music Discussion

Chapter Title: “We Can Tell Our Own History, We Can Tell Our Own Future”: Book Title: Mediating Indianness

Published by: Michigan State University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.14321/j.ctt14bs0zq.10

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107

“ We Ca n Tell Our Own His t o r y, We Can Tell Ou r Own Future” Quese I MC , Cult ure Sh ock Camp , and an Indigenous Hip- Hop Movement

C H R I S L A L O N D E

Near the end of the film Dead Man, as William Blake’s eye wanders through the Makah village and toward the longhouse into which Nobody has entered, Jim Jarmusch’s camera lights and lingers upon a sewing machine on the ground. The initial lap dissolve in Four Sheets to the Wind, the first feature- length film from Seminole- Creek filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, merges a shot of trees with one of a phonograph, the needle scratching as it rides the final groove of a spinning record. The two machines are telling, and today, at least, we would do well to consider how they are linked. Jarmusch’s film is about representation, about film and the film industry, and about the technology or apparatus of the medium. The sewing machine empha- sizes the cut, of course, the element of film’s grammar that addresses our desire to see more, to see, in the case of Jarmusch’s film, Nobody, in all the richly layered meanings of that figure, and a dead man.1 The camera in Four Sheets to the Wind cuts from the record player to the body of Cufe Smallhill’s father, who has taken his own life. From its beginning, the phonograph was thought to offer a technology enabling one to communicate with the dead. In the words of Thomas Edison himself, speaking of the capability of his invention, “if we evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved or manipulated . . . by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument when made available ought to record something.”2

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108 | Chris LaLonde

Given the dominant society’s desire, one might even say need, to link the indian and death, it is little wonder that Four Sheets to the Wind focuses on the record player in a scene that includes Frankie Smallhill’s corpse.3 More must be said, however, for the sound track of the shot and the scene in which it is a part offer us a traditional trickster story, told in Muscogee Creek. In effect, then, Harjo’s film offers the story of rabbit, bear, desire, and a trick as a supplement to whatever had been playing on the turntable, a supplement that, like the film itself, confounds audience expectations and tells an(other) story.

I have opened on Dead Man and Four Sheets to the Wind to draw our attention both to technologies of representation— technologies of capture and projection, if you will— and to each film’s awareness of and concern with those technologies. I have also opened with Harjo’s film because if you have seen Four Sheets to the Wind, then you have heard the music and lyrics of Pawnee- Seminole hip- hop artist Quese IMC. Cufe’s cousin Jimmy listens to “Micco Rebels from the Sun” in his car while talking on his mobile to Cufe about Frankie’s funeral. Initially in the background on the audio track, the song increases in volume after the conversation ends; accentuat- ing the cut, “Micco” sutures together the shot in which it is first heard and the three shots that follow to conclude the scene. Here, then, Quese’s music is situated to address our desire to hear and know more. A through line materializes: capture technologies, information and communication tech- nologies, movement, death, ceremony, and Native hip- hop.

Before turning to Quese IMC’s music and his work with Culture Shock Camp, a word on the startlingly obvious. Anyone surprised by the existence of Native hip- hop could be said to suffer from an understanding of hip- hop as a product of and rooted in urban environments and a misunderstanding of contemporary Native life. Born in the South Bronx in the 1970s, the combination of graffiti art, break dancing, DJing, and rapping known as hip- hop laid claim to the city and announced both the presence of young African Americans and their articulation of the economic and social condi- tions under which they and members of preceding generations suffered.4 As Tricia Rose notes in her early, influential study of rap music and Afri- can American culture, “hip hop replicates and reimagines the experiences of urban life and symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style, and sound effects.” In so doing, “hip hop gives voice to the tensions and contradictions within the public urban landscape . . . and attempts to seize the shifting urban terrain, to make it work on behalf of the dispossessed.”5 More than simply a proclamation, hip- hop is an appro- priation that embodies a call to action. Graffiti artists announced their

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An Indigenous Hip- Hop Movement | 109

presence on trains that circulated the city, parts of the city abandoned by the dominant society are reclaimed with the music pumping from sound system speakers and with the crowds gathered to listen and move, and tech- nologies of consumption, the turntable and records, are transformed into instruments of creation.

