Black sonic space and the stereophonic poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time

Abstract

In the liner notes for Amiri Baraka’s 1972 album It’s Nation Time (Motown-Black Forum), Baraka asserts, ‘This recording is an institution.’ Recording on the heels of the 1970 Congress of African People , Baraka felt that the establishment of a pan-African nation was paramount, but where ought such a nation to be established? Could a recording be an institution? What does a nation sound like? The album, which received a limited release under Motown’s progressive Black Forum label, mixes poetry with free jazz, African drumming, and R&B – melding together the popular with avant-garde and traditional forms of black music. In doing so, It’s Nation Time attempts to re-inflect black life with a proud African ancestry and spirituality. In this article, I explore how Baraka uses the format of the stereo LP to push beyond the constrictions of place and history in order to produce a new, contingent black sonic space. The acoustic spaces Baraka inhabits are projective, hyperbolic, and imagined, and reflect a development in the studio stereo recording that took place around this time as engineers discovered that sonic spaces could not only be reproduced but manipulated and produced. As I show, It’s Nation Time strives toward a theory of sonic space that might redefine the parameters of a national space and create a new conception of blackness.

Keywords:

• Amiri Baraka
• stereophonic
• black sonic space
• black nationalism
• Black Arts Movement
• Black Forum
• Motown
• poetics

When Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) passed away in January 2014, the words most often used to describe his legacy were ‘polarizing’ and ‘controversial’. As a writer who came of age among the Beats, who broke away to participate in the black radicalism of the 1960s, and who later became a Marxist, his artistic output has been diverse and his message at times contradictory. His outspoken, often violent, critiques of white bourgeois culture and the treatment of black Americans led many to accuse him of race baiting, but his simultaneous insistence on the beauty and spirituality of black culture would galvanize a generation of black poets and artists. As a poet, playwright, essayist, activist, teacher, and founder of the Black Arts Movement, Baraka was prolific, but perhaps Baraka is best known for his engagement with music. His performances of poetry with jazz would help set the stage for the emergence of hip-hop, and Ishmael Reed has argued that Baraka ‘did for the English syntax what [Thelonious] Monk did with the chord. He was an original’.¹ And yet, while Baraka was known for his engagement with black music in his poetry, many have overlooked It’s Nation Time – the out-of-print 1972 LP that he recorded for Motown’s Black Forum label.² Chanting, singing, and screaming his poetry over the rhythms of African drums, free jazz, and R&B, Baraka asked his listeners: ‘Can you imagine something other than what you see? Something Big, Big & Black. Purple yellow red & green (but Big, Big & Black).’³ It was a call to action for black people to imagine new futures for themselves – an album that put into action his ideas about black music and Black Nationalism by creating new black sonic space within the dimensions of the stereo LP.

We do not often think of the stereo LP as a tool for radical political thought, and yet It’s Nation Time reminds us to consider the ways in which sonic space became an important imaginative forum for both political and social thought. In histories of recorded sound, the popularization of stereo recordings has been generally thought of as a marketing ploy on the part of record companies – Greg Milner, like many, has dismissed stereo as ‘high fidelity’s second act’.⁴ But such histories tend to focus on stereo’s role in relation to the music industry rather than its broader social history. Stereo would reshape the way we think about sonic space, and when the first mass-produced stereo album was released in 1957, it was not only the same year as the Civil Rights Act, but it was also the year usually acknowledged as the beginning of the ‘space age’. One could argue that ‘space’ as a theoretical concept dominated the 1960s, and as Baraka himself had said, the issue surrounding racial integration and later Black Nationalism was always a ‘space question’.⁵ In this article, I turn to It’s Nation Time in order to explore how Baraka employs the LP to develop a stereophonic poetic characterized by sound in its spatial dimension. Baraka’s stereophonic poetic allowed him to pry open new sonic spaces for poetic protest – a space in which a new Black Nation could be born.

When Baraka recorded It’s Nation Time, he had just returned from the 1970 Congress of African People (CAP) in Atlanta. Black Nationalism, self-determination, and pan-Africanism had been important themes at CAP, which aspired to create a governing body that could put the ideas of Black Power into action. But one of the biggest questions that CAP and Black Nationalists had yet to resolve was: where should such a nation reside? Did a people so geographically dispersed comprise a nation? Some still advocated for a return to Africa, but others questioned whether a nation needed to have a geographical location in order to exist. While the term ’nation‘ has historically meant many things – from a loosely constituted group of people united by language, religion, or common heritage to a geographically bound political state – the questions raised at CAP were indicative of a struggle with the concept of nationhood in the context of the late twentieth-century nation states.⁶ For Baraka, however, the concept of ‘nation’ retained its plasticity and is perhaps more in line with Benedict Anderson’s redefinition of nations as ‘imagined communities’.⁷

Energized by the ideas and questions raised at CAP, Baraka considered It’s Nation Time to be a kind of founding document of Black Nationalism, stating assertively on the liner notes: ‘This recording is an institution.’⁸ But how can a recording be an institution? Can a nation have a sound? The1970 meeting of CAP in some ways marked the high point of Black Nationalism, but it was also the beginning of Black Power’s demise.⁹ The mandate for a unified nation with its own governing body was nearly impossible to actualize on a geopolitical level, and nationalism proved to be a fraught subject that divided black radical thought. By 1974, even Baraka would separate himself from the nationalists. However, on It’s Nation Time, one can hear Baraka struggling with how to bring a black nation into being while rethinking the idea of what a nation might look and sound like; the album registers the imaginative, hyperbolic, and ultimately never-realized creation of a pan-African nation.

