its tune at wedding receptions.

[00:56:34]So popular has the British singer's cover been ever since its initial release on November 2nd, 1974 that it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2016.

[00:56:47]Two years later, Toyota, the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, featured its owned commissioned arrangement of the cover in one of its ads, literally investing in the familiar simplicity of the song's loving message, which extends beyond that between one man and one woman to include, say, Camry's, Corollas, and their wouldbe drivers with purchasing power.

[00:57:16]Countless performing artists from Kenny Rogers and Babyface to Diana Ross and Lauren Dagel, just to name some of the sung arrangements, have covered Cocker's cover.

[00:57:28]But that's just it. What has become staple in the American popular repertoire is that cover.

[00:57:37]Fewer ears are familiar with the fact that You Are Beautiful was first composed, recorded, and released by Billy Preston, let alone that his version is significantly different from its famed variant.

[00:57:54]That a cover would be better known is not in itself unusual. Perhaps the best example of such a preference in American popular taste is Whitney Houston's 1992 cover of Dolly Parton 74 I Will Always Love You.

[00:58:12]Follow any televised talent show or attend any local bar karaoke night for that matter. And I bet you that what Expectant Ears usually anticipates is the room hushing ac capella with which Whitney's version spellbinds the ear rather than the strum and twang with which Dolli's version sets the country mood.

[00:58:34]To be sure, and true to Parton's characteristically generous spirit, the now 80-year-old queen of country has never publicly resented Houston for using her own voice, the voice, to make the song her own.

[00:58:50]By contrast, live performances of You Are So Beautiful by Preston himself were prefaced at times with what seems like a bittersweet acknowledgement of Cocker's contribution to the let's say crossover success of the song.

[00:59:06]On the one hand, Preston called Cocker my good buddy and my good friend when introducing the song.

[00:59:14]Preston even performed the song with Cocker himself and Patty Leel at the Apollo in 1985.

[00:59:21]On the other hand, at least on one occasion, Preston poked fun at Cocker's effusive stage presence by playfully mocking the British singer's bodily gestures before getting on with his own performance of the song.

[00:59:37]>> This is a song that I wrote that was made confident by my good buddy Joe K.

[01:00:02]He's real him. Whatever Preston's personal reasons for such a performed ambivalence, Cocker's cover of Preston's You Are So Beautiful loses something crucial. The gospel imagination queerly at play in Preston's use of the vamp, which is completely missing from Cocker's take.

[01:00:27]In the time allotted to me this morning, I will focus on that nearly two-minute vamp at the end of Preston's version, which renders complex the aesthetic of what is considered a simple song. First, through a reading of two words from the vamp's refrain, specifically the phrase so beautiful. I will demonstrate how the vamp deconstructs the conten distinction between the beautiful and the sublime as discrete categories differentiated by among other qualifications their respective delimitations of the imagination.

[01:00:59]While the beautiful is said to delimit the imagination, the sublime is said to delimit as in take limits off of the imagination.

[01:01:09]Preston's use of the vamp in turn deconstructs the limit itself.

[01:01:15]Then by attending to the vamp's sonorous qualities, I will situate its deconstruction of aesthetic categories in the oral mediation of a gospel imagination.

[01:01:25]Finally, reflecting on Preston's own queer relation to gospel or the gospel, I will end by asking how the vamp in you are so beautiful may help us better hear the complex aesthetic of those whose seemingly simple songs are neither in nor out but at the limit.

[01:01:45]But first, a preliminary note, or rather a preliminary question is in order. Why even bring up Emanuel Khan?

[01:01:54]Why turn to the terms that an 18th century Prussian Lutheran philosopher of the enlightenment set for aesthetics?

[01:02:02]After all, as a chorus of critics has decrieded, Kant's astonishing provincialism from his 1764 observations on the feeling of the beautifulness of lime through his tripart critical system, critique of pure reason, critique of practical reason, critique of the power of judgment to a 1798 anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. All of it bears and lays bare a racism that is anything but ancillary to his thought.

[01:02:29]For example, in a 1990 article titled Kant and the Negro, Ronald Judy rightly takes Kant to task for stating that quote, "The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling."

