Music all the Time: Fred Moten Interview at Open House

At Open House, editor Housten Donham interviews Fred Moten. They discuss The Feel Trio, visual and spatial models, sound and music, Moten's early influences, being poetry, and more. An excerpt:

[Housten Donham]: The other most immediate element I’m impressed by in The Feel Trio is sound. You utilize a lot of repetition, anaphora, and a constant movement between the syntax of everyday speech and that of lyric. There are also multiple overt references to song, to singing, and to music. How do you see this book operating on the level of sound, both in form and content?

[Fred Moten]: The two biggest influences for me are Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey. And part of what’s striking about those two is their intense engagement with music—particularly, with black music. And so I’m just following behind them in that respect. I’m also following behind them in the intensity with which they think about these questions in their poetics. Baraka has an essay from the 60s called “How you sound??” It’s about this essential, irreducibly important phonic register that need not be indexed to a normative lyric subjectivity. The essay does, however, definitely index a mode of lyricism that has been explored and cultivated precisely by folks who have both been refused access to that normative subjectivity but who have also refused that normative subjectivity themselves. In both Mackey’s work and Baraka’s work, they’re always trying to get to something that you can hear in an emphatic way, like in James Brown, or in Betty Carter, or in Coltrane. That was the path that they took, that they established for folks like me to follow along behind. And obviously it’s not just them. I feel like that same pathway was very originally and beautifully blazed before them by Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Zora Neale Hurston. There’s a specific set of protocols within the general frame of black poetry, black writing, and black music that I’m operating within.

HD: What were some of your earliest experiences with poetry, and how did those experiences influence your later work?

FM: I grew up in a house where people were listening to music all the time, so those are my earliest experiences. It was a big deal for me when a person who was a former student of my mom’s, who was like an older brother to me, Mike Davis, brought over a copy of the Bob Marley and the Wailers record, Rastaman Vibration. I remember also when Marvin Gaye’s record What’s Going On came out. And I remember those “middle period” Stevie Wonder albums from the seventies, from Talking Book all the way through Hotter than July. The thing that was great was the album covers would fold out, and you could read the lyrics. And that was a major thing for me, to be able to read those lyrics written out as verse. I feel like Marvin Gaye, and Marley, Stevie Wonder, folks like that, were really conscious of the lyrics as lyric. One of the first things that I was conscious of experiencing as poetry was Stevie Wonder’s lyrics. Stevie would do this stuff, man, where he would come out with these really convoluted, inverted ways of saying stuff. These long, almost epic similes. Like, he has a great song called “As” in Songs in the Key of Life and one of the lines is “As the earth around the sun knows she’s revolving.” If you say that shit out loud. . . you know, the average kid in school hands that in, it’s gonna be covered in red, right? Now if you sing it, it makes perfect sense.

Read it all at Open House.