Consciousness collects lyrics for songs Lex Brown has sung in her videos and performance art shows over the last eight years. (It also includes still images from those vids and shows.) What follows is her introduction to the collection.
Dear reader,
Here you’ll find many songs that I have written over the past eight years: songs about living, aspiration, failure, money, food, love, family, governments, and technology. The work is loosely arranged by core themes, with selections from performances ranging from 15 to 60 minutes long. The text is accompanied by video (stills) made over the same years. It is the first time these lyrics are publicly available as writing, and I’m deeply grateful, relieved and excited for them to exist in this physical form.
I always loved singing. I began using it in my work in order to express emotions and analysis at the same time. To me, song is the best container for stories and complex observation. It travels through the air, it can carry history, it’s stored in our memory, and the memory is free. A listener is able to construct an image from a song without the fear of it being fake news in a post-fact world, because it reveals its inventedness in its difference from speech. I love that you can’t reduce live singing: no matter how good or bad it sounds, it is what it is.
When I first started writing songs, the point was to bare my feelings. It was the best to be real about my experience while simultaneously creating an experience of impact for others. I had felt (and still mostly feel) that this is the role of the artist. Singing is more real than image or object, which are easily susceptible to distortion: they can be copied over-explained, recontextualized, erased, or disowned. Those processes can be means to empowering or disempowering ends, but we do see the manipulated value of the art object resulting from an attempt for capital to divorce itself from a relationship with bodies (and all they entail: survival, appetite, labor death). Songs can be equally manipulated/manipulative: as jingles, national anthems, and Top 40 music prove, but it is difficult to imagine the power of a live singing human voice ever being fully divorced from that of the singer. It is that bodily experience that is indelible and inescapable. Even the worst singer signing the worst song can be touching. As long as we have vocalization, we have life.
With so much weight given to the discourse surrounding an object or image, rather than whether the experience of it is valuable in itself, I’ve found myself gravitating to songs as the core of my work. The discussion to which I have worked to contribute, is one in which the Artist-Singer is foregrounded: not as a conceptual theory or poorly executed character, but as the purveyor of a bodily medium which has the unique ability to critique our relationship to images and technology by being leveraged alongside them within a singular practice.
If there was a proposition in my first videos, it was that my identity was never the point so much as being a consciousness within a randomly assigned body. For a while my basic performance message was “identity doesn’t matter,” full stop. I hoped someone would challenge me on having that vantage point-as the result of growing up in an affluent mostly white suburban tech-industrial area, which both afforded me that neo-liberal viewpoint and demanded that I assimilate to it (somewhat as a survival mechanism). The challenge never came, at least verbally, and perhaps that indicates something. Or nothing. So, I have just wrestled with this something-nothing myself.
The term intersectionality (coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw) is as old as I am, and has grown to be commonplace. It’s one of those words that make me thank the gods for language, for being able to have words as adults that we did not have as children. It makes space for the reality that goes beyond the restrictions of mass media and elevator-pitch notions of identity.
My upbringing put me at a social and critical distance from what I always heard described as “the black experience.” There are, of course, as many black experiences as there are black people. Growing up, my experience was one in which identity announced itself as a construct early-on and repeatedly. Aside from coming-of-age at a distance from extended family and people who share my ancestral story, I found it easy to know that identity is a construct from the simple reality of life and death. If we still have no answer for why we are here in the universe, then obviously everything else that follows is made up.
I am also a woman and very American. I talk about commerce and marketing a lot in my work, partially because an awareness of class is constantly with me. Black Suburban American. We out here. I don’t want to create a facebook group or carry a flag about it, but if social migrations are the manifestation of changing ideologies, there is something still yet to be openly acknowledged here: there is a “Now what” quality to being of suburbia that I see as the subtext for my life and practice. What actually comes after the Dream? A level playing field to play the same game? Now what happens when you’re black and free to fabricate meaning in the highly powerful, deeply abstract, often vapid sandbox of contemporary art?
Alejandro Guzman once wisely said: “A lot of people nowadays sell blackness just to have whiteness.” It points to the folly of trying to change a culture by using the terms it’s given to you, as well as the lack of imagination involved in reconstructing the terms of your oppression.
I certainly don’t want to go backwards into the structures that imperialism propose. But I am not alone in feeling the complexity and confusion around what “forwards” is now, in this moment of high language and late capitalism, or even if “forwards” is the logical direction. What about inward? What about outward? What about inside-out?
Throughout the course of these eight years, I have moved from the basic exploration of consciousness-in-body, to the cacophony of mentally processing our modern world…dairy cows are played by dog actors, news stories about city infrastructure and potholes turn into stories about plot holes, a man is shot for carrying a bag of potato chips. The confusion is in the technology, supply chain, and the body all at once, with the spirit clamoring for some space in the noise.
As the selfie era germinates into the blockchain age, we are seeing how gross amounts of personal data are returned back to us as algorithms, protocol, and restrictions for how to conduct our lives, artificially constructed by our very own monitored behavior. There will be further enmeshing of the technological material with our cognitive faculties, and less of an ability to distinguish the organic. In order to fortify our communal resistance to the effects of mass data management, the first step might be simply keeping one’s thoughts in some kind of order and managing the narratives we’re fed: writing as much as scrolling. Another step is not losing the physical voice, our tool for connecting with each other, though Siri and Alexa may want otherwise. It’s not only the singing voice, the rallying voice, or the soothing voice to keep active – also simply the voice that says, “Hi. How are you?” as you walk down the street.
BUY CONSCIOUSNESS ONLINE HERE (AND MORE MS. BROWN FOR YOU AT www.lexbrown.com)
xxx
Editor’s Note:
Ms. Brown’s songs—and her publisher, Genderfail—remind your editor of the late Carmelita Estrellita’s pomes. The link between the two lyricists isn’t direct—Lex read Estrellita’s stuff for the first time just last week. Still she agrees Estrellita’s lyrics are “awesome.” Her affirmation is reason enough to provide a link to the transgender rhymer’s First archive here.