Commodore Barry Park, the oldest park in the borough of Brooklyn, is encompassed by a fence that wraps around the roughly 10 acres of green pasture, baseball dugouts, basketball courts, playgrounds, jungle gyms, and a community swimming pool. Earlier this month, during the 11th annual Afropunk music and culture festival, the park was enveloped by a sea of bodies, mostly different hues of brown, some white, and blue New York City police department traffic barricades. Festivalgoers, in vibrant attire, stood, impatiently and enthusiastically, in a queue waiting to experience the energy of the diaspora that lay inside. The tickets in their palms and pockets—this was the first year the festival charged a mandatory admission fee—seemed a ripe allegory to the festival's underlying mission of acceptance: one must pay a price to truly understand nuances and complexities of blackness; there are no simple routes inside.
-=-=-=-In its early days, Afropunk was more acutely focused. The festival, named for a documentary directed by James Spooner, served as a bridge for disaffected black youth navigating the subculture of punk, a most entirely white space, to share in a common experience. The ways in which punk culture intersected with blackness became a means of interrogation and introspection, a bridge to explore a particularity of black identity.
In Spooner's Afropunk, punk culture functioned as a connector. What it meant to like Suicidal Tendencies or Fishbone became a way of seeing oneself. The film shows, with Spooner's delicate lens, a handful of individuals tell stories of their involvement in, and ideas about, punk culture; and what it means to be black as a result thereof. The shots are captured in comfortable, personal spaces like a living room or a studio, and from different angles — the lens looks upward, down, from the sides, and straight forward at the faces of self-identified punk heads from various cities across the country. Afropunk as an identity one must come to terms with comes across particularly lucid and saliently, an allusion to what would become the underlying theme in the Afropunk festivals to come. According to the testimonials, Afropunk is at once a mentality ("I think it’s a state of mind," one of the subjects says) and an affirmation. Blackness is rendered as unquestionable. ("I don't have to say, 'Am I a part of the black community?' I walk out on the street and I figured out all black people are a part of the black community. You don't have to do anything, you're black," one of the interviewees says.)
Since those early years, the spirit driving the festival shifted toward the center, away from the subculture of black punk existing in the margins. Afropunk's identity as a space of examining commonality within a niche counterculture transmuted into what Spooner alluded to on film—a broader, more mainstream vision of what punk could be. In part, this shift corresponded with a change in attitude—black punk slithered into acceptance, from the underground to a more comfortable, crowded mainstream space. But, perhaps more tellingly, those at the helm of the festival decided to redefine it, converting Afropunk from a subculture with a distinct identity into a fluid idea that could be broadly applied across the spectrum of blackness. This shift was apparent throughout the weekend, from the artists to the fashion to the energy.
This year's festival featured an eclectic bill of black musical talent (it's most diverse to date), a mix that included international icons and local stalwarts. The array of performers ranged from aging rock'n'roll legends and young blues aficionados, to resurgent neo-soul vocalists and enigmatic pop icons. The lineup blended style and genre, a survey of diverse voices, many of whom have carved out alternative spaces in the music landscape on the sidelines of the mainstream; yet, notably, each act remained tethered, through style and aesthetic, to widely-accepted popular culture norms.
Washington D.C.'s GoldLink delivered the weekend's best performance. In a red baseball cap and short gold chain, which accented his knee-level gray tee shirt, he rapped, sang, danced, and flexed to songs like "Wassup" (set to Timbaland and Magoo's "Indian Flute") and "Dance on Me". At times, he swapped roles with his DJ, playing hype-man to the main attraction, pointing his microphone at the crowd, leading them in a sing-a-long to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It". He cracked jokes and laughably launched into a flurry of body rolls. His energy, rebellious and rambunctious, was, ostensibly, punk; though his music vacillated across multiple mainstream genres, from hip-hop to EDM to grunge.
Other newcomers harnessed the tangential vibes of black punk, though traces of dominant popular culture permeated their sets as well. Raury and Danny Brown matched GoldLink's enthusiasm, but paid homage to their hip-hop lineage. SZA delicately intoned on songs like "Babylon", but blended her newer mix with sounds from more than 30 years ago. Bass virtuoso Thundercat, an ostensibly avant-garde talent, influenced by the liberation of free jazz, led onlookers in a slow rendition of Kendrick Lamar's "Complexion", a coy testimony against colorism, a de facto endorsement of one of the weekend's key themes.
