The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 19

About a week or so ago, maybe a bit more, I read a story online. Best twenty prince songs. Y’all know how I feel about Prince. Imagine how I felt when I saw this (ranked) list:

• 20. Sign O the Times

  19. Alphabet Street

  18. Get Off

  17. 7

  16. Adore

  15. Nothing Compares 2 U

  14. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World

  13. Call My Name

  12. Batdance

  11. 1999

  10. I Wanna Be Your Lover

  9. U Got the Look

  8. Cream

  7. Let’s Go Crazy

  6. Diamonds and Pearls

  5. Little Red Corvette

  4. Raspberry Beret

  3. Kiss

  2. When Doves Cry

  1. Purple Rain

This list (and I’m not linking the original story on purpose) is trash.

Trash I tell you.

Trash.

So after one of my folk asked me on FB what my list was, I did the following:

I asked people to come up with their own.

About twenty or so took me up the suggestion. There’s some overlap in the resulting lists—a lot of the GenX folk stuck to the first 2/3rds of his career. But all of our lists are better than the trash list above. “Batdance?” Now if I did the list again, some of the tracks would stay the same. I can count maybe 15 that would stick. But the rest would fluctuate. I’d make room for Another Lonely Christmas for example, and Prince’s contribution to Live Aid (4 The Tears in Your Eyes), but I don’t know what I’d delete. 

You should try it. Don’t think too hard about it—you’ll get caught up by the fact that Prince inhaled and exhaled in musical notation. Just list songs as they come to mind. If you get stuck on one album—truth be told I could come up with a top twenty from Controvery, 1999, and Purple Rain alone—just choose one or two and move on. 

I bet your list won’t be trash either. 

…..

There’s a graffiti alley in Baltimore that’s been around just about as long as I have. I drive by it a few times a week, and while I can’t really see into the alley, there’s a portion on N. Howard off of North that I can really keep track of—seeing what comes and what goes. When Nipsey Hustle was murdered for example, someone created a beautiful garage door sized portrait that I thought would last, until one day I drove by and it was gone. When Lamar Jackson became one of the best two or three quarterbacks in the league, someone created a slightly larger than life above the waist portrait, with Jackson waving to passers by above all of the other pieces. 

I drove by two days ago…and this is what I saw:

It’s Sunday, and I’d originally planned to take the day off. But I realized that everyday I didn’t shoot this increased the odds that someone would come and tag over it. So I came down to NomüNomü as quick as I could. This is the most radical shift in this section of the wall I’d ever seen at once. Took my breath away.

To give you a sense of how drastic and large this is, I was able to zfind a picture from 5 years ago featuring the Nipsey Hustle piece, which fits in the door now covered by most of the “R” above.

I happened to get the shot just in time to get info about the person who’d passed away. Cypress was a longtime Baltimore graffiti artist, who’d just moved to Pittsburgh. He would tag as “Barks.” No one knows who did it—I’d imagine it had to have happened somewhere between 3 and 4am. 

We take a certain type of stasis for granted, when the reality is much more complicated. Change is always bubbling just beneath the surface, until the moment it comes up for air.

…..

I noted in one of the last two issues that this season is one of transition. Four or so years ago I began to think about how to segue into this stage of life a bit differently. I committed to taking on projects that would hold my interest, that would be just outside of my capacity to execute, would build on the work I’ve already done, and would open possibilities for myself and others. Finally, they would have to be projects that would take no more than four or five years to complete. I know myself enough to know that I do have the capacity to work on projects for longer than four or five years—like this third book!—but I am also familiar enough with the aging process to know that even though my sixty isn’t likely to be the normal sixty, my sixty isn’t going to be my 50 or 40. 

The major projects I worked on have been the Sawyer Seminar, of which the Looking Rights exhibition is a part…the Racism in Political Science project, of which the Hopkins Racial Politics Summer School is a part…and then the governance work I’ve done at Hopkins. When the Sawyer Seminar ends this Thursday with the conclusion of Looking Rights, I’ll have concluded all of them. Not the way I’d conceived of them, but in a way that can lead to future work. We haven’t even begun to think about spin-offs from the Sawyer Seminar project but they’re there. I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked, given my photography, about my own show…but I now can see how that would work. 

The next four or five years aren’t crystal clear now, but I have enough faith in what I’ve done to know that the projects that will emerge will come soon enough. But while those projects percolate, I have a chance to finish my writing. I’ve reached a point where I know what books I want to have completed when everything is said and done. If I’m lucky I can do more than that, but I know I don’t want to do less than that. With all of this done, with no more meetings to coordinate for a while, I can get to them. I figure two more stages, and it’s a wrap in one way or another.

If you’re around by any chance we’re having a party commemorating not just the last day of the show, but the last event of this stage. Thursday evening at 709 N. Howard. From about 6pm until I don’t feel like playing music anymore. Many of you have been on this journey with me. Come celebrate with me.