Splendor and Misery takes place on a starship whose “cargo” consists of slaves. These prisoners have been “selected for their strength”; this probably means that they are destined to serve as cannon fodder in a war zone. But before any destination is reached, the prisoners rebel against their servitude. Almost all of them are killed in the course of the uprising, together with “the crew and other passengers.” It seems that the starship’s AI is to blame for these deaths; fearing “a total loss of control,” it causes sedatives and poisons to be “pumped through all the vents” of the ship.
However, one of the slaves survives the massacre. He succeeds in escaping confinement, commandeering the ship, and “setting a new course.” Significantly, we never learn this survivor’s name; he is referred to only by his slave classification, Cargo number 2331. No matter how far he goes, we are told, “he is still a runaway slave and so lonely.” His “gift of freedom” is only a negative one: a freedom from, but not a freedom to. The only thing he can do is continue to run away; he cannot help being “paranoia prone,” for “he knows they’re coming for him” no matter what. He has “no destination” for his flight, and no companions to share it with; in such circumstances, “his survival is paramount, there is no other objective.”
The album’s scenario designedly recalls the historical Middle Passage, when kidnapped Africans were transported by ships across the Atlantic, in order to be sold as slaves in the New World. Today, the Middle Passage functions as a crucial point of reference for Afrofuturist efforts both to understand the actual history of Black oppression, and to imagine alternative histories and futures that would be free from this oppression. What would it mean to be abducted by cruel, strange-looking aliens, who showed no mercy or empathy, but who overwhelmed you with their powerful military and carceral technology, dragged you away from your home, and put you to work in a hellish new world? It sounds like a science fiction scenario, but it actually happened: as Kodwo Eshun puts it, “slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction” (Eshun 2003). Chattel slavery in the New World was no aberration; we can no longer ignore its central role in establishing capitalist modernity as we know today (see, e.g., Beckert and Rockman 2016).
Eshun further reminds us that those kidnapped and enslaved Africans were the first moderns: the first people to experience the
real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern … Slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction … Afrofuturism therefore stages a series of enigmatic returns to the constitutive trauma of slavery in the light of science fiction.
(Eshun 2003)
In this way, Splendor and Misery returns to the scene of the Middle Passage, and also to the long (and often suppressed) history of slave rebellions in the New World. The album fabulates an alternative future history by extrapolating from actual past traumas. When Afrofuturism takes up past events, projecting them into the far future, it revises and replays those events, in order to give them different – and less dire – outcomes. The Black Quantum Futurist movement today envisions “creative futures” as a way to “reach back to redefine the present and the past” (Phillips 2015). This is the utopian, liberatory side of Afrofuturism. At the same time, however, Afrofuturist speculation forcibly reminds us how deeply this history of oppression still weighs upon the world today. The United States of America has never made reparations for the slavery and genocide that were instrumental to its founding, and that still lie at the roots of its prosperity. The traumatic events of the past are not dead and buried; rather, they continue to shape the actualities of the present, and to infect our visions of the future. This is the dystopian side of Afrofuturism, resonating with the philosophical project of Afro-pessimism (cf. racked & dispatched 2017). Splendor and Misery partakes of both these tendencies. Cargo number 2331 frees himself from bondage; but he is still marked as a fugitive, and he is unable to create a new life elsewhere.
The way into Splendor and Misery is through its aggressively disruptive soundscape. Most of the album is dissonant and noisy. Hutson and Snipes’ electronically generated soundtrack includes melodies and beats such as we would expect from a hip hop album; but it also features nerve-racking low-frequency drones, together with static, distortion, feedback, and other sorts of unpitched sound. This noise sometimes works, in traditional musical ways, to accompany, and emotionally inflect, the album’s rapping and singing. But just as often, the noise interferes with the vocals: it plays over the words and threatens to drown them out.
We can hear this right at the start of Splendor and Misery. On the opening track, “Long Way Away (Intro),” the performance artist Paul Outlaw sings a plaintive verse that introduces the themes of the entire album:
I’ll follow the stars when the sun goes to bed
Till everything I’ve ever known is long dead
I can’t go back home ’cause I want to be free
Someone tell the others what’s become of me.
I am quoting the lyrics here as if they were clearly audible; but in fact, they are difficult to distinguish. Outlaw’s voice is electronically altered; it is so distorted that it sounds as if he were singing from inside a closet, or through a low-fidelity megaphone. And his words are smothered by a wall of sound, consisting of static together with a rumbling drone that suggests the roar of airplane engines (or perhaps I should rather say, in this context, the roar of starship engines). We are barely able to extract the signal from the noise; the message seems to have been broadcast from a great distance, and under conditions of duress. This tells us that the starship is indeed, as the track’s title suggests, “a long way away,” lost in the vast emptiness of interstellar space.
