Shabaka (feat. ELUCID) - "Body To Inhabit"
It was not only a dimension where the spirit of Alice Coltrane still gently strums along with us in the present and does not have to be summoned, but a dimension more sacred than this one, beyond time and space themselves, in another continuum that could only be known by the name of heaven.
In my religious youth, they always taught me that you do not utter the most sacred experiences out loud: that was seeing Shabaka for me. I don't speak of where I was, or who I was with, or what led to us sitting there, totally in the moment and unaware of each other.
Or at least totally unaware of myself is how I still felt a longing to be. But as so many times before, journalistic obligations kept me at a slight emotional remove from the moment, now aware more than ever before of how much I missed by claiming to be an objective observer, who was really a not-so-innocent bystander, hoping I was far enough away from the splash zone of the war machine to not have any blood on my own hands.
I could not fully give myself to the music, because I was too preoccupied with the words inside my own head that I would conjure to describe that music to you, while denying that my own writing has always been music too.
I still feel like I am in that alternate universe, the one I always wanted to live in, where lo-fi beats and cosmic jazz and jam bands were always already the same thing, where nonfiction and fiction collide into each other, and where there is no binary boundary drawn between music and that which we call "music journalism."
And then I hear ELUCID unwind a web of words from his mouth while Shabaka conducts a symphony of pure experience in the background, and I realize this is not an alternate dimension; it is the right one, and it is reality proceeding ahead of me, right on schedule, like the New York City of our collective mind's eye, where the trains run on time, and the infrastructure is not rotting like a metal carcass before us, and no dying bodies are ever stepped over.
In fact, no one ever has to die at all.
Before the master MC even uttered a word himself, the unquantized and unquantifiable chant of human hands clapping themselves into a looped refrain served as a gateway into another world, the definition of a mantra, which is what rap verses so often are, which is why they are called verses in the first place: they are meant to be repeated, and treasured, and revealed, like the face behind a mask, or a body you just realized you already inhabited, or a series of past lives on an infinite loop until you achieve the upper echelon and transcend from all the tedious bullshit of mere mortal existence.
You have forgotten that you were already a god, because they wanted you to believe you were even less than human.
“Forgetting I remember I forget again” is some shit I have felt every day of my life. Or at least that's what I think it was. This time, that time, and also that other other time.
This is a cypher with myself that will never be completed, like the impossibly Confucian sound of a single hand clapping in the completely perfect solitude they might have referred to in other times as nirvana.
I thought this was a song that needed to be chopped & screwed, so I chopped & screwed it.
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