‘Plush Safe He Think’: Shaping the Black Modern Rocker

I plug in my six-string Strat and turn on the Fender amplifier. My foot hits the overdrive pedal, and then it activates the delay pedal. I strum the guitar and beautiful white noise streams from the amp. I walk up to the microphone and let out my heart. Punk. Indie. New Wave. Rock and roll expression. I have my own voice and style, but as I look back I have trouble finding a rocker with a face like my own. The museum of African-American rockers is a small one. If you drive too fast, you’ll miss it. Modern rock’s stage is devoid of dark-skinned rockers. It feeds off the images of white heroes: Lou Reed in the Factory with dark glasses and a wall of feedback; Joe Strummer kicking out revolution rock to the sweaty Londoners with mohawks, safety pins and desperate shouts; Tom Verlaine wrapping his expansive, urban love songs around the ears of CBGBs enthusiasts; or David Bowie shifting between different alien poses, entrancing and inspiring his followers.

When I think of contemporary black performers, all that comes to mind are images of men with razor-sharp bodies, wireless microphones in one hand, throwing the other hand in the air, waving it, holding down the beat with it, inciting a crowd of sweaty heads with it. Another man by his side, rocking the call and response, dancing, and spinning records. Women dancing. Clothes scarce. Crews with names like Terror Squad and the Clique. Rolling deep through city streets and southern avenues.

If I look back into history for black musical icons, I come across the bebop champions, Dizzy and Bird. Always Bird, looking tragic. Hunched over his sax, a sad-eyed Jesus’ son. Then I think of the six-string jazz cats, Charlie Christian and Grant Green. If I try to dig up images of black rockers, I see Chuck Berry contorted like a chicken dancing across a stage. He’s followed by Bo Diddley in a snake-skinned suit and Little Richard raging something dandy on the ivories. However, they all come through in sepia tones. They are more antiquated than modern.

Search Criteria: Rock Music + Black Musicians
Search Results (1): Jimi Hendrix

That would be the obvious reference point. On first look, we assume that he holds the copyright on the blueprint image of the black rocker. Though his rock career was short — he debuted his rock persona in 1967 and was dead by 1970 — he consistently redefined his identity in the world of classic rock. He was a master of striking poses — poses that inevitably left footprints for subsequent black artists to fall into.

Pose #1: Imagine 1967. Swinging London. Jimi done up in British psychedelia; Jimi as the black Syd Barrett, the dark dragon of flower-power London. He is flanked on either side by his white rhythm section, the Experience. He is the utterly cool black man, wearing white clothes and making them look better than any white man wearing the same threads. Clapton, George Harrison, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck all look at him, stupefied. Women aim to bed his LSD sonic explosion. Hendrix lets go of his early years as an R&B sideman on the chitlin’ circuit. The black folks say he is passing for a white musician. Oh Hendrix, that crazy nigger! In his Purple Haze-phase Jimi is pure sexuality, a savage in proper clothes, a futuristic send-up of the ever-admired, ever-envied Jack Johnson.

Pose #1 send-up: Lenny Kravitz, shifting his image ever so slightly from flower child to hippie scenester, has made a career of plugging into Hendrix’s hip rocker sex image. Unafraid to dress like Hendrix and even steal a riff or two, Kravitz is a black sex symbol that white women adore.

Pose #2: The psychedelic smoke clears and “Crosstown Traffic” emerges. Electric Ladyland lays its expansive hands on the future of rock. It’s no longer about foxy white chicks: it’s about his foxy guitar. Hendrix defines his new identity, shit, he defines a new genre: the guitar god. He is neither black nor white. He is just Hendrix. Watch him ignite his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival — forever burned into celluloid history. Hear him attack the “Star-Spangled Banner” on the acid-casualty Sunday morning of Woodstock. His sexuality has been completely absorbed by the music. The guitar is his cock. Another genre is born: cock rock. No longer an overt threat to white male sexuality, Hendrix has instead become the ultimate musician, absorbed, in stereo-total, by his music. Is he even human? Is he even sexual? He is much more Joe Louis than Jack Johnson as he turns his focus to the perfection of his craft.

Pose #2 send-up: The artist currently known as Prince, while an undeniable sex symbol, has always been more of a musical mad scientist than anything else. Holed away in the studios of Los Angeles and Minneapolis, select few have been more possessed with mastering melodies and arrangements than Prince.

