Fear of a Black Planet
Fear of a Black Planet…
is another carved record this time one from my personal collection. This record was given to me by an old friend who converted to Islam many years ago. He made the decision that he no langer needed his records and so gave them to me for safe keeping. When passing on the records in 2001 he expressed the desire to move away to the middle east, to fully embrace his faith. After he left that day, I didn’t see him for many years. Then suddenly in 2017 I bumped into him again in Blackburn town centre. After a converstion shared over a couple of cigarettes, it became clear that he had been struggling with his mental health, and was no longer pursuing his faith.
Seeing him again had a deeply significant impact on me, and I thought a great deal about our meeting. When I returned home, I came across his record, this very record. It was extremely interesting to see that many of the records that he had passed on had strong anti-establishment narratives, they were records which embraced the politics of black power, and significantly espoused the teachings of Louis Farakhan and the Nation of Islam, this direction of travel led to my friend shunning music altogther, which I found to be an extremely interesting tension in the development of identity.
The presence of the record in my house, was so very resonant; the deeply moving dilogues between the owner, music, record, artists, paratexts, participant observer, politics, beliefs, values, society and the poetry of identity were immedicatley apparent. The struggles of being a minority living in the UK were being highlighted again with the rise of a populist political discourse which started to hold sway over the public attitude from 2016 onwards. As I picked up this record, and was holding my friend’s story in my hand outside my window swirled a ever increasing nationalist rhetoric and a palpable xenophobia. This record and its complex provenance seemed to embody many of conflicting narratives filling the public sphere.
At the same time I had been engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement since the killing of Eric Garner on July 17 2014. So with all this as context, I decided to carve this record with the names of hundreds of names of those who had been killed in police custody, detention centres, at border crossings, across Europe, in the UK and USA onto the surface of this record.
I felt that this particular copy of ‘Fear of Black Planet’, which was seminal and groundbreaking in its message, sound and voice, on its release in 1991 was the perfect vehicle for this memorial.
(The work was first shown at PRISM Contemporary 2018. Photo Credit Lee Smillie)