If either unaware of the movement of Natives off reservation to urban centers, especially from the beginning of the relocation period in the second half of the twentieth century onward, or unwilling to imagine the indian anywhere save the reservation, no matter what Timothy Taylor describes as the “tolerance of difference, heterogeneity, and . . . cosmopolitan out- look” of those— predominantly urban dwellers— who fancy what the music industry categorizes as world music, one would tend not to think of Natives and hip- hop.6 Given the subversive and communal nature of hip- hop, how- ever, it makes sense that young Native artists would turn to it as a vehicle for expression and resistance. As a means to, in Quese IMC’s own words, “tell our own history and tell our own future,”7 to get at the history and the future to which he refers, I want to tease out five strands in Quese IMC’s three available CDs, link at least two of those strands to his work with his brother DJ Shock B and Culture Shock Camp, and return to technology. The strands are the personal, the political, the cultural, the pan- Indigenous, and what I call being aware.

The fusion of Native and hip- hop cultures is writ large in Marcus Frejo’s stage or performance name, Quese IMC. In an interview in the Hip Hop Herald, Quese tells George Jackson that Quese is a transcription of the Skiri Pawnee diminutive suffix kis;8 IMC stands for what Quese does: emcee. His discography consists of The Betty Lena Project (2006), Bluelight (2008), and Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles (2011). Beginning with the first disc and reaching through the third, Quese IMC offers songs that are infused with personal history. In tracks such as “Superbrightstar” from Betty Lena, “Little Marcus” from Bluelight, and “Best Times of Our Lives” from Hand Drums, we hear stories rooted in a childhood in Oklahoma. He begins his rap in “Superbrightstar” by announcing his position as an outsider from Oklahoma City: “Yo, here I am / creeping out the boondocks / to your boombox.”9 From there, Quese traces a trajectory “from killer crossover jumpshots / to crossing over to hip hop / killing MCs every chance I got.”10 Still, he raps that he is “owning every moment / with nostalgic longing.”11 That nostalgia finds articulation in “Best Times of Our Lives,” a song about a dear childhood friend no longer present. “Best Times” is haunted by her loss. Quese raps of sharing toys, packs of gum, and childhood Oklahoma streets with his friend. They would stay together late into the night, in no small

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measure “because your home life was hard and / and you were saddened / so we were just swinging” in the park.12 Quese’s home life at the time was also marked by difficulties, his father and mother divorcing when he was eight, but through the trials, both psychological and economic, he raps “I was there for you / and you were there for me / escaping home life / through music to get free.”13

Hip- hop is liberating for Quese IMC, then and now. In “House,” a song with looped horns and drum tracks that produce and sustain a dance rhythm, Quese proclaims that hip- hop was his parent when his mother and father divorced. He raps in homage to old school hip- hop, from Fla- vor Flav of Public Enemy to LL Cool J, and for all the b-boys and b-girls and “houses of freestyle” past and present. In a celebration of hip- hop, Quese raps of break- dancing moves, “backspin / head spin / windmill,”14 includes sustained break beats that create a space for his rap, and verbalizes scratching with his lyrics, “there goes another DJ / thwack, thwack,” to complement scratching on the music track.15 He also celebrates his older brother Brian, whose performance name is DJ Shock B, with a bitingly bright rhyme: “Old school crews bring out all sorts / my brother was a DJ / domestic import.”16

While songs like “House” and the earlier “Hip Hop 84” celebrate the genre and its connection to personal and social liberation, Quese IMC is aware that not all rap is directed toward positive ends. In “Rebel Music,” Quese and fellow rapper 20– 20 know that “a lot of MCs don’t walk their talk / they remind me of the corrupt politicians.”17 “Empty” goes further, proclaiming that the talk of some artists is, well, empty, taking to task those rappers whose

style is as dope as empty drugs you got about as much pull as empty gloves and your record label is as fat as empty pockets.18

Contra those artists, Quese IMC offers something dope and fat, but only if one listens, for

between the lines is what you missed at fi rst

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but let me tell you that I’m a poet story tells and this is the day that the music lives.19

For Quese IMC, the music lives because it is part of a movement. We hear this in “Mouse” when he announces that “I went from battling with mikes / to battling for rights”20 and in doing so creates an “opportunity to move and make change / feeling it deep inside / things we fight for our claims.”21 In “The Youth Conference” individual activism is linked to quite specific group activism, for “the youth are a movement” that will be part of a “new revolution.”22 With “The Bird Song” the “I am, I am the movement” gives way to first an address to an unspecified individual, “You are, you are the movement,” and then to a statement of solidarity that echoes: “we are, we are the movement / the movement / the movement.”23

“Mouse” also refers to a number of Native nations, homelands, and sites of activism:

We stood up in Caledonia manned up in Oka got sent to Oklahoma gathered up in Arizona Big Mountain to Bear Butte rallied up in South Dakota Mohawk, Anishinob, Canada to Minnesota Wounded Knee to California.24

In giving his voice to Native nations across North America and to key moments in the history of Native American activism both in Canada and in the United States, Quese IMC is here linking the movement to which he is committed to Native issues and to Native rights.

