A Hymn From the Mouth of Reality: Obscenity, Psychosis, Sweetback – lareviewofbooks

A YOUNG RICHARD PRYOR sits inside a dark, nondescript bar.California is a weird state,he says,because they have laws for pedestrians you know, like, you cross thestreet they have laws for pedestrians, but they dont have laws for people at night when cops accidentally shoot people.Looking just past the camera, the comedian then plainly asks:How do you accidentally shoot someone six times in the chest? To which his familiar barrel-chested but tight-lipped impersonation of a white police officer appeals,Well, my gun fell and just went crazy,andasmall group of people laugh off-screen. Working out new material, Pryor isnt so much sculpting a joke in this moment as he is extracting it from 100 years of civic ruination.

X.

In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America established a new film classification system thatintroduced the censorious and sensational X rating. That same year, in the wake of riots and uprisings across more than 100 US cities, white middle-class psychiatrists trading on racist tropes of sexual menace begandiagnosing Black radicals with a form of paranoid schizophrenia they called protest psychosis. Three years later, when MelvinVanPeebleswrote, directed, and (with a young Earth, Wind & Fire) scoredSweet SweetbacksBaadasssssSong about a male sex-performer-turned-revolutionary set in Watts,LosAngeles theartistforwent MPAA approval, opting instead to self-classify his film: Rated X by an All-White Jury. His critique, though aimed at the movie industry, likewise adjudged these psychiatrists busy pathologizing Civil Rights movement rhetoric, Black Power militancy, and the primitive art they claimed induced paranoid delusionsenfleshedin hostileBlack bodies.

Revolutionary and reactionary, exploitative and anti-bourgeois, pornographic and avant-garde,Sweetbackhas long been credited as a progenitor of the 1970s blaxploitation film cycle, even if resemblance among the action movies born of Sweetbacks popularity and financial success was at times merely nominal. Van Peebless picaresque caper unfolds in the form of a vaudevillian mash-up of burlesque performances, gospel numbers, live sex shows, funk music, psychedelic visuals, and flamboyant agitprop aimed at American jurisprudence. Two LAPD detectives show up at a brothel to enlist Sweetback as an extra for a police lineup; in transit, the cops arrest and brutally attack a young revolutionary named Mu-Mu; Sweetback intervenes, beats the cops, and flees, endlessly running through the city. The remainder of the story moves with the perpetual motion of fugitive cartography, to borrow words from Michael B. Gillespies recent Criterion essay, mapping Los Angeles with a renegade fury. All the while, stylized expressions of schizophrenic symptomatology and paranoia converge throughout Sweetbacks protracted fugue state, as it were.

In recent years, film historians and scholars have begun reappraisingSweetbacks Black vernacular style with respect to the L.A. Rebellion film movement, as well as European New Wave cinemas influence on Van Peebles while working in France during the late 1960s. Indeed, Van Peebless first film,The Story of a Three-Day Pass(1967), explored ideas of DuBoisiandouble consciousness rendered through playful formal inventiveness suffused with psychosexual melodrama. Upon news that the filmmaker, musician, composer, novelist, playwright, painter, and actor had passed away in New York City at 89 years old this past September, a virtual funeral procession followed, paying respects to the artist and his singular body of work. On her recently launched Black Film Archive, a momentous living register of Black films made from 1915 to 1979, Maya Cade created the sites first comprehensive directors page in honor of Van Peebles. And just days after his death, the Criterion Collection issued the Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Filmsboxset, adding the artist to its recently curated Black Lives collection online.

This celebrated reupholstering of Van Peebless movies exemplifies ongoing critical negotiations surrounding race, genre, politics, and prestige in film historiography (that Nicholas Forster has previously written about forLARB). Van Peebless music, equally illustrative of the political energies that Black musicians brought to the American film enterprise particularly the stunning heterodoxy ofSweetbacks soundtrack as well as its complex relationship to the movies Rated X status similarly warrants this attention.