Pose #3: Coming back down from the mountain and his solitary guitar-god posturing, Hendrix publicly inhales his African-American roots with the debut of his new band, the all-black Band of Gypsies, in 1969. They bleed black-power political agendas without even saying a word. No one has ever seen a black hard-rock band. Across the Atlantic, Cream must be blushing. Shit, Clapton thinks, I’ve been one-up’d by this nigger again! Won’t he just die or something? Hendrix is a master of the craft at this point: His fingers move across the guitar with butterfly grace. The political artistry of Ali comes to mind.

Pose #3 send-up: In the late ’80s day-glo ideology is seized by black militants and run through thrash pedals. Vernon Reid’s Living Colour flexed a political statement in requiring black blood for membership eligibility in his band. He made it clear that it was not just a band — it was a black band. He went on to form the Black Rock Coalition as an association for black musicians.

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Hendrix offers a number of iconic foundations for the contemporary black indie-rocker, but should the framework be limited to one guy who only played for four years? But other influences can be found in unlikely places. Consider the 1980s African-American painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the quintessential New Wave Negro. He soaked in what it meant to be a black man in America and breathed his impressions into his work while also co-opting the culture of European art. His paintings mixed urban hip-hop ideals with new wave rock aesthetics and the African-American diaspora with Western modernist meditations.

I was in 11th grade when I learned that Jeffrey Wright, a graduate of my high school, was in a film called Basquiat. To support him we were told to see the film, which painted a mesmerizing impression of the New York 1980s art scene. It also featured a strong period soundtrack of new wave and post-punk music.

I was immediately attracted to Basquiat, or rather, Wright’s portrayal of him. It was the way he moved and talked with quiet, impressive confidence; the way he put his art before everything else; and the way he would swoon lovers into his arms by saying the right words at the right time. Although he was a visual artist, Basquiat worked the scene like a rock star. He could have been a Lou Reed or a Mick Jagger.

Schnabel’s film became a cult picture for me. In college, I learned more about Basquiat through some independent research in the university’s art library. After school, I moved to San Francisco, where I began playing rock music. As my band became more serious, I became more conscious of my public image. I was very aware that I was a black man, playing indie rock in a scene populated mostly by white men and women. I wanted to be part of the scene but still affirm my African-American identity as well. Around this time my obsession with Basquiat resurfaced. I already owned the biopic, but another film, Downtown 81, had been rediscovered and released. A New York underground film from the early 1980s, Downtown 81 features the real Basquiat as the central character — essentially playing himself — and also includes other cult figures of the time, such as Debbie Harry of Blondie.

I began to use Basquiat as a prototype of how I should present myself in a white rock scene. Building from pictures I had seen of Basquiat, his attire in Downtown 81, and Wright’s version of the painter, I began to dress like Basquiat, wearing tight-fitting collared shirts buttoned all the way to the top with no tie. I adopted his cool, laid-back tone of voice. I began to walk like him, a relaxed but focused stride always looking like you’re on the verge of something cool. I dressed up as him for Halloween and everybody who knew about Basquiat immediately got it. Despite my laughable visual arts skills I even suggested to a band mate that we start spray-painting witty and intellectual tags on the streets of San Francisco as Basquiat had done in New York before becoming a famous painter, quirky one-liners like “Plush Safe He Think” and “SAMO As An Alternative to Art.” My band mate just laughed at me.

In time, I was able to let go of my Basquiat crutch and slip into my own style; after all, I like to wear ties. However a crucial part of Basquiat’s philosophy remains with me as I push forward with music. Like Basquiat did with art, I try to pull from my experiences as a black American in addition to the Anglo-American rock traditions laid-down in the past thirty years, thus creating what Wright’s Basquiat calls a Creole — a mix of the African and European.

While today’s black indie rockers don’t have much of a black-rock tradition to plug into, we do have considerable freedom in defining the poses black musicians can assume in modern rock. When a white frontman emerges from the underground, he will undoubtedly have to weather references to his predecessors (David Byrne, Mick Jagger, etc….) If Aristotle questioned how many new stories could actually be told, then consider how many new white rock n’ roll icons can their actually be? No matter how hard Coldplay’s Chris Martin tries, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke will eternally have beaten him to the punch.

In contrast, the black modern rocker moves in a space where expectations of certain racial performance have yet to be erected. People simply don’t expect to see black people playing rock and roll. It defies racial expectations. Thus, while onlookers scramble to find a point of reference for black people playing guitars beyond the obvious comparisons to Hendrix, we can just be what we want to be. We are not passers — we don’t have to choose between our white rock roots and black experience. We take what we want from each well. All that is really required is that we rock out. And isn’t this, after all, the type of freedom we’ve been waiting for?