[01:02:42]Judy reminds his reader of Khan's conclusion, and I quote again, "So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, that is white and black, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color." That's that's K.

[01:02:58]More recently, in her 2023 book titled anti- aesthetics, black aesthesis, and the critique of form, Rswbana Bradley does not spare Kant from her study of quote the constitutive relation between modernity's aesthetic regime and the racial colonial world order. of Kant specifically. She writes, "His census communis or the shared a priaryy capacity for aesthetic judgment is revealed as a decisively exclusive universality, the borders of which are erected and policed by and through the racial regimes of representation.

[01:03:32]Perhaps no broadside is as thoroughgoing as the one David Lloyd launches in his 2019 book titled Under Representation: The Racial Regime of aesthetics." Lloyd writes, and I quote at length, "Above all, representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory. The savage or primitive and the negro or black remain on the threshold of an unrealized humanity, still subject to the to affect and to the force of nature, not yet capable of representation, not yet apt for freedom and civility. They stand in Orten Spillerson's resonant phrasing as vestibular to culture serving as the root by which dominant modes decided between the human and the other. The narrative of representation conceptualized in aesthetic theory from Kant to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin constantly replays this distinction between the pathological or affectable subject that demarcates the threshold of the human and the aesthetic subject in and of representation.

[01:04:38]It shapes an aesthetic anthropology prior to any philosophy of art.

[01:04:45]And yet as a result Lloyd cannot simply dismiss Kant and neither should we.

[01:04:52]Lloyd warns with the precience of hindsight that the discourse on the aesthetic that emerged in the late enlightenment especially in the work of Kant his interpreter consciously assumed a founding role in the reconfiguration of the liberal arts or the humanities as disciplines.

[01:05:12]These were to be concerned not only with the refinement of taste but with the formation or cultivation of human beings as civil subjects necessarily defined against the undeveloped racial other. To return to the aesthetic is then to return to the founding claims of the cultural disciplines within or against which critical intellectuals continue to operate.

[01:05:38]and continue to operate. They have while Paul Gilroyy's 1993 book titled The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness concludes with The Slave Sublime, which Stacy Leman's 2022 book makes its titular concern.

[01:05:55]Christina Sharp offers introductory remarks to a 2024 collection of essays titled Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World.

[01:06:06]In fact, in a 2019 essay of her own, Sharp declares, "Beauty is a method."

[01:06:12]To be fair, Sharp nowhere cites Kant in her beautiful statement on beauty as method.

[01:06:19]And it shows because for Kant, beauty, and indeed all taste was not a matter of method, but of manner.

[01:06:27]In a short appendix at the formal center of the third critique that is the critique of the power of judgment Kant pronounced for beautiful art there is thus only a manner not a way of teaching it. The master must demonstrate what the student is to do and how he should accomplish it. and the universal rules under which he ultimately brings his procedure can serve rather to bring its principal elements to mind as occasion requires than to prescribe them to him.

[01:06:57]Of course, Sharp need not follow Kant's example, but in a way she has. For if Fred Moen in his 2017 book titled Black and Blur, consent not to be a single being is right that Kant is interested in freedom.

[01:07:12]And if freedom is a matter of taste, escape, a matter of flavor, then Sharp's beautiful remarks on beauty are a stylistic delicacy.

[01:07:22]In sharp, the taste of beauty consists in attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escapes violence whenever possible, even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins.

[01:07:36]Sharp is without a doubt a consmate chef, but I do not mean to single her out. Fellow contemporaries have recently returned to the aesthetic as, and I quote Lloyd again, a domain of creativity and imagination in which we enjoy freedom denied to us in the actual world of domination or heronomy, asserting a persisting non ideological moment in aesthetic experience or even reclaiming the utopian or emancipatory potential of the aesthetic.

[01:08:10]In short, this contian conception of the aesthetic, the true political effect of which is for Lloyd the deferral of freedom's actualization in the world, runs through the tradition of aesthetic philosophy from Schiller to Marcusa, from Matthew Arnold to Rancier, from the right to the left of the political spectrum. And we could add from say Jose Estean Munoz to Sharp and the more recent Cydia Harman.

[01:08:36]Beauty is indeed all the rage these days.

