The Sound Of Black Aggression

Bad Brains, Jeff Mills and Cecil Taylor

First things first: I’ll be delivering a series of lectures for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University beginning this Friday at 7 PM ET, and continuing for three weeks after that. The subject will be the music of Cecil Taylor. The first lecture will cover his early life and his music up to 1961; the second will discuss his music of the 1960s and 1970s; the third will deal with his work in the 1980s and 1990s; and the fourth will cover the 21st century, until his death in 2016. You can watch (and ask questions!) live, or watch an archived stream for up to seven days afterward. Individual lectures are just $10 each, though you can buy the full four-part course or even subscribe to the entire season. Click here to sign up, and I’ll see you on Friday!

The first big step in loving Black art is accepting Black people as fully human.

Once you have internalized that idea, you can then truly grapple with the phrase “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (translation: “I am human, nothing human is alien to me”) and recognize that it is true of everyone else, too.

Other people have all the emotions you have. They have all the moods you have. They are as complex and ever-shifting as you are. And thus, all forms of art are available to all people. Some disciplines require more technical training than others — you’re not going to master oil painting, or play the violin, or sing opera, in a day — but there’s no such thing as “you shouldn’t be making that type of art, because you’re not a member of Group X.” (Please note that I am not talking about so-called “cultural appropriation” here. That’s a topic for someone else’s newsletter.)

What I’m talking about is the emotional side of art, more so than the technical/material side. No emotion, and no style, should be off limits to any artist. But for a variety of reasons, some approaches and motivations are seen as inappropriate for certain classes of people. And while it may never be stated explicitly, one creative emotion in particular is often regarded as off limits. Naked aggression is treated very differently when coming from a Black performer than when coming from a white one.

This is absurd, of course. Music is a performance. It’s art. As someone posted long ago, no matter how hard and angry you try to come off, you’re still singing a song. But as we’ve seen over and over from Delta blues to rock ’n’ roll to hip-hop and even jazz, music that the audience perceives as angry or aggressive (even when that interpretation is wrong, as when French critics of the 1960s characterized the Art Ensemble of Chicago as political radicals) is always read as truth — and perhaps even more dangerous, autobiography — when coming from a Black artist.

Nonetheless, Black artists are as entitled to aggression in their artistic practice as anyone, and they don’t owe the audience explanations or justification (anger doesn’t have to be righteous, it can just be anger). And three recent releases — one a reissue, the other two archival documents — make that point in different, but related ways.

Bad Brains are maybe the greatest punk band America ever produced. They’re certainly the greatest hardcore band in the world. Their self-titled 1982 “yellow tape” and the follow-up, 1983’s Rock For Light (produced by Ric Ocasek of the Cars! I know, right?), juxtapose blindingly fast punk anthems (that nevertheless contain memorable hooks, shout-along choruses, and shreddy guitar solos) with deep, spiritually conscious reggae and dub tracks. And their live shows, as documented on numerous releases, were mind-expanding, heart-stopping displays of steamroller aggression.

In November 2025, a double LP of previously unreleased live performances came out for Record Store Day Black Friday, and it’s as intense and aggressive as anything in their back catalog, while also being some of the earliest Bad Brains material available anywhere. Live At The Bayou, now also available as a 2CD set, contains two complete sets, one from July 1980 and another from March 1981, a full year before the “yellow tape” came out. Indeed, at the time of these gigs they had only a self-released single (“Pay to Cum”/“Stay Close to Me”) to their name, though they’d recorded a 16-track demo in 1979 that would finally be released in 1996 as Black Dots, and five songs a year later that would become 1997’s Omega Sessions.

