Yo Yeah (track 10)

[This is part 10 of a longer series – previous track – “Player Haters” – next track – “Respiration”]

This is a mysteriously beautiful interlude – a look into that “synaptic space” from last time – that in some way is the hinge that holds the album together through an ambient night-time streetscape. As the last strains of “we take the Black Star Line, right on home” give way to spoken word performances, the cypher-circle continues to widen – first, it’s a young girl intoning a poem that echoes “Astronomy/8th Light”:

Black is:
Black is something to laugh about
Black is something to cry about
Black is serious, black is a feeling
Black is us, the beautiful people

Looking back at “Astronomy/8th Light“, there is a calm here (feels like a late-night urban serenity) that wasn’t present on the earlier track, which was more declaratory and upbeat.

Then an older woman with more of a 60’s Afrocentric cadence – an anonymous contributor on genius.com attributes the poem to Johari Amini:

That was when some of them bad n****’s made beauty moving juju change as the drum musics hum!
Mojo vibrated and high Johns screamed through the bloods ’til Nomo hears the blood sounds
Nomo spoke intercourses and all the n***’s listening acted missionaries too
Dig my people, they acted
The rhythms pulling their minds was one and move move moved
Universe-Earth spirits firing the soils to destroy the evil un-image
Cleanse the waste from the cold lands
Until the cosmos was whole again
And the world had become nude

I think a key line here is “dig my people, they acted” – remember that the album started with the idea that “music ain’t supposed to stand still,” and that Black Star later referred to themselves as a movement. This is a musical movement (“the rhythms pulling their minds”) both of unity – “Their minds was one and move moved moved” – and destruction of the idols of whiteness – “firing the soils to destroy the evil un-image” and “cleans[ing] the waste from the cold lands” both suggest a kind of cosmically righteous revolutionary violence, which, for me resonates with the poem Nina Simone can be seen reciting (and which she credits to David Nelson of the Last Poets) on Summer of Soul, at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival:

We then move onto a man speaking on the irony of being stuck at a traffic light – a sample of “One-Eyed Critics” by Norman Jordan:

3:30 in the morning with not a soul in sight
We sat four deep at a traffic light
Talking about how dumb and brainwashed some of our brothers and sisters are
While we waited for a green light to tell us when to go

Again, the emphasis on activity and movement – “when to go” – here it’s coming as a kind of joke about being woke but obeying authoritarian traffic lights while stuck in a car. In some ways that would be opposite of “we take the Black Star line, right on home,” invoking, in a lighthearted way, the stasis that systems of oppression can make to seem inevitable and necessary – a dominant theme of both the upcoming “Respiration” and especially “Thieves in the Night,” and finally overcome on the posse-track “Twice Inna Lifetime.”

As we are pulled a long towards the album’s absolutely masterful final three decisive and conclusive tracks, we transition from a celebration of spoken-word towards a celebration of graffiti – and then a very haunting Spanish-language interlude, and then “Respiration” starts for real – widening the cypher to incorporate a broader cross-section of New York, and the world.

[This is part 10 of a longer series – previous track – “Player Haters” – next track – “Respiration”]