[01:08:39]Allow me then to not so much try my own hand at the aesthetic as an alternate sight of freedom, but to test my own ear with regard to the taste, a queer taste for something more complex as I hear it in the vamp of Preston's simple song.

[01:08:55]Let's hear it together.

[01:09:04]Yeah. Heaven beautiful.

[01:09:31]>> And your smile. Your smile, >> your attitude.

[01:09:44]>> I can't help but love you.

[01:09:52]Beautiful.

[01:09:54]Beautiful.

[01:09:58]Your name.

[01:10:01]Beautiful.

[01:10:12]>> Your lips.

[01:10:18]I love you. I love you, baby.

[01:10:39]I just want to thank you, baby.

[01:10:58]Uh, that's about a two-minute vamp, which is almost as long as Cocker's whole version just just to compare.

[01:11:07]The vamp's refrain, you are so beautiful, seems pretty straightforward.

[01:11:13]At a grammatical level, we have a one-word subject, you followed by a predicative expression in which the adjective beautiful simply expresses a quality attributed to the subject. What about you? You are beautiful all on your own. There is nothing left to say.

[01:11:33]But if I were asked to elaborate, to say more, to take stock of your beauty, all I could add is the word so.

[01:11:44]It's a small and supple word. So, one might say it has a beauty of its own.

[01:11:51]Yet, in the vamp's reframe, its function is anything but small.

[01:11:57]In this line, the word so not only intensifies the adjective beautiful, it also gives beautiful a sense of degree, of extent, of measure.

[01:12:07]How beautiful. So beautiful. Now, if I were to go to any local store and ask for so many or so much of a given item, the question I would undoubtedly receive would be how many. How much? You see, while the word so gives a sense of measure, it itself cannot be measured, neither in quantity nor in taste. How beautiful? So beautiful. Not beautiful only to such a degree. Not beautiful only to this or that extent, but so beautiful, immeasurably beautiful, incalculably beautiful, beautiful beyond bounds. So beautiful.

[01:12:52]Therefore, what at first blush appears to us as a beautifully self-contained statement of beauty by way of so becomes unbounded.

[01:13:02]So much so that the beautiful becomes sublime.

[01:13:08]In the 23rd section of his third critique, Kant differentiates between the beautiful and the sublime as follows. The beautiful concerns the form of the object which consists in limitation.

[01:13:20]The sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object in so far as limitlessness is represented in it or as its instance.

[01:13:29]Although this is not the only distinction that Kant makes between the beautiful and the sublime, it is considered fundamental by philosophers who would otherwise have little in common with each other. For example, in his 1979 book Kant and the claims of taste, the philosopher Paul Guyire, who has dedicated his career to the study of Kant and has written at least seven different books on the man, I'm not called for that. Um, I guess some people are, right? um quotes the lines that I have on the screen as defining the fundamental difference between beauty and sublimity.

[01:14:07]Similarly, in his 1978 book, The Truth in Painting, the philosopher Jacqu Dereda also identified Khan's distinction as of fundamental importance. But in characteristically deconstructive fashion, Dereda takes the distinction in a different direction.

[01:14:25]Commenting on Kant Dereda writes, "One can hardly speak of an opposition between the beautiful and the sublime."

[01:14:33]An opposition could only arise between two determinant objects having their contours, their edges, their finitude.

[01:14:40]But if the difference between the beautiful and the sublime does not amount to an opposition, it is precisely because the presence of a limit is what gives form to the beautiful. The sublime is to be found for its part in an object without form and the without limit is represented in it or on the occasion of it. When Guyia returned to the question of the beautiful and the sublime in his 1993 book content, the experience of freedom, the first footnote is reserved for Derrida in his reading of these categories.

[01:15:10]The patron saint of deconstructionism has addressed himself to the critique of judgment. Derided's arguments are often wretched.

[01:15:20]Nevertheless, Dereda's essays have been very influential. That's literally the first note in that book.

[01:15:27]Guyire's issue with Dereda is that he puts K on his head, so to speak, the limitlessness and the content sublime is, according to Guyire, an occasion for the triumphant imposition of human reason, rather than a revelation of its utter inadequacy, what Dererida would call the negativity of the sublime or the abyss.

