10,000 Screaming Faggots
“10,000 Screaming Faggots (Hood By Air FW14)” was the title of the musical rating for the autumn/winter 2014 Hood By Air (HBA) vogue present, with contributious from DJ Complete Freedom, Tim DeWitt, and Juliana Huxtable.
The theme for this present was trans because the future-forward prefix to the uncooked artistic adaptability of streetwear vogue. HBA cofounder and CEO Leilah Weintraub defined that one of many present’s targets was to elicit emotional responses to the style line’s incubation of concepts quite than one explicit theme. And true to his description, a lot of the present’s designs had been androgynous, as fashions of all genders had been adorned with halos of hair extensions, loose-fitting silhouettes, skirts, and heeled boots. The gathering featured many staples of streetwear vogue equivalent to graphic T-shirts, jackets, and sweatpants punctuated with metallic adornments and ornamental zippers, and accompanied by strappy platform boots typically seen in underground cyberpunk/goth music scenes. The present itself was minimalist, nearly mimicking showboating walks down hallways into darkish golf equipment, with flashing white lights complimenting the rhythmic bass of the soundtrack.
Shayne Oliver, HBA cofounder and designer, insists on a multi-sensorial expertise on the runway, which pulls from his expertise as a DJ at New York Metropolis’s influential GHE20G0TH1K social gathering, which was established by longtime buddy Venus X. The social gathering sought to unite the Black, queer, and goth social gathering scenes she frequented. In an article titled “Courtroom Catharsis Via Chaos,” Nico Amarca describes this influential social gathering in these phrases:
Face tattoos, Buffalo platforms, chokers, bondage trousers, Marilyn Manson T-shirts, lime inexperienced braids, blinged-out gold title chains and head-to-toe Hood By Air. You stroll inside to a scene reigned by chaos and mutability. Darkish rap, Jersey membership, ballroom, industrial, nu-metal, dancehall, grime, reggaeton, baile funk and Aaliyah all rammed into one another at frenetic cadence. Vogueing, shuffling, dabbing, twerking. Welcome to GHE20G0TH1K.
Within the childhood of GHE20G0TH1K, Oliver was resident DJ, which allowed each HBA and GHE20G0TH1K to develop alongside each other. Because of their shared “darkish banjee aesthetic,” Oliver and Venus X collaborated on a number of tasks. GHE20G0TH1K grew to become probably the most electrifying artistic facilities for queer folks of shade within the US. Venus X typically collaborated with underground queer digital dance music artists, DJs, and labels, equivalent to DJ Complete Freedom and LA-based label Fade to Thoughts.
Though DJ Complete Freedom met Oliver via the GHE20G0TH1K community, he developed his profession via LA-based events. Previously and briefly (mis)named the “worst” DJ, Complete Freedom discovered his groove two years earlier than connecting with Venus X, by enjoying at Ignacio “Nacho” Nava’s Mustache Monday social gathering and on the Wildness social gathering he cofounded with mates Wu Tsang, Asma Maroof, and Daniel Pineda. Complete Freedom says his methodology of music-making is closely influenced by Venus X and Oliver’s “disruptive” and “uncomfortable” type. Venus X’s dynamic GHE20G0TH1K units had been thought of “deconstructed” or “post-”membership music. As a DJ, Venus X juxtaposes, blends, and remixes her queer, Afrodiasporic, and ladies/femme identities, explaining in interviews that the deconstructed music popping out of Ghe20 G0th1k was influenced, partly, by the recession that started in 2008, the cultural obsession with the apocalypse main as much as 2012, and younger adults’ ensuing emotions of hysteria and helplessness. Sonically, “post-”membership music is a style characterised by a “post-modern” mix that
breaks away from dance music tropes like four-on-the-floor beats, steady tempo, and fixed combine with gleeful anarchy, proposing a sonic locus the place ballroom breaks, subject recordings, rap a capellas, and heavy steel are reconfigured into dancefloor fodder … It’s imaginative and prescient is high- and low-brow cultural signifiers as a way to reclaim the membership flooring co-opted by mainstream electro-pop and EDM.
The “post-”membership music type grew to become a disruptive power in digital dance music by breaking away from the conventions of High 40 membership remixes made well-liked within the Eighties and ’90s. Within the “post-”membership music ethos, distinction is included into the combo to seemingly tackle how nightlife grew to become splintered throughout music style, race, ethnicity, and sexualities within the late 2000s and early 2010s.
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I’ll return to HBA’s use of “10,000 Screaming Faggots (Hood By Air FW14)” shortly, however first, some concerns on Black sound and the DJ set. Kodwo Eshun’s Extra Sensible Than the Solar illustrates how writers can examine modern Black music and its digital afterlives after soul with out the identification politics of “the road.” Such a name tantalizes students of other Black music who take care of style redlining by music industries and the artists this marginalizes.
