THEO CROKER FEAT CHRONIXX: ‘UNDERSTAND YOURSELF’
"Understand Yourself" a music film exploring the science fiction novel Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler that details a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control through movement. Premiering now at 4:3 Boiler Room TV @fourthree.boilerroom.tv
In a future where communication is primarily nonverbally, movement is the medium and the message. ‘Understand Yourself,’ a new music film by Theo Croker and Chronixx, from Croker’s latest album Star People Nation, creatively reworks ideas that groundbreaking African American science fiction author Octavia Butler first introduced in her novel ‘Patternmaster,’ the first book from Butler’s provocative Patternist series.
In this music film, the collaborative partnership between Croker and Chronixx provides the occasion by which viewers are transported to another world, another order of reality. Croker’s trumpet erupts without warning only to retreat into the background after providing listeners with soulfully infused, sonic instructions for living. With lyrics like “up you mighty people, which point towards a “United States of Africa,” Croker enlist early 20th century black nationalism, particularly the philosophies and opinions of Marcus Mosish Garvey, the Jamaican-born leader and
founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), to conjure up a Pan- African vision of the future. However, if you’re not paying close attention, you run the risk of missing out on how Croker’s musical embrace of black nationalist ideals like unity and self-determination stretches and extends them in new directions, journeying beyond prescribed limitations to radically new experiences. Nowhere is
this point made clearer than the visuals that accompany Croker’s new song.
Directed by Kordae Jatafa Henry, “Understand Yourself,” which is itself a
reworking of a popular Garvey expression (“Educate Yourself”), is indebted to the life and work of celebrated author Octavia E. Butler. By moving creatively between Garvey and Butler, self-understanding becomes the subject and eventual pathway to freedom. With Henry at the helm, we find a raw constellation of bodies communicating telepathically through corporeal movements across vast and seemingly unfamiliar landscapes. Here, Butler’s ideas about shared collective identity and systems of control find a powerfully evocative visual compliment. This
beautifully choreographed story expresses themes as vast and universal as self- discovery and sacrifice but it does so without compromising its specificity to the inner lives of black people. If jazz is dead, it only temporarily died in order to “rise from its own ashes” and be born anew. For as Amiri Baraka reminds us, black music and the social conditions that structure our lives are interrelated. Which is to say, one can’t discuss black music without thinking about how the sounds and images that musicians like Croker and artist like Henry produce derive their power and potency through their relation to the lives of black people. This too, is another form of nonverbal communication.
So in a strange way, Butler’s future is already present.
-Written by Darol Olu Kae