Consciousness Amid Crisis: Elaquent's Forever is a Pretty Long Time and The Superiority of the Arts in Our Lives
by Jessica BrantOur longest days are barely over. What feels like a sci-fi feature set in a distant, dystopian future is actually the current reality for millions of Americans that were forced into home confinement for three months, jobless, living off emergency bills tucked under mattresses for occasions we couldn't have imagined would come close to this. Others were not as lucky. In the face of the current global pandemic, nobody is safe. Nobody is in control. We're all bobbing around in our own lifeboats, dumbfoundingly looking on at the destruction we narrowly escaped. The country is now opening its rebuilding phase, but we're faced with yet another problem, the most blatant and under fire: the problem of racism. As outdoor patios fill up and citizens file into shopping plazas, we try to return to some sort of normalcy, if even possible. But we must ask: Is the worst over, and if not, where do we go from here?
For a music journalist, solutions of comfort, in our immediate worlds, are simple: If you like art, support the arts. Catch up on all of the albums you didn't get to listen to throughout the year. Watch all the music biopics and documentaries you didn't have the time to watch. Enjoy live-streaming concerts and donate to your favorite artists' Patreon accounts. Read. Read. Read. Artists are the essential workers of this pandemic, this moment. We have the chance to be heard, to change the status quo. This power is why it's important to SUPPORT THE ARTS on a local scale first. Change trickles from inside out.
I've been taking some time away from writing about music to really listen to recordings as life soundtracks and not just something else to criticize or gripe about. One album that's been helping me through the devastation is Guelph, Ontario producer Elaquent's album, Forever is a Pretty Long Time (released February 2020). The concept is emblematic of how marginalized identities, including me, experience the world. We dodge crises every day, not just in a mask for three months. We wear one our whole lives. For an artist it's even harder.
Suffering and Accepting
The album reminded me why I love writing about music with breadth, and why I continue to support independent musicians. Forever is a Pretty Long Time starts with a smoky saxophone loop on "Guidelines," which features legendary underground MC Oddisee. The saxophone seems as though it could go on forever until a blaring bass switches up the feeling entirely. The 30-second interlude places me in the annals of contemporary jazz, in a seat at the historic Colored Musicians Club in my city of Buffalo, NY, where, if alive today, I would soak up a set from fellow Buffalo native, Grover Washington Jr. That would almost certainly include his epic saxophone solo from his 1976 composition, "Mister Magic," and perhaps a rendition of "Just the Two of Us" featuring the late Bill Withers, where the horn section's inclusion was mandated by record companies.
For many artists, this is the career end goal: to leave a profound impact in a legacy granting critics with more than scythes for Twitter banter and fans with more than "dear diary" lullabies to fall asleep to. The legacy is in the ability to transcend a moment or feeling we may take for granted, and distill from it the values needed to guide our moral compass into a forever we can live with. The soul needs to know where it's been to get to where it's going. Elaquent's beat alchemy (mixed with a healthy balance of classic jazz and hip hop) is medicine for the mender, who must assess the damage before hitting that sweet spot between suffering and acceptance. That's what we're all doing right now, suffering, then accepting.
Album collaborators Chester Watson, Guilty Simpson, and Saturn Alexander grapple with their perception of time and their place within the continuum, but they're mending while at odds with their conflict, the antagonist being the neurosis of being an artist in the music industry against the protagonist, the conscientiousness mind, wading through the seconds, the minutes, and then the hours of each day lived.
Trip Back in Time
I spoke with the musician who runs the Colored Musicians Club, George Scott, in my hometown, where Grover's influence helped sprout roots in other jazz subgenres, shortly before the pandemic hit. In the early 90s, George Scott led the Big Band movement in Buffalo and was able to do so with respect for younger generations of musicians experimenting with the art form. Presented in what was considered disenfranchised rock music to a larger, snarkier jazz fan base was an opportunity to grow the art form, according to Scott.