Black feminist traditions of each humanist and post-humanist camps spotlight how white supremacy undergirds the (post-)Enlightenment ideas of human and post-human, which permit mainstream music industries, pageant/occasion planners, and lovers to undertake race-blind attitudes—equivalent to PLUR (Peace Love Unity Respect)—that preserve the established order of this practically seven-billion-dollar world music business economic system.
Artists of shade in digital dance music—particularly queer artists of shade—have developed a musical epistemology that references the sonic archives of Black queer life to prioritize coming collectively in distinction inside DJ mixsets. How can these “Afro-philo-sonic fictions” assist us work via the tensions of our lived materials realities to narrate to 1 one other and even obtain unity? That is particularly pressing given how a long time of selling by the mainstream music business has decentered the racial/sexual minority liberatory politics of EDM tradition whereas adopting nearly all of its manufacturing types. These (re)discoveries are well timed given the current calls to democratize and even return the rave to the queer Black and brown communities from which it emerged.
DJ units are sonic journeys, fictions—or as DJ scholar Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) explains, “temper sculptures … generated by the meeting means of DJing and sequencing and so forth. the social building of reminiscence.” Via mixsets, queer-of-color DJs reconstruct minoritarian life via the sonic archive by sampling and remixing. Right here, Lynnée Denise’s notion of “DJ scholarship” connects the DJ as tune selector to DJ as archivist. Queer DJs of shade use units to indicate their connection to modern sociocultural identities via sampling the sonic archive of their communities. What’s at stake for the inclusion of mixset evaluation is being attentive to the decrease frequencies of Black and Black queer reminiscence and, by extension, archival observe, which operates “independently … in well-liked tradition and tutorial historiography.” Mixsets of queer-of-color dance music scenes could assist to deal with the constraints of grand narratives and even develop how we archive minoritarian communities.
The circulation of mixsets typically mirrors literary kind. For DJ, instructor, and theorist Brent Silby, a mixset usually follows a construction just like fictional storytelling in that it contains (1) an introduction, (2) growth, and (3) a decision. We are able to refer to those as Act I, Act II, and Act III. Act II is the midpoint the place DJs discover their groove or “predominant argument” via tracks becoming a selected theme or temper. Throughout this part, DJs usually introduce battle characterised by “a barely totally different (maybe tougher) sound,” creating the strain essential to propel the set to the subsequent sound. This motion is achieved via sampling points from the introductory part (Act I). The decision part (Act III) returns to the music type discovered on the finish of the introduction and the start of the event part. DJs throughout minority communities, equivalent to DJs Venus X and Complete Freedom, use units to power listeners into an “energetic participation” that forestalls a “cool and distant acceptance of information.” The thing will not be essentially to flee actuality however to confront urgent social points by sampling present occasions.
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“10,000 Screaming Faggots (Hood By Air FW14)” borrowed its title from the nineties dance observe “10,000 Screamin’ Faggots (Within the Life Prolonged Combine)” by The Moonwalkers, a duo consisting of dance music singer-songwriter Extremely Naté and dance music producer Maurice Fulton. In accordance with the liner notes to the Moonwalkers observe, it was impressed by an evening out in Miami and was (controversially) devoted to the duo’s homosexual fan base for his or her “infinite assist.” There are two predominant voices within the tune. The primary is from the attitude of a determine who proclaims his disgust with the exuberant queer clientele in a dance membership, and whose personal orientation is undiscernible: “They had been laughing and dancing / I imply screaming in every single place / Writhing their our bodies in whole abandon / I imply it was disguting!”
The opposite voice, which is extra distinguished, is a feminine narrator who recounts a dream about performing for an adoring homosexual crowd:
I had a dream final night time
That I used to be adored past think about
Carried on the shoulders of 10,000 screaming faggots
[…]
10,000 screaming faggots in unison and chaos as they sang
Songs of affection and disappointment
Songs of honesty and ache
[…]
They had been my mates
For to them, I’m actual
Having fun with the great thing about womanhood
For me permitting them to really feel
The feminine speaker’s name and response with the adoring crowd reifies her gender as she connects with them via feelings of “love and disappointment … honesty and ache.” The tune is crucial to the canon of “bitch tracks” from the queer Afro-Latinx ballroom dance tradition of the nineties.
