Doubled Double Consciousness and the Sound of New Afrikan Expression

Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth in 2018 by examining his all-too-often and all-too-long unacknowledged role in developing, furthering, challenging, and shaping what we now know as “sound studies.”

It has been an abundant decade-plus (!!!) since Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies “link[ed] the formal structure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to the contemporary mixing practices of DJs” (13) and we want to know how folks have thought about and listened with Du Bois in their work in the intervening years.  How does Du Bois as DJ remix both the historiography and the contemporary praxis of sound studies? How does attention to Du Bois’s theories of race and sound encourage us to challenge the ways in which white supremacy has historically shaped American institutions, sensory orientations, and fields of study? What new futures emerge when we listen to Du Bois as a thinker and agent of sound?

Over the next two months, we will be sharing work that reimagines sound studies with Du Bois at the center. Pieces by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Kristin Moriah, Aaron Carter-Ényì, Austin Richey, Jennifer Cook, Vanessa Valdés, and Julie Beth Napolin move us toward a decolonized understanding and history of sound studies, showing us how has Du Bois been urging us to attune ourselves to it. To start the series from the beginning, click here.

Readers, today’s post by Austin Richey considers the possibilities of Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness, as it applies to the Black Atlantic in general. He approaches “doubled double consciousness” through the case study of two artists: Tendai “Baba” Maraire and Efe Bes.

–Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Liana Silva, Eds.

Efe Bes with his tama at Ohana Gardens, Highland Park, MI – taken by the author

In his 1903 text The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois expresses the “otherness” of Black American identity as a “double consciousness,” an internalized condition whereby an individual’s self is contested by what Du Bois describes as the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls…; two warring ideals in one dark body” (2). This in-between status requires one to negotiate between these dual perspectives, and through the sonic expressions of cultural mediation, we may hear the tactics with which Black American culture creators select and present a particular version of their cultural identity.

In this essay, I argue for a doubled double consciousness that extends Du Bois’s conception into an increasingly interconnected space that Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic, a space which includes the histories and traditions of distinct African cultures, diasporic African communities, and Pan-African ideology. Based on the sonic practices of two artists, Seattle-based Zimbabwean American rapper and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, and Detroit-located Afrikan drummer and storyteller Efe Bes, we may hear doubled double consciousness as a multi-dimensional site of negotiation whereby musicians source from plural geographic, temporal, and cultural springs to compose a sonic “mix” of Black musical histories; this “mix” echoes the space where the hip hop DJ “noisily bring[s] together competing and complementary beats without sublating their tensions” (Weheliye 13). This anti-anti-essentialist tactic, as Carter Mathes describes in “The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom,” demonstrates that “it is the open space of sound that invests the project of black radical thought with the uncanny spontaneity of experimentation.”

“Tendai Maraire of Shabazz Palaces, Sub Pop Silver Jubilee, Pop Stage” by Flickr user Jeff Few, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Importantly, doubled double consciousness is a challenge to the received status of the “other,” and reveals a multiplicity of gazes through which an individual is viewed. As Maraire reflected,

I always felt that America saw us the same; not as African-American, Zimbabwean or even Black. Just Ignorant Negroes. As I got older my friends and I learned we’re all in the same social and economic positions. But I still had American friends who thought I felt better than them because I was Zimbabwean, and friends that were from Zimbabwe who thought I was better than them, or lost my culture because I had a curl and wore Jordans. (quoted in Devriendt)

Maraire assumed a singular, hegemonic gaze, yet his lived experience in America and Zimbabwe exposed him to critiques from black Americans, diasporic Africans, cosmopolitan and rural Zimbabweans, not to mention advocates, and sometimes appropriators, of different cultural lineages in a diverse city like Seattle.

While Du Bois claimed that the doubly conscious individual “does not wish to Africanize America,” the sonic expressions of doubled double consciousness reflect a particular Afrikan perspective, that is, a redefined social discourse which emerged from the intertwining of Black American activist efforts and knowledge derived from plural ancestral histories and African culture. By positioning themselves as Afrikan – not American, not African, but in-between – these artists showcase how doubled double consciousness is not a condition, but a tactic of negotiation and re-presentation.