[01:15:46]If Guyire upholds Khan's containment of the limitless, Deredal lets it all hang.

[01:15:53]Preston's You are so beautiful, however, seems, at least to my ear, to be doing something else.

[01:15:59]The unbounded beauty about which the lyrics sing is certainly intensified by its seemingly endless repetition. On my count, the vamp loops at least 15 times.

[01:16:13]The loop on which the lyrics run gestures toward an everlasting endlessness.

[01:16:18]Preston's own adlibs talking about your legs, your eyes, your lips, seem to delimmit what exactly is so beautiful.

[01:16:27]But their accretion within the loop delimmits by way of intensification just how immeasurable the beauty is. It cannot be reduced to a single aspect.

[01:16:38]Meanwhile, the limitlessness of this beautiful turn sublime begins to find echo in the organ, which noodles chromatically on the third repetition of the vamp, as if to suggest that harmony itself will not remain measured. On the 13th repetition of the vamp, the piano's accented hits compound the sonic texture even further. It all sounds like I'm back in church.

[01:17:05]The song itself is in the key of A flat, the shouting key, so I am told.

[01:17:12]Everything seems to be primed for a praise break.

[01:17:16]And yet the vamp burns at a deliberate pace.

[01:17:21]The organ sounds but sounds at a distance. No modulation, no polyonic vocal part.

[01:17:30]Just a church boy singing about someone so beautiful.

[01:17:44]And then the fade out.

[01:17:48]Has the sound ended or has it gone elsewhere?

[01:17:52]Have we come to the end or has one of us been taken elsewhere?

[01:17:58]How many broken hearts have asked this question?

[01:18:03]I agree with our own Braxton Shel that in the gospel imagination the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power into a physical reality.

[01:18:15]I wonder though what happens to the absorption and the transport that the gospel imagination materializes through and in the vamp when you are a church church boy at the limit of church and world of sacred and secular of in and out.

[01:18:31]Is it still transport or termination?

[01:18:34]It is hard for me to tell. And I wonder if it too was hard for Preston to tell.

[01:18:40]Living in an open closet while loving the gospel that could not make room for him whole. Billy, I wonder how did you express what it's like to live at the limit so beautifully in Preston's. You are so beautiful. With Preston's, you are so beautiful. I hear a complex aesthetic. I hear an aesthetic that is neither simply beautiful nor sheerely sublime, but something someone at the limit. Thank you.

[01:19:27]All right, we have about 25 minutes for discussion. We're going to go until 10 afternoon. Uh so we invite our panelist up um to take a few questions before we open it up to the room. Are there questions that you all have for each other?

[01:19:53]I mean each talk was so rich >> in its own way. Yes. Yeah.

[01:20:01]>> Hello. Can people hear me? Yeah. Um Jonathan, I really loved your your talk and uh I was just wondering about that phrase in the Fonon quote that you work with and in most cases and if you had any thoughts about that in most cases.

[01:20:18]I think um I think in most cases is honest, right?

[01:20:25]It's a it's a pessimism. Um in most cases the black man is not able to take advantage of this descent into a a veritable veritable hell. Um, and so it's that's why there's a sort of like holy pause I I take in even thinking of the hold of the slavehip as a kind of lower room in conversation with the upper room and containing this sort of uh potential power be it spiritual or otherwise. Um because it is not it ain't easy, you know. It is in fact hard. Um hard enough that in in most cases maybe most people are are are incapable. And yet um there's something um actually what Professor Shelley mentioned earlier off the off rip of the panel is um something Nor Bessie Phillips said, right? Like this they've been trying to destroy this sound since the beginning, right? And um and so there's also like optimistically a kind of not not really certainty um but there is a kind of bullishness then with which I like I try to make much of or think deeply about uh the power of black black expressive culture like and it's so that that in most cases which creates a lot of doubt and and seems to suggest a kind of profound unlikely iness becomes in fact in a strange way like likely like um because we're still here you know um still sounding it out as it were um but yeah I think like mostly what I think about in most cases is that I find it to be honest like I think for being honest thank you for that All right, we can open up to the to the audience.

[01:22:45]>> Good morning. Hi. I had a question for the first and the second um panelists.

