On Chicago’s lakefront one breezy August night in 2014—five days after a Missouri police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown—the thirty-nine-year-old saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and “panoramic sound quilter” Matana Roberts led a nine-piece pickup band in a free outdoor concert at a public band shell. At the outset, Roberts ran down a lengthy list of dedications. She got applause when she named Chicago jazz legends and laughs when she shouted out entire sides of the city. When she reached the names of four slain black youth, culminating with a pointed “Mike Brown,” the audience went silent. Roberts turned to the band and swirled her flattened hand to conduct them in, and they were off and running.
In 1997, seeing God’s Property’s “Stomp” on MTV was just as weird as seeing Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”
If gospel choirs and anarchist collectives had anything in common, surely it was bashing the video channel and its skin-drenched paeans to mammon. Credit the groups’ shared evangelical impulse. With these two simple motivational anthems — each had a second verse same as the first — the groups sought unlikely fans outside their normal audiences. And they found them: Their albums went triple platinum, becoming the biggest ever sellers for, respectively, gospel choirs and anarchist collectives.
In the 1970 “Beethoven” issue of Revue L’Arc, the French essayist Roland Barthes tried to figure out what happens when we listen to music. He proposed there were “two musics: one you listen to, one you play.” Barthes claimed music for playing — physical, “muscular,” performed “alone or among friends” — had already vanished in favor music for listening, as performed by professional interpreters. But listening to Beethoven’s music, he still found what he called an “unknown praxis,” in which listeners projected themselves into Beethoven’s creative activity, composing and performing it vicariously while they listened. “Operating” the music, Barthes called it, as though Beethoven’s musical texts were contraptions of some sort. What might those operations look like? Maybe you’ve surreptitiously conducted Beethoven from your theater seat, or felt your step buoyed by humming the Eroica, or complained to your loved ones that the Fidelio Overture sounds like the work of an anal retentive man determined to wring the life from any musical idea unfortunate enough to enter his head. These are all reasonable responses to Beethoven.
I Believe the Songs 