Joelle Kim
Final Essay
Due Date: 12/14/16
The Triangular Intersection of New Orleans, Violence, and Music
In his ethnography Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, Matt Sakakeeny describes the complexity of the triangular relationship between structural violence, interpersonal violence, and musical articulation within the city of New Orleans. Structural violence is defined as a form of violence in which the overarching social system harms or disadvantages individuals by preventing basic human rights. Interpersonal violence is the intentional use of physical of force or power against another individual. Through his fieldwork, Sakakeeny learns and explains how New Orleans musicians utilize music as productive, not destructive, weaponry against structural and interpersonal violence. He explains how brass band musicians use their musical instruments to portray a clear collective voice that expresses a message of resilience, community, and progressive action.
Sakakeeny first acknowledges the issues at hand. He writes, “There is the submerged infrastructure that unevenly governs our lives, creating racialized patterns of health care, housing, education, commerce, and criminal justice, which materialize as debilitating types of structural violence.” He supports this claim with specific examples, giving the statistic, “Incarceration, for example, increased 442 percent between 1970 and 1995 and has disproportionately affected young black men, to the point where one in three will fall under some form of criminal justice supervision.” Similarly, Sakakeeny states, “The particular risks that structural violence poses for black Americans were evident following Hurricane Katrina, when those who remained in New Orleans were denied assistance while military and law enforcement prioritized the punishment of criminality—both real and imagined—over securing human safety.” These two examples are only a few of many that demonstrate the reality of racial bias embedded within everyday occurrences. More explicitly, interpersonal violence, which results in physical harm and often death, is unfortunately common within New Orleans, a city with a murder rate ten times the national average. Sakakeeny chronicles the deaths of Joseph Williams and Dinerral Jevone Shavers, members of the brass band Hot 8, to communicate the grave repercussions of New Orleans’ established system of violence and to call attention to musicians’ response to these tragedies.
Joseph “Shotgun” Williams is the first musician Sakakeeny discusses. Williams encountered police officers outside of a food store because his car was registered as stolen. As portrayed through the details of the event, the encounter escalated recklessly. Sakakeeny writes, “When Joe moved towards the passenger door, officers filled his body with bullets. He died at the age of twenty-two, unarmed, with his arms raised upright out of the open passenger window.” Following the death, the police department defended its officers, ruling the shooting as “justifiable,” due to Joe’s prior arrests and his seeming attempt to use his truck as a weapon. Lawyers discouraged the family from pursuing a criminal trial due to high expenses and the difficulty of conviction. Thus, the matter was dropped without charge or investigation. Sakakeeny uses Joe’s death to depict how structural violence and its implicit biases often evolve into explicit interpersonal violence. Joe’s reputation as a crooked individual preceded his innocence, and the system’s prejudice cost him his life.
Dinerral Jevone Shavers, who died at age 25, was a respected musician and music teacher within his community. His death was the result of teenage violence against his stepson, and Shavers was shot while attempting to drive his family to safety. Despite the reality of the situation, Sakakeeny notes, “The report listed a prior arrest of Dinerral’s even while speculating that he had not been the intended target.” In this tragedy, structural violence and interpersonal violence transcend beyond direct confrontation or interpersonal feuding. Simply existing within this city’s society is in and of itself a threat to one’s livelihood. Sakakeeny shows how New Orleans’ media misrepresented Dinerral’s death by aiming to portray him as deserving or dangerous of such violence.
Sakakeeny learned throughout studying this city and culture that structural and interpersonal violence are unavoidably present within these musicians’ everyday lives, regardless of their personal choices or character. In the face of acknowledging the issue, Sakakeeny then explains how New Orleans musicians uniquely combat this problem. He says, “What is notable and music and violence in New Orleans is the explicitness with which musicians have responded to violent death through the composition of new songs and especially through the performances of jazz funerals in honor of their fallen bandmates.” Just as he gives specific examples of how the issue abounds in New Orleans culture, he also supports this claim with evidence of musicians’ responses.
