Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom

4. MeShell Ndeg

To some, god is the light that leads them to believe that they see and know everything . . . I sway to the pulses of the rivers of blood that flow through my body, because I believe in things that you cannot see. I believe in things I cannot see. —MeShell Ndegéocello, “Akel Dama (Field of Blood)” The most arousing thing to me is sound. Even the sound of bodies when they’re touching just wears me out, or the sound of breath, or the sound of wetness. —MeShell Ndegéocello, interview with Rebecca Walker, 1997 What does it mean to “believe in things we cannot see”? How is wetness audible? In western cultures, sight and vision dominate conceptualizations of knowledge, power, aesthetics, and sexuality. The epistemological power of music (sounding and listening) is often marginalized, cast in the shadow of visual and literary culture. In American popular music, bassist/singer/songwriter MeShell Ndegéocello privileges sound over sight in order to address some of the most critical problems in contemporary society. Her daring intelligence and musical creativity render her one of the strongest voices, male or female, in popular music today, yet the only published feminist analysis of Ndegéocello (Burns and LaFrance 2002, 133–67) focuses on just one of her songs (“Mary Magdalene ” 1996). This chapter aims to fill a serious gap in the literature and to highlight the powerful aesthetics created in Ndegéocello’s remarkable works. 81 4 MeShell Ndegéocello Musical Articulations of Black Feminism Martha Mockus Ndegéocello’s music is rooted in 1970s funk but also blends stylistic features of soul, jazz, and hip hop. For her virtuosity, musical energy, and sexual candor many critics have compared her to Prince (York 1993, Harrington 1994, Seigal 1994, Darling 1994, Powers 1996, Sanders 2001, Jackson 2002), yet she also names Toshi Reagon and Sweet Honey in the Rock as important models (Rogers 1996, Harrington 1994). Unlike Prince, Ndegéocello has an audience comprised of mostly young women of color and queer women; her music is played rarely, if at all, on mainstream radio. She offers her listeners an unusually politicized musical experience of sensuality that reaffirms the need for personal passion and feminist transformation. In June 2002, Ndegéocello released her fourth album entitled Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape. Three months earlier in an interview with Essence she said, “I call it an anthropological mixtape because it’s a musical excavation of my own journey, one that I hope others will relate to” (Bandele 2002, 99). In later interviews she explained this more fully: This record is about digging up our past in order to understand where we are going; it is about me evaluating my musical journey from [Washington] D.C. and go-go to being a jazz musician to a funk and soul singer to a hip hop lover; it is about critiquing the music industry, programmed radio and my own participation in that industry. I don’t believe in pointing fingers in one direction, so the album is definitely as much of a self-critique as a critique . Beyond these themes, I just tried to be funky and collaborate with amazing vocalists, musicians and icons to create an intergenerational dialogue on identity and transformation. (Waring 2002; Cline 2002, 46) If some of the constitutive binaries of anthropology have been self/other, civilized/primitive, colonizer/colonized, and speaker/spoken for, Ndegéocello turns anthropology on its head. Much like the work of her literary predecessor Zora Neale Hurston, Ndegéocello’s “anthropological mixtape” emanates from a cultural insider seeking to explain her own worldview by locating herself as a black, queer female musician and assessing the state of black America at the start of the twenty-first century. Central to her musical ethnography are her political convictions about the search for freedom and the struggles against capitalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia in African American cultural history. I want to argue that Ndegéocello’s music embodies many of the same feminist critiques offered by Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Angela Davis, and it is their work that informs and inspires my analyses. I also include the voices of Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Cheryl Clarke, 82 MARTHA MOCKUS whose passionate ideas about economic justice and sexual freedom resonate deeply with those of Ndegéocello. In her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought, Collins writes, “Developing Black feminist thought also involves...