I was fortunate to grow up with having an abundance of people in my cultural bubble who could tap into what my interests were. I mean, I don't know if I would call it that. More of seeking the right audience for your interests.
ABLE LIFE WALKER PARTS MOVIE
Watching a movie is a more communal experience, but is there code switching that goes on there too?
In one of the chapters of The Little Devil in America, you write about the massive diversity among Black music listeners and the kind of code switching you would do on the school bus-how you could produce a tape from your stash depending on the kinds of listeners you would encounter, whether you were sitting next to a goth or a hip hop fan.
ABLE LIFE WALKER PARTS SERIES
It’s been a two year process. Pablo and I had met on a judging panel for something in 2020. He reached out shortly thereafter to see if I wanted to do something with the Walker, but it was a very vague ask. We landed on the film series because one, I wanted to have something that could run through few different months or at least a couple of months, something that people could come to and return to. And two, I was in the midst of this ongoing obsession with performance and the way that was routing itself in the moment was through the Black film soundtrack. That was a really useful starting point to kind of think through these films which had music that played a central role in them. Once I found that thread through which I could make this series, it was kind of easy. How long did it take you to put this list together? How did the initial conversation with the Walker about doing this begin?
He'll be introducing The Five Heartbeats tonight at 7 p.m., and he told me he’s going to try to get back to the Walker for Dead Presidents in August, before inevitably returning to Minneapolis sometime during the upcoming Wolves season. I was excited to talk to him about this film series, but what I really wanted to ask him was, how did a genius poet from Columbus, Ohio become a die hard Timberwolves fan? He was kind of enough to indulge all of my questions. He’s an important thinker, and he’s been recognized for this both commercially, as a New York Times bestseller for Go Ahead in the Rain, and as a 2021 recipient of a prestigious MacArthur “genius grant.” He’s going to be in town tonight for the first film in the series, Robert Townsend’s 1991 cinematic roman à clef about Motown, The Five Heartbeats.Ībdurraqib’s last two books, 2019’s exegesis on A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain, and his 2021 essay collection A Little Devil in America have both examined Black performance, particularly music and dance, in the context of American history. The Walker has tapped poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib to curate a film series he’s calling Hanif Abdurraqib’s Black VHS Experience.
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