Screenshot of Maraire playing the nhare mbira, from the video “Chimurenga Renaissance – The B.A.D. Is So Good (Live on KEXP)”

Rapper and multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire has been a staple of the Seattle hip hop scene since the early 1990s. While he honed his lyrical style in the cyphers of Seattle’s Columbia City, his parents Dumisani Maraire and Lora Chiorah-Dye, a renowned Zimbabwean ethnomusicologist and performer, and Zimbabwean dancer and instructor respectively, fostered a cosmopolitan Zimbabwean household; musically, Maraire performed live with his parents’ drum, dance, and marimba ensemble, sung Christian hymns in Shona, and opened for hip hop legends Snoop Dogg and Slick Rick. This provided Maraire with an extensive sonic palette to source from, yet his early attempts to bring these worlds together into an Afrocentric message were met with resistance:

[Audiences] didn’t even know what I was playing when I pulled out an mbira [a Zimbabwean lamellaphone] on stage 20 years ago and rapped with it. No one cared, rappers laughed. The world just wasn’t ready for that. With gangsta music at the time…they didn’t want to accept a dude with an mbira talking about political views out in Zimbabwe.” (Maraire interview) 

Today, as half of the Afrofuturistic hip hop duo Shabazz Palaces, Maraire has continued to incorporate the mbira, ngoma (drums), and hosho (gourd rattles) into his musical production; as Shabazz Palaces toured with artists such as Radiohead and Lauryn Hill, Maraire’s Afrikan hip hop style reached a global stage.

Tendai Maraire and Hussein Kalonji – courtesy of the artists

Doubled doubleness tactics come out forcefully in Maraire’s side project Chimurenga Renaissance, a moniker which connects chimurenga, a Zimbabwe-specific political struggle, to a global Black consciousness movement. Maraire and musical partner Hussein Kalonji, son of the famous Congolese Rhumba guitarist Raymond “Braynck” Kalonji, blend the melodic elements of Zimbabwean mbira and Congolese guitar with the sounds of the Roland 808 drum machine, funk and soul samples, topped by Maraire’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical flow.

Chimurenga Renaissance’s single “Pop Killer,” from 2013’s Defenders of the Crusades EP, exemplifies the power of doubled double consciousness to signify complex ideas to a variety of audiences: through his dismantling of problematic pop musicians who have left their culture behind, Maraire aims his Afrikan hip hop at American and Zimbabwean communities who have critiqued his cultural claims, as well as encourages other black musicians to dig deep and proudly represent their heritage. The video for the track follows Maraire as he travels to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe (11^th-15^th centuries), with his mbira to confer with his ancestors. Sonically, the song has three distinct sections whose juxtaposition showcases the multiple sound cultures which make up Maraire’s complex identity.

The track opens with sound of wind, followed by a sampled and chopped up boom-bap drum beat. As Maraire improvises on his reverb-drenched mbira he is joined by a sampled walking bassline, while the chorus and reverb effects Kalonji uses for his arpeggiated melodies complement the timbre of Maraire’s amplified mbira. In the second section, the mbira remains while sampled drums are replaced by hand clapping, hosho, and ngoma, signifying a shift from the reproduction of electronic sounds to the liveness of group participation. Over this, Maraire’s unremitting lyrics call out those who reject their histories, telling them, “This ain’t a show, this a sacred ritual. You can’t possess it because your life is hypocritical.” As Kalonji’s guitar re-enters, the track slows to a third section where Maraire’s raps: “The gold on my pinkie represents where I’m from. If you ain’t never seen it then we ain’t close enough. I got some bigots in my wallet, sativa’s in my pocket, passport to touch the world cause the man can’t stop me.”

Jacob Mafuleni, Tendai Maraire, and Martha Thom in a still from Chimurenga Renaissance’s “Pop Killer”

The official video also includes a bonus verse, featuring Maraire rapping live in a field accompanied by Zimbabwean musicians Jacob Mafuleni and Martha Thom; this rural scene, featuring an unamplified mbira and driving rhythms from the hosho, further amplifies Maraire’s connection to ancestral life, while his raw vocals and intense delivery are reminiscent of a rap cypher.

