Jorrell Watkins’s poetry collection PlayHouse is as moving a debut as I have read in years.
John Murillo wrote of the book:
“Though Jorrell Watkins’s Play/House is anything but formulaic, it is difficult to describe without reverting to the usual formulas: It is, in fact, a ‘stunning debut.’ It is ‘wide-ranging’ and ‘riveting’ and even ‘interrogates popular notions of the intersectionality of Blackness and masculinity.’ (Blacksculinity, if you will.) All the stock phrases apply, but none are enough. And while such interrogationality is there for those who come to poetry for such things, this book was really written for the rest of us. Those who come in search of the soulful, who mean to be moved, who read and make the stank face; who appreciate the carefully-crafted but are greedy for the gutbucket, who demand that the poems we read be more than ‘interesting’ and ‘ambitious.’ We demand from our poems sweat and blood and bone, and Watkins has us covered. As a reader, I am ecstatic. As a practitioner, a player in the house Play/House just stomped through, I’m shook.”
In his own words, here is Jorrell Watkins’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection PlayHouse:
I want to bring back mixtape CDs. The ones full of songs pirated from LimeWire or whichever sketchy site you heard about on MySpace. My first mixtape CDs were compilations of southern crunk music, hip-hop, and R&B. I exchanged them with friends on buses, scribbled love notes on them for my crushes and played them on my older brother’s home stereo system. The mixtape curated a sonic experience that transcended time, place, and identity. Artists who would never get on the same track together in their own world were listed side-by-side in the worlds my mixtapes created. As I grew older, this intergenerational, multi-genre conversation between Black music artists became increasingly important to how I viewed myself as a Black boy growing up in the south and the history I belonged to.
My debut poetry collection, PlayHouse: Poems, positions music as a dwelling that people, from Billie Holiday to members of my family, can inhabit and shape. I’m very interested in the craft of Black music making as well as the historical-cultural production of Black music itself. The songs below are among the many that my poetry collection muses and plays on repeat.
Paris, Tokyo by Lupe Fiasco
Lupe Fiasco’s first two albums, Food & Liquor (2006), and The Cool (2007), were the lyrical respites I needed living in the south, where crunk and trap music ruled the scene. As a teen, this song amplified my imaginary and transported me beyond the Mason-Dixon line I’d never crossed before.
Mothership Connection (Star Child) by Parliament
Why stop at national borders when we could surge through the atmosphere? I imagine myself at this 1976 concert in Houston where the crowd were compelled to groove and generate the energy needed to bring down the Mothership. Sweat and funk worked against gravity and reason for nearly ten minutes of syncopation to answer Glenn’s call, yes, we want to fly. Can you imagine the reverie of witnessing the Mothership descending to claim her star children lost on Earth?
Blue World by John Coltrane
John Coltrane’s Blue World (2019) was originally recorded for a film in 1964 and stored away until rediscovered by a Canadian archivist. The summer prior to the album’s release, I researched music as graduate student fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. There, I saw one of John Coltrane’s saxophones in the museum’s collection. I felt unworthy of handling his saxophone myself, but it made me think about how objects can embody memory and connect us to the past.
Fight The Power by Public Enemy
I was alive but too young to fully embrace the Golden Age of hip-hop (1986-1993). I’m thankful for the 2005 reality tv show, Flavor of Love, for prompting me to ask, who is this guy wearing clocks around his neck? I soon learned that he was Flavor Flav, the hype man for the pioneering hip-hop group, Public Enemy, led by Chuck D. Their song, Fight the Power, is part-anthem, part-chronicle, and part-rallying call for all oppressed people to rise! In Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, this song blasted from Radio Raheem’s boombox catalyzing the uprising of Brookyln’s residents in response to the brutal death of a beloved son. Revolutions need music like this and will continue to demand sonic dissonance against relentless oppression.
White Tee by Dem Franchize Boyz
To have a XXL or XXXL white tee as a southern Black boy in the early 2000s was a necessity. Just imagine a blacktop of Black and Brown boys playing ball dressed in white tees flowing like gowns. The white tees made us kin as much as they made us safe. If someone reported to the police the description, “boy in a white shirt,” that could have been any of us.
Got Ur Self A Gun by Nas
I’m thankful that as a teen my encounters to gun violence were few, though my proximity to guns were closer than I’d imagined. Out of all the men in my family (father and three brothers) I’m the only one to never have owned or even held a gun. Nas’s song reminds me of the tension and fear that I felt compelled my brothers to grab a firearm before they’d reach for a hand.
Ruff Ryders’ Anthem by DMX
Summers, riding shotgun in my father’s 2001 GMC pickup truck with him blasting this song on our way to cut grass: we couldn’t talk over DMX’s shout-rap style, so I’d just nod my head until the song ended or somebody cut my father off on the highway. His road rage in sync with DMX made the song an echo of him as much as anthem of those landscaping summers.
Heaven Sent by Keyshia Cole
After the day’s work was done, my father and I would cool down with a big gulp from 7-Eleven. My father loved Keyshia Cole, and this song of hers undid the bass of his baritone into a serenade of enduring love. I’d wish he’d let Keyshia Cole sing, but the evening sun and melting ice diluting the 32oz soda I sipped on made those serenades a little sweet.
Rain is a Bringdown by Ruth Brown
Summer of 2019, I was thumbing through papers in the Jonas Bernholm Rhythm and Blues collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History Archives Center and found papers on Ruth Brown. Looking through Brown’s discography, I was struck by the title of this blues-infused jazz ballad. The song captures the climate of a love-worn relationship. Like many blues songs it’s deceptively plainspoken. Though, the straightforwardness heightens the peculiar moments captured in the song.
Meet Again by Maxo Kream
Bridging hip-hop and trap, Maxo Kream delivers a thoughtful, narrative critique of the prison-industrial complex. Using the epistolary form, Kream pens what’s happening outside for his brothers locked up on the inside. Listening to this song, I think about the family, friends, and community members I’ve seen cycled through the jail-prison system. As harrowing as United States mass incarceration is, “Meet Again” grants me solace and optimism for all our bonded people’s homecoming.
Bando by Migos
Welcome to the traphouse, or rather, the bando. Migos are not the first rappers to rap about the infamous dwelling, but this song tops my list as the most memorable. I just love the blaring of the electronic horns and whistles punctuated by the trap drums. The lyrics are underwhelming but the flow balances playfulness with provocative imagery. Still, this song falls a bit short of the Migos’s signature style but hints of it rises in Takeoff’s verse, (rest in power, Takeoff).
The Big Payback by James Brown
When I first heard James Brown say, “I don’t know karate, but I know ka-razor” I cackled. This song is swagger, funk, and soul compressed into a ball and then tossed in a comeback no-look hook shot from half-court. James Brown isn’t just singing but defying the boundaries of song and testimony. There’s a loose fragmented narrative centering on betrayal and ultimately revenge. Though, we spend most of the song reveling in ecstasy anticipating the big payback.
Jorrell Watkins is from Richmond, VA. He received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Fulbright Japan, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry and his debut full-length collection, PlayHouse: Poems, was recently published by Northwestern University Press.