How the Rhythmic Beating of “Vibe” Carried Me Beyond Borders https://ift.tt/lE6Pc9o
After the second mention of the hi-hat in Corey J. Miles’ book, Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South, I went down a rabbit hole of music. First, to the proclaimed fathers of trap, T.I. and Gucci Mane; then further down to the sounds of Goodie Mob’s “Thought Process”; and swirling among other artists who have roots in the subgenre or just borrowed from the South – Outkast, Young Jeezy, Beyonce, Miley Cyrus. Beat after beat had me back in the early 2000’s. It was goin’ down in the Pittsburgh club scene; we all had whatever we liked (or we think we did), and ladies, myself included, backed our thangs up on the dance floor. And while I could feel the rhythmic beats through the soles of my feet, I failed to realize how much of trap music is pain music – and how much value it offers beyond musical enjoyment.
Right out of the gate, Miles, an assistant professor of sociology and Africana studies at Tulane University, states, “I’m lost.” And, thus, we follow Miles on a journey to “find the South,” an exploration on how Southern Black sound and feeling push against the rigid, mapped-out boundaries that dictate what and where the South is. While the book plays on various sounds of Black life in the South, Miles pays homage to trap music and its role in locating what Miles calls the “carceral South.”
Focusing primarily on area code 252, which represents a collection of rural counties in North Carolina, Vibe raises the alarm on the carceral landscape of this area. The carceral South extends beyond the physical space. It is also a history; it is a way of thinking “through the ways that movement across the region has not allowed Black people to escape the criminalization of Blackness.” Miles helps readers feel the legitimacy of the carceral South through telling about his own experiences as a cis Black man from the 252, as well as by leaning heavily on conversations with trap artists in the area.
Before Vibe, I was misinformed, perhaps a little judgmental. I thought trap was about guns, drugs, and violence for the sake of these. While Miles defines trap as a subgenre of Southern hip-hop that centers around dealing drugs and guns, his conversations with trap artists reveal the ways in which the subgenre also expresses drug dealing as “one of the only viable means to earn a living wage.”
But Black lives in the 252 are not just economically constricted. The heavily policed area also forces individuals “to momentarily relinquish [their] commitments to the softest parts of [themselves] to engage in behavior that will make it possible for [them] to feed the people who make having a soft self possible.” Streetz, a trap artist featured often in Miles’ book, states: “Even though there is guns and drugs in the song, it go deeper than that, it’s pain in it too.” It is through conversations with artists like Streetz, Premo, and Ivy that I began to understand the meaning of trap music, a sounding out of the ways in which Black people are trapped by systemic racism – a way to safely reveal their emotions about life in the carceral South. Trap music is an expression of how Black people feel living in a community where they exist under continuous policing and surveillance, how living conditions trap them in a lifestyle others may believe they choose. Vibe questions how much choice one has living in a system designed to control and contain.
Miles claims that he cannot make Vibe a genre it is not, and it is very much a written piece of scholarly work founded in research – but I’d like to challenge you, Miles. “Black life is songlike,” and Vibe is a work on Black life. Vibe beats with the rhythm of Black sound and feeling. Miles writes:
Part of being Black is feeling it. No hands up, no selling loose cigarettes, no playing with toy guns, no walking in the street, no sleeping in your own home. There is no type of empathy that can reproduce how heavy your skin feels when it can be your death sentence.
Damn, Miles. The strategic stylizing of the excerpt above, with its short sentences and phrases visually broken apart on the page, left me feeling the tension and rhythm of the weight in his words – the staccato energy pushing me forward quickly, with a sense of urgency that added power to an already heavy message.
Further in Vibe, we hear of the community’s grief after a young man, Amp, was murdered. In the 48 hours after Amp’s death, Mono, another trap artist, wrote, recorded, and filmed a video in Amp’s honor that featured the whole community. Miles writes: “Death comes so often; we have perfected our rituals of care. I hate that we are so good at mourning.” Again, Miles creates well-crafted sentences that help express the weight in what he is saying. There are two short, powerful clauses that pack a punch, followed by a slightly longer sentence that forces you to slow down when reading it, bringing a sense of heaviness to the reading.
Vibe is written as a song itself, which means it extends beyond the realm of higher academia. In fact, I argue that Vibe is a song that needs to be heard more by those outside of the ivory towers.
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