Shoshone Odess Johnson – Goldsmiths College, University of London
Kode9 and The Spaceape- Black Sun (Hyperdub 2011)
It takes a special kind of intellect in order to make white people dance. It’s never been an easy task. Kode9 is one of the especially rare breed of musicians who is a so-called white person and can still make white people dance. At his May gig at Plastic People, I witnessed the transformation of a number of people into spinning spasmodic dervishes with the pressurized bass of his sonic innovations. During his twisted, monstrous rearrangement of a Nicki Minaj track, a man next to me was channelling a host of late-capitalist demons, pushing out the postcolonial melancholia with each convulsion. In a sort of parody of the b-boy circle, a wide berth of space emerged around him, in order to avoid the omnidirectional abuse of his phantom limbs. Kode9, AKA Steve Goodman, the concept-engineer turned sonic militiaman, had turned this man’s body against itself.
On Black Sun, his long-awaited second collaboration with the Spaceape, Kode9 unveils a trickling, melancholy iconography, equal parts musique concrète and dub. Spaceape’s low, drawling patois evokes nothing more than the mysterious, haunting plea of Michael Smith’s “Mi Cyaan Believe It,” or Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Dread Beat An Blood.” But if Smith and Johnson were warning the world about a neoliberalism that contained within it all of the same ingredients of the genocides which founded liberalism, warning us that “Margaret Thatcher/ You better watch her,” Spaceape and Kode9 are marking out a terrain of conflict within this undead regime. On “Otherman,” Spaceape seems to be offering us a message through a megaphone at a rally, or by cellphone, a communiqué from another space or time, interrupted and undercut by trickles and a synth which sounds like the Starship Enterprise’s church organ.
In terms of motifs, Kode9 focuses consistently on the idea of the trickle, just as much as the parahuman synth. Amidst the sustained failure of trickle-down economics, when services and means of communal self-ownership seem to be trickling up, not down, when nobody any longer pretends that business leaders are not shadow politicians, Kode9, like Mount Kimbie with “William” or Teebs with “Double Fifths,” takes the microdynamics of fluid and makes them percussive. The juxtaposition of trickles with the clicks and whirrs of office machinery imply the emergence of the “intellectual proletariat,” the low-wage paper pushers, working in any number of incarnations of marketing and PR, spinning words and relationships toward the maximization of profit for someone else. At the same time the trickle is that of a relaxing Zen fountain, the meditative practice which sustains the ego and conscience of the social justice-minded ecocapitalist.
If James Baldwin was right, whiteness can be read as a kind of self-imposed exile from any possibility of an ethical transcendence of the self, as an enclosed monadism of safety. It would then become imperative to begin to dismantle the sonic textures and aesthetic presuppositions of whiteness, just as readily as one would refute white political organization, showing the common links of liberalism and fascism. In his seminal text Sonic Warfare, Goodman writes that “(white) noise music” is marked by a “fetishization of midrange frequencies,” whereas the multicultural organic assemblage of “the dancehall system simultaneously immerses/attracts and expels/repels…not just heard but felt (28).” The title track accomplishes this aim beautifully, mixing a snare that sounds like someone hitting a hollow log with a steady droning synthesizer, as alarming as a sudden barrage of plasma fire from a UFO.
