“The Screamers”: Baraka and Radio Ecologies

by Ben Erdmann

Radio’s electromagnetic transmission is eternal: words, riffs, solos stretch out into space before becoming indistinguishable against the irradiated background. Perhaps this is why they escaped Sun Ra to Saturn. The good word had collided with its orbital rings, spilling a tune of rebellion. “The repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair. It spurted out of the dipthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion” (Baraka, "The Screamers" in Tales, p. 76).

American writer Amiri Baraka’s “The Screamers” tells a story of the jazz club. The narrator rejects popular music, opting instead for flight from the pop culture: “I disappeared into the slums, and fell in love with violence, and invented for myself a mysterious economy of need. Hence, I shambled anonymously through Lloyd’s, The Nitecap, The Hi-Spot, and Graham’s desiring everything I felt” (p. 74). Baraka’s story is told in the grammar of jazz, new phrases sprouting from half-completed sentences; an improvisational rhythm draws the reader in as if they could hear the screams of the crowd, of the saxophone, of the police sirens that follow those club-goers who march definitively from the venue.

This march is, perhaps, the portion of “The Screamers” that’s most often discussed in contemporary theory about the Black Arts movement and the musical form of jazz. “Then Lynn got his riff, that rhythmic figure we knew he would repeat, the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world. And he screamed it so the veins in his face stood out like neon. ‘Uhh, yeh, Uhh, yeh, Uhh, yeh,’ we all screamed to push him further” (p. 78). Lynn then descends into the crowd, marching to this world-creating rhythm; his accompaniment falls in step, followed by the crowd as they make their way onto the street. “We marched all the way to Spruce, weaving among the stalled cars, laughing at the dazed white men who sat behind the wheels” (p. 79).

As the music, the musicians, the witnesses to that rhythmic production spill out of the club, the narrator describes the crowd as “Ecstatic, completed, involved in a secret communal expression. It would be the form of the sweetest revolution, to hucklebuck into the fallen capital, and let the oppressors lindy hop out” (p. 79). And as so often met the secret communal expression of black culture, “The paddy wagons and cruisers pulled in from both sides, and sticks and billies started flying, heavy streams of water splattering the marchers up and down the street” (p. 79). Baraka demonstrates clearly that this is not simply the repression of the marchers or a rejection of a black counterpublic; no, this is a condemnation of that very communion contained in the language of jazz. “And only the wild or the very poor thrived in Graham’s or could be roused by Lynn’s histories and rhythms. America had choked the rest, who could sit still for hours under popular songs, or be readied for citizenship by slightly bohemian social workers” (pp. 73-74). To condemn that communion is to condemn those wild and very poor dancers, musicians, and witnesses.

As such, “The Screamers” argues that black musical traditions contain more than what becomes legible as a sonic rhythm. “All the saxophonists of that world were honkers,

Illinois, Gator, Big Jay, Jug, the great sounds of our day. Ethnic historians, actors, priests of the unconscious. That stance spread like fire thru the cabarets and joints of the black cities, so that the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes” (p. 76). Here, the form that “The Screamers” takes on may echo jazz, borrowing its improvisational, riffing techniques, but that echo first bounces off of an entire ecology of black cultural traditions that respond to American anti-blackness, produce modes of relation illegible to whiteness, and reject the ‘popular music’—which is to say popular culture, popular consciousness—of the time. Despite the violence that meets the marchers following Lynn’s honking saxophone, “Lynn and his musicians, a few other fools and I, still marched, screaming thru the maddened crowd” (p. 80). This music produces revolutionary sentiment, the ability to imagine otherwise in response to the violence contained in the status quo.

WKCR is indisputably indebted to these black musical traditions. After the 1968 protests on Columbia University’s campus, the reshuffling of WKCR’s programming schedule saw a growing emphasis on the alternative music of the time—protest music, music for rebellion; jazz, of course, was on the front lines of this newly alternative schedule. It’s easy to perceive this reshuffling as a relative domestication of the revolutionary grammar espoused by the music that spilled onto the streets of Harlem, of Newark. After all, radio enables the listener to ‘sit still for hours,’ indulging in a sonic decadence without any material stake in the music’s production or meaning.

But this is itself a domestication of the radio ecology. This view affords an inordinate amount of power to the DJ, to the airwaves, as if they held a monopoly on meaning that could overcome the music; radio need not require a parasitic relationship to black cultural traditions. Instead, radio should be understood as an ecological endeavour. Every moment that those electromagnetic waves extend themselves through space is a moment in which that space is reshaped, reterritorialized, molded into new forms by the sonic power of the music carried through the atmosphere. For how could a radio station domesticate revolution? Baraka states in the documentary Sing! Fight! Sing! Fight! From LeRoi to Amiri: “So we drove up into the middle of it, you know, Belmont and Springfield Ave, and we were circling, really looking, you know, checking it out up close. What is a rebellion up close? I mean, most people never seen what that looks like.” Perhaps this is the value of an ecology of radiowaves: the creation of a compulsion to see up close, an encouragement to participate in the rebellious sonic grammar of jazz rather than simply consume it.

Maybe that’s what the Saturnian extraterrestrials sought. Perhaps they wanted to see up close, to commune as the witnesses of the jazz club could. Electromagnetic waves carry no revolution in their movement, but the improvisational grammar that graces their transmission does. “A-boomp bahba bahba, A-boomp bahba bahba, A-boomp bahba bahba, the turbans sway behind him. And he grins before he lifts the horn” (p. 72). Radio produces a necessary communion spanning cities, nations, planets, galaxies—a communion only enabled by the information it transmits. And it is in this communion that the radio ecology might be found. A web animated by those who produce music, those who witness it, those who are compelled to action in the street by it. Its nodes can be found in traffic, in the car radio, sure, but these are but moments of sonic experience connected by the communal transmission that moves through the streets.

The narrator of “The Screamers” states of his travels through jazz clubs: “You see, I left America on the first fast boat” (p. 74). Perhaps this boat floats on electromagnetic waves, partially animated by the choppy waters of black culture cum radio transmission. Radio is not, cannot be a domestication of these rebellious techniques. To bear witness to its communal ecology is to be compelled to action, to marching, to screaming.

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by Ben Rothman ALBUM