Of course, It’s Nation Time was not Baraka’s first foray into the political realm, nor was it his first recording. Following his break with the racially integrated Beat crowd in the mid-1960s, he had become increasingly political. With poems like ‘Black Art’, he helped to ignite the Black Arts Movement, which emerged around 1965 as the cultural wing of Black Power and Black Nationalism, and responded to the growing unrest among black Americans following the assassination of Malcolm X.¹⁰ Baraka changed his name from LeRoi Jones to Imamu Amiri Baraka and wrote poetry with a more radical edge, including ‘Against Bourgeois Art’, and ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’ – poems which he frequently performed and also recorded with musicians such as Sun Ra, Sonny Murray, the New York Art Quartet, Albert Ayler, and others on albums such as: Sonny’s Time Now (Jihad Productions, 1965); New York Art Quartet (ESP Disk, 1965); and A Black Mass with Sun Ra (Jihad Productions, 1968). What distinguishes It’s Nation Time from these earlier efforts, however, is Baraka’s poetic dialogue with the specificities of stereo sound, the LP, and his theoretical model of sound in its spatial dimensions.

Space is the place: imagining black sonic space

Admittedly, the stereo effects of It’s Nation Time are not revolutionary. If I had wanted to write simply about experimental stereophonic techniques, there are better albums to feature – the Beatles’ self-titled The White Album (1968), for instance, or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973). But the stereophonics of It’s Nation Time are particularly interesting because the soundscape it creates reinforces the thematic aspects of space in Baraka’s poetry and combines them with electro-acoustic effects and speech acts. In a 2003 interview with Kalamu ya Salaam, Baraka agreed that the album was artistically the most realized of his recordings to date. ‘I wanted to go from rhythm and blues, to new music, to Africa at will,’ Baraka stated.¹¹ At a rudimentary level, the album attempts to construct a sonic environment that expresses a relationship between different genres of music and their geographic-temporal relations to one another: African drums, as an ancestral music, feel ‘farther’ away, while the R&B tracks, with electric amplified instruments like electric guitar, bass, and keyboards, feel ‘closer’ and more direct. On the two opening tracks, ‘Chant’ and ‘Answers’, the unison female voices and the African hand-drums and shakers sound distant, especially when contrasted with Baraka’s voice, which is not just significantly louder but lacks the ambient acoustic quality, feeling instead flat and close to the ear as a result of close mic’ing. ‘All praises due to the black man. All praises due to the creator . . .,’ he intones.¹² The track hearkens to the sounds of ritual at the moment that he establishes the stereophonic landscape. The African instrumentation overlaps with an African American jazz sound, the drumming slowly and seamlessly gives way to Lonnie Liston Smith on piano, who plays a series of ascending and descending arpeggiated tone clusters to a dream-like effect, finally leading into the track ‘All in the Street’. The lyrics, as printed in the pamphlet Spirit Reach, encourage the listener to transpose sound into the visual dimension:

Can you Imagine something other

than what you

see Something

Big Big & Black

Purple yellow

Red & green (but Big, Big & Black)

Something look like a city

like a Sun Island gold-noon

Flame emptied out of heaven

grown swollen in the center

of the earth

Can you imagine who would live

there¹³

Asking his listeners to ‘imagine’ this new world that seems to exist simultaneously at the center of the earth and out in the ‘Big & Black’ (i.e. outer space), Baraka induces the audio-eye of the listener, creating a moment of synaesthesia through lyrics and sonic effects. In the liner notes, the will to listen in order to see is part of the album’s philosophy: ‘These are projections of (image/sound) which represent the new life-sense of African men and women here in the west, it is the African man’s vision/version of music.’ As these opening tracks illustrate, the album itself wants to complicate the line between vision and sound.

There is a small but growing body of literature about what R. Murray Schafer has called the ‘soundscape’ – defined as ‘any acoustic field of study’ ranging from musical works to acoustic environments, including urban environmental noise.¹⁴ The elasticity of the term has allowed it to be adopted by a range of scholars to suit various ends, but as Jonathan Sterne notes, we ought to consider the concept of the soundscape in its historical context: ‘soundscape is very much a creature of mid-century sound media culture, first radio, then hi-fi (a term Schafer directly borrows), then stereo.’¹⁵ In Spaces Speak: Are you Listening? Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter draw a comparison between the ability to create virtual auditory space (as created by stereophonic sound reproduction and other electro-acoustic tools) and the ability of Renaissance painters to represent perspective in their paintings. With technologies for recording and manipulating sound, ‘Musical space is unconstrained by the requirements for normal living, and musical artists are inclined to conceive of surreal spatial concepts.’¹⁶ However, when we talk about real or virtual soundscapes, we tend to rely on visual language and metaphors. Sound engineers and acousticians talk about the ‘sound image’, but as Peter Damaske points out in his book Acoustics and Hearing, ‘acoustical quality is basically defined by subjective sound impressions’, and even technical data gathered by machines only gives partial information.¹⁷ In other words, listeners always play an important role in constructing a sound image of an acoustic environment – often through descriptive language. Thus, my readings of Baraka are interested in the ways Baraka himself, through his poetry, describes and reinforces the idea of these new sonic spaces.

My own intervention draws upon Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, in which Weheliye usefully points to the ways black culture and its uses of sonic technologies have shaped modernity more broadly.¹⁸ Weheliye has noted that despite cultural historians’ interest in space as it relates to the postmodern moment, few have thought about the sonic dimensions of space. In his readings of Ralph Ellison’s “Living with Music” (1955) and Darnell Martin’s film I Like It Like That (1994), Weheliye maintains that music influences and shapes the spaces in which we dwell, arguing that ‘consuming sonic technologies and being consumed by them suggest specifically modern ways of be(com)ing in the world’.¹⁹ However, while Weheliye makes an important point about how sonic technologies shape the places we already inhabit, he does not discuss either the projective aspects of sonic space or the connection between spatialized uses of sound and the development of stereo technology.