Sweetbacks music, which was also released as a highly successful soundtrack album on Stax Records, fused traditional Black diasporic styles with newer electroacoustic composition techniques often used to signify paranoid ideation. The films scattershot uses of tape loops, repetitive melodic fragments, discordant intrusions of dialogue, voice-doubling effects, and asynchronous audiovisual editing can together be heard as signifying, or at least suggesting, dissociative auditory hallucinations. Historically, these paranoiac recording techniques are more commonly attributed to vaunted works of musiqueconcrteand West Coast minimalism coming from places like the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Yet such accounts often conspicuously ignore nonwhite artists like Van Peebles, in part because they also elide less reputable art forms, particularly adult movie production, in which some avant-garde composers got their commercial starts. Van Peebless sound work carries with it traces of this coterminous relationship between experimental electronic music and adults only entertainment.

In 1968, Van Peebles released his debut album,Brer Soul, made up of nine erotic, tragicomic soliloquies he recorded live with a small jazz combo just off 42ndStreet in Manhattans red-light district. It was here the artist developed his titular alter ego, an unruly voice that sounds as much likeDick Gregoryand Rudy Ray Moore as it does The Watts Prophets and Gil Scott-Heron. This trickster character soon aurally appeared on the soundtrack for the directors second film, Watermelon Man (1970) also composed by Van Peebles which even credits Brer Soul as the voice of the films music, further fusing the artist and his alter ego.WhenVanPeeblesstepped intoSweetbacks starring role, he was simply completing the mischievous trinity of performer, protagonist, and acousmatic provocateur.

This figuration proved integral toSweetbacks aesthetic radicalism, which officials condemned as a symptom of protest psychosis with long-lasting punitive and lethal effects. I should restate that a central contention of psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon, who introduced the term protest psychosis in theArchives of General Psychiatry in 1968, was that the art and rhetoric of Back liberation literally caused delusions, hallucinations, and violent projections in Black men. Rehearsing the fundamentals of scientific racism with loud classist overtones, this diagnosis echoed previous pseudoscience, such as 19th-century physician Samuel Cartwrights claim that enslaved Africans fleeing captivity did so because they suffered from a specific form of mental illness he called drapetomania (or, essentially, runaway madness). Theorized as a specifically Black form of schizophrenia, it also espoused the more sweeping suppositions of social degeneracy peddled by the American eugenics movement.

Furthermore, as scholars like psychiatristJonathan Metzland media historianJeffrey Sconcehave written, when treatments for mental illness adopted increasingly severe punitive measures during the 1960s and 70s, the psychiatric language of schizophrenia soon coursing through American media and entertainment became a complex metaphor for race and violence. Incidentally, both authors draw attention to an infamous 1974 print ad for the neuroleptic anti-psychotic medicationHaldol that featured an illustration of a menacing, fist-wielding Black man who, Metzl and Sconce also aver, unmistakablyresembles James Brown dressed in flashy raiment against a vague, fiery urban setting. (It is worth pointing out that Brown had scored two blaxploitation hits just the year before:Black CaesarandSlaughters Big Rip-Off.)

By that same token, associations between blackness, madness, and violence, in Metzls words, functioned as forms of black autobiography long before they became tools of white projective identification. A well-known precedent comes from Mamie Smiths 1920 coded protest song Crazy Blues, recorded in response to a particularly violent summer of white supremacist attacks on Black communities, police brutality, and subsequent riots in over three dozen US cities, from Harlem, New York, to Elaine, Arkansas. Almost a century later, when his 2015 albumTo Pimp a Butterflyhelped give sound to theoriginationof the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendrick Lamars The Blacker the Berry could waive Smiths coded language: Burn, baby, burn / Thats all Iwannasee [] They may say I suffer from schizophrenia orsomethin / But homie, you made me.And Christopher St. Johns 1972 film,Top of the Heap, a deeply experimental work releasedin the wake ofSweetbackandShaft, was quickly (andcontroversially) packaged in the emerging blaxploitation style with the tagline: His rage was the illness of the times!Sweetbackis animated by this historically specific dialecticaltensionbetween different cultural forms of paranoid expression and racist evolutionary theories of mental illness.

