Hearing Art

Hearing art What Basquiats paintings sound like BY JOSH KUN Otto, a Brazilian musician who sings, programs beats, and plays the triangle, ends his new Condom Black (Trama) with a song for Jean-Michel Basquiat. Ive imagined what Basquiats paintings sounded like before a Charlie Parker sax run into an overdose oblivion, a Max Roach drum solo that takes New York back to Africa with a stopover in Haiti, El Gran Combo reveling in a paint descarga, Grandmaster Flash scratching over John Cage but nothing ever like this. Ottos "Basquiat," which he lists as a "bonus track" on an album partly dedicated to practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian candomble religion, is a crooked and hesitant electro bossa nova shaped by stumbling beats. It sounds a little like Rammellzee and K-Robs early hip-hop classic "Beat Bop," for which Basquiat did the album art, only slowed into a Rio carnival chill-out, with Rammellzees robot rants about bunny rocking and finger popping replaced by Otto crooning in Portuguese about a coconut that rolls all night long down a hill. "From morning to afternoon to night," he sings, "my coconut can t stop rolling." Basquiat is mentioned only once in the song, in the final line, as the one "who knows." That Otto, a 90s Brazilian, should reach for Basquiat, an 80s Puerto Rican Haitian New Yorker, makes sense. Since his death, in 1988, Basquiat has become an Afro-Atlantic icon of cultural creativity and exchange synonymous with the search for new ways alternate ways of making black art in the Americas. He d be especially attractive to Otto because of the tradition Ottos music caries on: the 1967-68 Brazilian musical movement begun by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil thats known as tropicália. As Christopher Dunn explains in his excellent new Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (UNC Press) about the movement that looked to both Andy Warhol and Brazilian concrete poets, tropicália advocated cannibalism as a Third World musical practice, wherein Brazilian samba would eat up the Beatles and candomble would devour Hendrix the African and the Indian chomping on First World delights in order to make a local identity out of international parts. Basquiat also made chomping, cannibalistic art that turned concrete poetry into scribbled pomo verse (Gils "dried meat in the window" fragment prophesying Basquiats "quality meats for the public") and rewired Warhol for black history. Where tropicália turned the Campbell’s soup can into Carmen Miranda, Basquiat in his "Arm and Hammer II" collaboration with Warhol took Warhols Arm & Hammer�logo reproduction and morphed it into a jazz record. Plus, Basquiat was hip-hop�s first gallery star, and hip-hop has tropicália�s reliance on technological hijacking and cross-cultural recycling running through its veins. In Basquiat�s paintings, as in hip-hop, blackness eats everything up, but it sometimes gets eaten, too, leaving skeletons and skulls as traces that wear Kangols, speak bebop, and spray graffiti tags as copyright notices. Veloso�s tropicalista motto, "I refuse to folklorize my underdevelopment," resonates with Basquiat, who played with art-world expectations of black identity by balancing hip-hop with the downtown avant-garde of the No Wave scene. The only professional recording Basquiat ever made with his Mudd Club noise band Gray, "Drum Mode," appears on the new Anti-NY (Gomma) compilation in two versions: the listless 1984 original that sounds like the inside of a hollow steel pipe, and its 2001 remix by Paul Mogg, which puts Basquiat into the same global breakbeat loop that Otto feeds off. In his poem about the band, "Gray," African-American writer Kevin Young describes Gray�s music as "radio � ham � ambulance-music" that melded DJ scratches into guitar strings plucked with metal files. Young doesn�t think of "Gray" as a poem but, like Otto, as a song for Basquiat. The book in which it appears, To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books), is made up of 117 such songs (Young lists them as tracks on record labels), alternate takes on familiar Basquiat themes and verse remixes of individual Basquiat paintings that cross-fade Young�s words with sampled Basquiat text. The book is "an extended riff" says Young, with Basquiat�s life and work as "a bass line, a rhythm section, a melody from which the poems improvise." Basquiat�s canvases were nearly phonographic (flat surfaces encoded with sound), and Young�s book doubles as an album primed for literary playback. It even opens with a warning to page-turning audiophiles: "distortions clicks & pops from analog equipment are part of the fabric and only contribute to the garment�s uniqueness and sound quality." Young�s Basquiat is analog; Otto�s Basquiat is digital, with distortions, clicks, and pops worked into the sequenced mix. They are both, to borrow one of Young�s titles, "urgent telegrams to Basquiat." Young wants Basquiat back ("you always were a climber stop come down some day and see us again end"); Otto wants him just as he is, as an influential ghost haunting black Atlantic undergrounds. In both cases, it�s Basquiat�s paintings themselves that are left as the most urgent telegrams, oil and color missives sent out to anyone ready to receive them.