Quese IMC is well aware that people miss the political, social, and cul- tural elements of his music, and hence miss the movement, if they are unable or unwilling to see beyond the stereotype of indian. Those within the hip- hop world are just as susceptible to this blindness. In “I Am My Ancestors,” a song from The Betty Lena Project that incorporates the elements of flow, layering, and rupture Tricia Rose identifies as critical to hip- hop and its potential for “social resistance and affirmation,”25 the strength and power of

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Quese IMC’s rap are undercut by his competitors in MC battles who trot out the same old tired clichés of indianness:

and it pisses me off when I get on a stage and MC battle and I am ready with punch lines and the guy just babbles making fun of my origin, my being and my blood’s racing dissing my culture telling me to go back to the reservation calling me a drunk savage and everything that’s degrading dancing around like a cartoon indian while the crowd’s hooraying cheering like idiots and I’m tired of it being okay for you to make fun of my people.26

To counter the cartoon indian, Quese IMC turns to one of the pri- mary elements of hip- hop: sampling. Rose contends that “samplers are the quintessential rap production tool;” the computers enable artists and pro- ducers to repeat and recontextualize portions of music and lyrics.27 Rose notes, further, that sampling is a way to “pay homage, [it is] an invocation of another’s voice to help you to say what you want to say.”28 There is both an artistic element and a political edge to sampling. Aram Sinnreich’s inter- views with musicians, producers, software developers, and sound designers revealed that artists move from “taking to making” via their personality and the vision present in the choices they make: “Thus, for configurable musi- cians, stylistic originality can reside in the selection of source materials, the selection of samples from those materials, the temporal and spatial arrange- ment of samples, the transformative techniques applied to those samples, or the hermeneutic interplay between samples that characterize the work as a whole.”29 The very act of sampling is also, at least for some, an act of resis- tance to regulations and industry norms. In the words of DJ Adrian, “you’re subverting the dominant cultural paradigm, and turning it into something that you probably personally like. And that’s what’s really cool.”30

Quese IMC samples from a wide range of sources. We are offered bits of speeches by and interviews of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, along with bits of histories chronicling Native– non- Native rela- tions in the United States and the wrongs done to the First Peoples in the name of progress, the nation, and organized religion. For instance, “Micco

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Rebels from the Sun,” one of Quese’s earliest recordings, begins with two samples: The first recounts an example of the dominant society’s desire as it proclaims that “white settlers came to covet the rich Nez Perce land, ignor- ing their long friendship with the Indian Nation,” while the second sounds a note of defiance with Chief Joseph’s statement, “the white man has no right to come here and take our country, and we will defend this land as long as a drop of Indian blood warms the hearts of our men.”31 The song closes with the voice of history speaking first underneath the chorus and then standing starkly unaccompanied as it tells us of the promises made to Geronimo in exchange for his surrender, promises that were not kept. In traversing Indian Country from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and linking dislo- cation and imprisonment, “Micco Rebels from the Sun” effectively tells a painful chapter in the history of Native- white relations.32

Quese IMC recognizes that those wounds remain, rapping in The Betty Lena Project’s “Hey Young World” that

It was the Spanish and European track that caused damage and managed to become a virus in my people who had it learning survival skills, but upon being befriended that quickly ended, when the gaping wound was opened with no bandage but they were candid with the Catholics to murder, rape, and molest the Indian people on the day they landed33

Crucially, we also hear traditional chanting underneath the lyrics of “Hey Young World.” That chanting sounds a note of community and cultural practice. Here and in other tracks, then, the chanting stands in opposition to the wishes and desires of the dominant culture. We also hear Houston Tiger speaking in Muscogee Creek and the Eufaula Church Choir singing hymns in the same language on various tracks and the sound of Native drum groups in “The Young Conference” and elsewhere. Such samples cor- respond to Rose’s notion that sampling can pay homage to those who have come before and help the artist say what she or he wants and needs to say.