Although Weheliye overlooks the relationship between stereophonic recordings and the importance of sonic space, I am not the first to use the term stereophonic to describe the pan-Africanist consciousness. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy describes the double consciousness experienced by Afro-diasporic people as ‘stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal’.²⁰ Though Gilroy uses the term only in passing, his invocation of the term ‘stereophonic’ reveals how we have come to understand the stereophonic in terms of the temporal and spatial dimensions created by two channels of sound. Gilroy’s metaphoric use of stereo and its dual-channelled sound in the context of black studies reverberates with the many tropes of intertextuality and doubleness that flow from W.E.B. DuBois’s ‘double-consciousness’ to Henry Louis Gates Jr’s Bahktinian ‘double-voiced utterance’ to what Julian Henriques sees as the double in ‘dub’.²¹ And yet, as recent discussions in black sound studies have shown, we might be wise to reconsider the binaries that too often “other” blackness as outside Western modernity.²² It can be helpful to remember that stereophonic, rather than referring to binaurality or two channels of sound, refers to sound's three-dimensionality and comes from the Greek stereós, meaning solid.

Tsitsi Ella Jaji has borrowed the metaphor of stereo to describe Africa’s own reciprocal relationship with creative and political movements throughout the diaspora. Jaji’s book, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity offers a ‘perspective on diaspora that includes and inscribes Africa as a constitutive locus rather than viewing it as a “source” for diasporic populations and practices but not an active participant’.²³ While Gilroy invokes the dual channels of a modern stereophonic metaphor precisely for its doubleness, Jaji reaches back to the Greek etymology of stereo defined as ‘solid’ in an attempt to break down the binary. As she puts it, she is ‘dubbing stereo in for solidarity’.²⁴ Provocative though this turn of phrase may be, Jaji’s leap from stereo to solidarity is less concerned with a direct consideration of the technology itself.²⁵ And yet, both Gilroy’s and Jaji’s suggestive uses of the stereo metaphor seem to invite us to resituate the stereophonic within its historical and cultural contexts, and it is from this position that I hope to touch upon the very real ways stereo technologies became a way for a pan-Africanist like Baraka to explore black sonic space. For although Sun Ra declared in 1973 that ‘space is the place’, most listeners have struggled to follow what he meant.

What’s your sound? Mid-century developments in recording technology

Within the histories of recorded music, stereo rarely registers as more than a benchmark in the audiophile’s pursuit of high fidelity. Using two (or more) microphones, stereo recordings inscribe both sides of the record’s groove with two channels of sound that, when replayed, produce the illusion of hearing sound in a real space. Stereo thus plays upon what cognitive psychologists refer to as the interaural time difference and the interaural level difference – in other words, the difference in time as sound hits one ear and then the other, and also the difference in volume as it encounters the ear that is closer to the sound source.²⁶ The high fidelity (hi-fi) movement began with the introduction of vinyl records in the late 1940s. With longer play time and vinyl’s improved sound, hi-fi albums promised to recreate the experience of the concert hall or the jazz club in one’s living room, ‘as though he were hearing it live’.²⁷ These developments along with advances in magnetic tape recording technology (such as Ampex) not only allowed for a more ‘live’ sound, but they made it practical to record a ‘live’ album because the technology itself was more portable. However, it is worth noting that the desire for stereo hi-fi by audio engineers was not simply about replicating the original performance, but rather about presenting the sound of that performance within a culturally inscribed setting, such as the concert hall; stereo recordings reproduce not just the sound of the instruments but the sound of the space in which they are produced. Audio engineers refer to this as a ‘sound image’, but some, including Paul Théberge, have taken to describing the audio space of a stereo recording as a ‘sound stage’.²⁸ In this way, stereo became a theatre of sound: both a performance space and a performance of space.

Although stereo LPs did not appear until 1957–58, research into stereophonic sound began in the 1930s when film companies started looking for a sound to complement cinematic realism.²⁹ One of the ironies is that the first commercial film to incorporate stereo sound was Walt Disney’s surrealist Fantasia in 1940, an animated film in which dancing hippos and other animals are accompanied by classical orchestral pieces; in other words, sound was being used to enhance the dimensionality of a visual medium, and in the case of animation, a determinedly flat medium.³⁰ Even at this early moment in the technology’s development, stereo was embedded within a paradox: on the one hand, stereo promised greater realism and the reproduction of sounds in real spaces, on the other hand it enabled a kind of sublime fantasy and the creation of spaces that could never exist in ‘real’ life – such spaces are not unreal, but a kind of simulacra.³¹

This tension between the real and surreal (or even hyperreal) plays upon the science of binaural hearing and the way sound’s three dimensionality intersects with the visual sense.³² It is precisely the visuality of stereo that Baraka highlights on It’s Nation Time as he recreates an audio space that unites various genres of black music, asking the listener to imagine ‘something other than what you see’. Despite stereo’s promise of fidelity to an original performance in a particular setting, recording engineers quickly saw the opportunity to create uniquely imaginative sonic spaces.