Outlaw’s opening song-fragment is reprised a number of times in the course of the album. We hear it at the end of the fifth track, “Wake Up,” leading into the sixth track’s full-length choral version of “Long Way Away.” A few tracks later, the haunting melody is repeated again, without the lyrics, in “Long Way Away (Instrumental).” And we hear the fragment one last time, with slightly different lyrics, at the start of the final track, “A Better Place.” Each time, we are reminded that home, companionship, and redemption are not available to Cargo number 2331 any longer.
What is it really like to be a long way away, to be permanently exiled from home? This is the emotional and conceptual focus of the album. Cargo number 2331 “dare not stay long” in any one location, for fear of capture. In our relativistic universe, distances in space are also passages of time. If you travel at close to the speed of light, what might seem to you like a short interval of time corresponds to an immense duration for the people you left behind. A near-light-speed voyage, like the one recounted in Splendor and Misery, is therefore also a kind of time travel. But this traversal of time goes only in one direction: it hurls you irreversibly into the far future. The “ship’s clocks count millennia,” we are told, as it presses its “course relentlessly forward.” Even if you were able to return to your spatial starting point after such a voyage, so much time would have passed that everyone and everything you knew from before your departure would be long gone. This dislocation of time and space is the objective correlative of Cargo number 2331’s existential sense of exile.
The speaker of “Long Way Away (Introduction)” laments that “everything I’ve ever known is long dead.” He “can’t go back” to a home that has been destroyed. The price of freedom is eternal exile and eternal solitude. The only escape from slavery is into a far future when it no longer exists – in part because, by that time, human society itself might well no longer exist. Splendor and Misery recounts, almost in spite of itself, a mad flight, a vast displacement, an irreversible journey away from any point of origin and from any form of community. This is not an exciting nomadic adventure, but a harsh necessity. Unable to return, the speaker begs us, out of his nearly inc
omprehensible displacement in space and time, to at least preserve his memory, and to connect him, at least notionally, with other people: “tell the others what’s become of me.” In effect, this desperate request sets out the task that the album as a whole seeks to accomplish.
Musical performance is usually thought to heighten our sense of the present moment: it unfolds as an extended duration, during which musicians and listeners alike are enveloped in the same atmosphere of sound. This is all the more so with music organized around rhythmic call and response, as in the African-American tradition. The modern technologies of broadcasting and recording detach the musical performance from its point of origin; but this is often said to extend the musical sense of heightened presence. Broadcast allows for sonic events to be received all over the world in real time; recording allows the sound to resonate with full effect in other places and at other times.
But Splendor and Misery undermines this common presumption of sonic presence and simultaneity. It proposes a more alienated, or deconstructive, understanding of sound. Throughout the album, we are reminded of the gap between broadcast and reception, not to mention the loss of fidelity in the process of reproduction. There is no hope of call and response when the singer is isolated, and the sonic event is stretched out and dispersed. Cargo number 2331 desperately cries out for some sort of solidarity:
So drop the message …
Get at me, my brothers, my sisters, get at me
Where are you? (Interlude 03 – Freestyle)
But he gets no answer to his call. There is no community out in the reaches of deep space; and hence no reciprocity or response. The atmosphere of noise and interference corresponds to a blockage on the level of narrative. As Nadine Knight observes, this is quite different from what happens in earlier, more optimistic, Afrofuturist works. Splendor and Misery is quite bleak; it “cannot imagine a world where the slave family can escape as a unit, where a home can be made among the emancipated” (Knight 2018).
At one point, the album drops a poignant memory of life before abduction and enslavement:
Happiness is waiting at your door
In a sleek black dress and a kiss that says “hello”
And a thick black mess and a mom that says “don’t go.”
But the point of this reminiscence is that it presents a past that cannot be recovered. Cargo number 2331 did go away, for whatever (voluntary or involuntary) reasons. And now there is no way for him to return.
The album makes us hear, as it were, the very distance – and especially the time delay – separating the emission of the sounds from their reception. As Daveed Diggs raps at one point, “what if everything was at the wrong time?” The album ponders this question throughout. We might say that Cargo number 2331’s rebellion unavoidably happens at the wrong time: rather than being a historical event, it is only possible as a disruption of the (linear, progressive) order of history. Lacking a collective dimension, it cannot create a new reality, one that would have ongoing historical consequences. This slave rebellion is only a gap in the record. No matter what Cargo number 2331 does, “time will not afford him/Any cover, any pardon.” The narrative cannot be brought to any satisfying conclusion. We have no direct, real-time access to the album’s science fiction story; we can only experience it in delayed and distorted fragments. The album presents itself to us as a hazardous, incomplete, long-distance, time-lagged, and one-way-only transmission.
