After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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is blocked by work, which in turn blocks our capacity to imagine other ways of being beyond the “freedom to earn.” “The problem with work,” Kathi Weeks tells us, “is not just that it monopolizes so much time and energy, but that it also dominates the social and political imaginaries.”27 So when performance becomes work, it too becomes a blockage to freedom. This is why it’s critical to issue a distinction between performance as work for the minoritarian subject and the work of minoritarian performance (which is the emancipatory unworking of work). If Simone’s repeated insistence that performance was her job teaches us anything, it is that not all performances by women of color, queers of color, or trans people of color will be minoritarian performance. To this extent, Simone’s own (auto)biography is expressive of the antagonism between the emancipatory work of minoritarian performance and performance as a form of minoritarian labor.
Press play and let Little Girl Blue tell you a story about what it might have been like to watch twenty-year-old Simone performing in a dark, smoky bar. Presaging Phillip Auslander’s observation that early forms of mediated performance often strove to reproduce the experience of live performance, Simone once described Little Girl Blue as a reproduction of one of her famed sets at the Atlantic City bar where she was discovered: “When you listen to that Bethlehem album you’re hearing the songs played as they were at the Midtown Bar.”28 In addition to the title track, the lineup included her surprise hit cover of Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” the show tune “Love Me or Leave Me” (featuring an inversion of Bach’s Inventions, discussed below), and a version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” mashed up with Beethoven’s “Midnight Sonata.”
The sound of Little Girl Blue was the cumulative effect of a life spent working as a performer. From an early age, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, as she was known back then, pursued her mother’s dream to “become the first black American concert pianist.”29 Raised in a musically inclined family, she began playing piano in the home. She cultivated her prodigious talent as she learned the fundamentals of improvisation and audience engagement in the black church, playing piano at services and revivals to support her mother’s Methodist ministry.30 “Gospel music was mostly improvisation within a fixed framework,” she wrote. It “taught me about improvisation, how to shape music in response to an audience and then how to shape the mood of the audience in response to my music.”31 Framing improvisation as a formal aesthetic register, technique, and collaborative practice, Simone reminds us that improvisation is something that a performer learns (whether being taught by another and/or by oneself). In doing so, she avoids the reduction of improvisation to an intrinsic, inherent, or biologically determined trait of black artists. If improvisation is often associated with black people, this proximity might be best apprehended as evidence of the creative genius by which black people adapt to conditions of annihilation, learning how to improvise freedom and sustain life from within the fixed coordinates determined by white supremacy.
Even as a child, while accompanying her mother’s ministry, performance was her job. As her talent gained recognition from both white and black community members in the small, segregated town of Tyron, North Carolina, a group of women (led by Simone’s mother) worked together to raise funds for formal training with a local piano teacher named Muriel Mazzanovich. Throughout her childhood, Eunice performed concerts of Bach and Rachmaninoff to segregated audiences in order to raise money for her education—first with Mazzanovich and later at the Allen School (a private boarding academy in Asheville, North Carolina). Following graduation, Mazzanovich helped her to secure a scholarship for study at the Julliard Academy in New York in order to prepare her to audition for Philadelphia’s famed Curtis Institute of Music. Waymon was ultimately denied admission to Curtis and you know why. The rejection gutted her and played a critical role in the development of her race consciousness.32
After being rejected from Curtis, she had to get a job to support her training as well as her family so she started to work as an accompanist and vocal coach. Working as a private tutor gave Eunice access to the vast trove of popular music that would eventually comprise her repertoire. She would dig through boxes of sheet music looking for obscure show tunes to teach her students, committing the songs to memory “rather than us[ing] sheet music [because] it saved time.”33 Soon she got hip to the fact that you could make even more money playing music in local bars than teaching private lessons, and she landed a seasonal gig in Atlantic City at a place called the Midtown Bar. All the while, she continued her training, enrolling as a private student with Vladimir Sokhaloff (an instructor at Curtis).
It was at the Midtown that Nina Simone was born. She assumed the stage name to hide from her minister mother the fact that she was playing “the Devil’s Music” for a living. While her gigs may have helped with material survival, in the beginning they were hardly emancipatory. Above everything else, it was waged labor: “I performed from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with a break of fifteen minutes every hour. For that I got ninety dollars a week plus tips.”34 The Midtown was a dark, narrow room dominated by a long bar and featuring a small stage with a piano set up at the back. In spite of the inauspicious surroundings, Nina treated her Midtown sets as if she were playing in a premiere concert hall. When she was a child, Mazzanovich trained her in the corporeal habitus of a classical musician, issuing lessons in “how to bow after a recital, how to walk gracefully on and off the stage, and how to sit up straight at the piano and look elegant and composed while I was being introduced.”35 She incorporated all the seriousness of her training into her first performances in the bar, embodying these rituals, and even donning a chiffon evening gown while sipping on a glass of milk as she played popular songs for an often empty room of drunk regulars.36
Simone made a distinction between the emancipatory work of performance, which she felt when performing classical music, and the alienating drudgery of her job in the Midtown Bar. The performance of classical music was a means through which she could touch upon the promise of autonomy and a life in freedom in happiness. To the young Eunice Waymon, the music of Bach, Czerny, and Liszt “was real music, and in it I found a happiness I didn’t have to share with anyone.”37 But while she initially regarded popular songs with relative disdain, rather than succumb to the drudgery of her 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, she began to play with her material, transforming her work at the Midtown into a condition of possibility.
She started by imagining the performance as occurring elsewhere, “closing my eyes and pretending I was somewhere like Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera.”38 But soon enough she mobilized her performances to improvise a way out of the stultifying and disappointing prospects of her job as a bar musician: “So the only way I could stand playing in the Midtown was to make my set as close to classical music as possible without getting fired.… The strange thing was that when I started to do it, to bring the two halves together, I found a pleasure in it almost as deep as the pleasure I got from classical music.”39 If Simone’s performances at the Midtown began as the alienating experience of work, it was through performance that Simone was able to emancipate herself (if only momentarily) from the depressing drudgery of work: “I sat down, closed my eyes and drifted away on the music.”40 Through performance Simone was able carve out a zone of autonomy, pleasure, and happiness in which she could begin a song in the Midtown Bar and close her eyes to travel to a concert hall in her imagination where she could be some kind of free.
To use the language of autonomy is to highlight a resonance between what Simone was doing on the stage at the Midtown and what Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi describe as the “central theme of” the Italian workerist Marxism known as “Autonomia”: “the struggle against work, the refusal of work.”41 Inspired by the young Marx, the Autonomists have long understood the regime of work to be an alienating domain of coercion and unfreedom. The collective refusal of work (paradigmatically exemplified in the general strike) is one of the few means laborers have to force capital to alter its course of development.42 But the refusal of work also promises a path out of capitalism, as Lotringer and Marazzi suggest: “Only when the worker’s labor is reduced to the minimum is it possible to go beyond, in the literal sense, the capitalist mode of production.”43
Young people began to gather nightly for her sets, as she improvised a new aesthetic born from a unique fusion of popular standards, show tunes, gospel, hymns, and classical composition: “I knew hundreds of popular songs and dozens of classical pieces, so what I did was combine