Complete Freedom and Shayne Oliver align themselves with the queer-of-color archival observe of utilizing music to doc their historical past, tradition, and aesthetics. The musical rating to the HBA vogue present mirrors the connection between the 2 voices within the Moonwalkers observe—the disgusted down-low determine and the lady who’s reified by the adoring homosexual crowd. The combination fabulates how the down-low determine may need met the narrating girl, who, as we’ll see, is greater than the person bargains for.
Act I: “Let Me Take You Away From Right here”
Given the trans theme of the 2014 HBA vogue present, it’s no shock that introductory part of its musical rating offers with disclosure, visibility, and utopia/dystopia. As if mirroring the awe-inspiring night time that led to the Moonwalkers dance observe, the set begins with a easy however chilling interpellation, or hailing, of the down-low determine: “Do I do know you from someplace?” Does the narrating girl acknowledge the down-low determine from an evening of “laughing, dancing, and screaming in every single place,” with queer our bodies “ripping in whole abandon”?
Complete Freedom turns the down-low determine on its head by inserting the onus again on this determine—for why would he be in a membership with a neighborhood that disgusts him? The repeating query (“Do I do know you from someplace?”) builds the down-low determine’s nervousness about being misidentified as queer—an nervousness generally discovered inside Black music and musical critique, equivalent to in Gil Scott Heron’s “The Topic Was Faggots” and the work of Amiri Baraka. Right here, the ominous alternate between the “down-low” and the “out” girl who acknowledges him factors to the methods of negotiating a number of types of stigmatized sexual identifications. The unease of this interrogation is furthered because the set fades right into a pattern of a snarling chihuahua over the background of darkish industrial otherworldly sounds—as if triggering the return of a repressed reminiscence.
The music, although nonetheless ominous, turns into lighter, as if the repressed reminiscence grows extra obvious. The listener is positioned again into the current second. Right here, the looped a capella of Beyoncé’s “Finish of Time” fades in. The feminine narrator beckons to the determine: “Come take my hand / I gained’t allow you to go / I’ll be your buddy / I’ll love you so deeply / […] I’ll love you ‘til the top of time.” The reverbed a capella juxtaposed with the sweetness of the lyrics and the expansiveness of the background music make the narrator seem to be a siren calling the listener to a forbidden fantasy simply past attain. “Come take my hand” repeats as dissonant strings and area sounds fade in and ultimately crescendo over the vocal pattern. The refrain continues: “Let me take you away from right here / There’s nothing between us however area and time / […] Let me shine in your world / […] Make me your lady.” The phrase “Make me your lady” repeats as if signaling the completion of a spell entrancing the determine. Right here the sampled lyrics have a foreboding tone that overloads floor, or first impression, as a way to obscure an esoteric which means that’s out there solely to those that are educated of other networks and programs of which means.
Act II: “No I’m Not the Lady You Thought You Needed”
The combination then modifications moods to introduce the battle. This begins with the fading-in of a spoken phrase piece by DJ, visible artist, and author Juliana Huxtable: “When small boobs are championed by the defeat of the social impulse to make them larger and extra supple by the identical sleazy dudes within the Higher West Aspect with pec implants whose dad and mom secretly orchestrated the creation of distinct gender dysmorphia from the … ”
The location of this piece introduces the down-low determine to the choice epistemes hinted at by the vocoded Beyoncé pattern. As if calling for a brand new world order, Huxtable’s renouncing of antiquated magnificence requirements and gender norms juxtaposed with the area sound results and lyrics discloses the lady talking as alien to the world of the down-low determine. The girl is “eccentric” as a result of she satirizes and critiques the heteronormative regimes by which they each dwell. She positions herself as not an alien, however somebody who transcends these regimes. The lyrics “area and time” concurrently evoke the “tensed” and “tenseless”-ness of the Black efficiency aesthetic discovered between Beyoncé’s lyrics and Huxtable’s spoken phrase piece. As Huxtable’s piece trails off, her phrases are garbled, as if suggesting that her phrases and views are inhuman or illegible to the programs that search to “code out” the decrease frequencies of other epistemologies.
That the lady is greater than she seems is highlighted by a pattern from the horrorcore traditional “Load My Clip” (1995) by Lil Noid. Whereas the chopped and screwed pattern is transient, it matches the widely darkish apocalyptic (learn: beginning-of-a-new-era) theme and style of the set. The lyrics additional reveal that the talking girl has a powerful sense of self:
Speaking shit I’ll load my clip and shoot you in your fucking face
Carry that shit as much as the door you wanna strive me, Noid hoe
[…]
Bitch my nuts you finest not ever take a look at
Blackout is my nigga so Lil Stabby received his fucking again
Get yo’ arms up we’re those so rattling close to we gon need to scrap.