Some of these early songs — “Redbone in the City,” “Stay Close to Me,” “The Man Won’t Annoy Ya,” “Many Changes in Life” — make it into the sets, and they demonstrate the band’s rapid evolution. “Redbone” is more of an old-school punk song; it sounds like the Plugz. “The Man” and “Many Changes” are both reggae tunes, and “Stay Close” is fascinating as an attempt to have it both ways: reggae verses, punk chorus. They also play a couple of covers. Their version of Wire’s “12XU” is notable for making it clear that Minor Threat ripped it off wholesale, and they strip Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” down to an 85-second sprint (and change the lyrics). If you want to hear the band onstage at their absolute peak, playing most of their best and best-known songs, Live At CBGB 1982 is probably the way to go. But the rough ’n’ ready performances on Live At The Bayou are a crucial document of their rise to power.

There’s a strong undercurrent of aggression in Detroit techno. Underground Resistance, the group formed by Jeff Mills, “Mad” Mike Banks and Robert Hood at the turn of the 1990s, made militant, minimal tracks with a revolutionary ethos, layering fierce noise over pounding beats. Mills and Hood went on to solo careers that continue to this day, and encompass everything from jazz-fusion-ish movie soundtracks to ecstatic gospel house. But Mills is also responsible for one of the most aggressive techno albums of all time, one that’s been reissued this year for its 30th anniversary. Live At Liquid Room was recorded at a club in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district on October 28, 1995 on two turntables and two reel-to-reel tape machines (in order to play tracks that hadn’t been pressed to vinyl yet). He cycles through almost 40 pieces of music in just over an hour (culled from a three-hour set that began at 3 AM), most of them his own but placed alongside others by Joey Beltram, Surgeon, Ken Ishii and more.

What makes Live At Liquid Room such an astonishing experience of Black sonic aggression, though, is Mills’ own performance. He’s not just playing records; he’s cutting them up — modern DJ mixes don’t feature anywhere near the amount of scratching and rewinding heard here — and wrenching tempos up and down and deliberately mangling the music in a dozen different ways. He lets the beat slip; he scratches records in a way that suggests the jarring noise is the point; he plays absolutely wrecked copies of the 12” singles that make up most of the mix, allowing the music to fill up with vinyl crackle.

It’s all greeted with rapture by the late-night/early-morning crowd; room mics capture waves of screaming and applause at the few quiet moments. But is listener pleasure the point? The tempos are so fast, the bass so blown-out, the familiar hooks so warped and distorted, that it’s easy to wonder how someone might even be expected to dance to this music. Listening to it, I’m reminded of Michael O’Donoghue’s maxim, “Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.” Jeff Mills seems to be trying to rejigger that to say, “Making people dance is the lowest form of DJing.” This feels like an attempt to pin people to the wall, not get them on the floor.

There’s one other album I feel fits comfortably alongside these Jeff Mills and Bad Brains releases, but it’s not going to be out until April. Cecil Taylor’s Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts, to which I contributed a liner note essay, contains two full sets performed on October 8, 1969 by a band that included Jimmy Lyons on alto sax, Sam Rivers on tenor sax and flute, and Andrew Cyrille on drums. The group only existed for about a year, but the music they created together was of such relentless intensity that audiences were basically steamrolled. These two concerts (a 90-minute afternoon set, and a 50-minute evening set) were part of an extended European tour that found Taylor’s group opening for the Duke Ellington Orchestra and Miles Davis’s quintet with Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.

Taylor and Davis didn’t get along; the pianist told me that on the first night of the tour, he heard the trumpeter telling his band, “Don’t listen to him; he’s bullshittin’.” But DeJohnette, at least, had different ideas. In the liner notes to the package, he recalls, “I would get excited to have Cecil playing before we went on... the stage was reverberating when that band finished. It was still on fire.” And this is indeed music of astonishing ferocity and, yes, aggression. Taylor pounds the piano with his forearms at times, and Cyrille matches his intensity, almost playing blast beats as the horns take raw, desperate solos — at certain points, Rivers begins emitting hoarse vocal cries in between phrases. This is free jazz as fast-moving forest fire; the urge to get out of its way is strong.

If you’re not in the mood for sonic aggression, stay away from these records. But if the sound of Black artists operating at peak intensity without the slightest concession to an audience’s tender feelings is as appealing to you as it is to me, then all three are essential — three sides of the same coin, as it were.

That’s it for today. See you Friday!