Sampling can do more than simply mine an archive and use from it that which pays tribute to one’s predecessors. It can also call into question the archive and the ideology that underpins it. This, too, is an act of resistance, one that Quese IMC engages in when he samples songs from American popular culture. We hear this, for instance, in “Oklahoma,” the fourth track from The Betty Lena Project, which in the first six seconds offers the first syllable of the first word of the title song of the popular musical looped and

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layered to repeat the point of origin; we then hear the chuckle of Quese IMC’s co- rapper on the song, as the female voices complete and repeat “Oklahoma,” now layered over by other female voices repeating the phrase “we can break it, we can break it, we can make it baby.”34 At the top of this layering the rapper asks, “how you doing Quese, are you ready man?”35 and then introduces him. In effect, the recognizable first phrase of the musical’s title song is invoked not as a point of origin to be paid homage to, but as that which is in need of a supplement that takes the phrase apart. As Quese’s fellow artist proclaims, “OKC will be noticed / so we cannot ignore this state.”36 With his hip- hop, Quese IMC is “goin to spark a wildfire / forest / give a culture shock to you tourists.”37

Similarly, in “Them Country Roads” Quese IMC samples and revises “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” John Denver’s 1971 hit painting a bucolic and nostalgic picture of West Virginia mountain living. Here the opening follows the chord progression and melody of the pop song, only to have the downbeat of the snare and Quese’s singing and revision of Denver’s chorus constitute the supplement. “West Virginia” is replaced by “Native America” as “Them Country Roads” becomes a proclamation of Quese’s home and a claim for Native land rights. In countering all the voices that have said to him, and to countless other Natives, that he is not going any- where, that he is destined to be simply a statistic, Quese IMC chooses to “do things kind of different / than you’ve ever seen” by turning to hip- hop in order to help in the process of “taking it back you all / every song / we sing / is one step to getting our land back.”38 While in “The Bird Song” Quese IMC repeats “the movement” for emphasis, a repetition that one can argue is in keeping with an oral tradition, here both “back” and, later in the song, “a new world” are repeated in order to stress change that is a return and what the change will bring.

The samples at the opening of Bluelight’s “Red Zeppelin” add a layer of complexity to Quese IMC’s art of the sample. A musical passage from Led Zep- pelin’s “What Is and What Should Never Be” is remixed to add guitar chords to either side of the sample. Here, the transformation of the sample keeps intact the meaning of the song’s title while wresting it from the ahistorical fantasy that Led Zeppelin’s lyrics articulate. If, as Quese IMC raps later in the song, “you know my music / you know my intent,”39 then the audience knows that Quese is keeping before it a fusion of hip- hop, Native concerns, and the lived experi- ences of those marginalized by the dominant society. Far from the invitation of “What Is and What Should Never Be,” where Robert Plant sings “If I were to say to you tomorrow / take my hand child come with me / to a castle I will take

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you,”40 Quese IMC brings his listeners to a world where borders are policed and people of color are targeted for interrogation there.

The Led Zeppelin sample is followed by a sample of Xzibit’s “Concen- trate” where the hip- hop artist announces “I don’t drama / I’m just gonna stomp downbeat.”41 While in the context of MC battles “concentrate” can stand, as Brett Esaki states, as an admonition for the artist to maintain her or his focus throughout the battle,42 Xzibit repeating the word until it becomes a mantra, the lyrics of the song and its music video do not suggest that a rival MC threatens concentration. Rather, “Concentrate” reveals that women can cause one to lose one’s focus. And while Xzibit can rhyme “con- summate / man was made to procreate,”43 it is women as objects of sexual desire that comes across loud and clear in both the song and its video: “hyp- notized by the way she move / take your time you might arrive too soon” is followed later in the song by “Don’t let yo’ concentration snap / I love the way she arch her back / like how a mothafucker s’posed to handle that.”44

Instead of a depiction of women as at least distracting, if not threaten- ing, Quese IMC’s “Red Zeppelin” features female rapper Fawksie One and what he calls “female energy / yo, that’s what’s up.”45 As such, Quese’s stomp downbeat here, an effort to “stomp the movement” and help people to “get connected,” includes, one might even say needs, females. It is, after all, Fawksie One who has the song’s last word. Her rap, delivered with strong line end stops, concludes with the pronouncement that she and Quese are together.

keeping the balance through hip hop masculine and feminine energy alive City of Lost Angels that’s right Bluelight46

Bluelight is directed at and is from Los Angeles; it is given over to calling out what in the song “California” is described as “artsy- fartsy / art that has no content” and calling for people to join Quese in “spark [ing] the movement” against gentrification, the destruction of neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and antimigration and anti- immigration sentiments and practices.47 As is true of the rest of Quese’s music, Bluelight is also from Oklahoma, for, as he announces in “Empty,” “I’m rooted deep / with deep roots.”48 With its emphasis on both the male and the female, “Red Zeppelin” makes clear the cultural ground into which Quese IMC is rooted and from which he speaks. According to Duane Champagne, southeastern Native nations such

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as the Seminoles share “a cosmological view of order in the universe”49 and recognize that if the universe’s forces are in balance, then so too will the human world be in balance.50 As a consequence, the Seminole, Creek, and other southeastern Nations value order and harmony. As Patricia Wickman writes in The Tree That Bends: Discourse, Power, and the Survival of the Mas- koki People, “all things exist in complementarity to each other, rather than in opposition. The Giver of Breath and humans, men and women, and humans and nature all function in a symbiosis.”51 “Red Zeppelin” speaks directly from this worldview when it announces that the balance of mascu- line and feminine are maintained through hip- hop.

