“Egypt is the place to be”: “pyramids are oh so shiny,” and “the women here are oh so cute.” But there’s a heavier message, if you’re listening for it: key afrocentric/afrofuturist theorist George M. James tells us that the Greek conception of “atom” referred to “that which cannot be cut,” while only Egypt’s “Memphis Theology” provided modern science with the know-how to “successfully split the atom” (Stolen Legacy 149-50). And West Coast hip hop pioneer Greg Broussard, coming on like the top dog among ancient Egyptian priests, shifts this knowledge to the turntables and beat science, boasting that, “I mix so fast, I scratch so sweet, there’s not another D.J. on earth who can compete.” But before concluding that the Egyptian Lover is just a mac daddy manipulating Black nationalist themes to accumulate a harem, one needs to hear the two key musical quotations: first, from Kraftwerk, including the heavy breathing from “Tour de France” and a pastiche of the synth line in “Trans-Europe Express” (via Afrika Bambaataa, of course); and, second, “The Snake Charmer” theme, which accompanied Little Egypt’s bellydancing at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The place called “Egypt,” therefore, bears all the historical marks of the globe: Berlin, New York, and Chicago-style Orientalism, for starters. The doubled title betrays this difficulty: the proper name, lacking a clear and determinant referent, becomes ever more emphatic, but thus all the more open to a cut.
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“Immigrant” (Sade)
In a couple of ways, we’re asked here to think about issues of translation. For the trax, the key is a simple—but not simplified—ethics defined as the relation between the least of us (immigrants) and the “toughest among us” (“natives”); the previous phrase is sung in an extreme monotone despite the general lushness of the orchestration. What is the price of being included? What lies beyond—“too much”—the threshold of tolerance when understood in relation to pain? (And perhaps tolerance is predominantly about the experience of pain as much as it is being a pain.) At this level of discourse, things count because of the imposing odds. From an immigrant child’s first lesson in “the fact of blackness” to his “dignified” manner in the face of it to our relative ease in a world where it’s “hard enough/Just to make it through a day,” we’re asked to sympathize while our privilege is idealistically negated by our squeamishness of self-suffering. In a geopolitical vein, things are counted similarly by the United Nations; it’s the vantage point that differs. Noting the “complex interrelationship between migration and development” in their “Declaration of the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development,” the General Assembly says it’s about “synergies,” though. Things must be square between the rights to movement/livelihood and “development.” (In other words, let there be remittances!) Sade’s allusion to the story of Joseph yokes the two contexts together, with the body and blood of the immigrant wed to the center.
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