Amiri Baraka on Sun Ra - When Angels Speak of Love

SUN RA IS SPIRITUALLY ORIENTED

"HE UNDERSATNDS THE FUTURE AS AN EVER WIDENING COMPREHENSION OF WHAT SPACE IS, EVEN TO “THE PHYSICAL” TRAVEL BETWEEN THE PLANETS AS WE DO ANYWAY IN THE LONG HUMAN CHAIN OF PROGRESS, WE TRAVEL THE SPACEWAYS, FROM PLANET TO PLANET. IT IS SCIENCE-FACT THAT SUN RA IS INTERSTED NOT SCIENCE FICTION. IT IS EVOLUTION ITSELF AND ITS FRUITS. GOD AS EVOLUTION, THE FLOW OF IS” 

So the future revealed is man explained to himself. The travel through inner space as well as outer. Sun Ra is a new content for jazz, for Black music, but it is merely, again, the spiritual defining itself. (“Love in Outer Space”, “Ankh”, “Outer Nothingness”, “The Heliocentric World”, When Angels Speak of Love” (1963 - album), Of Heavenly Things”…etc..

“But the content of The New Music, or The New Black Music, is toward change. It is change. It wants to change forms. From physical to physical (social to social) or from physical to mental, or from physical- mental to spiritual. Albert Ayler no longer wants notes, he wants sounds, The total articulation. Ra’s music change places.”  Amiri Baraka, in Black Music."

Amiri Baraka's Black Dada Nihilismus

Black Dada Nihilismus



Against what light

is false what breath
sucked, for deadness.
Murder, the cleansed

purpose, frail, against
God, if they bring him
bleeding, I would not

forgive, or even call him
black dada nihilismus.

The protestant love, wide windows,
color blocked to Mondrian, and the
ugly silent deaths of jews under

the surgeons knife. (To awake on
69th street with money and a hip
nose. Black dada nihilismus, for

the umbrellad jesus. Trillby intrigue
movie house presidents sticky on the floor.
B.D.N., for the secret men, Hermes, the

blacker art. Thievery (ahh, they return
those secret gold killers. Inquisitors
of the cocktail hour. Trismegistus, have

them, in their transmutation, from stone
to bleeding pearl, from lead to burning
looting, dead Moctezuma, find the West

a grey hideous space.

2.

From Sartre, a white man, it gave
the last breath. And we beg him die,
before he is killed. Plastique, we

do not have, only thin heroic blades.
The razor. Our flail against them, why
you carry knives? Or brutaled lumps of

heart? Why you stay, where they can
reach? Why you sit, or stand, or walk
in this place, a window on a dark

warehouse. Where the minds packed in
straw. New homes, these towers, for those
lacking money or art. A cult of death

need of the simple striking arm under
the streetlamp. The cutters, from under
their rented earth. Come up, black dada

nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape
their fathers. Cut the mothers throats.

Black dada nihilismus, choke my friends

in their bedrooms with their drinks spilling
and restless for tilting hips or dark liver
lips sucking splinters from the masters thigh.

Black scream
and chant, scream,
and dull, un
earthly
hollering. Dada, bilious
what ugliness, learned in the dome, colored holy
shit (i call them sinned

or lost
burned masters
of the lost
nihil German killers
all our learned

art, member
what you said
money, God, power,
a moral code, so cruel
it destroyed Byzantium, Tenochtitlan, Commanch
(got it, Baby!

For tambo, willie best, dubois, patrice, mantan, the
bronze buckaroos.

For Jack Johnson, asbestos, tonto, buckwheat,
billie holiday.

For tom russ, loverture, vesey, beau jack,

(may a lost god damballah, rest or save us
against the murders we intend
against his lost white children
black
dada
nihilismus