.NifMuhammad reflects on a confessional album from the late ’90s that helped him make sense of his teen-age world: “Black Music,” by Chocolate Genius, Inc.
, or to position it as some kind of outlier, an answer to the Bad Black Music with its guns and gold. In a 2002 retrospective for the alt weekly Cleveland, one writer described the album as “defining itself by race and then carefully dismantling every vicious stereotype,” noting the absence of “pimps and playas” in the songs.
“Don’t Look Down,” the third track on “Black Music,” begins with Thompson speaking over sombre swells of guitar. “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jesus,” he says. “I suppose that means he’s been thinking a lot about me.” If you are a distracted listener, or maybe even just listening in a room humming with light, everyday sounds, you might miss what comes next, which is Thompson uttering an inquisitive but exhausted “I don’t know.
Maybe it’s that I know Black folks like this, and always have. Certainly it is that I have been Black folks like this, and might be again. By “like this” I mean that I loft my proclamations and curiosities toward a god whose existence I am skeptical of, most days. I have no concrete belief in Heaven, beyond the feeling that, if it is real, there are some people whom I love up there, preparing me a room, and that’s enough for me to at least be slightly fearful of any divine vengeance.
A confessional poet can operate at any remove he wishes. He can say, “The speaker in the poem is not me, even if I am speaking in first person,” and that can be true. But the trick of the “I” isn’t who you are or are not or what you have or haven’t endured. It is what you can make a reader or a listener believe. Thompson is a brilliant writer of the confessional because he seems to understand this. There’s the question of truth vs.
I still push “Black Music” onto friends and loved ones, in the hope that the album might somehow transcend its standing as an obscure cult classic. When I can’t resist my curiosity, I’ll read the Thompson interviews that pop up from time to time. He doesn’t talk much about “Black Music,” but he speaks brilliantly on craft, on sound, on writing.
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