Last Saturday, 10/23/21, Dr. Mark Lomax II and Eddie Bayard made the trip to Kent, Ohio to perform Lomax’s 2014 suite #BLACKLIVESMATTER. Viscerally powerful, I was deeply impacted by Mark and Eddie’s performance, and was reminded of the intense communicative power music can have. “Communion” may be a better word. Phrases like “downloading experience” were rattling around in my head as I thought about what it was like to experience the rage, passion, sadness and hope of this 45-minute suite that embodies many of the emotions the artists have probably felt for much of their lives, and pointedly in the last years as we have tuned in as a nation—finally, and still not enough—to our Black citizens being murdered by the police and often without recourse.
If one is not Black, it can be a significant challenge to open oneself fully to feeling the pain and struggle of Black people. Even if non-Black people people are sensitive and empathetic, it is difficult to bear the truth of Blackness in this country, that Black people can still be murdered by the police without justice being served, among a long list of inequalities and injustices. Even the most well-intentioned may only be able to stomach so much before that other sense kicks in: it’s not “me,” the defense mechanism that allows us to stop short of feeling what a Black person must feel every day: the inescapable terrifying reality of the looming possibility of being randomly murdered even by those who your very own tax dollars pay to protect you. This is a reality that can’t be put down, conveniently forgotten about for a time because it’s too emotionally burdensome to bear it.
Scott Woods, Columbus, Ohio-based poet, gives voice to the Black experience on the webpage for #BLACKLIVESMATTER:
There is a scene in the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood in which the lead character, Tre, shows up at his girlfriend’s house after being randomly harassed by a police officer in the street. He proceeds to slide into an almost comic flail of tears, reiterating over and over that he’s ‘tired’ of the numbing rut of disenfranchisement his life has become...looking past the theater of the moment reveals one of the truest depictions of black rage ever captured on screen. It is a moment of complete and utter despair, an overwhelming impotence against a systemic disabling of self-worth, and because of the crime’s random nature, an allegory for every black person’s declining self-worth. It is a rage that wants to fight back against despotic injustice but realizes that it does not have the means, a rage casting about its frustration in the winds of despondency, voiceless and burning with the heat that only self-hating embarrassment can inflame.
What does one do in the face of “complete and utter despair” and “overwhelming impotence”? In #BLACKLIVESMATTER, Lomax and Bayard channel these experiences into an extraordinarily generous work of art: they turn themselves into vessels and invite us into a space where we have the opportunity to experience these emotions directly for ourselves. We vibrate with this anger and despair, we become a physical embodiment, a sonic crystallization of that very rage and impotence. Sound molecules emit from Mark and Eddie’s instruments and unravel within our bodies, forming us into a direct understanding of what it’s like to be Black in America.
While the piece depicts violence and outrage, the artistic gesture is ultimately deeply hopeful. Lomax is giving us a chance to download his pain, with the wish that it will lead to greater awareness, empathy and ultimately change. I hear the message “I believe we can all be in this together, please listen and share this experience with me. We are only as strong as our most oppressed. I am you, you are me.”
Before performing, Lomax spoke at length about the piece. Notably, he led off by saying he wanted to give us some context because we might hear some things that are triggering. Can you imagine? Black people are murdered by the police, and he doesn’t want a largely white audience to be triggered by simply mirroring that violence back to us? This opening gambit is a bellwether for a piece that walks right up to the line of overwhelming us with intensity and sits there so we can experience Blackness in American without turning away. It is indeed a tightrope walk: Lomax needs the experience to be intense to be accurate, but he needs us to be able to stay and feel it for it to be effective. The degree to which Lomax can feel where that line sits is an art in itself.
I quote Lomax’s opening remarks at length below (italics mine):
I want to give you some context... because you might hear some things that are triggering…when we did this project first in 2014, we were trying to figure out how to make an artistic response to what we had been seeing, something that we in the African American community at large across the nation knew was happening, but for the first time, we started to see things, and it felt like every day we were hearing another name, it felt like every day we were seeing another mother cry, and it felt like every day, we saw another community grieve, and every day, we saw people not be held to account. That was frustrating.
When Barack Obama became president, we heard him say, ‘Trayvon Martin could have been me, Trayvon Martin could have been my son.’ The highest office in the land, finally, could relate to the plight of a people who for now 401 years and counting have suffered at the hands of oppression. It’s gotten better, yes, but it’s still not where it should be. And yet we still have to protest, we still have to fight for the right to be human. And it’s not just a black issue, don’t get me wrong. We have a lot of ‘isms in this country that we have yet to work through.