This passage means that the narrating girl will not be solely keen and able to defend herself but in addition has the assist of her household. That is punctuated by a refrain of barking chihuahuas, a longstanding effeminate signifier for homosexual males. Curiously, the pattern placement will be learn as each an affirmation of ethnic identification and as self-defense. The African-American Vernacular English inside this pattern, as a way to iterate a powerful sense of Black identification, is paying homage to the saying “My gender is Black.”
This saying attends to how the traumatic occasions of the transatlantic slave commerce excluded African descendants from the binaries of public/home gender roles. The violent imagery of the lyrics is paying homage to the “by any means” self-determination useful to girls, femmes, and nonbinary folks of shade dwelling in protection of themselves, as outlined by the Black Panther Get together and the Avenue Transvestite Motion Revolutionaries (STAR). Such a name for self-defense is very poignant given the simultaneous under- and over-enforcement in Black transgender and queer femme communities. The pattern of “Load My Clip,” showing within the “battle” part of the combo, serves as a recognition of the phantom of violence (state or interpersonal) that haunts transwomen and queer femmes.
Act II continues into an industrial interlude that includes a chopped and screwed remix of Beyoncé’s “No Angel.” This isn’t solely a nod to Houston’s Black music scene; by slowing down Beyoncé’s voice and reducing its pitch, the pattern additionally troubles notions of gender classification and humanity: “Child put your arms round me / Inform me I’m the issue / No I’m not the lady you thought you needed.” The tune nods to the politics of gender disclosure, passing, and visibility inside the transgender neighborhood.
The vocoded vocals and the lyrics additionally contact upon how Black performers use know-how to invent what it means to be human. Because the Beyoncé pattern continues, the narrator reveals herself to the determine: “Beneath the gorgeous face is one thing sophisticated / I include a aspect of bother / However I do know that’s why you’re staying / Since you’re no angel both child.” If the earlier part and the start of Act II arrange the antagonistic relationship between the down-low determine and the feminine narrator, whose trans tendencies are steadily revealed all through the set, then this part, with its exaggerated vocoded vocals and lyrics, is the climax or decision. It signifies a leveling of the sector, which is required for the down-low or closeted determine to open himself as much as the world and worldview by which the narrating girl exists.
Act III: Cunty
Now that the world has opened for the down-low determine, the combo’s dénouement explores themes of liberation, belonging, and self-affirmation. That is achieved by the short fade-in and loop of Disco Lucy Lips, the narrating girl within the authentic Moonwalkers tune, shrilly yelling “10,000 Screaming Faggots.” On the similar time, Complete Freedom stacks the pattern of snarling chihuahuas within the foreground. The narrating girl of the set interpolates her neighborhood and summons her household.
That is particularly poignant as the combo strikes into ballroom tradition’s sound, aesthetic, and historical past. Because the Moonwalkers observe fades in, a pattern from Kevin Aviance’s “Cunty” enters the sonic panorama, bouncing from left to proper within the stereo subject. The inclusion of ballroom music acts as a sonic declare to area, transferring ballroom from the margins to the middle. It additionally alerts an enlargement of gender aesthetics. In his evaluation of gender within the ballroom scene, Marlon Bailey explains that “cunt,” “pussy,” “female,” and so forth. function a standards for gender efficiency in competitions and for passing as “genuine femininity” in the true world. As the combo continues, trilling and commentating by Kevin Movado Prodigy fills all elements of the stereo subject till it crescendos with a double bass drum solo.
The solo fades out into white noise, exaggerating the abruptness of the instrumentalized “ha crash” sound that’s attribute of ballroom dance music. The set then goes right into a commentary-vs.-commentator ballroom observe, visually marked within the vogue present with a vogue femme efficiency. What I discover poignant within the inclusion of this vogue femme efficiency by precise dancers is that it visually positions the narrator as part of a household (home) and the bigger neighborhood. Whereas queer aesthetics had been implicit earlier within the combine, the dancers’ presence within the vogue present makes an express declare to Black queer tradition and identification. Musically, that is vital on condition that the “ha crash,” and the Jersey membership music rhythmic motif in modern iterations of ballroom music, are well-liked in “deconstructed/post-”membership music.
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Utilizing DJ scholarship, I’ve tried to excavate the sonic archives inside “10,000 Screaming Faggots (Hood By Air FW14)” as an example the way in which digital dance music DJs aurally symbolize the tradition, points, and experiences of Black queer communities. Mixsets will be considered as archival objects that comprise culturally particular histories, epistemologies, and ontologies essential to underrepresented communities. Reminiscent of Tricia Rose’s dialogue of digital dance music, I hope future students and critics place digital dance music again within the Black radical custom.