In a 1966The New York Timesop-ed titled A Journeyintothe Mind of Watts,ThomasPynchon who would soon become the literary Saint Dymphna of 70s paranoia wrote, Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate. He then cited conversations with Watts community members about their memories of the previous summer, likening the uprising to creative improvisationin loose musical terms: [T]hrough much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights. Indeed, this notion of collaboration was in large part why Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor ofEbonymagazine whenSweetbackcame out, denounced the film, arguing that its hip emphasis on individual acts at the expense of collective action harkened back to the pre-Watts days of unorganized political struggle.

While reviewingSweetbackfor TheNew York Times,critic Clayton Riley similarly discussed politicalradicalismand jazz in loose psychiatric terms. What constantly captures the attention here, he wrote, is the madness of Van Peebles as an artist [who] possesses the kind of singular sense of purpose, the sort of outlaw consciousness that must have driven the energies of Americas premier creative psychotic, Charlie Parker. After citing the countrys racial terrors and the saxophonists beautifully unbalanced brain, respectively, as impetus and accelerant for the most righteous music this nation has ever heard, Riley then declared: Van Peebles utilizes that same kind of functional insanity.

XX.

The X rating was not merely a scarlet letter of obscenity. An insignia ofillicitness, it also represented marketing potential for so-calleddeviantart and entertainment. After 1968, producers of adults only movies began proudly touting their wares as X-rated. Soon, other types of artists, especially comedians, likewise adopted this new brand of solicitation. For example, Rudy Ray Moores 1970 party record,Eat Out More Often where his toasting pimp persona and eventual blaxploitationhero,Dolemite, first materialized read, Rated XX For Strictly Mature Audience, in bold typeface across the LPs front cover. In enterprising fashion, Van Peebles similarly courted the X ratings transgressive properties when he brokered a distribution deal with Cinematic Industries, an independent company that specialized in pornographic films, exhibitedSweetbackin adult theaters alongside first-run cinemas, and, in addition to the movie and its soundtrack album, published a manifesto-inflected production diary all of which bore the aforementioned Rated X by an All-White Jury seal.

But titillation was not Van Peebless only move. At the time ofSweetbacks production, the countervailing forces of economic disenfranchisement, urban riots, and white flight all exacerbated by repeated calls for law and order central to Nixons 1968 presidential campaign had further compounded structural forms of historical paranoia that extended from post-slavery terror rooted in African American trauma on one hand and white fears ofmiscegenationon the other.Sweetbacks stylistic blend of urban noir, fugitive slave narratives, and the Black Stud stereotype refracted this particular confluence of paranoias, the X rating further signifying Van Peebless explicit engagement with formerly codified prohibitions against sex on-screen.

Early in the film, we see a bohemian sex show at the brothel where Sweetback works, a scene tinged with magical realism yet undergirded by miscegenations very real historical proscription. After Sweetback strips down to his signature derby, the shows emcee presents an invitation to the crowd: As a special added attraction, if one of you young ladies would like to step up and trythis gentleman. But when a young white woman rises to remove her dress, the brothels manager, standing wide-eyed behind twovoyeuristiccops, emphatically shakes his head no. The visual punch line lands because the films audience knows the setup. As Linda Williams writes in herspectacularbookScreening Sex, Taboos of interracial sex [in American cinema] grew out of an American history that has covertly permitted white men sexual access to black women and violently forbidden black and brown men access to white women.

Nevertheless, Van Peebles later presentsspectatorshipwith a provocative reversal of this taboo in the films most elaborate set piece where, to escape the threat of an all-white motorcycle gang, Sweetback has to win a fucking duel by delivering a noisy orgasm to the gangs female leader. (A year later, the groundbreaking hardcore filmBehind the Green Doorwill go all the way by presenting Marilyn Chambers and Johnnie Keyes in a fully explicit interracial sex number, albeit one with asquickyrepresentation of primitivist hypersexuality.)

On one level, this scenes complicated spectacle of sex and violence loosely positions Sweetbackwithin the late-1960s rush of fast-and-furious biker films like Born Losers,The Glory Stompers, andHells Angels 69, produced byexploitationpowerhouse AIP. Yet, as a revenge fantasy, the particularities of the scene inevitably invoke the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where he was stabbed to death by Hells Angel member AlanPassaroduring aRolling Stones performance.Infamously documented in the concert filmGimmeShelter, shaky footage ofPassaro stabbing Hunter was repeatedly shownas evidenceat the ensuing criminal trial.In January 1971, whileproduction began onSweetback, the Hells Angelwas acquitted of murder charges on grounds of self-defense.

