Black American music has a long tradition of keeping hope alive. W.E.B. Du Bois highlighted the importance of the “sorrow song”—the “rhythmic cry of the slave”—in chapter XIV of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”
Du Bois found an importance in Black music, and particularly sorrow songs, because:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?
While Du Bois offered these reflections more than a century ago, they ring true over the course of the last century-plus of Black music. In what follows, I will offer a reflection on the type of hope that Black music helps us to experience. I will first try to develop an understanding of Black music in terms of the existential theme of blue note hope. I’ll then discuss The Forever Story, the most recent album from hip-hop artist JID, as offering rich examples of blue note hope.
Blue Note Hope
As we see in Du Bois’s analysis of sorrow songs, the type of hope offered by Black music should be distinguished from what might be termed optimistic hope. The hope involved in sorrow songs doesn’t evince an optimism about what circumstances are soon to come. Rather, convey a hope resting on the idea that at some point, somewhere—in this existential plane or the next—justice will exist for Black people. It is this latter kind of hope I will term blue note hope.
Many have written, challenged, and troubled the notion of the blue note, but what most agree upon is that the blue note is inextricable from the backdrop of the Black living, dying, and death from which it is born. While the concept has been applied broadly across various disciplines like musicology, performance & media studies, homiletics, and aesthetics, sonically, the blue note is often associated with the intentional bending of a major third toward a minor third (or vice versa). What results aesthetically from this intentional alteration of the blue note that sounds and feels off-key.
In terms of its historical development, Sylvianne Diouf has persuasively argued for the importance of Muslim sonic influences on the tradition later characterized as the blues. Through a juxtaposition of early recordings of freedman spirituals like the “Levee Camp Holler” to the Muslim adhan (call to prayer), Diouf conjures the image of exploited farmhands calling out to Allah for the fortitude to enunciate traditions of Black Muslim-ness that could traverse the horrors of the southern plantation. Through these means, enslaved Africans produced creolized music and spiritual life prolonged through (oral) musical traditions.
The existential dimensions of the blue note speak to why it has been musicologically relevant to Black communities and musical traditions well beyond Black Muslim ones. In the “off-key” blue note space between the major and minor chords, the participant is forced to encounter the notion of a radically contingent space of being “out of tune.” This contingency mirrors the Black experience of an anti-Black world in which we find ourselves staring in the face of and occupying a temporally, emotionally, and spiritually liminal space between, on the one hand, the fleeting joy and catharsis of now and, on the other hand, the impending melancholy of return to the death-dealing world once the song ends and the lights go out. The dissonance of the space where the blue note resides offers a restorative and transformative sense. This sense creates the possibility for the experiencer to be free to just be.
The dissonance of the blue note is a dignified assertion of subjectivity against the objectifying anti-Black world from which the blues speaks. As a genre, the blues allow for participants to make meaning. As Lewis Gordon writes in Fear of Black Consciousness, “Blues music and lyrics address dissonance and responsibility and let forth a wail in which the blues poets and singers cry, despite it all, that their lives matter” (195). Further clarifying the relationship between the blue note and the existential freedom it signifies, Gordon notes elsewhere:
What many musical artists from the blues to jazz to R & B to hip- hop know is that the ultimate goal of musical performance is to make music. All “out of tune” means is “tuned to a different frequency.” …[T]he ability to express music in different ways is a manifestation of freedom and also a metacritical reflection on what constitutes music. Its implications for other forms of human practice—such as building and governing social institutions—are similar. What ultimately is the point of calling for democracy if we cling to models that don’t groove—that is, don’t exemplify the people’s living engagement, participation, and responsibility for institutions of power and their creative transformation?
These aspects of the blue note help us understand the distinctive form of blue note hope I suggest is characteristic of Black music. Blue note hope is existential: it concerns how people living in the now relate to an existence that will endure beyond now and which is meaningfully linked to times preceding now. Blue note hope relates to this existence through an emphasis on contingency. It is a hope that is necessarily uncertain; it must leave room for unforeseen and unforeseeable possibilities. Rather than conceptualizing hope as a properly closed thing, blue note hope is an actional praxis, a perpetual practice of critically reflecting on action. Although it is oriented toward the goal of Black liberation, it isn’t a narrowly teleological practice that privileges a specific future. Instead, it dialectically leaves room for limitless possibility and pragmatically strategizes tactical actions to take toward particular outcomes (however seemingly unlikely; e.g. abolition).
Such uncertainty renders hope as a sort of “discipline,” a praxis which, as Mariame Kaba notes, sustains and renews a recognition of contingency, of a sense “that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change… in any direction, good or bad” (xxv). Kaba recognizes that while striving toward this future that doesn’t yet exist, we will undoubtedly make mistakes. Nonetheless, we can’t let the likelihood of such mistakes or a fear of tomorrow prevent us from taking revolutionary action today. Kaba learned the “idea of hope being a discipline… from a nun… who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world” (26). Unlike the escapism and utopic imaginary that are often associated with “hope,” the kind referred to by the nun “was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced it all the time.” Kaba began to incorporate this existential praxis “as a philosophy of living [in which] hope is a discipline… that we have to practice… every single day” (27).
