The Meaning of Michelle Read online

  Michelle Obama, our First First Lady, did that.

  The Composer and the Brain: A Conversation about Music, Marriage, Power, Creativity, Partnership … and the Obamas

  ALICIA HALL MORAN AND JASON MORAN

  ALICIA:

  I first met Michelle Obama when I was understudying the role of Bess in Porgy and Bess on Broadway. After the show was over, after the curtain call, we stayed on stage in our costumes. She came up to each of us and hugged every one of us, regardless of whether we were the star of the show or a backstage hand. Her love and support were gold. Celebrities (people with much less important things to do than run the world) send the vibe, too often, that they can’t be bothered with you. Michelle Obama can be bothered with you.

  JASON:

  Both the President and the First Lady are so present, so generous. For the groundbreaking of the African American museum, I played a song. Then after, we all went to the White House. The Obamas came out to meet people and it was a big crowd. Someone from the staff took me by the arm and said, “You need to get to the front.”

  Michelle said, “Elizabeth [Alexander] just told us about you and we really love you.” Then Barack comes right behind her and he says, “Yes, I really liked that song.”

  He said, “Michelle really does the listening to music, but I’m going to find that song.”

  I was thinking, he’s bullshitting me about that song.

  He said, “You think I’m lying. I’m not lying to you.” He reached into his pocket and took out this piece of paper. It was just a white card and written on it, very small, was: “Jason Moran, I Like the Sunrise.” He showed it to me and he said, “I’m looking for that song.”

  It’s very hard to be genuine all the time, but somehow they shine in these personal interactions.

  ALICIA:

  He also said, “Those kids must be good piano players.” He mentioned our kids and it’s like, they’re really showing you, how artful and connected they are.

  JASON:

  When we got married, we were lucky that there were a number of couples who could be models for us. Our parents were the easiest and primary examples. My parents stayed married until my mother passed a year after we were married. Alicia’s parents are still married. Once I left Texas and got to New York, I realized it was more common to meet people who don’t stick together. So we made it a point to find other people who we thought were models. One example was Fred Wilson and Whitfield Lovell. I feel that they have been great models of partnership, friendship and being artists together.

  One thing my grandmother said when we got married is: Make sure you communicate. That’s what you really learn in a marriage to admit when you’re lost and when you’re wrong. I’m still trying to learn that lesson.

  That’s what makes me cherish Alicia more and more. I can cut off. Alicia is able to pull what really needs to be said out of us.

  ALICIA:

  Isn’t that great? What he’s talking about is me persecuting him with my nagging. But he can make a poem of it.

  JASON:

  Like the Obamas, especially when he was a senator and then later on the campaign trail, the distance has always been built in. As a musician, I started going on the road in college. Then after school, I was on the road too.

  We managed it in our relationship, but nobody prepares you for having children and navigating the distance and travel in your work. I was always indebted to Alicia for holding it down at home and raising our kids when I needed to be on the road. So when the opportunity came for her to tour as Bess in the national company of Porgy and Bess, I said, “Yes, I can be here for nine months. I’m supposed to be here.”

  My touring life is something that I’m still wrestling with. As our kids get older, I have to build a different system because this won’t sustain in a healthy way forever. One of the ways I’m trying to wean myself off of the idea that I have to be on the road is in considering how potent jazz is for Black people and that we need more jazz, here in America.

  At each various stage of our marriage, I’ve said to Alicia, “What was I doing before we were married?” The good and the bad, this is so much better than what existed beforehand.

  I call Alicia the brain. When we were in Venice last summer, I posted a photo of the two of us and I said, “Plotting with the Brain on Your Behalf.”

  The Brain is pretty literal. I met Alicia as she graduated from Barnard. What she brought into my life was an intellectual component that was totally absent. None of my friends were discussing music in a way that brought in place and the landscapes that the music emerges from, what are the codes and meanings. She had this amazingly rigorous comprehension of not only Black music, but German music and French music and what it means to culture and society.

  I was learning how to do the music, but I wasn’t necessarily concerned with why I was making it. Alicia is the one who said, “You need to turn that around. If you turn this around sooner, you’ll be ahead of nearly everyone else because it’s clear that none of your friends are thinking about this.”

  And when I think of the conversations we’ve had over the years, I think about the conversations that Michelle and Barack must have in private. How he applies what Michelle says and how I apply all the things I’ve heard Alicia say. How do people apply the knowledge or criticism they’ve been given privately?

  Also Alicia and I are extremely aware, which I’m pretty sure that Barack and Michelle are too, of the people who took their hand, the people who are not mentioned in any article or book. People who took their hand and showed them something and didn’t tell them how to apply it, but just stepped back and let them transact on this knowledge over and over again.

  Their level of achievement doesn’t happen by just being a good student. Somebody teaches you how to learn, somebody teaches you how to be around other people, how and when to be demanding, and they’ve somehow really gotten the lesson and used it.