By the mid-1960s there were a number of labels and producers interested in using the recording studio as an instrument, but not all were convinced of the benefits of stereo sound. For example, Phil Spector (‘wall of sound’) and Brian Wilson (the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds) used multi-tracking to create new sonic environments, but preferred mono recordings. The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ on their self-titled White Album (1968) became one of the most notable experimental stereo recordings, pioneering panning, looping, samples, and other studio techniques as a way of representing revolution in sonic space, and yet the Beatles released both stereo and mono versions of their early records (with many preferring mono). Within the world of soul and R&B, both Stax and Motown were known for their recognizable sounds and used stereo to enhance these effects. Whereas Stax’s sound relied largely on the fact that it recorded in an old movie theater in Memphis (i.e. a real space), the ‘Motown Sound’ (as it is often called) was achieved through instrumentation and studio recording effects. This sonic signature was created by a recognizable blend of pop and soul, characterized by the tambourine, electric bass, and call-and-response vocals; it is a prime example of how sound, rather than simply music or a musician, came to dominate commercially successful recordings. Motown’s sound, however, was more than simply its instrumentation, but its arrangement of the vocals, the use of reverb, and its particular use of the stereo space. One of the best examples is The Supremes’ 1964 album Where Did Our Love Go? As Greg Milner describes, on the title track:

For the entire song, quarter-note handclaps keep the rhythm. They begin the song in the right channel, quickly migrate to the left, and remain there until the last few seconds, when they merrily skip across the stereo field and back, as though daring the listener to figure out the secret of their sound.³³

A similar strategy can be heard on the track ‘Come See About Me’ – also produced by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier – which Baraka repurposes on It’s Nation Time. The drums enter in the left channel but gradually fill the entire stereo field. Diana Ross’s lead vocal emerges front and center, while the backup vocals truly sound like they are in the back, giving the illusion of a larger space because they have the echoing quality of acoustic sound. Although other companies would try to reproduce the Motown sound, it was nearly impossible to do because it was not merely the sound of the Detroit studio or some real place, rather, it was an audio space constructed by record producers and engineers who knew how to wield the voices and the instrumentation of Motown’s stable of talent within the stereo frame.

Given Motown’s reputation for inoffensive crossover music and Berry Gordy Jr’s reluctance to release albums by radical black artists, the creation of the short-lived Black Forum sub-label was surprising. Between 1970 and 1973 Black Forum released a limited selection of spoken-word recordings, including Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time, and others by Martin Luther King Jr, Langston Hughes and Margaret Danner, Elaine Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and others. Black Forum was formed by a small group of producers at Motown who were empowered by the efforts of mainstream black artists on Motown and other labels to take more vocal political stances in their music. Songs like James Brown’s 1968 anthem ‘Say it Loud, (I’m Black and I’m Proud)’ became a huge force in the movement and opened the door for other mainstream black recording artists to write political music. Such music included The Temptations’ ‘Message from a Black Man’ and Sly Stone’s ‘Don’t Call me Nigger, Whitey’, both released in 1969, and Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ in 1971.³⁴ The albums released on the Black Forum label were part of a small but growing trend; in the era before video, spoken word and commemorative albums played an important role in preserving historical events and speeches. Those associated with Black Arts, Baraka included, advocated independent modes of dissemination, and Baraka himself created his own record label and publishing company, Jihad, to this end. Black Forum, however, created an important space within the mainstream for artists and activists with non-mainstream messages.

Baraka seems to have been aware of the ironies of recording a black nationalist album for Motown and used the opportunity to reinforce his ideas about the spiritual nature of all black music, even R&B. For instance, on ‘Come See About Me’, he overlays The Supremes’ original song lyrics about getting over lost love with poetry calling to ‘the deity’. Critics of Motown claimed that the record label whitewashed black music in order to make it palatable to white listeners. Baraka, however, felt that there was a black spirituality to be unearthed from Motown’s version of R&B – ‘even The Miracles are spiritual’, he said.³⁵ Although it is not entirely possible to transcribe the interplay between the two sets of lyrics, whose rhythmic relation to one another is elastic, I attempt to do so here (see Table 1) to show how the spiritual and secular intersect. On the left I have transcribed Baraka’s voice, and on the right, the backing vocals with a few references to instrumentation. In terms of the stereo arrangement, the Supremes-esque backing vocals play in the right channel, while Baraka’s vocals play in both – an arrangement which spatially orients his lyrics as central and yet interpenetrated.³⁶ On the page I can easily separate the streams of music, but such separation is more difficult in the moment of listening because the lyrical lines overlap and overtake one another, smudging to the point of interference. The lyrics call and respond to one another and ‘Hey God’ is answered by ‘I’ve been praying (for you)’. In this instance, the stereophonic works on two levels: that of the album’s engineering and the aesthetic decision to ‘mash up’ (as it were) two separate lyrical trajectories. Doing so allows the track to perform the task of bringing the secularized (and saccharine) R&B closer to its spiritual roots – later trading ‘come see about me’ for ‘come see about we’ and making the individual or personal plural. By bringing together the spiritual and popular aspects of black music, Baraka’s attentiveness to the stereophonic dimensions of the album extend beyond the album’s engineering and inflect the poetry as well while he develops his theory of black sonic space.

Table 1. Lyrics from ‘Come See About Me’, Baraka’s voice (left) and backing vocals/instrumentation (right).

O Allah,	(African drums and electric bass)
all deity, jinn, spirit creation
on the earth, where we live, cut off from
righteousness
by devil
in corporated
(repeat)
come see about
we
us
black people your first creations
All deity	(Music shifts to Motown Sound)
Hey God
Hey God	I’ve been praying (for you)
Hey God	‘Cause I’m lonely (so blue)
Spirit	Smiles have all turned to tears
Interior animation of existence
we here	But tears won’t wash away my fears
cut off	That you’re never ever gonna return
in a devil land
we need something to be strong god	To ease the fire that within me burns
all spirit flesh us with strength to	It keeps me crying baby for you
allah give us will to	Keeps me sighin’ baby for you
get up	So won’t you hurry?
and split […]	Come on boy, see about me
	(Come see about me) […]

Source: Baraka, “Come See About Me,” It’s Nation Time (1972), Side A 11:13–12:30.