And so the piece goes from anger, goddamn America, to a declaration of war, it’s time to “Stop Singin’ and Start Swingin’.” And I was asked, are you advocating violence in this piece? I can’t even really fight, I’m a drummer (Lomax chuckles). I’m not advocating violence. What artistically we are trying to convey is a question: do you consider me an American? Because if you consider me an American, then that means we are Ameri-Cans, which means we can overcome these issues; if you don’t see me as an American, then maybe we are Ameri-Can’ts, and we have made a decision that we don’t care enough about each other, our collective humanity to ask ourselves these hard questions and have these difficult conversations and create what America could be.
So the fight is not me taking up arms against the government. America spends almost a trillion dollars on its military. There’s no way anybody from the little ghetto called Linden in Columbus, Ohio could muster up enough resources to stand against an empire that spends almost a trillion dollars on its defense, that’s not the fight I’m trying to have. I’m not even trying to have a culture war. I’m trying to fight for the soul of all of the people in this country. It’s a different approach. It’s a more humane approach…
And then it goes from anger and a declaration of war to a resolution. In the third movement “Black, Beautiful and Powerful,” we have Dr. King saying, ‘don’t let anyone take away your manhood.’ What happens if we work as if we’re fighting as Ameri-Cans and we work together to ensure equitable access to opportunities for all of us, because we’re human first? And at the end, King says, ‘if we want to be free we have to sign our own emancipation proclamation on our hearts,’ because freedom is not something that’s given to you, it’s something that you do, democracy is not something done for you, it’s what you do every day. We have not yet I would argue been a democracy in this country, but we can, we can. And what does it mean to be democratic? That’s part of the hard conversation.
The three movements of #BLACKLIVESMATTER are “Part 1: Amerikkka,” “Part 2: Stop Singin' and Start Swingin’,” and “Part 3: Black, Beautiful and Powerful.” A video of important Black leaders, such as Jeremiah Wright, Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as scenes of protest and even a lynching, runs alongside the music, providing visual context.
Each of the three parts swells with intensity, though the first two parts are notably more visceral and abstract than the third, each reaching overwhelming peaks. In contrast, the third sings out loudly and passionately via the blues, and generally remains more groove-oriented than the other parts. Bayard and Lomax have played together for over 20 years, and their level of communication and commitment reflects this deep experience and creative partnership.
The piece ends with a scrolling list of the names of Black people who have been murdered by the police, and whether or not their murderer has been held to justice. I sat in silence, in a state of reflection and remorse, almost prayer. After the performance I had a chance to talk with both Mark and Eddie. Beads of sweat dripped down Mark’s face, a liquid symbol of the exertion and energy he had just expended. Eddie told me (I’m paraphrasing) that it took a lot to play this piece again and again, he had to find new ways to get into the intensity of the piece. It’s true that the piece requires a genuine catharsis on the part of its performers to work on us in the way they hope. I mentioned to Mark that it must have been a hard piece to end: even though there’s some sense of resolution, clearly there is still so much work to do. He replied that that was why they played the blues, a scale that can stack a minor third over a major third, which I took to mean that the blues can mix despair and hope in equal parts.
As I’ve reflected this week on the experience of hearing #BLACKLIVESMATTER, I keep thinking about how remarkable it is that Lomax, faced with “complete and utter despair” and “overwhelming impotence,” can make such a generous, hopeful artistic offering. It would be so easy to buckle, to become chronically enraged. Instead, Lomax fights for the rise of a collective consciousness that understands that we are all in this together. It must be baffling to be Black and wonder why white people aren’t collectively more enraged by what’s happening in this country. Lomax understands the futility of fighting a system that spends nearly a trillion dollars on its military, but he also knows that the cliche “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” won’t work either, as it would mean joining a system of conscious and unconscious oppression. Lomax’s point of view is more like, “if you can’t beat ‘em, change ‘em.” Lomax knows that for this change to occur, it must occur within white people, and it must be difficult knowing this is ultimately out of his control: as another cliche goes, Lomax knows that he can lead a horse to water, but how does he maintain the faith and hope that the horse will ever drink? We need to get to a place where white people are ashamed that Black people are killed on our soil, because this is our country, damnit, and we are better than that. We need to feel deeply that this is being done to all of us. Through experiencing #BLACKLIVESMATTER, we may be able to develop true empathy for what it’s like to be Black in this country and move towards a collective consciousness of greater humanity.