"When I was young, I dug Grover, I dug the young guys, because they were speaking my language," he said. "There were people that were a little resistant to it (the sound we were trying to create), but later on as we (the George Scott Band) were getting more gigs, it finally hit home with people."
Despite tension aroused by cuts to music and arts education and a refusal to renew music teaching contracts in schools, big band music is still clinging to the zeitgeist in Buffalo; George Scott is active in the network of eight big bands still gigging around the city. He's also working on the formation of a youth big band for students suffering from these cutbacks as chairman of the Michigan Street Corridor. "I'm really working to get that young musician exposed to jazz music," he said promisingly.
We don't often see how an artist is impacted by their own laborious undertakings, how time transforms attitude, mindset, and motivation because the consumer is only gifted with the sparkly bow. And while serious artists are creating product for consumption, they're not superheroes, though the hustle may reveal otherwise; On "Annoyed," the ninth track on Elaquent's album, Saturn Alexander shifts our attention to these truths, and to other artists, whose own perceptions of time may cause career setbacks.
Other occurrences inside and outside of an artist's control, such as microaggressions, whether in the workplace or out of it, can also cause setbacks. Saturn's song is a classic rendering of class struggle, but she searches for no scapegoats. She raps: "My daddy gotta clock and it's always ahead of time, so I'm always on time if I seek it I make it mine." As of last year, Saturn Alexander was working in operations at Sprint, and in an interview, she revealed that her 9 to 5 inspired her creativity, often writing verses in traffic to and from her job. With the same 24 hours in a day like the rest of us, this 25-year-old is proving that being a "working artist" balancing two lives is no longer something to be ashamed of, but really more of a superpower than one may realize. To be bigger, we must do and think bigger, and in a gig economy fueled by Darwinism, artists are always asked to split their time, and yes, their personalities, to fit the bill, to make it work, to offset the powers that be. And we suffer, accept, then rebuild. The next day we wake up and do it all over again.
Back to Life, Back to Reality
There are other musical moments on the album that are teeming with impolite deliverances of lived experience in a"white facing" world. What we think is time slipping away could really be us doing what we can or what we must with it because of the institutions we are complicit to. On the fourth track, "Thread Count," Detroit rapper Guilty Simpson knuckles down his audience with the political rapturing of a most deadly Killer Mike persona: "So instead of support, they play ya short / Still show up to eat with a knife and a fork / I swear to God life's too short / They want me in a box, guarded by pork." Listeners get a taste of the Detroit underground scene in later bars that acknowledge The Fillmore, where Miles Davis, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin famously staged shows.
I ponder for a moment on how performances at historic venues have propelled the careers of many musicians forward, and the tough road that they had to tread to forge their ways over the hurdles-systemic racism and social injustice-for months, for years. We're still living that now. What Forever is a Pretty Long Time has done for me during the time of coronavirus is granted me the gift of time, the time I needed to appreciate the artists preserving their art forms and cultures, and to listen to my music with greater respect for those who paved the way for independent musicians. Freelance writers usually specialize in an area of expertise, but because I had to fight my way into journalism due to discrimination, I had to become an "expert" on several areas in a very short amount of time, and I never stopped learning.
As we take pause from normal operation, either through Facebooking social media concerts from our living rooms to lift spirits or through organizing campaigns to raise money for other gig economy workers, it is with gratitude that I've been able to muse at some of my colleagues, because forever feels okay in this place. Besides each other, because even to those who experience this time as dawdling, time is ours for the taking, to do what we will, what we must.
A work's translucency and transferability hinges on an artist's desire to make it so. Elaquent desires to connect with his work, without purporting to be prophetic or all-knowing within his genre. He simply made a record, but what a timely record it was. None of us are all-knowing. None of us could've imagined what this moment would feel like in our country's history. So we suffer, accept, and rebuild.
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Jessica Brant is a writer from Buffalo, NY. Her work has appeared in PopMatters, Upstart NY, and The Word is Bond. She writes on marginalized identities and is Native American by descent.
