Introduction
From Raengo and Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video :

Midway through Kahlil Joseph’s short film Music Is My Mistress (2017), the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu turns to Ishmael Butler, a rapper and member of the hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces, to ask a question. The dialogue is inaudible, but an intertitle appears on screen: “her: Who is your favorite filmmaker?” “him: Miles Davis.” As Joseph suggests in Music Is My Mistress, this generation of artists holds the freedom of expression achieved through Black music as an inspiration for formal experimentation in audiovisual media and approaches its filmmaking practice through musical processes, such as improvisation, remixing, looping, and sampling. Often working collaboratively, these artists have taken the music video into the art gallery and bridged the gap between this popular form, art cinema, and installation art.

The current phenomena of saturation, eclecticism, and innovation in Black music videos, visible in works like Beyoncé’s Lemonade (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Kahlil Joseph, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Todd Tourso, Jonas Åkerlund, 2016) and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Ed Burke, 2019), Jay-Z’s 4:44 (2017) music videos, and Donald Glover’s work across platforms, requires a closer, but also more expansive, look at Black artistic lineages, or what we call “ensembles,” to underscore fluid and sometimes intergenerational collaborations among several of the artists involved in this practice. “Ensemble” is also meant to evoke Fred Moten’s theorization of the relationship between the part and the whole, the soloist and the group, epitomized by the cooperative and improvisational relationship between musicians in the jazz ensemble, which he sees as constantly experimenting with forms of sociality as well as formal lawmaking and lawbreaking.[1] Indeed, we see this contemporary work, in part, as benefiting from a previous network of experimentations beginning with the politics of film form elaborated by the LA Rebellion filmmakers—Charles Burnett and Larry Clark, in particular—as channeled through what we call the “Howard Pedagogy Lab”: the mentorship of Haile Gerima, who trained cinematographers and filmmakers Ernest Dickerson, Malik Sayeed, Bradford Young, Jenn Nkiru, and Arthur Jafa.[2] We also note how these contemporary videos build on the feminist and experimental sensibilities advanced by filmmakers such as Barbara McCullough, Kathy Collins, and Julie Dash. Black music, for this previous generation of filmmakers, constituted a model of actualization, of exploration, and of intergenerational relations—a living archive of the past and a laboratory for the imagination of the future. That imagined future is now the present concern for both Black Studies scholars and contemporary visual artists.

Whether it is Jafa’s “Black Visual Intonation” (the study of how Black image making might aspire to “the beauty and alienation of Black music”), Young’s “Black intentionality” (to underscore the political valence of form), or Nkiru’s “cosmic archeology” (using visual culture archives to excavate the energetic lineages of Black memory), Black contemporary artists who are redefining the music video form all share a commitment to “Black study” visualized through images that reverberate with the vibrational intensity of the music that inspires them.[3] As Charles “Chip” Linscott indicates in his essay, we can follow this interplay through decades of Black music, film, and video history. Our starting point is the opening of Larry Clark’s 1977 film Passing Through, dedicated to musicians “known and unknown”; it begins with the chatter of musicians and the sound of instruments being tuned. In other words, we can actually hear the music—the practice, the process, and the ensemble—coming together. Writing on the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” which similarly features the sounds of congregation, Moten argues, “What emerges is a form, out of something that we call informality.”[4] This informality, which, Moten clarifies, is not formlessness, emphasizes music making’s groundedness in modes of sociality, process, and Black study. Perhaps because of this informality, which occurs as part of a still-developing artistic practice, this “golden age of the Black music video” has been the most thoroughly documented by journalists rather than by academics.[5] Thus, while the role of Black music in Black filmmaking is not entirely new, what perhaps is new is that the theoretical concepts developed by Jafa, Young, and Nkiru now appear as a matter of fact and part of a critical mass in the popular press.[6]

[1] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

[2] Interview with Alessandra Raengo, “Bradford Young—The Visual Art of Black Care,” Vimeo video, 23:18, liquid blackness, September 26, 2018, https://vimeo.com/291961328. See also his collaboration with Common, Black America Again (2016).

[3] Harney and Moten describe “Black study” as a noninstitutional way of “thinking with others,” that experiments with different forms of sociality and what they call “fugitivity.” See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). See also Arthur Jafa, “Black Visual Intonation,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 264–268. Jafa mistrusts synchronized sound because it subjects Black bodies and voices to the demands of coherence of the cinematic apparatus. He prefers the fugitivity of postdubbed sound. See Arthur Jafa and Tina Campt, “Love is the Message, The Plan Is Death,” e-flux 81, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/126451/love-is-the-message-the-plan-is-death.

[4] Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 129.

[5] See Danielle A. Scruggs, “We’re in the Golden Age of the Black Music Video,” Artsy, August 8, 2017, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-golden-age-Black-music-video; Hilton Als, “The Black Excellence of Kahlil Joseph,” The New Yorker, November 6, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/the-Black-excellence-of-kahlil-joseph.

[6] Nate Freeman, “The Messenger: How a Video by Arthur Jafa Became a Worldwide Sensation—and Described America to Itself,” Artnews, March 27, 2018, http://www.artnews.com/2018/03/27/icons-arthur-jafa; Tene Croom, “Common, Bradford Young unveil ‘Black America Again’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, New Pittsburgh Courier, July 12, 2017, https://newpittsburghcourier.com/2017/07/13/common-bradford-young-unveil-short-film-Black-america-again-at-carnegie-museum-of-art; Jenn Nkiru’s Brain-Bending Vision,” Financial Times, February 7, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/05d2648a-292f-11e9-9222-7024d72222bc#comments.