We're back and we're real Black today, with a wild Cupid's arrow straight through the heart of the dominant power structure's dessicated, omnicidal heart of darkness.
Full disclosure: I am sick of doing this page strictly on the basis of whatever bloated, baby-booming Caucasian rockstar was born today, and being only able to cover artists if they are well-known enough to have been broadcast on the FM band by the $hithead Radio Network.
So I've decided to expand my palette to include other, non-musical artists and to construct what might be termed "audiofilmic creative presentations" around these figures and sounds.
Obviously I will still post concerts; the majority of posts here will remain in that vein. But once a month or so I am gonna let my hair down and be more who I really am.
This isn't new. I've hosted radio programs -- some lasting for years -- in the past where I did live mixes based on speeches and crazy sex instructional records from the early 1960s and whatnot.
These will still hew to the birthday/anniversary format you're all familiar with, so feel no fret.
We'll begin with this little audiological nightmare, which I have been working on all week in preparation to share it today.
Fifty-five years ago today, Malcolm X -- whose house had been bombed to cinders the previous night and who was but a week from being publicly executed in front of his family -- traveled to Detroit and delivered his final full speech.
And what a 90 minutes it was. You can really sense the doom and despair, as well as the unimaginable courage it took to keep talking when the powers that be are showing you what they have planned if you don't stop.
I won't go into too much of what I did and its intention, except to say that I constructed this so the background never dominates or takes anything away from the content of Malcolm's words, ripped as they are from yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's headlines.
If I had to put it into syllables, I would say that this is meant to illustrate the soundtrack for a bizarre, surreal dream, in which Malcolm is making his pronouncements in front of a group of robed muezzins, whose prayerful chanting serves to protect the onlookers from the encroaching bombs and bullets drawing near outside.
There's also an undercurrent of 1965 Hard Bop, some of which Malcolm himself probably listened to back then, before being slaughtered for telling the truth like he was.
Without too much prior explanation to cook the thing before you hear it, I would say if there were 10 people in the world today speaking upon parasitic, life-extincting Capitalism with this degree of honesty and clarity, this porcine, death-dealing paradigm would fall of its own weight before dinnertime already.
I should also mention that all the audio I used for this, from the radio chatter to the ordnance dropping on the defenseless, is contemporaneous to the speech and is derived mostly from authentic footage of the Vietnam War, then raging and swelling the bank accounts of the complicit pigs running it to as-yet-unseen levels of genocide-for-profit.
Additionally, I should say that the inspirational impetus for doing this thing came from watching the new Netflix series, in which a courageous and intrepid investigator gets to the bottom of who really shot Malcolm, who sent them, and why. And discovers -- to his utter shock and eternal dismay -- that it's been an open secret, in the place where the killers came from, pretty much since that day.
Malcolm X
"The Last Message"
Ford Auditorium
Detroit, Michigan USA
2.14.1965
EN remix
01 The Last Message pt.I
02 The Last Message pt.II
Total time: 1:26:14
disc break goes after Track 01
Malcolm X - words
to a backdrop consisting of actual Vietnam War footage, Islamic prayers and
Jazz of 1965, including:
Albert Ayler - Prophet
Archie Shepp - Call Me By My Rightful Name
Bobby Hutcherson - Movement
Charles Mingus - They Trespass the Land of the Sacred Sioux
Herbie Hancock - The Eye of the Hurricane
Jackie McLean - Right Now
John Coltrane - Vigil
John Handy - Tears of Ole Miss (Anatomy of a Riot)
Lee Morgan - Trapped
Ornette Coleman - Sadness
Sunny Murray - Justice
Sonny Rollins - Little Malcolm Loves His Dad
Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil
the final public speech of Malcolm X
soundscape created and mixed by EN, February 2020
489 MB FLAC/February 2020 archive link
I should mention I had the LP of this speech when I was a young teenager and its effect on me has been ongoing, intense and indelible. I hope it finds the same territory, in this remixed form, for whoever hears it that it has for me.
I'll be back in a few days with more BHM materials for your auditory perusal, count on it. Don't miss out on this little Valentine from Malcolm though, as he draws back his bow and shoots his arrows of unalloyed truth into the dark heart of The Beast that still enslaves all of us -- whether we choose, in our engineered illusions of personal comfort, to acknowledge the subjugation or not -- today.--J.
5.19.1925 - 2.21.1965
Many thanks
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