Balance, order, and harmony can be maintained through ceremony, of course, and Quese sings in “Them Country Roads” of a ceremony DB, which is to say a ceremony downbeat, that will lead to recovery of land and renewal of tradition. In “Them Country Roads” the ceremony invoked is a sweat; in “Greencorn,” the song on Bluelight that follows Quese’s claim in “Bounce” that he “grabbed a mic and my culture,”52 Quese IMC references a specific traditional Seminole and Creek ceremony of renewal and healing. The per- sonal and the ceremonial come together in the track’s opening narrative when Quese tells the story of his great- great- grandmother, Martha Lena Chubco, who at thirteen was captured by U.S. soldiers during the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century, was made to walk to Indian Territory, and grew up to be a respected elder and healer. This is the lineage that Quese honors by singing songs that are “culture music / movement music.”53

The bridge between the story of his great- great- grandmother and Quese IMC’s music from the underground, where he and DJ Shock B are “known as the sound chiefs / culture shock / camp / please,”54 is made with a single word: “mvto.” Mixed with echo so that the second syllable stretches into the first bars of the music, the Maskoke word meaning “thank you” is an acknowledgment of connection and, potentially at least, community. It also resonates with the centrality of reciprocity in the Maskoke worldview. Wickman notes that in order to understand the importance of reciprocity to the People, one needs to recognize that there is “a reciprocal relationship of the Maskokalgi with all the other elements and forces of the universe.”55 Because medicine “serve [s] as the medium of communication and interac- tion between seen and unseen forces in the cosmos,”56 it makes sense that it is in song, itself a medium of communication and interaction, that Quese IMC gives thanks to his maternal kin and continues the cycle of healing of which his great- great- grandmother was a part.

The two “interludes” in The Betty Lena Project offering Native voices highlight how the loss of one’s language can lead to the loss of self and

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community for Native peoples. Thus, it makes sense that language and ceremony are linked in “Greencorn” when Quese tells his audience that his great- great- grandmother was a heles- hayv, a traditional medicine maker or healer, and the connection is reiterated in the following song, “Herkv, Herkv.” There, elder Houston Tiger offers a chant of peace and goodness in Maskoke prior to Quese’s painful rendering of impoverished streets and abandoned neighborhoods where children are abused and adults abuse themselves with alcohol and other drugs. Tiger’s slow chant or song con- tinues underneath Quese’s rap, suggesting that peace and goodness are the counter to the story being told. Quese announces the path to peace and balance when he says that Natives will sweat in order to never forget where they have come from and to pass on that knowledge to future generations.

In the song immediately following the first interlude, “Quese IMC,” Quese links who he is both to where he is from and to Culture Shock Camp— the latter is the name he and his brother DJ Shock B use when performing together, the title for the Oklahoma hip- hop summit the two of them held beginning in the mid- 1990s, and the name of the outreach to Native youth that they work with. In those endeavors, the brothers combine hip- hop with traditional song and prayer. One is just as likely to see and hear Pawnee and Seminole song and prayer chanted to the beat of hand drums as to see DJ Shock B creating at the turntables, Quese freestyling in the break beats, and Pawnee/Yakama artist Bunky EchoHawk creating a painting onstage. As Quese said in a September 2011 interview, Culture Shock Camp is about “organizing our community . . . [the] movement of our people, empowering our people.”57 Culture Shock Camp gives a shock to the tourists, to be sure, one that opens their eyes and minds to the creative energies and abiding concerns of Native youth.

