Vusumzi Nkomo
“Vertigo must have seized them…” 1
I want to argue that Nkosi X’s VoidTape is a project of Vertigo, which is to say, it is a consequence of the disorientating effects of ‘worlding the world’ in Black, as a Black (in Cape Town). I want to argue that Nkosi X’s VoidTape occupies the abyss that occupies us: It is in the Void that we must resist, that we must be, dance, sing, produce life, refuse and struggle. Nowhere else but in the void, for the void is everywhere.
The heart of the project, its pulse and passion, Beautiful Corpse, sits about half-way through the album. After a hard-hitting 3 minutes of heavy truths, a punchy and sonic saunter, (unbearable)Blackness laid bare before us; an impassioned pessimism that shits at liberal ideas of bourgeois individualism & ‘against all odds’ triumphalism, evocative & soul-stirring & heartwrenching honesty, debilitating destitution that has perennially (that is, since the colonial encounter) haunted Black creative/cultural production, the possibilities and impossibilities of filial and familial integrity, Home as concept and space/place, Black death as given-guaranteed, the impossibility of Black (free) speech and all its oxymoronic possibilities under white supremacist capitalist hydraulics of coercion in a City that is resistant to change. After all this, we are still plunged into a void, dark space of silence with nothing to hold on to; a Hold.
It is this space that haunts: a haunting space and nonexplanatory denouement at the
end of a song. It is dark in tone and hue, spectral and confusing, silent and pensive, and is the space upon, and from, which the rest of the album is conceive, a well in a Hole that waters the rest of the ideas that have come to constitute VoidTape.
Thinking about this album means thinking through this darkness (and social death) and as Mbembe suggested 2, to “assume. . .and live with it.” It is the knowledge of one under a kind of spell, an imbalance, a collision of a subjective vertigo and objective vertigo, as Frank Wilderson III says, “a dizzying sense that one is moving or spinning in an otherwise stationary world”, while simultaneously in a sensation that “one’s environment is perpetually unhinged” and “a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation.”
It is no shock that Enter The Void, the song before Beautiful Corpse, is titled that way. The void is where we can dream about escape (and entertain fantasies of fleeing as fugitives), dream about Angels, a New Life, groove, Soul, Love and Waterfalls. And dream about chasing Freedom.