[01:22:51]Um, I'm someone who works on hiphop and um, Islam and so when I think of black noise I initi I I I think of Trisha Rose's work on sort of hip-hop. So I was wondering about like the relationship between the kind of lo was it logo sonic >> logo sonication >> logo sonic station that you're talking about in these black church spaces and if you thought about in relationship to other musical forms so that was and then I'll just ask the second question like yeah and then when you were talking about get the down part I kept thinking about getting down >> and like laying your hair down and I was just interested in like how that cuz I feel like it's I feel like it goes along with your argument. But I was just interested if you might think about those terms too in relationship to what you're talking about.

[01:23:35]>> Yeah.

[01:23:37]>> So yeah, I obviously not obviously but yes, I think it can be expanded beyond just church spaces or fugitives church spaces. I like to think of it more in fugitive terms though. the Sadia Hartman and Steven Best quote um just for the sake of time is obviously much longer and much different and they they talk about black noise in terms of uh it in a legal context talking about this time during slavery in which you know when black folks enslaved black folks would make noise this was seen as something that was illegal and obviously that is the case um so certainly when I think there's a story from a couple of uh years ago I think pre- pandemic on Ust street in front of like the Metro PCS on the corner. This corner had been there for like 20 30 years or something.

[01:24:24]But as you street court has gotten gentrified, um the interlopers decided to file a noise complaint and all of a sudden everybody's like this, you moved into a neighborhood where this was and all of a sudden this black noise has become it's literally been made illegal. A noise that is is the noise that is the sound of a neighborhood. And I think for me the other part that I I think is uh key for me in understanding logosic exhortation as a fugitive practice is that it is illeible. You know like the the people who moved into the neighborhood couldn't understand it. And I think for a lot of people it's inaudible in the sense of that's not so much just the the actual physical hearing of you know sound waves going into one's ear uh pressing up against you know the bones of the stirrup and the anvil and whatnot like that. that is that is a piece of it but even the other piece of it you hear you just don't know what to do with it um and I think that's the piece in which culturally it's not there and obviously sure I think this can be expanded out um not all but you know a lot of religious practices include sound you know like so you know and those are things that can just be illeible um or um inaudible even amongst even amongst that >> uh thank you for for your question Um I think so this is like a I don't mean this to be a shameless plug but >> for your book >> but I wrote a book.

[01:25:52]>> It's called Inhabitants of the Deep, the Bluess of Blackness. And what I try and in that book I I developed this idea of the deep that I think is crucial to black expressive culture in precisely the ways that you're mentioning like this prepundonderance of phrases that we have that include down. Um, and where down is sort of like the place to be. So like we get down with the get down, you know. Um, and so I I think that that like that is a special thing about like and a unique talent of of blackness is is in fact getting down. Um, uh, that I I situate in relationship to uh the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Um, and this phrase that I take from Ola Decriano where he talked about the inhabitants of the deep like we we've made a life down here like we've inhabited the deep the deep. Um, but what I would say in this the my remarks for today was like an invitation to think about the deep theologically which is how I came up with like the whole notion of a lower room. Um, so I think it's like a for me it's a it's a cultural formation that spans the secular and the sacred, but I was really trying to lean into and explore the extent to which this might actually be sacred space, you know, um, like a a genuine lower room like that that we identify with the activity of the spirit as profoundly and as familiarly as we do with the upper room, you know, or in in Christian theology. Um, but thank you for your your question.

[01:27:32]Thank all of you for your uh presentations. I I have a um particular question but some comments first brief comments and that is um for Jonathan I think about with lower room I think about Carrie Day's work on Isuza re-imagined um the Isuza Street Mission where Pentecostalism emerges in the United States was a two-story building where most of the activity took place literally >> um on the lower level on the floor. Uh James Bowwin, of course, teenage Pentecostal preacher, talks about the threshing floor.

[01:28:13]>> Um and so it may be useful to talk um turn to um black expressive experiences of the emergence of Pentecostalism to read Pentecostalism not just from scripture but from black practice. But having said that, for all of you, particularly with the last paper, I'm thinking about something that Wallace Best at one point, I don't know if he's published this, called the Pentecostalization of the black church. And in particular here, I'm wondering about um and I see that Dr. Shelley stepped away, and I'm not a musicologist. I'm wondering if you all could think um about something here that I heard. I got to the session, the first session when it was over and I heard some people coming out saying something about something to the effect of, well, don't play the shouting music if you're not going to dance.