Black music: a place where black people live

If you play James Brown (say, ‘Money Won’t Change You . . . but time will take you out’) in a bank, the total environment is changed. Not only the sardonic comment of the lyrics, but the total emotional placement of the rhythm, instrumentation and sound. An energy is released in the bank, a summoning of images that take the bank, and everybody in it, on a trip. That is, they visit another place. A place where Black People live. (Baraka, Black Music, 1967)

For Baraka, the music was already a technology of sonic space in the stereophonic dimension. Baraka’s trifecta of black sonic space philosophers included James Brown, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra, and in ‘The Changing Same’ from Black Music Baraka utilizes a spatial vocabulary to describe a new theory of social expression at work in both R&B and Free Jazz. This marked shift from the typical musical discourse gives sound a multidimensional, even visual orientation – similar to the way James Brown can transport even passive listeners standing in line at the bank, to ‘a place where Black People live’.³⁷ By this same measure, Ornette Coleman is ‘the elemental land change, the migratory earth man’;³⁸ ‘Ornette was a cool breath of open space. Space, to move. So freedom already exists. The change is spiritual.’³⁹ The descriptions chart a new definition of space, one that better lends itself to a philosophical and spiritual account of geography and nationhood. As a central text and ‘institution’ of the black nation, It’s Nation Time attempts to locate where such a new nation would exist by redefining space.

Perhaps the most instrumental figure in Baraka’s development of a theory of black sonic space was Sun Ra. While some activists were more literal-minded about the need for a black space, in the music of Baraka and of Sun Ra we can hear a philosophical re-thinking of what space means.⁴⁰ Sun Ra’s 1973 album Space is the Place helped to catalyze this more celestial and philosophical thinking (now referred to as Afro-Futurism), because as Baraka noted early on: ‘Sun-Ra is spiritually oriented. He understands “the future” as an ever widening comprehension of what space is, even to the “physical” travel between the planets as we do anyway in the long human chain of progress …’⁴¹ After Baraka’s collaboration with Sun Ra in 1968 on the play and recording of The Black Mass, Sun Ra’s influence would continue to inflect his work – helping him to rethink the sonic space of the album as infinitely more flexible than physical space and ‘sticks and stones’ institutions.⁴²

In the sonic space of the album, Baraka could more freely explore the connections among Afro-diasporic peoples in the stereophonic sense proposed by Gilroy and Jaji, transcending not just geographic boundaries but temporal boundaries as well. Space is ‘way out waaaay out way way out’ he tells us on ‘All in the Street’, stretching the elastic ‘ay’ with each repetition.⁴³ But in order to reach this place, he appeals to the ear:

Hear each other miles apart (without no telephones)

Love I hear you from way cross the

sea … in East Africa … Arabia …

Reconstructing the grace of our

long past – I hear you love

whisper at the soft air as it bathes

you – I hear and see you⁴⁴

Baraka invokes the listening ear to access an African past, but without the technology of the telegraph or telephone. As Ingrid Monson reminds us: ‘In many West African musics, for example, the boundaries between language and music are much blurrier, since speech may literally be spoken through instruments, most usually drums.’⁴⁵ The performance of the lyrics themselves emulates spatial effects such as echoes. The chorus of men and women repeat Baraka’s words in a fugal pattern: lovelovelove I I I hearhearhear youyouyou … etc. Each word decrescendos in its repetition, and in doing so the words issue ripples and echoes as they reverberate against each other. The effect resonates like a voice speaking in a vast and vaulted space. The repetitions are orchestrated as part of the performance, but they are a self-contained stereo effect. Literally re-sounding reinforces the resonance of listening: love, I hear you.

The efforts to double and perform the resonant technology only become more clear when Baraka himself becomes the medium as ‘All in the Street’ continues, and he claims that that ancestors in Africa will speak through him if only we listen:

I am in touch

w/ them. They speak and

beckon to me

Listen they speak thru

my mouth

“Come on –

“Come on –

“Come on – ⁴⁶

In a moment of frenzied improvisation, Baraka becomes the ‘medium’ – the body through which the message speaks – speaking both in his voice and in the voice of the ancestors across space and time. Sound’s spatial qualities are largely a result of the fact that sound requires a medium through which to travel; sound must resonate in other things. When Baraka shouts ‘come on’ in quick succession, the words take on a percussive quality. The exclamation is also a call to the band to catch up with him as together they drive the tempo ever faster. By increasing the noise level of the album through wailing and scatting, Baraka also increases the track’s resonance within the space where it is played;⁴⁷ but these resonant spaces can only exist for a time. At the end of the poem as the band fades out, he says, ‘Here the contact is broken,’ for as the music ends and the poetry ends, the auditory space closes and so does the communion of African peoples across time and space.⁴⁸ The space itself that was open for a time by noisy ruptures no longer exists when sound is replaced by silence. Sonic spaces thus only exist in time, even on a recording.

Through time, speed of delivery, and noise, Baraka tries to explode the audio space into the projective/prospective realm. Baraka’s conception of the projective stereophonic space echoes Charles Olson’s 1950 essay ‘Projective Verse’. Olson’s manifesto aimed to bring the breath of the poet (and the poet’s listening) back into poetry, calling for poetry that was ‘(projectile (percussive (prospective’.⁴⁹ As Lorenzo Thomas points out, when redefined by African Americans, the return to speech and the breath has political implications.⁵⁰ But when poetry becomes a record, certain aspects of ‘Projective Verse’ become literalized, and the contact with Baraka’s voice and breath is not just projected but amplified. Olson exclaims, ‘Get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, … keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen’ – Baraka performs the speed and makes his poem the ‘high-energy construct’ necessary to move into a stereophonic dimension.⁵¹

On ‘Peace in Place’, his voice rips and fries on the ‘CR’ of ‘CRACKLE’ and explodes on the plosive ‘p’ in ‘HOTPUNCTURES’, rupturing with uneven repetitions and words that suggest fissures, breaks, and burns.⁵² Pushing upon the onomatopoetic capacity of words to articulate the sounds they describe, the poetry approaches the musical and sensual, leaving less and less space for silence and instead filling every space with sound:⁵³