In Detroit, Afrikan drummer and storyteller Efe Bes has used doubled double consciousness as a platform to critique those who have lost a cultural connection to African ancestors.

Efe Bes performing at Dabls’ MBAD African Bead Museum, Detroit, MI – taken by author

His own Afrikan-ness is marked not just visibly by his self-made Afrikan masks but also aurally through his unique musical instrumentation and style: Bes plays a collection of drums from across the African continent, including Senegalese sabar drums, West African tama and dundun, and South African ngoma, as well as a modified kora, balafon, and multiple drum machines. Bes performs complex patterns that source from the polyrhythms of West African music to the shuffle of American Blues, occasionally over instrumental recordings of popular hip hop singles, such as rapper Future’s “Fuck Up Some Commas.” For Bes, these musical traditions are connected by an emphasis on the drum, and his performances are marked by shifting patterns that easily move from the deep swing of the blues to the automated soul of techno, a tactic which he developed while DJing for Aretha Franklin in the early 1990s. Weaving these multiple black musical traditions, Bes creates a soundscape that simultaneously looks back to ancestral sound cultures while pushing the boundaries of what Detroit’s musical legacy will sound like in the future.

In addition to live performances, Bes produces his own music videos and promotes his music through YouTube. His archive of over 200 videos shows the breadth of his musical abilities, ranging from spoken word poetry combined with talking drum, to his most viewed original song, “Gimme Back My Shit,” an Afrikan funk tune in which Bes demands reparations for the devastation of Black culture worldwide.

The song begins with Bes humming and performing the main melody of the piece on electric piano. While his humming is laid back, the insistent rhythms of the piano foreshadows the lyrical intensity of this “real reparation song”; this is highlighted by the piano’s synthesized guitar sound, whose bright, cutting timbre and plucked sound are reminiscent of an amplified kora. This introduction leads to the main groove, where looped samples of syncopated funk drums and guitar accompaniment create a foundation for improvised tama drumming and his soulfully styled yet acerbically lyrical vocal performance.

“Give me back my shit, you done had it for so long you think that you own it.

I’m not talking about some, I’m talking all of it.”

Bes’s lyrics go beyond simple criticism, and instead, demand reparations in the form of cultural repatriation, or as Bes sings, “Give me back my ancestors you grave-robbing bitch.” In the self-produced music video, visuals of Pan-African statues, masks, and Mbuti pygmies are juxtaposed with images of Cecil Rhodes, starving children, and cellphones which rely on conflict materials like coltan; these images are punctuated by the sounds of African languages, such as the clicks and pops of Xhosa, as well as the sound of deforestation, such as gas-powered saws, further emphasizing the degradation and destruction of African cultures through the loss of music, language, tangible culture, and environment.

Through the sonic practices of Tendai Maraire’s Afrikan hip hop and Efe Bes’s Afrikan drumming, we may hear how doubled double consciousness is a tool used to negotiate complex ancestral recall. For these artists, doubled double consciousness is not simply a condition, but a powerful space to negotiate and re-articulate what it means to be Afrikan in America.

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Featured image: Screenshot from video “Pop Killer” by Chimurenga Renaissance

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Austin T. Richey is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His current dissertation research is based in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, where he is exploring the resonances between diasporic African musical, dance, and visual arts and Detroit-specific musical genres, such as techno, in this historically multifaceted American city. 

Richey has published original research in African Music, and has forthcoming articles in the Routledge Handbook of Music in the New African Diaspora and Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction, published by West Virginia University Press. Support for his work has come from the Society for Ethnomusicology’s African Libraries Prize, the Frederick Douglass Institute, as well as the Society for American Music, where he is an Adrienne Fried Block Fellow. Richey is also an active performer, playing regularly in the New York area with Serevende Mbira and Mounafanyi Drum and Dance.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Most pleasant to the ear”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Itinerant Intellectual Soundscapes–Phillip Luke Sinitiere

On Whiteness and Sound Studies–Gustavus Stadler

Unlearning Black Sound in Black Artistry: Examining the Quiet in Solange’s A Seat At the Table–Kimberly Williams