Ian Andrew Askew: “SLAMDANCE TV”
This Video Viewing Room features a new video by Ian Andrew Askew, SLAMDANCE TV (2021), accompanied by writing by the artist and archival material from a 1986 performance by The Black Rock Coalition at The Kitchen.
This presentation is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, Media and Engagement.
If I was Black and normal I’d still get fucked with.
So I might as well do what I want to do and take my chances.
— Marlon Whitfield
SLAMDANCE is an ongoing project in music, video, and performance. In each stage, I relish in the absurdity that permeates the stories we tell to explain Black people’s participation in our own culture. For this latest iteration, I had the privilege of spending some time with archival materials from performances by The Black Rock Coalition at The Kitchen.
At the center of SLAMDANCE is Afropunk (Afro-Punk), a term that emerges from James Spooner’s 2003 film of the same name. I’m partial to the original title, Afro-Punk: The ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ Experience. The reference to Patti Smith’s 1978 “Rock n Roll Nigger” and its lament, “outside of society, that’s where I want to be,” reminds us that the accusatory refrain of “black kids acting white” barely begins to address punk as a site of racial trespassing. Punk identity, at least in its conception, relies on white traitors attempting an imagined niggerdom. For the purposes of SLAMDANCE, Afropunk is not the community of Black punks that Spooner’s film brought together, nor the now-global annual music festival. Afropunk is instead taken as the amalgam of repeated attempts to define a Black punk identity. In order to wrap my mind and body around these repeated attempts to pin down that which perpetually squirms, I often return to the quote by Marlon Whitfield offered above. Whitfield’s admission illuminates the impulse to be Black, live free, and rock hard. But the impulse to organize (to create an Afropunk Festival or form a Black Rock Coalition) comes in response to particular cruelties, including ahistorical accusations of playing white music and industry relegation to an isolating oddball status.
I also look to Greg Tate’s phrase “anarchic signifiers of contrary negritude.” Tate, a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, recognized Afropunk in 2011’s “Of Afropunks and Other Anarchic Signifiers of Contrary Negritude” not as an aberration from within Great White Punk, but as one iteration in a long line of “discontents, malcontents, miscreants, and class traitors” who emerge from the Black American bourgeoisie and exhibit their “own peculiar set of behaviors around the thickets of racism, racial identity, Afrocentricity, class alienation, class privilege, class betrayal and interracial dating, black rage, black pleasure, and black feminism.” I’m most interested in attempts to define a Black punk identity that engage with these thickets as a daily presence in certain Black lives, and punk as a set of tools that may be used to address them.
Rock and roll, like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources and compensations, irrespective of genre.
The BRC embraces the total spectrum of Black music. The BRC rejects the arcane perceptions and spurious demographics that claim our appeal is limited. The BRC rejects the demand for Black artists to tailor their music to fit into the creative straitjackets the industry has designed. We are individuals and will accept no less than full respect for our right to be conceptually independent.
The Black Rock Coalition was founded in 1985 by Vernon Reid, Greg Tate, and Konda Mason. By early 1986, The BRC were presenting their first public concert at The Kitchen, with the help of then Music Curator Bob Wisdom. “The Apartheid Concert” located the BRC’s struggle against the music industry’s bigotry within a global liberation struggle, emphasizing the role of eclectic Black musicians in combatting “the twin evils of apartheid and institutional bigotry” in South Africa and at home. Selections included “Strange Fruit,” “Free Nelson Mandela,” and a three-guitar performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a searing rendition of the Black National Anthem, seventeen years after Hendrix’s own electric intervention into “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock.
In reading through the program for this show and the BRC manifesto, I reflect on apartheid as not just a state of separation, but a state of displacement, confinement, and alienation in your own territory. Resistance, then, goes far beyond notions of integration. The demand is for the opportunity to be in right relationship with an abundance you have been denied, whether that abundance is of land, water, kinship, sound, or otherwise. It is a refusal to abide by the forces that parcel out and hoard that abundance, thus manufacturing scarcity. The press release for 1990’s “The Black Rock Coalition Versus The Blaxploitation Songbook” at The Kitchen promised, “splicing, re-interpreting, and recombining” music from “a wide body of underrecognized sound, films, and attitudes.” These interventions from the early days of the BRC remind me that the body of Black music is abundant, and Black rock musicians are among those who defend the right to claim, remix, preserve, and evolve it.
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When I reference the absurdity that permeates the stories we tell to explain Black punks and their “miscreant” forebears, I do not mean these stories are silly or necessarily futile. It is the same absurdity that weaves through the essential stories one tells to declare “I am human” in the face of inhumane treatment. It’s the absurdity of having to answer a question that cannot be asked in good faith.
Because obviously I am human. And obviously I am not. And obviously
if I was human I’d still get fucked with.
So I might as well locate myself, tie strings around my toes and stretch the other end to—
I slick my hair up to the heavens, let it grow down to the earth
I insist that I am an opposition, not an aberration
I insist that I make sense to myself
Of the opposing forces, gravity and the floor
I sense that gravity is weaker, even if the floor is more final.
So I rise, float, land, and lift somebody up
Circular and gaseous, imitation and individuation
What rises to the top and stays there?
What sinks and gets trampled?
— Ian Andrew Askew, June 2021
Ian Andrew Askew is an artist working in music, theater, and performance. Their project SLAMDANCE began in 2019 as a workshop at Arts @ 29 Garden. Following the premiere of SLAMDANCE TV, the project will continue at The Performing Garage in July 2021. Other recent work includes : A Story Project and love conjure/blues. Their writing has been published previously by Aperture and The Peabody Museum Press. Learn more about SLAMDANCE and Askew’s other projects via https://www.ianandrewaskew.com/info.
Learn more about the BRC’s history and current activity via blackrockcoalition.org and in Maureen Mahon’s Right to Rock (2004), published by Duke University Press.
Video and images: 1) Ian Andrew Askew, SLAMDANCE TV, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. 2) Ian Andrew Askew, SLAMDANCE Rune. Courtesy of the artist. 3) Program for Black Rock Coalition, “The Apartheid Concert” at The Kitchen, February 1, 1986. Cover. To see the full program, click here. 4) Program for Black Rock Coalition, “The Apartheid Concert” at The Kitchen, February 1, 1986. Interior pages. To see the full program, click here.