I AM USING ALL OF THE SPACE ALL OF THE SPACE FILL THE

SPACE ALL THE

SPACE MY VOICE IS NOT HEARD MY FLESH IS NOT SEEN IT IS

ALL THE SAME⁵⁴

The enjambment of the lines and clustering of capitalized words emphasize the use of ‘all of the space’ on the page, while on the recording these lines seem to run into each other, breaking only so briefly for Baraka to take a breath (similar to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl).⁵⁵ One gets the sense that the space of the present listening moment might actually be stretched and expanded, like a balloon filling with air. In this flexible expansion of the audio space, Baraka and the instrumentalists push and pull against one another. Through the accumulation of undifferentiated sounds, nonsense words, screams, and shouts, language itself seems to break down in the flaming primordial heat of a new space erupting.

It’s Nation Ti-Eye-Ime

Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s before the era of the stereo LP, famously said that technological reproducibility ‘emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual’.⁵⁶ Benjamin stressed the absence of ‘the here and now’ of recorded works and suggested that technologies that abstract sounds and images from a particular place and time purportedly free them from aura.⁵⁷ The assertion was controversial, but the general acceptance of Benjamin’s claim that recordings and other kinds of technological reproduction removed the ‘aura’ of the original performance would lay the foundation for media studies. Ever since, his ideas have dominated debates around recording and ‘liveness’. But do Benjamin’s claims still hold true when stereo sound reproduction technology can arguably reproduce the spatial qualities of sound? It’s Nation Time, which explicitly aspires to a performance of ritual, challenges a number of generally accepted notions about the qualities of recorded sound, and in particular, Benjamin’s assertions about aura. The title track of the album was originally published in a 1970 pamphlet of the same name distributed by Third World Press, and the phrase ‘It’s Nation Time’ became an important chant at gatherings of the Black Nationalist movement. On the album, the track produces a radical rupturing of the aural/visual and spatial/temporal divide through its noisy screams and through the insertion of an ‘eye’ into ‘time’, but the phrase had a broader life span. Strongly influenced by Baraka’s poetry, Reverend Jesse Jackson adopted the phrase during his speeches at rallies. When he asked his audiences, ‘What time is it?’ they would respond: ‘It’s Nation Time!’⁵⁸ The call and response form is central to a number of black art forms and religious practices, and the phrase as well as the poem engages in the rhetoric of ritual in order to foster a sense of collectivity and unity. The poem itself calls out to listeners to come together in the service of the black nation:

Time to get

together

time to be one strong fast black enrgy [sic] space⁵⁹

The stylized vocal performance is reminiscent of a Pentecostal preacher, and Baraka moves seamlessly between the sacred voice, the vernacular voice of a James Brown style falsetto, and the voice of ritualized violence. In his readings and performances, Baraka was sometimes known to bring a gun on stage and point it at the audience, and on the album, he uses his voice to mimic the fire of bombs and machine guns (‘Boom BOOOM Boom Dadadadadadadadadadadada’⁶⁰), recalling the futurist writings of F.T. Marinetti and others.⁶¹ The performance of a ritual of violence opens into an assertion that ‘Christ was black/Krishna was black […] Shango budda black’, and so on.⁶² By blackening the world religions and the sonic space, the recording opens a possibility that this new nation can be accessed through listening as Baraka stereophonically melds sight with sound.

The eye’s intersection of time in the course of this chant could be thought of in terms of Baraka’s work at what Fred Moten refers to as the ‘interstitial’ break, but there is something more projective here: he is no longer working between but beyond – simultaneously inside and outside. Shouting ‘it’s nation time’ in repetition, Baraka aspirates the ‘i’ in ‘time’ repeatedly, so that we hear all the homophonic associations: time, eye, I. The synaesthetic meaning is also made explicit in the printed version of the poem from the 1970 pamphlet It’s Nation Time:

It’s nation time eye ime

it’s nation ti eye ime

chant with bells and drum

it’s nation time⁶³

As he bursts open time, Baraka’s voice is rough and hoarse with use, and it breaks and squeaks like the saxophones of James Wheeler (alto) and Philip Eley (tenor) as they play at the limit of their own upper registers. Fred Moten, when discussing Baraka’s earlier works, argues that his poetry is in the break: ‘This location, at once internal and interstitial, determines the character of Baraka’s political and aesthetic intervention. Syncopation, performance, and the anarchic organization of phonic substance delineate an ontological field wherein black radicalism is set to work.’⁶⁴ It is a break that refuses to close and that resists a single, settled meaning. Here, time is not just time, but the eye through which to look outward toward a new space and inward toward the ‘I’. These words rupture an opening that is both internal (that is, literally within the ears) and external (inscribed on the album). Although the album is called It’s Nation Time, time and space are intricately linked, creating not just an imagined space, but a real, audible one that can only be accessed in the moment of listening. As Paul Gilroy notes in his essay ‘Soundscapes of the Black Atlantic’, ‘remote listening had acquired both social and political significance in the black Atlantic world’ and helped to create a ‘community of listeners’.⁶⁵ While it is perhaps tempting to assume that all recordings lack aura and to think of all experimental stereo recordings as simulacra, by reasserting presence, It’s Nation Time does something different. The space it creates is imaginative and hyperbolic, to be sure, but the community of listeners who enter that space (who are, in fact, created by that space) are real.