Given Culture Shock Camp’s commitment to tradition and innovation, it is fitting that the song released as a single by Quese IMC and DJ Shock B, along with guest artist Eddika Organista, includes a recognition of the need “to create the balance.”58 This balance is only possible “Because I’m moving with the cosmos / with the message.”59 In Muskoke cosmogony, one moves with the cosmos by recognizing the reciprocal nature of the world and acting accordingly. This “enables equilibrium to be maintained.”60 The message of balance, not stasis, must reach into and inform human- to- human relations as well, for it is only in recognizing, for instance, that social power is rela- tional, that the power is conferred, and that one must wield that power in the name of and for the good of the community that the cosmos remains in balance.61

The physical and political movement that Quese IMC calls for through

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his hip- hop, then, is rooted in Pawnee and Seminole cultures. It is also pan- Indigenous and transnational. Just as he invokes sites of Indigenous activism across Native North America, so too does he turn to the voices and words of guest artists whose roots reach from, for instance, the Big Island of Hawai’i and the land south of the United States– Mexico international border. This helps to make the music a hybrid space or contact zone where sounds and words meet and mingle and are configured in the name of community and change. For example, in “Rebel Music” Quese IMC and Chicano hip- hop artist Cempoalli 20 rap about the importance of making connections over a combination of reggae rhythms and a dance track bass line:

We are building from place to place we are building from nation to nation we are building communication we are building liberation.62

Born because “we got new vision,” the call to build bridges emanates from Los Angeles, to be sure, but its claim to have “no more / mental prisons / no more / self- inflicted incisions” resonates well beyond Los Angeles as the audi- ence is encouraged to “make a change / build a bridge / fight the power / for all the kids.”63

Being aware, then, is born of the recognition of one’s cultural roots and the connections to be made both within and beyond one’s community and nation. In short, one’s being is aware, awareness is one’s being. More must be said, though, for Quese IMC strikes me as aware of the complex relationship between communication and liberation. To see this, we need to return to sampling.

In The Betty Lena Project, Quese IMC samples two very different recorded messages. The first, in “Mad,” is a message from his father. In that song and elsewhere, Quese chronicles the hard truth of his father’s struggles with alcohol, with the rage that would boil up at times when a twelve pack would not cause everything to “just fade away.”64 Alcohol contributed to his parents’ divorce and the beginnings of an alternating pattern of presence and absence as the young Marcus would spend time first at his father’s and then at his mother’s home. Quese raps about how good it is to see his father get his life back after beating the trap of alcohol, after which we hear the

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beep of an answering machine followed by his father’s voice. The second message, from “Billie Jean Left Hand,” is left on Quese’s mobile. The song opens with the voice mail system of the phone network giving the day and time, followed by Billie Jean’s message. Here, as is not the case with his father’s message in “Mad,” the sample gets sampled, as portions of the mes- sage we first hear at the beginning are repeated midway through the song.

The father’s recorded voice in “Mad” needs to be situated as part of the song’s foregrounding of and emphasis on media and recording technolo- gies. The song begins in the studio, with Quese checking the microphone and asking for more volume in his headphones. The stress on amplification gives way as the conversation continues to an explanation of the song that Quese, the producer, and the engineer are about to record. However, we only hear Quese’s side of the conversation. As such, the opening of “Mad” serves to highlight presence and absence and how technology can mediate both. The crew in the sound booth are present but, because they are silenced on the recording, they are at the same time absent. Quese’s father, on the other hand, is absent both from the point of the message— he has to leave a message because he and his son are not together at the same time and in the same place— and from its reception. Nevertheless, the technology enables him to be present even as he is absent. This, then, is the promise of record- ing technologies.

It is also the pain of recording technologies, a pain sounded with the recorded message to Quese from Billie Jean Left Hand on the day before she took her life. While Quese loops the final word in the phrase “That last mes- sage,”65 and in doing so puts a stress on the recording, the sixteen- year- old’s recorded voice echoes as a reminder that the young Standing Rock Native will be forever absent. Here loss is made meaningful, although by no means any less painful, with the sample of “We’ve Only Just Begun.” In Rhythm Science, Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, notes that the defamiliarization at the heart of the sample effectively links sampling and the uncanny: “Sound and image divorce and reconfigure before they unite in the mix. . . . The samples and fragments speak the unspoken,” speak what Freud called the uncanny.66 The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the canny, uncanny, as we try to make sense of the Carpenters’ 1970 hit in Quese’s song. It is not enough to say that the song is included for the purpose of irony. What led to Billie Jean Left Hand’s suicide calls the vision of “We’ve Only Just Begun” into question.

