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Up from slavery
Derrick L. Carter’s master works

BY JOSH KUN

The new mix album from African-American house DJ Derrick L. Carter, About Now . . . (Sixeleven), begins in the 1860s, on a Southern plantation, with hoe-toting slaves working the fields within earshot of their master’s call. Before flowing into Money Chocolate’s "Keep the Love," Carter puts a scratchy vinyl recording of Ernest Gaines’s 1971 slave-testimony novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman on his turntable and we hear the time-worn voice of the writer channeling the voice of Pittman’s master as he reluctantly frees his slaves. "Proclamation papers jus’ come down to me," Gaines has her saying in his voice, "and they said, y’all as free as I am." Carter lets the last few words echo for a few seconds, giving the present time to catch up with the past.

The autobiography is a fictional one, a creation by Gaines in which a 110-year-old former-slave-turned-civil-rights-advocate tells her stories into a tape recorder. But it marks the beginning of a technological chain reaction that now cross-fades between slavery and freedom and ends on the urban dance floor: a fictional tape recording is the basis for an actual novel that produced a vinyl sound recording that starts a house mix made from, in Carter’s own words, "118 Mac G4’s, 21 Technics MK 1200s, 7 pioneer DJM 500s and a DAT player found in the trash."

The ghosts of slavery haunt Carter, a black man who uses machines to make music for other people to dance to. About Now . . . is his response to that haunting, his DJ abolitionist attempt to take the power of freedom away from the master and put it, centuries later, into the mouth and hands of a former slave. In the CD’s track notes, he caps the song list with the pronouncement, "No more slaving from ‘Can’t see in the morning’ to ‘Can’t see at night.’ " For Carter, the end of slaving begins, in classic Caliban style, when the black artist stops being used by technology and starts using it to create new grammars of expression. "You give me words," says the DJ to Prospero, "that I might curse you with them."

In his 1999 Atlantic essay "Technology Versus African-Americans," Anthony Walton laid out the history that Carter’s mix curses at, a history of how the West developed new technology either to conquer and victimize blacks (the Portuguese "caravel" slave ship, guns used by slave traders) or, in the case of the cotton gin, to turn blacks themselves into machinery, the non-human instruments of labor that became the very technology used to build America’s empire. For Walton, the legacy of this history is black techno illiteracy. For Carter and just about every other 20th-century black musician — from Mamie Smith to Timbaland — who has used technology to cobble a new self out of soundwaves, the legacy is the opposite: the end of slaving and the beginning of black techno mastery.

Take the story of Leadbelly, the singer/songwriter/guitarist who in between being born on a Louisiana plantation in 1885 and dying dirt poor in 1946 was recorded by the white Library of Congress archivist John Lomax on the portable disc recorder he carried in the trunk of his car. At the time, Leadbelly was in year seven of a life prison term, and Lomax wanted to record "authentic" black music untainted by the trappings of the modern world. Once he captured Leadbelly’s songs on disc, Lomax played master to Leadbelly’s Pittman and proclaimed him free from the chains of Angola lockdown.

But as the recent PBS American Roots Music series pointed out, Leadbelly’s Lomax-writ freedom was just the beginning of his Lomax Jim Crow period — Lomax hired Leadbelly as his chauffeur and kept a man who wore finely pressed suits and fancy shoes singing in prison stripes for audiences full of white folks. It wasn’t until the ’40s that Leadbelly’s freedom became his own and he persuaded Moses Asch, the head of Folkways, to record his songs the way he wanted them recorded. "He utilized me," Asch has said, "and I was willing to be used because he knew that through me and through my medium he was able to express what he wanted."

This other Leadbelly story, the one where Leadbelly talks back, breaks free from Lomax, and labors for his own future, is the subject of a new poetry cycle by Tyehimba Jess, a young black poet from the same Chicago home town as Derrick Carter. Jess’s Leadbelly clings to his guitar, "this wooden head with open mouth," for freedom: "this starvation box with strings beats a blindin’ rhythm past cotton fields." Jess’s Leadbelly knows that he is just another link in a century’s long "penitentiary chain," and he knows that it is only through the songs he produces out of the machine of his guitar that the link can be broken.

"I want the world in my char-black hands," Jess has Leadbelly say. Carter’s already got that world — the mix is his way of telling us, at the beginning of a new century, what it sounds like.

Issue Date: December 13 - 20, 2001

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