  ALICIA:

  Something Jason always says is, “You don’t know when it will come back to you.” You give the gift and you don’t know when it will come back. But you give of yourself, and you earn that “time to get my blessings bucket” and someone will smell you. You have the fresh clean scent of having done something for someone else.

  I like the way the Obamas represent a reaching towards what I call, “the best that is at our disposal.” From the way she dresses to where they send their girls to school, it is a constant reminder of we can and you can. “I’m going to wear this J. Crew dress. I’m not going to send my kids to boarding school in the French countryside. They’ll go where other girls in D.C. go.”

  A large contingent of us are still in love with them because they dared greatly. She said, “You could be president.”

  JASON:

  I wonder what it was like when they first said it out loud, to each other.

  ALICIA:

  They dared to say it. Then they tried with humility. The humility with which they approached the bid for the presidency was an example to the nation. I wouldn’t call what Donald Trump did daring or trying; it’s like he’s just hurtling with velocity at the highest office in the nation.

  JASON:

  You never get the feeling with the Obamas that they are starved for attention. They shine the light broadly on the whole community.

  ALICIA:

  Talk about making room in that House. I have now shaken hands with Michelle Obama and Barack Obama more than I did with the president of my college or the dean of my music conservatory.

  Michelle Obama is as good as it gets and that’s a fact.

  JASON:

  That is a fact.

  ALICIA:

  She has achieved what we Black people have really taken personally, what Maya Angelou called “the dream of the slave.” It makes living in a contemporary society very easy. It’s easier to be brave in our era when possibility is modeled the way that that couple has. Think of what we once endured, just a few generations ago: lashings for just
lifting your face when the master spoke, lashings for eating an extra piece of bread, lashings for covering for a sister who has pregnancy pain and can’t lift a chair. The lashings, all those lashings. Our great-great grandparents saw this and endured those and now the dream is here. We have him and her.

  JASON:

  They are just getting started.

  ALICIA:

  She’s had three careers in one lifetime and she’s not even an old woman yet.

  JASON:

  Alicia and I have understood that our greater power lies in the community being given power. The more people have power, that collective power would seep out farther and wider and become a way stronger wave than anything we might do individually.

  Now there’s a history behind what we’ve done and continue to do, this is a wave that can’t be stopped now. It’s building momentum.

  The world doesn’t yet know the scope of what Alicia has to offer. I don’t think she does, either. But I know by the virtue of the conversations we have every morning and every night. The potency with which she addresses every thought is almost frightening.

  When Alicia is discouraged, I think she thinks, “Well, I don’t have a model for what I’m trying to do.” I can look to a Duke Ellington or a Herbie Hancock in the jazz pantheon. She maintains that she’s looking for something that doesn’t exist or been exhibited in the popular world. But I’m watching Alicia, over the past 18 months, sit at the piano and write her songs and find the ideas in these songs.

  Ragnar Kjartansson, Scenes from Western Culture, Dinner (Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran), 2015 © Ragnar Kjartansson; courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

  ALICIA:

  Which brings us back to Michelle Obama. To accept that you will be judged is actually the job that the First Lady signs up for. I see how she threads her power through what could have been a limited role of being judged all day long.

  It’s not a small role. It’s an all-encompassing twenty-four-hour judgment on your future, your past and your present; your children, their present and their futures. It’s everything and you’re always dressing in the mirror of public engagement.

  But she threads her power through these things and what she does is she reverses the gaze. She makes sure that while the world is looking at her, that she extends her gaze to the children and to the elders, to the craftsmen and the artists, to a whole range of people who had never been seen in that way before. She reversed the gaze.

  Lady O and King Bey

  BRITTNEY COOPER

  The mutual girl crush that Michelle Obama and Beyoncé share is a serendipitous study in twenty-first-century Black girlhood, womanhood and ladyhood. In 2009, Beyoncé performed Etta James’s classic song “At Last” at one of the inauguration balls for President Obama. Coupled with the President’s professed admiration for Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, it seemed that the Obamas were kind of like the well-heeled, older brother and sister doppelgangers of Hip Hop’s First Couple. Through the President’s two terms, the romance has continued. In 2011, the First Lady partnered with Beyoncé as part of her Let’s Move! campaign to combat childhood obesity. By this point in the President’s first term, Mrs. Obama had made her mark as mom-in-chief, as fashion icon, and as a loving, playful, dancing advocate for the health of the nation’s children.

  In many respects, Mrs. Obama epitomizes the triumph of the project of respectability that consumed Black women organizers at the turn of the twentieth century. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “race women” had hoped in the words of Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham that an “emphasis on respectable behavior [would contest] the plethora of negative stereotypes by introducing alternative images of black women.”1 With her Ivy League education, two-parent upbringing, traditional marriage to an Ivy League–educated brother, and two beautiful, well-behaved daughters, Michelle Obama represents more than the race women who occupied the public sphere before her could ever have dreamed. When she declared herself mom-in-chief to the chagrin of many white feminists who felt that she should “lean in,” many Black women celebrated. For once, African American motherhood would be center stage in American politics in a celebratory manner. As mom-in-chief, Michelle Obama could correct decades-long stereotypes of Black women as neglectful parents and money-grubbing welfare queens. Even as these stereotypes persist as an animating force in right-wing policies in the form of ugly dog whistles about “handouts” and “personal responsibility,” a visible and credible counter narrative now exists. In a world in which Black women were always treated as women but never as ladies, a Black woman becoming the icon of American ladyhood is a triumph of the hopes and dreams of all those race ladies of old.