Cornel West’s notion of hope echoes this view. Considering himself a “prisoner of hope,” through a synthesis of influences like James Cone, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov, West applies an existential lens to distinguish hope from optimism, pointing out:
This hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good. The dominant tendencies of our day are unregulated global capitalism, racial balkanization, social breakdown, and individual depression. Hope enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequality, group xenophobia, and personal despair. Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane—and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair yet never to allow despair to have the last word.
Thus, while blue note hope faces an open future, it also necessarily involves a militant rejection of the status quo. It is a hope that surveys the evidence in front of us, and despite the bleakness of the reality it encounters, seeks to survive and enact some sort of material change in the lives of Black people. This sort of hope was practiced by Frantz Fanon in resigning from his French-colonial appointed position as medical director at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria. After laying out his grievances at the “systematic dehumanization” of French colonialism and its refusal to recognize the Algerian “fundamental demand for dignity,” Fanon concluded that “For long months, my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And their conclusion is the will not to lose hope in man, that is to say in myself…” Fanon resolved “not to bear a responsibility, at whatever cost, on the false pretext that nothing else is to be done.”
This rejection of the status quo is linked to blue note hope rootedness in the love of Black people. Music, especially Black music, has always existed in relationship to social movements and provides an effective vehicle to inspire blue note hope amongst the masses, as West reflects:
John Coltrane taught us that all music is a form of prayer because music is fundamentally a matter of trying to transfigure suffering and our pain into a sound that can allow us not just to survive but to thrive… [M]odern music is always a matter of speaking to the soul… ennobling fighters… to tell the truth and be true to all of the love that’s gone into the making and shaping of them. That is what Black music, at its best, is all about; a form of spiritual weaponry of love for a people hated.
JID and The Forever Story
Destin Route, popularly known as JID, rose to prominence through Spillage Village, a Southern music collective of artists like EarthGang, 6lack, Mereba, and others before being signed to J Cole’s label, Dreamville Records, in 2017. Throughout his work, JID demonstrates a genre-bending and diverse curation of both lyrical precision and flow accompanied with a fidelity to the art of storytelling central to the genre of hip-hop.
JID’s first studio album, The Never Story, is a tale of navigating worlds of Black masculinity, poverty, and vulnerability. TNS carefully and gently explores interpersonal conflict and camaraderie, imagination & possibility, and becoming, while challenging the replication of generational harms generated from modeled behaviors. JID would later reflect that he wrote “NEVER,” the single from which the album takes its name, “at a point in [his] life when [he] had nothing and when my future seemed uncertain.”
As the proclaimed sequel to The Never Story, JID’s highly anticipated third solo studio album, The Forever Story (2022), can be read an extension of the thematic engagements of his debut album from a more mature perspective five years later. Where JID had once “never been shit, never had shit, never knew shit, never out, never do shit,” nowadays, facing mainstream recognition and budding stardom, he can offer blue note retrospection: “Lucky me, I was just a poor ass nigga, before I turned into a poet.” Everything has changed and nothing is the same, but at the same time, nothing has changed and everything is still the same; the age-old white supremacy/capitalism blues remain. Forever serves as the analytic that the emcee uses to celebrate and centralize the importance of family and responsibility in his ethical conceptualization and existential practice of [building] legacy.
This is very evident in a recent interview promoting The Forever Story. The interview covers many topics one might expect: JID and interviewer Ebro Darden discuss JID’s fidelity to Atlanta, JID’s reverence for hip-hop culture and collaboration with esteemed emcees such as Lil’ Wayne and Yasiin Bey, and the importance of creating art across genres and generations as reflected in JID’s work with artists like James Blake, Raven Lenae, and Thundercat. But the interview is conducted on land JID had recently purchased for his family, the importance of which to JID makes promoting the new album pale in comparison. The centrality of family to JID dominates throughout and then takes over entirely in the second half of the interview, which Darden conducts with the Route family, with JID only occasionally chiming in.
Throughout the interview, JID forefronts the issue of “trying to add to the legacy of my family,” characterizes purchasing the land and building his family’s legacy out as necessary for the process of “stepping into who I am.” This dynamic JID ties to the movement from The Never Story’s feeling of coming from nothing to The Forever Story’s hope of producing a lasting, meaningful legacy. This sense of family legacy, the interview reveals, is reflected not only in the themes of the record but directly in the music itself. The wailing at the beginning of “Kody Blu 31,” for instance, was a recording of his family mourning the passing of his grandmother at her homegoing service. To drive the point home (pun intended), the official music video for “Kody Blu 31” features mostly one-take cinematography trailing JID carrying a “For Sale” sign through the new family property as they celebrate with spades and a bar-b-que.
This sense of family and the blue note hope it reflects is not merely present in the backstory behind The Forever Story but is a prevailing theme in the music and lyrics themselves. The first half of the album has strong Southern hip-hop roots and a Trap feel with tracks like “Raydar” and “Crack Sandwich,” the latter of which tells the story of when his whole family got into a fight with a crowd at a club in New Orleans. “Crack Sandwich” is a commentary about how we deepen familial and communal relationships, develop new conceptions of solidarity, and foster radical practices of care through the collective participation in shared struggle.