Traditional communication theory is all about decoding transmissions; that is to say, “reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point” (Shannon 1949). The aim is to extract a meaningful signal, isolating it from the background noise that accompanies, surrounds, and obscures it. Splendor and Misery plays with, and reminds us of, this process. There are several ciphers embedded in the album. The track “Interlude 02 (Numbers)” consists entirely of a distorted voice, almost drowned out by static, delivering a coded message in the NATO phonetic alphabet, where each word stands for a letter: “Foxtrot, Uniform, Whiskey, Romeo,/Whiskey, Charlie, Oscar, X-Ray,” and so on. The sequence spelled out here is not in itself intelligible; apparently, it is a Vigenère cipher, the key to which is given in “Air ’Em Out.” That track, in turn, also features clicks that give a message in ASCII code. There is also a sequence of Morse code dots and dashes embedded in the noisy background of “True Believer.” And the final track on the album, “A Better Place,” gives us some cryptic numerical coordinates. Online commentators have cracked all these ciphers, though the results are not tremendously informative (Kupermintz 2016; u/opheres 2018; afloweroutofstone 2019).
Despite the existence of these particular ciphers, however, we cannot find a clear message in Splendor and Misery by simply extracting the signal from the noise, or by isolating the lyrics from the rest of the sounds. As Diggs raps at one point, “the life binary in Morse code/Ain’t really a life, right?” There is no way of reducing the album to information or code, no way of separating its ideas from its emotional atmosphere of distress and confusion. The album does not have a core message content that could somehow be extracted from the noise, and reproduced “either exactly or approximately” at another location and in another time. For dislocations of time and space are necessarily inscribed within it. We must grasp the album as transmission, by attending as much to the noise itself, and to the time lag that it implies, as to the angry and melancholy lyrics. Splendor and Misery in effect dramatizes a point made by the philosopher Michel Serres. All messages are accompanied by static and interference, Serres tells us, and the process of understanding them is therefore recursive and interminable. The noisy interruption becomes a crucial component of the very signal that it interrupts. The message can only be understood when we include the difficulties and even the outright failures of its reception (Serres 1982).
In fact, the mere presence of ciphers at various points in the album is more important than the particular messages they convey. Daveed Diggs says in an interview that “slave spirituals” in the antebellum South often contained “coded messages about how to get north.” But he immediately adds that, on a deeper level, “the philosophy behind them was about transcending place. They were about home actually being in the unknown” (White 2016; cited in afloweroutofstone 2019). The encrypted songs in Splendor and Misery, like those in slave times, point to a metaphysical longing for home – something that goes well beyond the codes’ actual messages. How do you find your home when it is unknown, or long lost, and when the place you actually inhabit is a site of captivity?
Diggs’ reference to slave spirituals also helps to explain why the album is punctuated, on several tracks, with singing by the male a cappella gospel group Take 6. Their sweet, melancholy harmonies, and even their lyrics, are designedly reminiscent of old slave spirituals. Take 6’s vocals thus cut against the grain of the album’s otherwise ubiquitous noise and dissonance. Sometimes, as in “True Believer,” these voices sing a yearning chorus about “going home” against a continuing background of static. But on other tracks – “Long Way Away” and “Story 5” – their singing is unaccompanied by noise or instruments; as Ruben Ferdinand puts it, this singing is “pristine, perfect in dreamlike vividity” (Ferdinand 2016). “Long Way Away” is mournful but accepting; it reminds us that “there’s no use in crying/No reason to wait.” But it also pointedly asks us to “pray that your children/Do not sing this song.” The cycle threatens to continue, repeating itself from out of the past, and into the far future.
“Story 5” stands out among the tracks sung by Take 6, because it is the only song on the album that neither forms part of the far future story, nor simply recalls the past of slavery. Rather, despite its elegiac tone, it seems to be set in the present moment. The song tells us about an empathetic woman named Grace, loved by everyone around her, who is apparently murdered when she attempts to expose malfeasance at the factory where she works. This melodious track also expresses a yearning for home that is unfulfilled: the ve
rses recount her gory death (“severed limbs and blood”), while the chorus asks, “Oh Grace, won’t you come back home?” “Story 5” thus combines the past of slavery (in its melody and general feel) with the present of continuing oppression (in its narrative content), posing both in implicit relation to the album’s projected future. Take 6’s a cappella singing evokes a sense of sentimental loss that feels quite different from – but that is strictly correlative to – the harsh alienation expressed through the album’s noise.
In counterpoint to this static that interferes with communication – what we might call the album’s negative noise – Splendor and Misery also offers us a lot of positive noise: bangs, clicks, burbles, groans, and other such sounds, as well as the frequent rumbling drones. As the album’s Bandcamp statement says, there is “music in the ship’s shuddering hull and chirping instrument panels,” with “rhythms produced by its engines and machinery.” These electronic sounds create “an imaginary sonic map of the ship’s decks, hallways, and quarters.” The starship’s creaks and rustlings give us a powerful sense of place, and of materiality. The ship’s massive sonic presence is both bountiful and precarious. The sound reminds us of how zealously it protects Cargo number 2331, both from the vacuum, silence, and extreme cold just beyond its thin walls, and from the other vessels pursuing him. Yet this busy noise also suggests that the machinery is not quite running smoothly, and that it may even be on the verge of breaking down. We are all too aware that the starship is pushing things to the limit, as “the navigations are failing, having traveled further than before.” In any case, hearing what one track calls “the echoes of the bowels of this floating metal hull” is crucial to our grasp of the story.
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