Thistragiccorrelationfurther draws attention to the fact that, stylistically and politically,Sweetbacktapped into the eras countercultural psychedelic paranoia that, intertwined with the affective experiences of hallucinogenic drugs, can likewise be historically read throughthe psychotomimetic prism of LSDs early relationship to clinical treatments of mental illness and its subsequent use by the CIA as a clandestine tool for amplifying paranoid states a.k.a. mindfucking.

Many of the extended montages that show Sweetback running down streets, over bridges, through miles of concrete tributaries and spillways, along railroad tracks, and eventually into the Southern California desert toward Mexico, are shot through with what Van Peebles described in the films screenplay as spooky psychedelia, involving split-screen images, jumpy superimpositions, and lurid solarization effects. During these dizzying barrages of visual editing, one of the soundtracks hardest hitting funk rock numbers, Come On Feet, repeatedly plays, with the songs jaunty rhythm section, jagged electric guitar work, and fitful brass punctuations propellingSweetbackalong. All the while, Van Peebles sing-shouts, Come on, feet / Cruise for me / Come on, legs / Come on run / Come on, feet / Do your thing.

Sweetbacks imperative to move his feet seems to citea popular vaudeville refrain uttered by countless Black and blackface performers, particularly comediansMantan Moreland and Lincoln Perry. While its placement over a lively backbeat also recalls the story told in Blind Lemon Jeffersons 1927 blues rag, Hot Dogs, wherein the songs dancing narrator sings about having his legs broken by a cop busting up a juke joint: Everybody got away but me / My oldfeetsfailed on me then / But yououghtasee emnow. Theres a similar levity to ComeOnFeet the first time we hear it inSweetback. However, when the song repeats during increasingly frenetic sequences (evoking the McLuhan-chicfreakoutmontages of Roger Cormans 1967 filmThe Trip), where phantasmagoric images flash, cut, and conjure on-screen, this potential comedic valence is exchanged for feverish apprehension.

In further intimations of psychedelic delirium, once Sweetback finds himself alone in the desert, we (via his projected subjectivity) hear the intrusion of voices in call-and-response patterns evocative of both gospel music and schizophrenic dissociation. In one instance, while he searches for groundwater to clean a gunshot wound, a chorus of women sing Wade in the Water an African American spiritual popularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers early in the 20th century along with Sweetback/Brer Soul and a clattering of unruly male voices:

Get my hand on a trigger.Youtalkinrevolution,Sweetback.Wade in the water.Somebodylistento me.If he cant burn you out, hell stomp you out.Godsgonnatrouble the water.He wont waste me.Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.Tambourine and handclaps.All together:Run,Sweetback! Run,motherfucker.

On theSweetbacksoundtrack album, this particular piece of music also includes the sounds of gunfire, sirens, barking dogs, police blotter, and spliced snippets of dialogue with corrupt cops corrupting so casually that their effortlessness itself sounds sinister (the aural equivalent of a murderous cops hands in his pockets). The track list onSweetbacks original LP sleeve even identifiesseveral of these fervent vocalcollagessimply as Voices.

In his extensive work on race and late-1960s American minimalism specificallyearly tape pieces by composer Steve Reich music theorist Sumanth Gopinath has written how the sonic trope of representing affective states of interiority, paranoia, and even psychosis through manipulations of the voice partly stems from practices in 1940s and 50s film noir. This aesthetic correlation between magnetic tape and mental disturbance then filtered into popular music during the 1960s and 70s. While most readily associated with psychedelic rock, from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix, we also find a prime example in Curtis Mayfields 1970 hit (Dont Worry) If Theres a Hell Below, Were All Going to Go, where he sings the sardonic line, Nixon talking bout, Dont Worry, with analog tape delay applied to his voice, producing a paranoiac sound that distortedly loops like a siren. (Mayfield would soon record his classic blaxploitation soundtrack Super Fly.)

