daphne brooks at USC on March 31, 2008

The USC Annenberg Research Seminar Series
&
The Popular Music Project of The Norman Lear Center

Present

Staring at the Sun:
Remixing the Diasporic Drone on TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain

A Talk By

Daphne A. Brooks
Princeton University

Geoffrey Cowan Forum (Annenberg Room 207),
12:00 p.m.
March 31, 2008




Join students and faculty for a presentation by Daphne A. Brooks, associate professor of English at Princeton University. Her topic: "Staring at the sun: Remixing the diasporic drone on TV on the radio's return to cookie mountain." From Professor Brooks: "It's all about (diasporic) time on Brooklyn underground art rebel outfit TV on the Radio's back-to-back masterpiece albums, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes and Return to Cookie Mountain. Listen to the postmodern doo-wop dirge of ‘Ambulance’ (on Youth) or the inter-oceanic goth blues of ‘Blues from Down Here’ (on Mountain) and you can hear the sound of a band cutting through the stillness of (rock) time, stealing fragments of Pere Ubu punk wave, staring-at-the Sun Ra bursts of the ethereal and Funkadelic hardcore jollies, walking a tightrope of musical influences that play with and at the margins of past, present, and future not-so-love(ly) sounds. This paper examines the way that black diaspora as a concept works itself out in the sounds of TV on the Radio and how this marvelously original band re-centers the ideas of trans-Atlantic black nationhood in the unfixed location of space, in the rapturous intervals of (re)mixed time." This event is part of the Annenberg Research Seminar Series.

daphne brooks

"Despair is worse than depression." –my mom

"Denial is worse than despair or depression."—my trace

Mystery white boy?:

Melodious configurations in Brooks' Work

Race is performative – emerging in crisis, in static moments.

Racial identities are submerged in Jeff Buckley's narrative. Brooks tells the reader about Buckley's early childhood influences: "The product of a Panamanian immigrant family (a Greek mother and a Franco-Panamanian father), Mary initially raised her son against the backdrop of her family's Central American ties" (19). We learn about his musical racial affinities and affiliations. Brooks' tribute, a eulogy of sorts, is jarringly refreshing because she does focus on Buckley as icon and as person to whom she could turn (making his music very personal); he rescued her car travels in Los Angeles as she navigated her way through graduate school terrain and the UCLA campus. Her mediations on Grace are marked by grace. What she says of him is true of her little gem: "…a wicked sense of humor, an electric charisma, an offbeat energy and weirdness, and a goofball curiosity…" (Grace 45). Brooks gives us a generous rendition of Buckley's music career, his life, and his philosophies. Her generosity is part of her grace, her storytelling style. Her epigraphs are really disarming like the ones for chapter four, "Love among the Ruins," by Luce Irigaray and James Baldwin (97). I don't enough about Jeff B to know if he was queer, assuming not, but DB does queer the text surrounding him not only by reading him against the rock in roll masculine backdrop but finding something refreshingly oppositional in his performance and way of being. "…in concert Buckley found ways to explore the self without exploiting women's abjection and myopic heterosexual desire" (87).

Lilac Wine

"'Grace' evokes the feeling of mystic flight through the rays of the sun and the light of the moon" (80).

What do we make of the seemingly less gracious figure of Adah Issacs Menken? Brooks finds a way to do a recuperative reading that encompasses all the complexities of Menken's racial identities and performance 'acts' that explored race and a trajectory toward gender and sexual and racial autonomy (an impossible journey): "Still, Menken may have utilized her blackface acts to call attention to the hegemony of mid-nineteenth-century theatre. For particularly in her steadfast attempts to purchase the (performance) rights of white men, she remains a critical figure to examine in relation to the resistant cultural acts of the marginalized…We might, then, read her minstrel characters as similar to her breeches melodramas and sensations pieces in that they transgressed white patriarchal conscription from within its very borders rather than simplistically succumbing to its seductive burnt-cork rhythms" (Bodies in Dissent, 203).

While I read Bodies in Dissent, especially "The Escape Artist" on Henry Box Brown's escape through the postal box and the politics of black women's bodies, I could not help but see the ghost of Harriet Jacobs as she performed the ultimate 'disappearing act' in her grandmother's garret for seven years.