The second half of the album exudes a more prototypically bluesy vibe, highlighting JID’s vocal range and lyrical brilliance. Acknowledgment of the love that made and shaped him takes center stage on “Bruddnem” and “Sistanem.” The tracks broaden the artist’s conception of family beyond the biological. Bruddnem is an ode to the beauty and thickness of loyalty requisite to developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships and camaraderie with other [Black] male counterparts with street/Trap dispositions. Through reflection on interpersonal relationships with women/femmes in his life, “Sistanem” extends the commentary on gender through grappling with themes of mutual protection, expectation, and desiring, and trying to unlearn “misogynistic mindsets” amidst a new proximity and access to capital and the rap star lifestyle it enables. JID tiptoes around double entendres and wordplay with lines like “Dialect from slave, diatribe, they tryna dissect.”
In addition to foregrounding Ari Lennox’s vocal brilliance, “Can’t Make You Change” offers a portrait of love as shot through with blue note hope. The song’s motif evokes the paradoxical relationship between love and freedom. As James Baldwin put the matter, “Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before… and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because, now, you have a home—your lover’s arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world.” As we grow and mature individually and together in a bidirectional intersubjective relationship, we latch on to important pieces of ourselves that we view as continuing to make us us, while at the same time, letting go of the pieces that no longer serve us in the process of moving toward the future selves that we are becoming. There is angst in this liminal space between being and becoming. Am I moving in the right direction? Will my beloved continue to love the me that I’m becoming? Regardless, I am responsible for moving toward it.
As JID and Lennox melodically articulate, we can try to learn to communicate with each other and resolve conflict as healthily as we’re capable, but our beloved can’t make us change. That is our responsibility. It’s something that we have to decide whether we’re willing (and/or able) to do for ourselves and our beloved. Blue note hope takes into account the contingency that our actions, regardless of how well-intended or effectively-performed, may fail to influence our beloveds to see the world through our perspective and change accordingly. We can only participate in future building; we can’t dictate or control it. Such a hopeful orientation toward love requires both the lover and the beloved to critically understand the limits of their mutual influence upon each other. Practically, this orientation toward contingency pushes us to recognize if and when we are desiring to control our beloved(s) and discern whether we can healthily and carefully demand them to act differently, ideally tending against the proclivity toward violent manipulation that we’re socialized into.
The standout track on The Forever Story, in my view, is “Kody Blu 31,” which comes halfway through the album. “Kody Blu 31” is a timeless Sam Cooke-like track, subtly elevating the Black existential roots of the Du Boisian Sorrow Song. In it, JID laments stressors like “Swastikas and the police, hang a nigga, swangin’ rope,” while also returning to the spiritual weaponry described by West, offering listeners the encouragement to invent hope in the face of despair as they continue to “Swing on.”
In the first verse, the rapper croons a blues prayer for fortification about risk, meaning-making, and being hope. Life is riddled with suffering and the journey toward personal growth and legacy, but the good news is, we’re already here. With everything we know, and all of the things that we could never conceive of that our ancestors survived to fight to make the conditions of our existence an auspicious, magical, and miraculous possibility. Any amount of resistance to Black existence we meet, we will fight; we don’t have any other option. We’re going to take our lumps, and we have to expect that, but we’ll learn from the pain we experience to keep fighting toward the just worlds we desire to die in. As JID says in the verse’s last line, “I hope a change is comin’, just keep on swangin’ on.” In the spirit of Huey Newton’s call for revolutionary suicide, we can’t lose if we swing because even if we lose we’re going down swinging for the world to know, which effectively inspires others to hope. It’s a verse of indignant hope fortified by 400 years of an unwavering indignant revolutionary spirit that hollers, “you can’t break this buck.”
JID’s invitation of listeners to “just keep on swingin’ on” renders hope as an actional praxis tied to responsibility. The moral arc of the universe doesn’t simply bend toward justice; it has to be bent through the organization of the masses. By accepting an existential blue note hope as a perpetual, eternal praxis of analyzing the historical evidence available in the present to move through the world toward actively building a possible future that one desires to die in, we can, in the words of Cornel West from “Prisoners of Hope,” “preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done.”
steve núñez
steve núñez is a Special Forces veteran, photographer, aspiring filmmaker, and decolonial abolitionist from Wilmington, North Carolina. He holds a Master of Theological Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School and is currently an advanced PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut with areas of specialization in existential phenomenology, Africana philosophy, decolonial theory, and abolition & carceral studies. He is working on a dissertation entitled “Abolition as Horizon and Anchor: Sociogeny, Counter-Violence, and Hope.” Centralized around a theme of militant hope, this philosophical history excavates the Black existential roots of abolitionism in the US through philosophical portraits of the abolitionist thought and practice of David Walker and Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois and Lucy Parsons, and George Jackson and Angela Davis.