At some fundamental and painful level, Billie Jean Left Hand’s life was marked by a succession of beginnings that led, I think, to its ultimate end. According to Left Hand’s grandmother, Billie Jean’s legal custody changed

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120 | Chris LaLonde

approximately thirty times.67 In and out of foster homes, Left Hand often had no one to turn to, again according to her grandmother, and over time began to suffer from depression. While Karen Carpenter can croon about a wedding day marked by “white lace and promises” followed by “horizons that are new to us”68 to be shared by the couple, Billie Jean Left Hand’s life was marked by a horizon neither new nor rich with promise. Quese IMC recognizes that Billie Jean’s suicide is connected to part of the ongoing “war that has been waged upon our people for far too long.”69 His song honors Billie Jean Left Hand’s life and spirit and offers a message of strength and healing for Native youth and their parents as it makes uncanny the Car- penters’ song in order to redefine “we” with the Native and their lives at the center, redefine “only just begun” as part of a call for change and action made to Native families, and tacitly posits a new “we,” America— one not marked by social injustice, racism, discrimination, and oppression.

The reference to the national game in “That Good Medicine” from The Betty Lena Project suggests that the song would have America before the audience.

I’m a reserve observer, observing the reserve ninth inning, bases loaded, full count he’s throwing the curve. One down, let’s toss, screw it, let’s take the whole thing, take my chance on one swing, with everything I’ve got, one shot, slow motion dream, anticipation in my team.70

Like Quese, who hits the ball out of the park, “The Good Medicine” handles the curve the nation that is the United States throws with both its initial and final invocation of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang.” With the first invocation, the song indicates how the settler Nation and its ideology imprisons. Underneath the final invocation of Cooke’s song, Quese tells his audience what is at stake: “life / yeah, yeah / freedom.”71 Understood within the context of “Chain Gang” and “That Good Medicine,” “Life” resonates both as being alive and as doing time in prison. It is only through good medicine, medicine rooted in tribal culture and worldview, that freedom, and therefore life, is possible.72

With freedom comes a call to action. Quese recognizes that mass media all too often precludes action, precludes movement, singing in “I Resist”:

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An Indigenous Hip- Hop Movement | 121

we’re hungry for the knowledge because we’ve been misled misled by the media, misled by the news update, update, they want you to stay tuned propaganda on the screens but the mental breakthrough will curb the mind control that keeps you satisfi ed and glued to your couch and the screen that keeps you fat and amused.73

Music, as Quese suggests in “Reflection,” is a way back to the essence that one can have lost touch with if one is caught up in the small screens con- taining “text / messages of murder, technology, and mayhem.”74 Quese asks his listeners, “Are you good, you ready, warrior steady?” (“Reflection”) while deploying the technology of recording, of representation, and the genre of hip- hop so that he can articulate a warrior stance for himself and others. For the Maskoke people, that stance is ultimately given over to maintain- ing balance in the cosmos.75 So it is that, as we have seen, Quese raps with Fawksie One, joins with Watasun on “The Bird Song” to make a plea for the defense of the natural world, and, with Hopi rapper Casper, sings “I Resist.” There, in and through song, Quese and Casper call on the audience, Native and non- Native, to join them in resisting authority that does harm to Indigenous peoples, especially, and to the earth. It remains for us, Native and non- Native, to hear Quese IMC’s call and “stand with our drums at the protest.”76

NOTES

1. On film and the audience’s desire to see more, see, for instance, Levi, “Crevice and the Stitch,” 41– 42.

2. Quoted in Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves, 146, n. 5. 3. I follow Gerald Vizenor’s practice of italicizing indian lower case here in order

to signify the representation created and perpetuated by the dominant society. 4. Rose, Black Noise, 2. 5. Ibid., 22. 6. Taylor, “Bad World Music,” 93.

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122 | Chris LaLonde

7. Radio interview, 23 September 2011, http:// www .blogtalkradio .com / native trailblazers / 2011 / 09 / 23 / native - hip - hop - artist— quese - imc - on - native - trailblazers.

8. Interview, n.d., http:// / www .thehiphopherald .com / Interviews .php. 9. Quese IMC, “Superbrightstar,” The Betty Lena Project. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Quese IMC, “Best Times of Our Lives,” Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles. 13. Ibid. 14. Quese IMC, “House,” Bluelight. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Quese IMC, “Rebel Music,” Bluelight. 18. Quese IMC, “Empty,” The Betty Lena Project. 19. Ibid. 20. Quese IMC, “Mouse,” Bluelight. 21. Ibid. 22. Quese IMC, “The Youth Conference,” Bluelight. 23. Quese IMC, “The Bird Song,” Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles. 24. Quese IMC, “Mouse.” 25. Rose, Black Noise, 39. 26. Quese IMC, “I Am My Ancestors,” The Betty Lena Project. 27. Rose, 73. 28. Ibid., 79. 29. Sinnreich, Mashed Up, 126, 127. 30. Quoted in ibid., 185. 31. Quese IMC, “Micco Rebels from the Sun” (single). 32. Carrie Sheffield’s 2011 essay on Native hip- hop artists rightly recognizes that

