The Banner Manner

David Banner plays with a wide range of aesthetics in his album Mississippi, drawing on Afro-diasporic practices from gospel to the blues. His music is singable, it’s mean, it bounces and it rages against the dominant whiteness. It is black in the many multiple meanings of the word. bell hooks, in her piece An Aesthetic of Blackness, illuminates some of those meanings for us. Her analysis can be used to see the ways in which Banner foregrounds three traditional black aesthetic practices, struggle, collectivity, and history.


we bout to free da slaves nigga

It is easy to get lost in Banner’s anger. At times I wanna turn his album off because I can’t bear to hear one more “fuck em niggaz,” even if it is being used as more of a vocal rhythm than anything else. We hear the anger through the straining of his voice, see it in the grimace and swagger of his performance, feel it in the tensing of our bodies to the beat, taste it in our repetition of the gritty nasty lyrics, and smell it steam off the overheated bodies that dance around us.

Common sense tells us Banner is just another angry black man, can’t control himself, why are you listening to that shit anyway? What does anger do but cause violence and pain? Well it fo sho causes both those things, but maybe the white majority deserves to be on the other end of pain sometimes. I’m not advocating violence against white people as some kind of retribution (I follow MLK and Ghandi in their tradition of struggle), but I am saying that there is a place for anger.

bell hooks writes about the black community’s need for artistic expressiveness that serves as “testimony, bearing witness” Ya can’t bear witness to the reality of life in the Mississippi Delta without being angry.

Banner is working with a long tradition of an aesthetic of struggle, in his case an anger aesthetic. Black art in the United States has always been about struggle in some way, the struggle to get through the work day, the struggle to escape slavery, the struggle to create community, home, and spirituality amongst hostility, the struggle to make a living and a life- a pleasure-filled, beautiful life, despite racism, economic disenfranchisement, and continued disinvestment of resources both material and otherwise.

Anger gears us up for struggle. Banner’s songs are like the best protest speeches: they get you fired up about injustice, they make you scream/chant with them, and they celebrate the fragile yet vigorous community that is being created. Anger as an aesthetic is about making us strain at our chains. As I mentioned earlier, Banner’s anger is a full body experience. So when we think about music being about struggle we can examine all those things: does it make our throats go raw, our bodies sweat, our heartbeat increase?

How is Banner’s work following the tradition of struggle? Does it make us fall out and speak in tongues, like in church as we listen to the preacher? Does it make us work harder, even when the work might be chopping cotton or working for the prison? Does it teach us to struggle together (but not in unison), ‘cause we need the beats and the chants and the raps, or the sopranos, altos, tenors to make music/change? Is anger what’s needed now when black people have space to make noise but only so much?


know what I’m talkin bout

Making art together, but not in unison, is a core aesthetic of blackness. hooks writes that in the black community there is a “belief that beauty, especially that created in a collective context, should be an integrated aspect of everyday life, enhancing the survival and development of community.”

Art and beauty, in this context, do not belong to upper class, to the universities or to opera houses or whatever gilded stages of cultural production the artistic elite like to claim. Art belongs to everyone, it is rooted in vernacular, in the “everyday.” Banner plays with this aesthetic by employing a variety of voices, noises, and everyday sounds.

The voices in his songs are almost always layered, giving a sense of the power of the voice. In What It Do the pop, pop, drop, drop, top, top, etc are keeping the rhythm as much as the beat. Like a Pimp, has multiple voices on the key words, telling us what to pay attention to and letting us know when to sing along. And in Fast Life, Banner opens with an inhaaaaale, cough, familiar sounds of smoking weed put straight into the music.

Collective self-expression is also seen in the vast range of musical traditions Banner samples (I use the term loosely here to mean ‘incorporates bits of.’) There is brass like a marching band in Fuck Em, an electric guitar classic rock sounding open in Mississippi, folk guitar like the beginning of a James Taylor song in Cadillacs on 22s, a John Mayer turns Spanish pop rock strumming on Choose Me, and a grunge metal synth and a gospel improve riff in Really Don’t Wanna Go, to name a few examples.


we from a place

Banner histories, that is he reps and makes history in his practice. hooks writes about the importance of history in black cultural production, particularly during the period of black nationalism, which privileged the home(land). hooks writes of artists “constructing a mythic past whose effectiveness could be felt in the present.”

Banner’s mythic past isn’t rose colored. It is murderous, racist, and fucked up. But (his)story is also about survival. Walking past lynchings and murders, tearing rebel noose flags from his neck in the video for Like a Pimp, Banner seems to be signifying “you didn’t kill us all motherfucka!”

In Cadillac on 22s Banner raps about Andre Jones and Reynold Johnson being murdered, about how it might be impossible to go on given the circumstances. But he also says, “Maybe Earth is telling just a place for us to learn/ Bout yo love, yo will and grace.” He seems to be signifying, God has always gotten us through, as the chorus echoes, “Pray to the to the lord for these Mississippi streets.”

In Mississippi, Banner is embracing his place as one of history and struggle as well. It is the place, “Where Medger Evers live and Medger Evers died.” It is significant that his life is captured in Mississippi as well as his death, just as all the others who have gone and will go.

hooks writes about commodification, the yearning for things rather than beauty. I think we often want albums to be things with a dollar value, so we can nail them down, measure how well they are selling, where they hit the charts. We don’t wanna look at their beauty, and their ugliness, in its wide range of representations. Things become ‘worth’ something when we can price them. Beauty is tenuous and it signifies. It requires us to appreciate both the sunflower and the rose, but also to think about how we decide which is more beautiful, which we want on our dining room table.

hooks helps us think about aesthetics, about the “artistry in everyday life, especially the lives of poor people, one that seeks to explore and celebrate the connection between our capacity to engage in critical resistance and our ability to experience pleasure and beauty.”

Banner music sometimes hurts, it leaves us bruised at the ankles and wrists, but it also lets us dance. It makes us be with each other and sing out. The aesthetics of struggle, collective expression, and history are deep rooted and black.