The Electric Nation of Black Music

I am Upper Reality,

And I am a descendant of the hostages of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, snatched and sold as human cargo from the continent of Africa to the United States of America and the Caribbean prior to the year of our lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty five.

Systematically denied full human status on the walking earth — deprived of life, liberty, and property, and rendered invisible on land for 400 years—we took up dominion in the air.

And we’ve maintained that dominion quite well, that’s why you can’t stop listening to our music.

Too decent to go displacing millions of people in creation of a ZION, we have established an electric nation in the wind, cartographed on the astral plane through the intelligent, and tangibly effective auditory networks we call, songs.

Within these songs lie the qualities of all our true and real and full humanity that the state fears the world finding out that we have—sentience, self determination, dynamicism, righteous anger, stalwart unwavering passionate beautiful everlasting love, and..rhythm.

The songs breathe in unison with all the living souls whose flesh was otherwise stolen through billions of preventable deaths, via forced labor, displacement, economic warfare, police occupation, educational poisoning and the bioweaponry of an antiblack medical system, including the public health genocide euphemistically referred to as the crack and AIDS epidemics.

Furthermore the songs restore the bonds broken by the counterintelligence campaigns effected through triangulation, benign neglect, state-sanctioned domestic violence,

And just plain old spite.

In profound resistance to this constant coercion into social and physical death , the songs remain alive, feeding and replenishing themselves one cookout at a time.

And while onlookers try to rationalize this power as some zero sum savant, an unlock caused by an intellectual and behavioral defect, waxing poetic about it with morbid fascination and armchair diagnostics at dinner parties, restaurants, and weddings, with September by Earth Wind and Fire playing in the background of course,

The soundtracks will never be focused on you. They’re focused on something brighter; the quest for us to find each other.  They comfort us when we go outside and shield us from dirty looks and tacit accusations of trespassing and stealing .  They soothe the centuries of pain seared epigenetically in our DNA.

They show us how to piece together the fragments of ourselves that were shattered and dispersed, the stories that were whipped and bled out of us , and the understanding that was ripped from our arms and auctioned off and re-explained back to us with a hint of disgust.

We discuss love, light, and liberation — and even where traditional academia intellectualizes the genius out of our fellowship, and gentrifiers contaminate the sonic landscape with their dogs that keep pissing and barking, loud, all day, cause they’re too big for those $2000 1-bedrooms people had once raised and cried over their KIDS in,

We cover one another in our own lullabies, coating our ears with infinity to drown out the mantras of degradation that a dying empire grows more and more desperate to hypnotize us into internalizing and reperpetuating.

You may want to render us invisible , save for the pornography of us bleeding and dying on TV, or the brief comic relief of us entertaining your fetish for a tokenized anthropological circus freak, but everywhere you go you will always HEAR us, because

This is a language far deeper than any genocidal subterfuge can puncture, more vast than mass incarceration can ever lock away, more intricate and more intelligent than a circle of fifths or Lydian dominant theory can ever reach, see

Black Music, is my mother’s prayer for my safe passage into holy shelter and clean sustenance through this wicked world,

Led with the undying faith that I will one day run into the arms of someone like her.

And we will harmonize together, saving each other’s worlds, and singing all the songs we both know.