How to Sample and Stretch a Prison Break: A Prelude to the Attica Blues

In this experimental inquiry, I welcome readers into an unfolding undisciplined platform, expanding upon my earlier theorizing of philly soul musicking through insurgent listening to Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues in all of its radical, beautiful, and tragic public memory work of the 1971 Attica Uprising. Philly soul musicking gives regional texture to a transgenerational Black diasporic performance practice that serves to archive the complexity of Black lived experiences and articulate felt collective visions of liberated Black futures. Through these introductory comments, I improvise what I reckon to be essential to the secretive sonic histories of the album, giving shape to a fire music organizing praxis meant to call us into being-with the anticolonial worldmaking project that the men of Attica advanced with their hearts, minds, and bodies on the line. This prelude foreshadows a wider overall project speculating upon how Attica Blues and other related avenues of Black compositional practice attune us to assembling active solidarities with militants/rebels on the frontlines inventing rhythmic zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation. I ask of the music’s fugitive archive, to draw on the words of James Baldwin, what are the contemporary use(s) of the Attica Blues?