“Storying”: Black History in Black Culture

Review of Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: GreyWolf Press, 2012), ISBN 978-1-55597-607-1, 483 pages, paperback, $25.00.

Kevin Young is a protean polymath, a poet who has published seven books; a cultural, literary, and music critic; and a naturally gifted historian. The Grey Album was chosen by GreyWolf Press to receive its 2010 non-fiction prize. The range and depth of Young’s knowledge and insight is compendious. In The Grey Album, Young views contemporary African-American and general

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American life from the perspective of the messages and meanings embedded, exuberantly shared, and cunningly secreted in black culture.

What is “storying,” and how does Young use it? First, he divides the book into four books, “Elsewhere,” “Strange Fruit,” “Heaven is Negro,” and “Cosmic Slop,” initially giving the reader the impression that all these books are somehow discrete and separate, when they are actually part of a braid of being. Second, in his own words: “The thread that binds all these books together is the notion of lying—the artful dodge, faking it till you make it—the forging of black lives in all their forms. Of what…we call storying” (p. 17). And, further, “To me, then, storying is both a tradition and a form; it is what links artfulness as diverse as a solo by Louis Armstrong—which, as any jazz-head will tell you, brilliantly tells a story—with any of the number of stories (or tall tales or ‘lies’ of literature) black folks tell among and about themselves” (p. 17).

How much of a “lie” is a “story”? In the context of this book, the question is meaningless. The “lie” of a “story” tells a truth.

Even the title of this scholarly study is a secret story, unless you already know it. The title, The Grey Album, was taken from a 2004 mash-up album by Danger Mouse. Mash-up? Mash-up artists take existing recorded music and mash them up, blending them together to form a new creation. Danger Mouse mashed up an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album with instrumental music from sources such as the Beatles—particularly The White Album—without permission to do so. The album was published on the Internet; a new medium for a new genre. Also, the title addresses the admixture of black and white, which becomes shades of grey.

In borrowing the title, Young signals a mash-up—a synthesis of serious scholarship, deep personal cultural readings of manifestations of deep black cultural forms—and weaves a tale. It may be “storying” in the sense of telling a story that may be too deep to be discerned as either truth or lie, because it just is. It just is, because that is what black culture is: a just-is-ness.

Young’s in-depth knowledge of black culture includes lit-

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erature, especially focused on the work of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, but also broadly inclusive of other black writers; music, particularly focused on blues and jazz, but broadly inclusive of other black music genres, including rap; and situates much of this cultural manifestation in modernism, edging into postmodernism.

In his broad encompassing of black culture, Young also makes a major contribution to the psychohistorical understanding of blackness in America. He uses the images of shadow, code, and mask. He begins with a quote from Sojourner Truth, “Sell the substance to support the Substance.” He questions the use of “dialect” by black writers. (Is dialect another variant of storying?) He offers, “The paradox of Dunbar as black popular poet parallels the paradox of African American Vernacular English, and the broader black experience in America: influential and even indispensable to the language, yet not recognized by it; denied by the very thing he and we helped create” (p. 130).

Is black culture, as Young infers, “selling snowballs in the street” to white America (p. 5)? Can black America call out white America for its storying? Young calls out eminent historian Peter Gay. We know Gay for his scholarly work on the Weimar Republic and Freud, on Freud’s atheism as a crucial factor in forming his psychoanalytic concepts, and more. Young challenges Gay’s 2008 610-page acclaimed study, Modernism, for never once mentioning African Americans. As Young scornfully, parenthetically comments, “That is, except for Baudelaire’s ‘mulatto mistress’” (p. 137). In Young’s study of the Harlem Renaissance, with the flowering of literature and jazz, he sees black culture as interpenetrating and actively shaping modernism and white culture. “In the case of an American modernism interested in an everyday language separate from a foreign, European past, the modern artist often turned to the Negro as both symbol and sustaining force” (p. 139).

The masks and codes of black culture—the hidden codes in spirituals that gave information about the Underground Railroad; the seemingly indecipherable, meaningless codes of scat singing; word-masks—are Young’s braid of storying meanings into truths. As Young tells the story of dialect writing: “Form as deformed. Tintypes turned into stereotypes, exaggerated and unmoving. A

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mask made of words” (p. 99).

Most impressive, actually, as Young reads American cultural history and American black history, with all its psychological nuances, is his use of his poetic sensibility to hear the hidden messages as manifestations of a people’s psyche; the psyches of white and black America interacting. Young’s epic reading of this psychocultural history culminates in a study of hip-hop—the last frontier for many “mature” white people receptive to black culture, yet baffled by the raucous hip-hop outbreak that young white people embraced, just as they once embraced rhythm and blues under the new name rock and roll in the 1950s. In hip-hop, he finds a fusion and confusion of opposites, neither an “I” nor a “We”; mash-up as borrowing and creating, celebrating and mourning. He addresses the fragmentation of Danger Mouse and “The Grey Album,” the separating of words and music, an art form that Young sees not as “representation nor rehearsal nor reality, but resurrection” (p. 396).

Is Kevin Young’s The Grey Album a mash-up? Is it “storying”? Is it a brilliant psychohistorical study of an amazingly rich culture? Is it a poetic vision manifesting as scholarship? I urge you to find out, so that the “I” and the “We” need not be clearly discrete and separate, but, rather, interweaving.

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