Tommy Butler & Future

Moten reminds us that black performance emerges from subjection of the other. What does it mean to interact with these performances? Is meaning preserved in the rhythm and vibration of the sounds? Can the meaning be translated to a culture (white privileged) that has not experienced oppression…

“There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter. It moves by way of the (phono-photo-porno-)graphic disruption the shriek carries out. This movement cuts and augments the primal. If we return again and again to a certain passion, a passionate response to passionate utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, an objection, it is because it is more than another violent scene of subjection too terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the prefigurative scene of a (re)appropriation—the deconstruction and reconstruction, the improvisational recording and revaluation—of value, of the theory of value, of the theories of value.” (16, Moten)

The album “Selma” comes to mind. It’s a musical which is a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.. Recently Future sampled Tommy Butler’s “Prison Song” from Selma in his song “Mask Off”. These two anthems reflect the disenfranchisement of communities in specific locations. In “Selma” we listen to a story set in Alabama where a non violent civil rights movement is taking place. In “Mask Off” we hear a story of drug use and the struggle of addiction. What is interesting about these pieces of music is how they’ve been appropriated in popular culture. Strange to see so many people removed from the context of Butler’s “Prison Song” cruising quickly in cars, roused by an anthem they are unaware of - all they know is that it moves them.

In “Prison Song”, a chorus sings, “Thinking you lost your senses, Oh my Lord, praise him be, Cold chills, prison cells”. In “Mask Off”, Future describes his own quest for freedom, “From food stamps to a whole 'nother domain”. In “Prison Song”, “Freedom waits out here”, an unsettling position that is expressed as “just ain’t feeling right”. Similarly, Future describes his search for freedom through drug use and driving fast down oceanside highways. Both songs speak of containment in contrast to freedom. The chilling effect of Future’s drug use echoes the cold prison chills described in Butler’s musical. Thinking of trauma and tremors.

What becomes evident when mainstream culture can appropriate a song steeped in the history of slavery and civil rights is that... most people must be feeling alienated! However, what are the consequences when the mainstream culture misappropriates? And how does the position of black performance make us uneasy when we reflect on the idea of the individual as commodity?

If Butler sought to pay tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., how does Future now substitute and reproduce meaning in “Mask Off”? Does the meaning evolve or is it preserved? Is the appropriation of hip hop for the mainstream an aid or a detriment in understanding race politics? Aren’t many of the lyrics in Future’s songs are layered with meaning that most stereotypical mom and pops would dismiss as condoning “bad” behaviour? And if no one objects does this become the meaning of the song regardless of it’s intent? In the same way that a language of slavery evolved out of secrecy, so does “Mask Off” contain hidden meaning that is unseen by many. “The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled

me with ineffable sadness” (23, Douglass via Moten)

“This is the story of how apparent non value functions as a creator of value; it is also the story of how value animates what appears as non value. This functioning and this animation are material. This animateriality—impassioned response to passionate utterance—is painfully and hiddenly disclosed always and everywhere in the tracks of black performance and black discourse on black performance” (21, Moten).