{"id":1352,"date":"2020-10-11T04:38:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-11T04:38:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sammysworld.org\/?page_id=1352"},"modified":"2021-05-18T13:13:52","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T13:13:52","slug":"standing-on-the-corner","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sammysworld.org\/standing-on-the-corner\/","title":{"rendered":"The SOTC Art Ensemble’s Rebellious Confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Founded in the early 2010s, Standing on the Corner makes music that spews frustrated confusion back into the face of the oppressive force that creates it.<\/strong> (ABOVE<\/strong><\/em>: <\/strong>From the music video for \u201cSahBabii \/\\ Now, Nation End, 38:15\u201d off 2017\u2019s\u00a0“Red Burns”<\/em><\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAMUEL HYLAND<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

On the fictional 1933 afternoon that saw budding film actress Ann Darrow snatched from the high-rise hotel room she found temporary refuge in, dragged atop the Empire State Building by Kong<\/em>, the monstrous runaway beast freshly escaped from a Broadway theatre, and forced to witness – from the antenna of what was planet Earth\u2019s tallest building – the all-out fighter jet shootout that killed her estranged captor, two dynamics were at play. On one side of it, you had Carl Denham, the ambitious filmmaker. He took it upon himself to venture far overseas, onto the grounds of a native-occupied Skull Island<\/em> in hopes of capturing the colossal being rumored to dwell there. Denham was known for filming in wild and exotic terrains. Skull Island, to him, was in no way as significant for its people as it was for its creature<\/em>, the mythical life he could prove the existence of once and for all; the mysteriously interesting animal whose intrigue was just grand enough to make its bondage put cash in the pocket. So Denham\u2019s ambition shone through the fates of what natives stood between him and his goal. When, after a long-enduring chase culminated in his promising young star actress being rescued from the clutches of this beast (now knocked unconscious with a gas bomb), and the entire crew were headed back to America to flaunt their catch, Skull Island<\/em> was left in ruins. The shambles were equally physical and structural. With all the rampaging, shooting, fighting — violent conquest — that got an unconscious Kong<\/em> on the boat back to America, his homeland visibly succumbed to warfare. At the anatomical level, Kong<\/em> was the natives\u2019 God. When the ambitious filmmaker arrived, the very first thing all passengers witnessed of Skull Island<\/em> was the formal sacrifice of a woman unto the creature. He was who they prayed to, who they bowed to, where their infrastructure found its roots. Denham kidnapped the people\u2019s religion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, the second dynamic at play was the one circling Kong <\/em>himself. Beastliness, mythology, and monstrosity aside, he was a natural being. He was not man-made, nor was he accustomed to the things of Western mankind. All he knew was primitive. His sole experience with people was of having dominion over them. In place of skyscrapers, automobiles, and live audiences, he lived amongst trees, liana vines, submissive servants. And in the last days of his life, suddenly forced into a completely opposite lifestyle to the one he grew up in – now a shackled, name-tagged Broadway spectacle amidst a man-made urban environment of human beings who did not worship him – there was a point where rightful frustration boiled over. But to his captors, his confusion was wrong. He spent his final waking moments bullet-riddled, plummeting from the top of the Empire State Building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Standing on the Corner, the New York City-based music group known for emboldened rejections of musical boundaries, seeks to tell through sound the authentic story of America\u2019s King Kong: people of color. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKing Kong was this very natural thing trying to suddenly survive in a city, and not in a safe way — it was very violent,\u201d founding member Gio Escobar told the FADER in a 2017 interview. \u201cAll of these things are intentional and connect to all of these things that are maybe not so accessible, but can only come from our experiences as black and brown people. I think these things we go through, if we don\u2019t talk about them, we\u2019re just going to be redundant, and not allow ourselves to progress.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Standing on the Corner was initially born as Children<\/em> of<\/em> the Corner – a live act getting its namesake from earlier Harlem hip-hop group Children of the Corn. With the help of producer Jasper Marsalis, the project eventually grew into the still-expanding SOTC art ensemble realizing Escobar\u2019s vision up to present day.      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way in which SOTC addresses what vital expression Escobar refers to is through music that defies all blockades upheld by what was once understood as art. Their debut release, a 33-minute eponymous EP enveloped with imagery of the Twin Towers and unintentionally released on 9\/11, features slow-burns of seemingly directionless, slinky, reverb-waddled guitar backed by muffled percussion skewed by digital means; yet in the same record, there are points where full songs lasting only a few seconds consist of disoriented shouts followed by brief percussion solos and urgent panting. Their second album Red Burns<\/em> – also unintentionally released on 9\/11 – pushes the artistic envelope even further. Most starkly, holding over an hour of music, the tape is split into two 30-minute tracks entitled Side X<\/em> and Side Y<\/em> respectively. But even beyond that, the record\u2019s content plays like one long idiosyncrasy. Red Burns<\/em> is not meant to be understood in one sit-down – let alone at all. Each epistle in the two-chaptered saga is a brain dump of feelings, knowledge, anger, frustration — rightful confusion that festers in bursts of brief electronically rendered monologues, or indistinct bass lines serving no purposes immediately decipherable, or horn sections that make the entire situation twenty times more unsettling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Side X\u2019s closing moments, there is a gradually sped-up (admittedly intensified) sermon given on the concept of \u201cTricknology:\u201d a deceptive form of manipulation based upon intertwined honesties and dishonesties often analogically tied to the systemic mistreatment of people of color in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator opens with ramblings of creatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow humans use (tricknology!) <\/em>against animals \/ we make the wolf feel pleasure in his own death \/ As far as the fish and the mouse go, we tricked them! \/ By showing them something they want, like cheese or a worm, just to kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But by the time the vinyl on Side X stops spinning, the disoriented, seemingly drunken babble becomes something much more relatable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMan abusing dope no different than the wolf who lick ice \/ and constantly, we\u2019re fish craving a worm \/ nothing to stop the hook from getting in the mouth, because it been destined and this is how the devil fights \/ the art of tricknology is when we can\u2019t fight the enemy, when you think the enemy doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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