Because of the phrase’s popular use by the Black Nationalists, its presence and reiteration here on the record directly participate both in the performative ritual of nation building and in the institutionalizing of the LP itself. To say ‘It’s Nation Time’ is thus a speech act in the declarative order: the phrase does not simply describe reality but ushers a new one into being. Saying the phrase creates the nation. This idea is central to understanding the way in which Baraka and the Black Nationalists were negotiating the desire for a unified pan-Africanism. Baraka’s sense of nation ti-eye-ime and the assertion of a black sonic space challenges Benjamin’s argument that technologically reproduced art necessarily lacks a ‘unique existence in a particular place’.⁶⁶ Here the audio space itself is its own unique existence. And when sound takes on spatial dimensions, as it does in stereo, it can perform the space of a new nation, however impermanent and fleeting it may be.

The stereophonic legacy

While Baraka’s interest in Nationalism turned out to be but one phase in his career, his interest in black sonic spaces was not. Traces of what I have been calling a stereophonic poetic continued to inflect his later works, especially his evolving book-length opus Wise Whys Y’s (1995) and the CD album Real Song (1995). Wise, as a poem that chronicles African American history, adopts a shifting narrative voice that moves across geographic and temporal boundaries. In the print edition, each poem is ‘accompanied’ by a piece of music. But rather than include musical notation, as W.E.B. DuBois did in The Souls of Black Folk (1903),⁶⁷ or descriptions of sounds, as Langston Hughes (1961) did in Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,⁶⁸ Baraka’s musical cues most often direct readers to a particular recorded version of a song, for example W-15, which calls for ‘(Creole Love Call)/Duke Ellington/(Sidney Bechet Version)’. ⁶⁹ Like so many of Baraka’s poems, Wise was written to be sounded – to be heard. In a 1980 interview with William J. Harris, author of The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: Jazz Aesthetics, Baraka explained:

AB:

… To me it [the text] is a score.

WJH:

What does this mean? In 200 years when you aren’t around, are you going to expect people to be listening to tapes of your work?

AB:

Yeah, I hope.⁷⁰

As for the future of text, Baraka felt that ‘the page will be used by people who want to read it aloud’.

Today, there are hundreds of recordings of Baraka’s various performances circulating not only among bootleg tape collectors, but also on YouTube and websites like PennSound. But to date, the recording that best actualizes Baraka’s stereophonic aspiration may be Real Song (1995), the CD album produced by the German imprint Enja. The album is a collection of live performances, Baraka’s personal home recordings, and poetry read in the studio, stitched together by the overarching narrative of ‘Johnny Ace’ (who might also be Sam Cooke). Avant-garde uses of digital engineering techniques such as panning lead the listener through the sonic spaces as one might be led through a haunted house, opening doors on a poetry that navigates the vagaries of Black experience.

When we think of Baraka’s legacy and of the afterlife of an out-of-print album like It’s Nation Time, it would be hard not to hear the reverberations in hip hop (and later, Afrofuturism), whose sonic landscapes began to take shape at this time. However, Baraka’s influence is not only felt in the performance style of rappers – as is generally acknowledged – but in the stereophonic poetics and spatial politics of hip hop. As Davarian L. Baldwin points out, because the mainstream acceptance of hip hop coincided with the rise of Reagan-era nationalism in the 1980s, a kind of Afrocentric ‘nation-conscious’ counter-rhetoric re-emerged in hip hop.⁷¹ We can hear it in the recordings of Afrika Bambaata, Public Enemy, and the Native Tongues collective (which included De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, and Queen Latifah, among others). Baraka himself would lament the loss of social consciousness in the commercialized rap that followed, and yet his projective sonic landscapes continue to find resonance today in the Afrofuturism of artists like Janelle Monáe and others. Stereophonic poetics reoriented our relationship to space. What Amiri Baraka made explosively clear was that stereophonic reproduction had the capacity not just to reproduce the sound of spaces but to create entirely new ones. Opening other dimensions was not simply the domain of science fiction but was made real via stereo sound. Today, we think very little about the produced environments from which our popular music emanates; the idea that they would replicate some real acoustic space is hardly a consideration, and recordings are mixed for headphones and car stereos. Listening in one’s living room situated perfectly between two speakers seems almost quaint now. And yet, the stereophonic dimension continues to be an important space for cultural exploration.

Notes

1. Reed, Life and Death, paragraph 8.

2. One notable exception is Meta DuEwa Jones's “Politics, Process & (Jazz) Performance: Amiri Baraka's ‘It's Nation Time’,” which listens between the published and recorded version of the title poem and addresses performance as a process of revision. For more see Jones, “Politics, Process & (Jazz) Performance,” 246–247.

3. From the track “All in the Street” on Baraka’s It’s Nation Time (1972).

4. Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 142.

5. As quoted in Szwed, Space is the Place, 311. For more about Baraka’s interest in the concept of space, see also Youngquist, “The Space Machine,” 336. In this essay, Paul Youngquist explores Baraka’s 1967 short story “Answers in Progress,” in which aliens come to earth in search of Art Blakey records; interestingly, Youngquist does not point out that a poem within the short story is recorded on It’s Nation Time as the track “Answers.”

6. See Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation, 42–79, 92, 167–68. Reverend Jesse Jackson, for instance, advocated a black political party. Furthermore, “The Black Panther Party’s Platform” (1966) called for ‘a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.’

7. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. Anderson defines the nation as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. Such communities are imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.

8. Baraka, It’s Nation Time, 1972 [liner notes].

9. For more about the decline of CAP and the internal battles between the Marxists and the cultural nationalists, see Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation, 219–254; Smethurst,The Black Arts Movement, 87–88; Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, xi–xxiii, 412–416, 456.

10. See Larry Neal’s description of Black Arts as it relates to Black Power in Collins and Crawford, New Thoughts on the Black Arts, 7.

11. Kalamu ya Salaam, “Amiri Baraka Analyzes,” 231.

12. Baraka, “Chant”, It’s Nation Time (1972).

13. Baraka, Spirit Reach, 10.

14. Schafer, Soundscape, 7.

15. Sterne, “The Stereophonic Spaces”, 67.

16. Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, 164.

