“pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is a braided essay that asks participants about their relationships to concepts of revenge and justice. The accompanying soundscape and interludes investigates the potentiality of the call and response nature of Black sound for destruction and regeneration. Consisting of an admixture of soca, noise, techno and poetry, these sounds accompany the video and makes clear a confluence of sonic alliances across time and geographic specificity within Black diasporas. These interludes punctuate the essay as a reminder of our histories of resistance that have been syncretized into cultural festivals, namely J’ouvert in Trinidad and Tobago. Looking specifically at the social function of these genres and their use in public space to incite chaos within the context of pleasure, I highlight a lineage of Black musical provocation as an analogy for flattening existing hegemony and the commons. How can song conjure the sublime, necessary, and oft resisted work of deconstruction? Here, a desire for revenge and restitution can function like a bassline on J’ouvert morning: a scaffold for channeling body memory and a hope for something-somewhere-better than here; loose and freeing under the cover of night. The soundscape’s droning bassline plays throughout the video and materializes itself in the viewer’s body: dread made tactile.
Film Stills
