Finding the Life in Flying Lotus' Vision of Death

One thing that’s again been made acutely apparent in 2014 is how death floats in a tighter orbit when it comes to being black in America. This includes human life (Michael Brown, Eric Garner), judicial obligation (grand jury fuck-ups) and cultural identity (Iggy Azalea’s existence). As long as blacks have lived in America, we’ve had to create, reform, and sustain methods to retain identity and culture in the face of an oppressive power. It’s been this way with slaves, where rhythms were used to communicate and preserve. It’s been this way in the history of jazz, where African rhythms and harmonies were inhaled and the sterile European influences gradually diminished in favor of improvisational freedom. It’s been this way in funk, where the mothership and dancefloor transgressed social and industry limitations.

Flying Lotus—real name Stephen Ellison—carries that tradition of black music both in his work and by blood (composer Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s wife, is his grandaunt and Motown songwriter Marilyn Mcleod is his grandmother). In addition to that, what sets FlyLo apart in his native L.A. beat scene is how his albums revolve around abstract ideas (the excellent Los Angeles is the exception). Ellison’s 2010 opus Cosmogramma, for example, deals with the planets. 2012’s Until The Quiet Comes, another stunner, examines the subconscious. His albums don’t aim for the head, though; they’re fully realized projects that thrill with its layers and constant eccentricities. Like Sun Ra did in his space travels and his Aunt Alice did with spirituality, FlyLo uses music to make the unseen but present feel like shared, human experiences.

In interviews, Flying Lotus has said You’re Dead! was inspired by personal loss and a flittering sense of creative worth. By itself, it’s excellent, but sometimes a great body of work is made even greater by its timeliness, even if by coincidence. You’re Dead! is polychromatic for an album that’s obsessed with one subject. It’s psychedelic, it’s contemplative, it’s hymnal, and it’s frenetic. For as much as there is going on, sequencing doesn’t come off as cacophonous. The songs—including the shards of funk, jazz and hip-hop that guide them—fit together while barely staving off collapse.

The freefalling cohesion isn’t the only thing that sets You’re Dead! apart from FlyLo’s other albums. In his past three albums, electronics have worked as quick access portal for him to grab and warp his influences. That’s been decreasingly the case as you go through his discography, and here, the electronics rest in the background as genres of black music—fusion/free jazz, funk, hip-hop—play at center stage. Yes, there are other influences at work, too; FlyLo cited the soundtrack for La Planète sauvage as an influence for “Your Potential/The Beyond.” The previous two albums have a decent range in influences, too. But the ideas they articulate are knowingly abstract. That’s not the case for death, an experience that’s imminent yet mysterious.

These traditions that FlyLo is working with on You’re Dead—alluding and using past ancestral innovations while imprinting one’s own identity in that lineage—are themselves staving off some form of death. In this context, FlyLo is in active conversation with death both musically and philosophically until there’s barely a difference between one and the other.

This is a method that’s also visible on D’Angelo’s Black Messiah—an album that exists in 2014 because of civic unrest. The two don’t deviate just because of intention, though. Black Messiah uses its ancestors to create this black utopian space: we’re drawing from the strength and soul of the past to break free of social bonds and the chalk outlines.

You’re Dead!’s tussle with death is more multifaceted and less quixotic. For one, it’s not just You’re Dead, but You’re Dead! There’s finality in that exclamation mark. It’s inevitability: you are human, therefore you will die. In 2014, it’s existentialist: if you’re black, you must struggle to be. It’s natural that the defenses come because that imminent struggle for identity subsistence, to live and to thrive. That Black American disconcert is alive here; there’s helter-skelter revolution in “Cold Dead,” the comic irreverence of “Dead Man’s Tetris” and church over philosophy on cuts like “Siren Song.” There are a multitude of voices guiding this thing. Flying Lotus isn’t just diving into his influences in his study of death; he’s also transfixing their personal and spiritual journey. The ghosts have a voice here, but FlyLo isn’t simply the conjurer of the dead. He joins his influences in how he uses the sonic tools to fight what can silence, using the fusion jazz breakdowns to repel creative stasis and to wring color out of the grim reaper. As death runs in close proximity to the Black American experience, You’re Dead! is a condensed, literal representation of this musical lineage as a counterforce.

This generations-long unease contributes to the torrid pace of the first half of You’re Dead! Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s wild improvisations—birthed by an obsessive need to remain boundless—are transfixed on to Thundercat’s bass work on tracks like “Tesla” and “Turkey Dog Coma.” (Let’s not forget the great Herbie Hancock, a known experimentalist himself, plays the keys on “Tesla” and “Moment of Hesitation.” He fittingly plays just a complimentary role; his accord within FlyLo’s complex compositions shows their cross-generation connection isn’t faint.) It’s a known idea that hip-hop was birthed as a means of expression within urban decay. Kendrick Lamar, who best articulates the album’s anxieties, acts accordingly as he lays out his manifesto at a dizzying pace—as if he’s hurrying to stave off a construct designed to snuff him out. Later, George Clinton’s head floats somewhere within the mysticism of “Coronus, the Terminator.” It’s a surreal microcosm out of the reaches the industry machine that seeks to harness it. And yet, You’re Dead never quite ceases its sense of rhythm. Within the fuss lies an interconnectivity that threads what comes before it into the now.

In album closer “The Protest,” astral strings and keys float in the background as we hear hums of, “We will live on forever.” He noted on Twitter that influences never really die. You’re Dead! demonstrates that this is true. FlyLo becomes part of a lineage in carrying his influences, thus joining a line of artists eternally protesting against deaths of all kinds that exist to silence them.

Brian Josephs writes, frolics, and cavorts in East Flatbush, New York. Follow him on Twitter.