  Thus, Michelle Obama’s vocal admiration for pop superstar Beyoncé is nothing if not curious. I’d venture to say that most grown Black women and the girls who will become them someday have an inner Beyoncé. Inner Beyoncé is a sexy chanteuse, whose milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. Inner Beyoncé might have Michelle Obama reminding her hubby Barack that she upgraded him, not the other way around. The curiosity is not that Michelle Obama has an inner Beyoncé; it is rather that this quintessence of twenty-first-century Black ladyhood admits to it.

  Once asked who she would be if she could be anyone other than herself, Michelle Obama replied, “Beyoncé.” And Beyoncé has embraced this relationship with mutual admiration and affection. It is Beyoncé who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Houston, while Michelle Obama grew up a generation earlier in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side. It is Michelle Obama who took a chance on a lawyer with little money and less professional rank than her, while Beyoncé married the former drug dealer turned rap music mogul Jay-Z. Still, because Beyoncé makes her money through not only her considerable vocal talent but also her consummate beauty and sex appeal, she invokes a different social genealogy of Black womanhood than the one from which Michelle Obama issues. Beyoncé is classed among the Josephine Bakers, the Millie Jacksons, the Ma Raineys and Bessie Smiths. Her connection to these bawdy traditions of blues and soul are remixed in a contemporary R&B and Hip Hop package that frequently makes Black feminists lose their minds, some out of unparalleled pleasure, others out of unparalleled dismay.

  Bey knows others objectify her body, and it seems she kind of likes it. In the “Partition” video for her 2013 visual and self-titled album Beyoncé, her actual, unretouched ass is a character in many of the video’s scenes. This kind of self-objectification feels celebratory for some feminists and retrograde and dangerous to others.

  Thus, there are risks to Michelle Obama’s choice to align herself with Beyoncé socially. On the one hand, she gets cool points from younger crowds. On the other hand, many Black women might clutch their pearls at Michelle Obama’s embrace of a Black woman who is frequently understood within the mythos of unbridled Black female sexuality. Whereas Beyoncé’s unapologetic focus on her body and sex appeal frequently causes her to be perceived as a threat to children by soccer-mom types who wish she would simply cover up and stop gyrating, many moms love the idea of their children doing a more chaste form of gyration with Michelle Obama for her Let’s Move! campaign.

  During the launch of that campaign, Beyoncé remixed her 2006 song and video, “Get Me Bodied,” a bass-driven club anthem, into the child and family-friendly “Move Your Body,” a savvy marketing decision which helped make the campaign seem fun and exciting for children. In this regard, Michelle Obama’s engagement with a pop icon created a context to make her campaign socially relevant and impactful.

  But the First Lady has also chosen more risky allegiances with Beyoncé, particularly in her husband’s final term. When Beyoncé performed with Coldplay at the 2016 Super Bowl, the Obamas sat down with Gayle King to discuss their Super Bowl–watching plans. Michelle told Gayle, “I care deeply about the Halftime Show. Deeply. I got dressed for the Halftime Show. I hope Beyoncé likes what I have on.” The First Lady was dressed in
a black blouse with black slacks. Several hours later, Beyoncé performed her new hit “Formation,” a song whose video offered an overt critique of anti-Black state violence, while wearing an all-black leather outfit and a makeshift breastplate made of bullets. A salute to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, the clear celebration of the Black Power Movement unsettled many white Americans who claimed that Beyoncé and her dancers were anti-police.

  But Mrs. Obama’s coy overture in all Black to the impending performance offers perhaps a slight window into her love affair with Beyoncé. During the President’s 2008 campaign, in an infamous cover called “The Politics of Fear,” the New Yorker satirized an iconic campaign fist bump that Michelle gave Barack prior to one of his speeches, by ginning her up in a Black Power–era Afro, and slinging a machine gun around her body, with a strap across her chest made of bullets.

  Eight years later, Beyoncé’s Superbowl costume, a clear tribute to the sartorial choices of the Black Panther Party, perhaps unwittingly, invoked this image as well. It was backlash over the image coupled with hand-wringing and vitriol toward Mrs. Obama during the President’s first campaign that caused her to retreat to the safer position of mom-in-chief. Eight years earlier, in February 2008, Michelle Obama said on the campaign trail, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country,” a remark that celebrated Barack’s success in the primaries and America’s ostensible desire to overcome its long history of racial discrimination. Before we knew Michelle Obama as mom-in-chief, we knew her as the well-educated, politically thoughtful, and appropriately critical wife of a young politician with a rising star.