[01:29:07]>> So, I don't know what happened in that session, but what it what it what it made me think about was with the Preston Vamp, I felt like there was something about to break. Um but as you it kept pulling back and I I felt that also last night at the concert that um Corey Henry is masterful with the instrument that he comes to the precipice and then recedes and um certainly in Pentecostal spaces people are there are all kind of ways to navigate that and so I I'm just really curious about this Those of us who can sense that something's about to break, but we we linger in that sp. I don't know whether to call that space liinal or what, but across all of your work, I'm wondering about that and labeling it a Pentecostalization.

[01:30:11]One thing I I'd say just as an invitation to think with uh the final paper which was just moving and uh brilliant really. Um like I I think there's a that when I listened to the the song that that vamp there's in the same way that you mentioned how there's a kind of the ambivalence with which he starts the performance because he's like I wrote this song. He's very clear that this other person made popular and there's some you know real ache like uh lament in in that reality by which someone else has profited immensely over your creation right I but I sense in the same way a kind of ambivalent use of the vamp in in that song where like there's the same way in which the these are these this musical and spiritual technology technology comes from a place where like I participate in it, but it's also a place that like um disciplines me or like restricts who I'm able to my my ability to be my full self. So I I experience at least the the like coming to the precipice and the pulling back as like um an ambivalent participation in an extension of a a musical tradition that has not always been or at least a a climate that has not always been affirming, you know. Um and so there's there's a lot it's a lot more complex. It's not like a like a unimpeded like shout unto a moment of breakthrough, right? there's some like real impediments that are needing to be negotiated in this rehearsal of the vamp, right? Um that to me is like the same reason why like a queer person might struggle to like can shout in church but might also struggle because of the reality of um homophobia in in church spaces. So like that for me it was it's it was like the the I'm on I'm on a tip with honesty lately but the the honestly the honesty I think that with which you hear that song for us or you allow us to hear that song I was really moved and and struck by like how you you brought us to the uh that it's complex right like um and you let us hear even the the ambivalence in the performance of the the vamp which I'm not I like the vamp camp to me is like a you know we're we're on our way you know the and this was a more like there's a kind of cruning melancholic lament that like is on our way and like pulls pulls back at times you know uh I thought that was gorgeous I'll just just add just one bit um because I hear that comment that you heard earlier this morning of like if you're not going to do it then don't do it right um in two ways um one as a a commentary on racial code, >> right? Do you even know, right? Do you even recognize? Um are you even equipped? Right? Are you trained? Can you hear it? Right? All those kinds of questions. But, uh drawing on on and extending Jonathan's comments, there's also this like queer sensibility that I'm trying to bring to the four as well without losing sight of the racial codes, right? And I think the ambivalence that I sense in uh Preston is is deepened by his attachment to the form, >> right? As as much as it forces him uh in terms of sexuality, he can't just leave it behind.

[01:33:52]>> That stuff is deep in him. And I think the ambivalence stems from that from an attachment that cannot be easily let go of but produces very complicated relationships to it, right? That I would imagine then manifest themselves in the in the gathering, right? Of not only do I not want to fully give myself over to the moment because of maybe the political aspects of its theology, but because I know where this can take me.

[01:34:25]You see, so I appreciate your your question.

[01:34:29]>> I'll say this as a musician, like fully cosign on all of that. Excess is scary.

[01:34:37]Surplus is scary. Um, it's the reality of knowing that as a musician and obviously as we saw in the sermon this morning, as a preacher, which is why I made the connection between the the the the heaven organ preaches, um, there's a particular type of power that you have to shift the room. Um, and I can use all these churchy phrases, but I feel like it's at that point of excess and surplus because at that point, you can't control it anymore. You don't know what's going to happen. It could catch, it could not catch. It could be the, you know, the the the the apex moment of breakthrough could only be breakthrough for some people. And again, I'll say this for me as a musician who's had to be on an organ when like are we going to dance or not?