17. Damaske, Acoustics and Hearing, vi.

18. Weheliye, Phonographies; see also Nyong’o, “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions”; Henriques, “Dread Bodies”; Weheliye, “Engendering Phonographies,” 181. More recently, in a conversation in Small Axe, July 2014, Weheliye has rightly re-emphasized the need to acknowledge the centrality of black culture to our conception of modernity ‘not by removing the specificity of black life but by using the liminal yet integral spatiotemporal positioning of blackness as a way to call into question modernity as such’.

19. Weheliye, Phonographies, 107.

20. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 3.

21. Henriques, “Dread Bodies,” 192.

22. See Nyong’o, “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions”; Weheliye “Engendering Phonographies.”

23. Jaji, Africa in Stereo, 6.

24. Ibid., 11.

25. See Jaji, Africa in Stereo, 89–92. Jaji offers illuminating thoughts on the unique uses of stereo of the son et lumière show staged off the coast of Dakar during the World Festival of Negro Arts (Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres) in 1966, which used light and stereo sound to illuminate the stories of historic sites of the slave trade.

26. Goldstein, Sensation and Perception, 378.

27. Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 139.

28. Théberge, Devine, and Everrett, Living Stereo, 5. Théberge claims that the term ‘sound stage’ should be used to define stereophonic space because ‘staging places an emphasis on the ways in which we might think of stereo not simply as a static space in which sounds are represented (or reproduced), but as a more performative space that is produced through a variety of social and technical practices and, also, a space in which other cultural practices are enabled’. For further reading on the sound image and sound localization, see Damaske, Acoustics and Hearing. v–vii, 18–22; Goldstein, Sensation and Perception, 376–390; and Yost, Fundamentals of Hearing, 173–184.

29. Altman, Sound Theory/Sound Practice, 49. Rick Altman chronicles this period in the history of cinema, noting J. P. Maxfield of Western Electric’s assertion that ‘sound scale must always match image scale’.

30. Boone, “Mickey Mouse Goes Classical,” 65. Andrew R. Boone reported in 1941 that the development of the sound for Fantasia was in many ways the brainchild of the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Just the year before, Stokowski had collaborated with Bell Labs to host a demonstration at Carnegie Hall of stereo recordings of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.

31. See Barry, “High-Fidelity and Sublime”, 116–118; Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 3. Baudrillard defines simulacra against simulation because simulation presupposes reality. Simulacra are ‘models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’.

32. See Morton, Sound Recording, 131. For listener descriptions of the visual qualities of stereo, see also Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, 53; Enock, “Stereophonic Reproduction”, 101.

33. Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 155.

34. Thomas, Listen Whitey! 12. Thomas recounts this period in some detail and notes that Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ was initially blocked by Motown’s Berry Gordy as too controversial, and was released only at Gaye’s insistence.

35. Baraka, Black Music, 188.

36. Like many moments on this album, the space is inherently gendered, and female voices are relegated to the background (not surprising, given the well-known misogyny of Black Nationalism in the 1970s).

37. Baraka, Black Music, 186.

38. Ibid., 197.

39. Ibid., 198.

40. See Wald, “Soul Vibrations,” 673–696, 862.

41. Baraka, Black Music, 199.

42. Baraka, “Liner Notes,” It’s Nation Time. The Black Mass (1966) is a play that explores the Jacoub myth in which Jacoub creates a Frankenstein-esque white monster whose greatest flaw is an awareness of time. See also Baraka, Four Black Revolutionary Plays; Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation, 209.

43. Baraka, Spirit Reach, 11.

44. Baraka, Spirit Reach, 11; Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1972), Side A 5:59.

45. Monson, Saying Something, 211.

46. Baraka, Spirit Reach, 12; Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1972), Side A, 8:10.

47. For an in-depth discussion of the political implications of the noise of free jazz, see Attali, Noise, 138.

48. Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1972), Side A, 10:59.

49. Olson, “Projective Verse”, Section I.1.

50. Thomas, “Neon Griot”, 308.

51. Olson, “Projective Verse”, Section I.3.

52. Baraka, Spirit Reach, 5.

53. Nathaniel Mackey compares this aspect of Baraka’s poetry to Dadaism and calls it a ‘dreamish arational quality.’ Mackey, “The Changing Same,” 375.

54. Baraka, Spirit Reach, 6; Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1972), Side A, 17:04.

55. See Ginsberg, Howl, 9–27.

56. Benjamin, The Work of Art, 24.

57. Ibid., 21, 24.

58. Woodard, Nation Within a Nation, 209. Reverend Jesse Jackson recalled: ‘I had drawn much of the strength of Nationtime from a poem written by LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka at that time. The sense of people saying, “What’s Happening?” … Say, … It’s Nationtime, it’s time to come together. It’s time to organize politically.’

59. Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1970), 21; Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1972), Side B, 12:35.

60. Baraka, It’s Nation Time, 22.

61. For more, see F.T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) and Luigi Russolo’s “The Art of Noises” (1913), in Rainey, Poggi, and Wittman, Futurism: An Anthology, 49–53, 133–138.

62. Ibid., 23.

63. Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1970), 24; Baraka, It’s Nation Time (1972), Side B, 14:58.

64. Moten, In the Break, 85.

65. Gilroy, “Soundscapes Black Atlantic”, 385.

66. Benjamin, The Work of Art, 21.

67. See DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. At the beginning of each chapter, DuBois includes a brief selection of musical notation and lyrics from an African American spiritual.

68. See Hughes, Ask Your Mama. Each section in this long poem includes descriptions of musical sounds in the right margin.

69. Baraka, Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 40.

70. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics, 147.

71. See Baldwin, “Black Empires White Desires”, 143.