For example, Hot 8 composed multiple songs such as, “Why Dey Have To Kill Him?” and “You Bang, We Bang Bang,” as active protests against police aggression and the death of beloved band member, Joseph Williams. Hot 8 musicians wrote and performed these songs as social commentary on the injustices of the system, conveying their sentiments in the most powerful way they knew how. The multi-faceted nature of music allowed audiences to connect on multiple levels. Lyrically, the words literally proclaimed, “You bang, we bang bang. Why’d they have to kill Lil’ Joe? They gone and killed Joe.” When performing the song, Big Al Huntley asked of his audience, ‘When we say ‘You bang, we bang bang,’ everybody feel that to your heart. I need everybody to sing it right now with me one time.” Aside from the lyrics themselves, the music also embodied the emotion behind the composition. Sakakeeny notes, “Musical instruments were deployed as a means of articulating suffering, frustration, and pleasure for audiences who use the music of the brass band to situation themselves as New Orleanians.” Sakakeeny reports that the lyrics and music combined became a force that demanded emotional and sometimes physical responses, communicating passion about injustice in the most interactive method possible.
Sakakeeny also mentions jazz funerals as one of the most unique ways that New Orleans musicians dealt with violence, a facet of this city that is unseen in others. Sakakeeny paralleled guns and musical funeral processions by saying, “They are deployed in public spectacles…that take place in the very same streets but differ radically in the way that one stops and silences while the other mobilizes and voices.” Sakakeeny observes the extraordinary quality of a New Orleans funeral is that the very place that tragedy happens is the same place of redemption, advocated through music. Sakakeeny demonstrates the resilience of the brass band culture through Hot 8 member Bennie’s experience at his bandmate’s funeral. “Bennie stows away his gun and clutches his tuba ever tighter, making music that merges the ancient voice of black New Orleans with the contemporary voice of black Americans.” Despite the fact that guns and musical instruments are both tools of agency, Sakakeeny highlights the power that arises when musicians choose tools such as music that fights productively instead of guns that fight destructively. This power can be summarized by Sakakeeny’s statement, “The instruments of the brass band do not only communicate with the dead; they mediate the relationship between the living and the dead.” In addition to mourning and grieving the loss of life, the music provides means of resurrecting life through remaining resilient through pain. In the midst of grief, anger, or fear, musicians can still declare with their music that through the pain, they will still play, and if they play, the message will still transcend through the power of song and in that way, the lost life remains active and powerful.
By doing a close study of these musicians, Sakakeeny receives an intimate look into New Orleans culture and music. One key benefit to his method is its emphasis on the native’s experience. Within such a specific sector of African-American music, the standpoint of the artist is a complex one that is seldom understood by outsiders. However, Sakakeeny aims to remedy this problem by submerging himself into the native environment through participant observation. As seen in his ethnography, participant observation requires long-term commitment, intensive documentation, interviews, and meticulous observation of the subject. This long-term process enables a more realistic encounter with the subject that combats generalizations and stereotypes that arise from hasty experiences. Thus, his ethnography showcases several strengths such as: a thorough, accurate account of making music, an opportunity for outsiders to experience the native’s point of view, a means to formulate truly reflective conclusions about the city, and a method that fights against stigmas and preconceptions. Sakakeeny utilizes his own look into New Orleans culture and his documentation as a fresh perspective that highlights the obvious dangers of structural and interpersonal violence in this particular place. He challenges readers to understand that it is a system that prevails, not always with malicious intent, but one that claims lives nonetheless. In this way, he empowers readers to learn and understand the music and city vicariously through his experiences.
One pitfall, not specific to Sakakeeny’s approach but of ethnography as a whole, is ethnocentrism. Despite the ethnographer’s attempts to record his/her own potential biases, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to ever objectively observe oneself. This issue transfers over to readers as well. One’s engrained ethnocentrism inevitably affects the way the world is perceived, and thus, puts the entire ethnographer’s record and the reading of it into a singular viewpoint. Can I ever see New Orleans through the lens of a native? Can I ever see it as Sakakeeny saw it? Is there a point to studying cities, culture, or music through an indirect lens, without intimate confrontation? These are inevitable questions that arise when reading his account, despite its thoroughness or clear communication. With ethnography, there is an obvious weakness in that the ultimate account is still from one person’s bias-influenced viewpoint. However, in accepting this to be true, accounts such as Sakakeeny’s are not futile. The reality of ethnocentrism does not then call for a passive, hopeless response that relents to the presence of personal bias in understanding a different culture. As Sakakeeny and his study of New Orleans show, there are productive outlets, such as music, personal involvement, and writing, through which individuals can vocalize and hear about issues, promote action, refuse to surrender to the system, and thus echo a voice that transcends life itself.