[01:35:20]Like that's an actual question that we're kind of looking at each other to figure out are we going to do it or we not? Um because if we do it, I don't know necessarily what's going to happen yet.

[01:35:34]I can sketch the the academic anatomy of it. I can give you how these things normally go, but when it's done, I don't know how it's going to end. I don't know how long it's it's going to go. And the second piece I said, this um just to put it just to put this out there, it's a conjuring. And again, those are things that are just kind of can be scary to the people who are actually in some, you know, form of leadership over making sure that the conjuring of this moment actually happens. The vamp is conjuring because you're doing this in repetition over and over and over and over and over again in hopes that something is going to catch catch fire.

[01:36:14]>> Yes, I saw another.

[01:36:15]>> Yes.

[01:36:20]>> To ask the panel to think of the the vamp from the song in the context of black noise. So, if you think of all the songs in the past that have been um captured by white white artists that were made by black original artists, I think they took that black noise out of the songs um to make it more palitable, >> you know, to audiences. So, I would I would like to hear, you know, your opinions on that if you see any correlation with that. And then my second question is black noise a a topic or even a term that we want to to use because it it could be seen as negative.

[01:37:05]Um because I think of um angry black women, black-on-black crime, um all these different connotations when it comes to blackness and is black noise something that we want to tie into a foundation of our culture to the black church because in my opinion, my humble opinion, um the black church and the Oregon and is spirit of the church um captures what was taken away from us through slavery through the slaveships by worshiping in private. So maybe that noise is recognizing a freedom that we didn't have in the past and I would just like to hear you know your thoughts on that as well.

[01:38:00]>> I'll start. Um, yes. I I think one of the um Big Mama Thornon, do I have that name right?

[01:38:12]You ain't nothing but a hound dog. That was I wish I got the artist name right.

[01:38:15]Um, Big Mama Thornon. You ain't nothing but a hound dog. That's one of the more popular stories gets taken by Elvis Presley and that's one of Elvis Presley's, you know, signature pieces.

[01:38:26]Um, and it lacks the scratch. It lacks the growl. It lacks all of these things that again, at least for me, I would detect as a black noise that makes it um that again culturally we can attune ourselves and be like, "Oh, this is an authentic song from Big Mama Thornton."

[01:38:43]Um that right becomes, you know, you know, goes gold and goes platinum when Elvis Presley does it. I think what's also interesting though is the black artists that take um songs from white um composers. I'm going to forget the names of these songs, but one of mine have always been Artha Franklin did not write a lot of these songs that she's fully like bridge over troubled waters. Like she I mean, you know, right? That's >> and and so right that was Otis Reading, you know, for for respect. But there's another one that I'm fully blanking on right now. Um, that's not Bridge Over Troubled Waters, but still those are her songs. You know what I'm saying? Like at this point, which who's who called it?

[01:39:25]>> Natural.

[01:39:26]>> Yeah, Natural Woman. That's what I'm saying. Like, like these are her songs, and nobody necessarily in the broad public even knows who uh who necessarily wrote them or or what they did with it.

[01:39:36]And, you know, and at least in these moments, thankfully, you know, the white artists are like, "Yeah, that's fine."

[01:39:40]You know, that's good. You know, you know, because they're probably getting royalties off of it, too. still nevertheless um yes there are moments in which I I think the black noise has been taken out and we we're still hearing stories of artists um you know art artists uh who are black Americans who are still getting some of their songs taken and whatever. All that to say, um, when I think when I reflect on your question, I think there is I have to acknowledge for me there is nothing that is pure black for us. um that is to say pure in the sense of something that comes from the west coast of Africa through the hold of the ship through the Caribbean seasoning process and here on these North American shores as opposed to somewhere in South America or Brazil that we are authentically a milange of these different things. Um but we are still our own unique culture.

[01:40:48]And I think some of these parts of our unique culture um do get erased um when they are Columbused in pop culture at times to our to I mean I think to to to the larger uh denigration of what culture can do. So yes, I I I I do agree with that. I agree with that as an impulse of black noise.

[01:41:10]>> Adrian or Jonathan, y'all want to reply quickly? We're at time.

[01:41:13]>> I'm sorry. I took two.

[01:41:15]Okay. Okay. Let's thank our panelists for fantastic