hip- hop can be an effective way to address historical trauma and the cycles of abuse it engenders while reaching a youthful, Native audience. However, Shef- field’s argument is limited to the extent that it does not attend fully to rap as a genre; nor does it make any reference to cultural specificity in its examina- tion of two Native hip- hop artists. Thus, while she writes that both Maniac: the Siouxpernatural and Night Shade sing of “the contemporary impact of historical trauma [that] can be seen wherever they look on their reservations. Poverty, gang warfare, and substance abuse plague the reservations in their songs” (Sheffield, “Native American Hip- Hop,” 104), Sheffield neither identi- fies the reservations nor the artists’ tribal affiliations. Therefore, both historical particularity and, crucially, specific Native worldview(s) and paths toward heal- ing remain unarticulated. See Sheffield, “Native American Hip- Hop.”

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An Indigenous Hip- Hop Movement | 123

33. Quese IMC, “Hey Young World,” The Betty Lena Project. 34. Quese IMC, “Oklahoma,” The Betty Lena Project. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Quese IMC, “Them Country Roads,” The Betty Lena Project. 39. Quese IMC, “Red Zeppelin,” Bluelight. 40. Led Zeppelin, “What Is and What Should Never Be,” Led Zeppelin II, 1969. 41. Xzibit, “Concentrate,” Full Circle, 2006. 42. Esaki, “Desperately Seeking Silence,” 383. 43. Xzibit, “Concentrate.” 44. Ibid. 45. Quese IMC, “Red Zeppelin.” 46. Ibid. 47. Quese IMC, “California,” Bluelight. 48. Quese IMC, 49. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 21. 50. Ibid., 22. 51. Wickman, The Tree That Bends, 47. 52. Quese IMC, “Bounce.” 53. Quese IMC, “Greencorn,” Bluelight, 2008. 54. Ibid. 55. Wickman, The Tree That Bends, 46. 56. Ibid. 57. Radio interview, 23 September 2011, http:// www .blogtalkradio .com / nativetrail

blazers / 2011 / 09 / 23 / native - hip - hop - artist— quese - imc - on - native - trailblazers. 58. Culture Shock Camp with Eddika Organista, “What Is Freedom if We Die?”

(single). 59. Ibid. 60. Wickman, The Tree That Bends, 47. 61. Ibid., 66. 62. Quese IMC, “Rebel Music.” 63. Ibid. 64. Quese IMC, “Mad,” The Betty Lena Project. 65. Quese IMC, “Billie Jean Left Hand,” The Betty Lena Project. 66. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid / Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science, 25, 28. 67. “Cheyenne River Sioux Working to Curb Teen Suicides,” 2002, http:// www

.indiancountrynews .info / fullstory .cfm - ID = 236 .htm. 68. The Carpenters, “We’ve Only Just Begun,” Close to You, 1970.

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124 | Chris LaLonde

69. Interview, Native Men’s Magazine, n.d., http:// www .nativemenmag .com / quese .html.

70. Quese IMC, “That Good Medicine,” The Betty Lena Project. 71. Ibid. 72. One can compare “That Good Medicine” with Tracie Morris’s “Chain Gang”

in terms of each song’s deconstructive impulse. In Morris’s words, “Chain Gang” and some of her other sound poems “usually have a cultural resonance that gives them more currency, more value than the literal meaning as well as a physical premise. I didn’t reference the songwriters . . . because I think it’s the deconstruction of the version as sung, the particular sound of them even more than the text (in terms of visceral recognition) that determines their value” (Morris, “Poetic Statement,” 212). While Quese produces a supple- ment to “Chain Gang” with his counterpoint to the chorus, Morris opens up that chorus in order to emphasize work, the physicality of labor, and the cultural and historical reality of imprisonment for African Americans. In the words of Christine Hume, “Morris radically unhinges the original,” “sum- mons the restiveness and physical toil embedded in Cooke’s refrain . . . and adrenalizes it to signify alienation, exhausted patience, anger, and threat” (Hume, “Improvisational Insurrection,” 230). Both Morris and Quese IMC, then, take a part in order to take apart the song in the name of liberation. See Hume, “Improvisational Insurrection.”

73. Quese IMC, “I Resist,” Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles. 74. Quese IMC, “Reflection,” Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles. 75. Wickman, The Tree That Bends, 95– 96. 76. Quese IMC, “I Resist.”

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