The Deep

AFTERWORD

THE BOOK YOU CURRENTLY HOLD in your hands—and are likely upset that you read too quickly and that is now over—is only one step in what its editor, Navah Wolfe, described as a game of artistic Telephone. You know how the game works: A phrase is whispered from ear to ear, and as it’s misheard by each participant, the cumulative errors transform the phrase into something new and unexpected. It’s an obvious metaphor, and something of a cliché, but it’s usually deployed to illustrate how signal accumulates noise, how transduction degrades information, how truth becomes fiction when it’s passed along as gossip. What that use of the metaphor ignores is that the phrase’s transformation is a feature of Telephone, not its failure—it’s what makes the game fun. Each new telling of The Deep has been productive, rather than destructive, and each new iteration has been carried out with admiration for the previous. The Deep has gone through three major rounds of Telephone to find itself now in book form, and might continue indefinitely, happily taking on the adaptations of each new interpreter, into the future.

Drexciya started the game. The Detroit techno-electro duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald—along with collaborators like “Mad” Mike Banks and Cornelius Harris of Underground Resistance, illustrators like Frankie Fultz and Abdul Qadim Haqq, DJ Stingray, members of the Aquanauts, and others—created the original mythology:

Their story took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression, and the founding of a utopian civilization. Drexciya’s music was, for the most part, instrumental, and what lyrics there were provided only small glimpses into the mythology they had created. As writer Kodwo Eshun explains: “It was a world that was only being filled in partially, track by track, and you were doing a lot of that navigating, with the help of the music and the track titles. In a sense, to be a Drexciya fan was to build the mythos by yourself.” With our song “The Deep,” we took up that project, navigating the undersea world that Stinson and Donald had created, filling in and building upon that mythos for ourselves.

Drexciya’s music has fascinated us, ever since we encountered it many years ago, for several reasons. For one thing, we admired how much story they were able to tell with so little written content. With a combination of only several hundred words, they created a fictional universe that nonetheless felt real to us. In our music we have always been focused on storytelling. We often talk about lyrics and themes as if we were writing short stories or novels. Although Splendor & Misery—the 2016 science-fiction concept album we made before we made “The Deep”—contains considerably more words than appeared in Drexciya’s entire oeuvre, we often referred to their technique of spare, elliptical world-building when we were making it. We wanted listeners to fill in the narrative and cocreate the world of the album as they heard it.

In the second place, we admired the fact that Drexciya’s elaborate, ambitious concepts were grounded in the most functional of music. Their tracks serve at least one concrete purpose above all: they make you dance. And this is not to say that they bridge some sort of highbrow/lowbrow divide—because we don’t believe in such a thing—but it’s essential to remember that Drexciya were much more than their narrative themes. To this day, the experience of listening to their music is communal, and it is deeply physical. This is as much a part of their politics as was the science-fiction story of Drexciya—the rave, the block party, the live concert… they are all approaches to utopian world-building. Drexciya continue to teach us the radical potential of bodies moving together in space.

The three of us wrote “The Deep” together. (Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.) We did so at the request of This American Life producers Stephanie Foo, Neil Drumming, and Ira Glass, who commissioned the song for their episode “We Are in the Future” and each gave generous notes contributing to the final result. We emphasize collaborative authorship at every stage of this ongoing work because collaboration and collectivity tie into our initial idea for the song. The first rule we established shortly after clipping. formed was that Daveed’s lyrics should never be written from a first-person perspective—this extended to the banishment of all first-person pronouns and possessives: I, me, my, etc. For “The Deep,” we continued to follow this rule, but narrowed it even further: the only pronoun allowed in the song was y’all. Our prohibition of the first person was, in part, a reaction to the fiercely individualistic authorship presumed in rap lyrics, so in imagining what a Drexciyan utopia might look like, through the lens of clipping.’s linguistic rules, we imagined their culture might affirm collectivity over the individual, and therefore, the plural over the singular. The word y’all, for us, became both an emblem of the Drexciyans’ advanced communal society, and a reference to the multiple-authorship of the song, shared between those of us in clipping. and our partners at This American Life, as well as with Drexciya and their collaborators.

Now, Rivers has contributed their misheard whisper to the chain, filling out our song’s narrative with their particular concerns, politics, infatuations, and passions. Rivers has fixed on the refrain Y’all remember, which is repeated many times throughout our song. They have expanded that phrase into a major aspect of their world-building. In our song, the lyrics serve as a kind of ceremonial performance of remembering. We conceived it as something like a Passover Seder, where the history of whatever new society is formed after the Drexciyans rise up against the surface world is retold. Now we’ve learned who is burdened with this ritual of remembering and retelling. Rivers has given us Yetu, and in so doing, shown us something that our song elided: the immediate and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma. Drexciya’s militant uprising, which we suggested was incited by climate change and the destruction of Earth’s oceans, becomes an ambivalent act of both justice and extreme violence, perpetuating further trauma. In their translation from Drexciya to clipping. to this book, Rivers has added a dimension of pain to all three texts. Yetu’s painful remembering might be seen as an allegory for the painful process of adaptation that Rivers has accomplished by retelling a fictional, but nonetheless consequential, story of white supremacist violence. It’s a retelling that reaches back to the materials it adapts, and complicates them; makes them better. In this sense, Rivers has coauthored our song in as profound a way as we have inspired this book.

Ever since the book’s announcement, we’ve been asked by fans and journalists if Rivers’s version of the story is “canon.” The answer is yes, and no. Part of our rejection of first-person perspective is also a rejection of the authoritative position that the notion of a canon assumes. Readers and listeners have before them three—let’s call them objects of study: the recorded oeuvre of Drexciya and its associated artwork and liner notes, the clipping. song “The Deep,” and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep. We prefer to imagine each of these objects as artifacts—as primary sources—each showing a different angle on a world whose nature can never be observed in totality. Each contributor has told their story about the same underwater city, and each telling has its own specific perspective, the way any two “true stories” about our own world can provide differing, or even incompatible, visions of our reality. Experiencing these works requires labor—something like that of an archaeologist who’s discovered multiple texts about the Drexciyan civilization and is tasked with assembling a picture of that civilization. We ask a lot of our readers and listeners. This is why we will return to the metaphor of the game of Telephone—it’s no fun with one person, and the joy of it is that no misheard utterance is more “correct” or “true” than any other. The pleasure is in the process, and the value is not in any one version of the phrase but in its gradual transformation purple monkey dishwasher