As if an act of premonition or foreboding or even foretokenparody on Mayfields part, it was only a few months after the release of this song that Nixon installed asound-activated tape recording systeminthe White House in 1971, just before Melvin Van Peebles releasedSweetback. That same year, an underground activist group identified as the CitizensCommission to Investigate the FBI exposed the organizations Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that, under the auspices of Director J. Edgar Hoover, spent years targeting, infiltrating, and discrediting a vast range of mostly leftist political liberation movements labeled subversive, including Civil Rights activists, Black Power leaders, and especially the Black Panther Party. And its here that we find one of the more damning and damaging effects perpetrated by the lingering notion ofprotest psychosis: the delegitimization of real paranoia and mentalderangementtriggered by manifest instances ofactualpersecution.

Amid the films transgressive tendencies, entrepreneurial spirt, and occasionally exploitative disposition, a historical counternarrative can be heard in thequixoticsurgeofSweetbacks many voices.

XXX.

In May 2020, after former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, protests and riots erupted in my neighborhood. Minneapoliss 3rd Precinct was soon infiltrated by militarized police, the constant air-swept tang of tear gas, and droning helicopters, ticker tape references to the 1960s and 70s appearing all over as automatic shorthand for the moment.The New York Timescultural critic Wesley Morris, in a more patently thoughtful manner, would soon refer to this as The Moment. He meant the singular moment of Floyds death, the subsequent local protests, the bewildering madness of additional police killings, and the allied uprisings in more corners of the planet than seemed fathomable. More concentrically, Morris was also describing the accrual of historic precedence extending backward to the abolition of American slavery in 1865, exactly 100 years before California police officer Lee Minikus pulled over Marquette and Ronald Frye along 116th Street in Watts, Los Angeles. From where Im sitting, the final example worth pointing to here in the wake of Minneapoliss recent rejection of police reform and, thus, civic refusal to reimagine public safety is my first, that of Richard Pryor and his role in the eminent concert film Wattstax.

The summer after Van Peebles releasedSweet SweetbacksBaadasssssSong, Stax Records organized the all-day, $1-per-ticket Wattstax concert inside Los Angeless Memorial Coliseum to commemorate the Watts Rebellion of 1965. The resulting movie features gleaming footage of numerous Stax artists including the Staple Singers (introduced on stage by Van Peebles), Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Albert King, the Bar-Kays, and a roaring nighttime set by Isaac Hayes playing his blaxploitation showstopper Theme from Shaft intercut with smaller musical performances set up around Watts and interviews with local residents. Like an exegete, Pryor appears throughout the film, delivering intimate stand-up inside a dark, nondescript bar. And some of this material would soon wind up on the comedians third comedy LP, That Ns Crazy, also released by Stax the following year.

Running just over half an hour, the record spans topics from education, sex, drugs, poverty, violence, parenting, church, prostitution, gambling, and Dracula, all rendered through Pryors ebullient artistry. The tie that binds? Citizen-sanctioned police brutality: Cops put a hurtin on your ass, man. You know? They really degrade you. White folks dont believe that shit dont believe cops degrade. Ohcome on, those beatings, those people were resisting arrest. Im tired of this harassment of police officers. Because the police live in your neighborhood. See? The records title cites another joke Pryor tells inWattstax, wherein his parents call a Black nationalist in their neighborhood crazy. But the phrases placement on the album cover in quotation marks under Pryors name clearly ascribes the phrase to the performer himself. In his recent book,How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind,La MarrJurelleBrucedescribes the historical outlaw persona invoked by Pryors album as a highly politicized black vernacular archetype: a folk hero and vicarious insurrectionist for the radically inclined. Ontheback coverofThat Ns Crazy, under nine photographs of Pryor arranged in a large X, it reads: Rated X Uncensored.

Matthew Tchepikova-Treon teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, where he is currently finishing his dissertation on film sound, popular music, and American exploitation cinema during the global political drama of the late Cold War. His work has appeared inJump Cut,FLOW, andThe Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media(eds. Reinsch and Westrup).

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