Afropunk’s defiant political roots showed up in various locations throughout the festival. The stages were outfitted with conspicuous affirmations of tolerance: huge black, semi-transparent screens hung on each side of the Afropunk banner that read in block white letters: NO SEXISM, NO RACISM, NO ABLEISM, NO AGEISM, NO HOMOPHOBIA, NO FATPHOBIA, NO TRANSPHOBIA, NO HATEFULNESS. Throughout the weekend hosts, DJs, and artists echoed this gospel of equality which galvanized the crowds, like a mantra. Advocates boisterously lobbied for their respective political causes, on issues of health disparities to police brutality. Chants of "Black Lives Matter" sporadically sounded. Saturday evening, a group of trans activists mounted a protest, forcefully commandeering one of the main bandshells. There, they led onlookers in a recitation of the names of trans women of color tragically killed this year, invoking Janelle Monáe’s "Hell You Talmbout" (Monáe is an Afropunk alum). The moment seemed poignant, a reminder of the double-consciousness blackness demands: even in a warm, "safe space," brimming with conscious black people, ties to the cold world around you remain unsevered.
In the open space near the tents where vendors sold clothing, jewelry, literature, art, where professionals disseminated information about health screenings and festival workers charged cellular phones, photographers corralled passersby to crystallize their magnificent fashion on film. Afropunk has a way of bringing out limitless black creativity from it’s festivalgoers—expressive and uninhibited. Unburdened. Inspired by the colors and patterns and people of the world. And anyone with a lens wanted to remember the moment. They snapped photos of vibrant dashikis, African tribal face paint, beaded bracelets, skirts and kilts, business slacks with Air Jordan's, flowers clipped to dreadlocks, women with tattooed shaved heads in evening gowns, platform shoes with natural curls, body paint to match leggings and combat boots. Men with European-tailored summer short-suits and kimonos and Timbs. The array of sartorial fervor was beautiful and overwhelming. The impossibility of Afropunk is seeing everything all at once.
As the night fell on Saturday, that dilemma manifested in the performances of the festival’s biggest names. The first, Lauryn Hill, who many had come to see, showed noticeable signs of rust. Arriving late, Hill began her set timidly, her voice restrained. Then, just as she began to find her place in the music, breaking into an uptempo dance sequence alongside her backup singers, Hill was abruptly interrupted; her mic lost volume, the stage lights went dark. Hill continued performing despite the fact that she could no longer be seen nor heard, a move that was met with cheers, but all you could hear at that point was Death Grips closing their set on the other side of the park.
Grace Jones followed Hill, clad in Haring-throwback body paint, channeling the eclectic, idiosyncratic vibes of the day. Shuffling through hits like her 1981 song "Pull Up to the Bumper", Jones eventually ditched her top for a natural expose, strutting about in a cape and voluminous headdress; later, she dawned a mask. The crowd cheered as she launched into "My Jamaican Guy" (a song later sampled by LL Cool J on "Doin’ It"). She also paraded through the crowd on someone’s back, her regality reminiscent of Strangé in Boomerang. Her performance carried with it the confidence of an iconoclast, as Barry Walters recently noted in a cover story for the latest Pitchfork Review. "For her audience, for anyone who has ever been too queer, too black, too female, or too freaky for the world around them," Walters wrote. "Grace Jones is liberation."
What seemed strange about Jones' set was not just how close it seemed to play into the energy of the day, confident and flamboyant, but how well it aligned itself with the direction of the festival's future. Jones, like her fellow headliners, contributed to the spectacle of the weekend. Jones affirmed Afropunk as large and outlandish and worthy of celebration. But she also was a barometer for the grandiosity to come.
The underlying purpose of festivals are that they exist to grow, to outdo themselves every year, to build on what once was. Afropunk has joined that rich tradition. The appetite to diversify is insatiable, and expansion slyly reaffirms its purpose: to experience more one must continue to come back, but the growth provides assurance that there will always be more to see.
As is true of blackness. One can never fully experience it all. For it adds layers as it expands; it deepens as it lengthens.
The beauty of Afropunk is that it has become the largest celebration of that vastness. But, in doing so, the festival has abandoned the very intimacy that allows black culture to be felt in the way it deserves.
