Means to the Ends: A Review
“I find my means to the ends
but what it mean in the end?
It wasn’t set up for us to begin with.
-J Wade, “Hindsight”
What is the relationship between means and ends? How do we determine our ends and by what metrics do we measure the utility of our means? And finally, how do we orient ourselves to achieve our ends on quickly-shifting terrain while our means are constantly being stripped, appropriated, and returned to us as unrecognizable fragments? Is it possible for one to find their bearings in such conditions—which are nothing more than the standard state of things in an anti-black world? Even more menacingly I ask, does the desire for order further settle us into our predicament? The latest collaborative release by Pleasant Sherman and J Wade, Means to the Ends, is the attempt to grapple with these queries, which are as dizzying as they are absurd; dizzying because they’re absurd; absurd because they leave us grasping for straws or walls mid-freefall through an abyss where all sound is silenced. Means to the Ends is the noise that escapes the void like steam from a pot of grandma’s greens: fleeting yet revelatory, revelatory because fleeting.
The album is saturated with hauntingly inundating loops that reveal just as much as the bars laid on top of them. Pleasant Sherman, the producer of Means to the Ends, is undoubtedly indebted to the influence of legendary producer, J Dilla. Dilla’s own masterpiece entitled Donuts is peculiar in that it ends with its beginning, playing with our understandings of time as linear and progressive. Black time, though, never has a clear beginning or end. Instead, it is a collage of fragmentary moments that seem meaningless when viewed singularly, which obscures the singularity of blackness. The cover art to Means to the Ends, a collage that perhaps pays homage to legendary artist and Charlotte native, Romare Bearden, picks up on the theme of dissonance as it’s a series of images that take time to properly decipher. They’re stacked and laid in various and seemingly contradictory directions, requiring the viewer to re-orient their body accordingly by twisting their neck or turning their phone. It kind of reminds the listener that they have a body and that Means to the Ends does not intend for the listener to try to transcend or escape their body during the listening experience; this isn’t church. Conversely, the listener has to settle into their body and joyride with Sherman and Wade. This does not mean that the body already has all the answers and we must simply listen to it, but that if an answer is to arise it must begin with the prayer of black revolutionary Frantz Fanon: “O my body, make me always a man who questions!” The body is one means to the ends. And to begin my reading, I start at the album body’s conclusion to elucidate a potential frame with which to listen to the album. I’m not aiming for a comprehensive review, but for a contextualization that leaves the spontaneity of that initial listen intact.
The final song on Means to the Ends, titled “Ours,” begins with a sample that is chopped in a way that distorts every word but “ours.” This emphasizes two things. First, the selective obscuring of the sample’s lyrics remind us that words can only take us but so far; at times, they may even move us farther from what we mean while providing the façade of bringing us closer to a stable existential foundation upon which can we live our respective lives—an impossible existential closure. Close and far the same/Closure hard to say, J Wade laments. There is power in words to shape reality, but the relation to this power is dependent on the color of the mouth that utters those words no matter the intensity behind them. We’ve been shouting “Black lives matter” for nearly a decade and what do we have to show for it? My efforts all in vain/To grow we face the rain/I guess I face the change/I guess I’ll make the change/Reality is pain/Close and far the same, Wade continues.
Secondly and relatedly, though Wade uses the singular “I” in her verse, “ours” draws attention to the necessity of collectivity for any particular activity undertaken. While our voices do not necessarily change our conditions, enough of them put together can flood our ears to create fertile grounds by guiding our intellect and emotions. This is especially fruitful when those voices are critical without condescension. As I first listened in my living room, Wade’s own voice bounced from left to right in my headphones, encircling me as he quips, You pray for change but stay the same/And that cannot just be. As previously said, this is not a passive or disembodied listen. I’m being directly questioned and even challenged: Are you a part of the ours or “we” that are actively seeking to change ourselves? Given the self-reflexive nature of the entire album, Wade is also posing this question to himself because only through a critical reflection of the self can we indict the World for its violence. Safiya Bukhari—a member of the Black Liberation Army—offers this in her memoir, The War Before: “We must not be afraid of allowing the old self, rife with the negativisms of this society, to die so that a new, more revolutionary and progressive self can be born. Then and only then do we stand a chance of destroying this oppressive society. It is with this thought in mind that we use the weapon of criticism and self-criticism to correct the way we deal with each other.” “How you gon’ win when you ain’t right within?”
This song’s own end is marked by a recording of Malcolm X stating the necessity of leaving our respective religions “between ourselves and our god.” Charles Long, a black religious theorist, writes that religion provides an “orientation” or way or understanding one’s body in relation to the material world around it. Religion provides an existential foundation by providing an organizing principle with which we live, knowingly or unknowingly. Without religion, we might find ourselves slipping into the abyss of blackness. Why, then, would we want to leave our god at home? Religion provides the practitioner a subjective pole against which they gauge their moral decisions. But religion obscures that morality is itself subjective. Christian morals are not the same as Muslim morals which are different from Buddhist morals as distinct from morals found in Ifá. These differences are not an issue until we attempt to universalize our morals and impose them onto others, as European Christianity has done to the World. WEB Du Bois writes that a nation is inseparable from its religion and, by and large, modern Christianity has been an instrument for anti-blackness. Its iconography equates blackness with sin and we are still seeing the implications of this in our “secular” present. White Christianity has ordered the World against, on top of, and through black people so that those not marked as black don’t have to approach the abyss of absurdity where all subjective meaning is eviscerated and all that’s left is the facticity of our objective nothingness. Anti-blackness functions like a religion by providing an ordering principle, so anti-anti-blackness must necessarily be a disordering schema. This explains Malcolm X’s assertion and Pleasant Sherman and J Wade’s insistence on using his words. We need to put the religion down and embrace chaos. Only through chaos can radical ways of organizing ourselves emerge.
This all gives more context to the first song on the album, “Conviction,” in which we hear a voice seemingly discussing the morality of his actions. He says, “I’d say I was being punished but I know that the world doesn’t punish wicked people. We make our choices and take what comes.” Without religion as a moral anchor, a universal moral force that punishes evil-doers is no longer imaginable. Instead, the universe is understood as morally objective, which leaves us to query ethics and relations of power. This isn’t a matter of what is right or wrong at the individual level, but rather an interrogation of hierarchal societal relations that determine what is right or wrong. This is where Means to the Ends wants us to arrive, at an indictment of the World. Means to the Ends is, itself, a means to that end. Across its eighteen tracks, the album weaves through topics like love, hate, uncertainty, ambivalence, competition, and comradery to demonstrate how they are each conditioned by the World. “Highrise” features a loop repeating “I feel very small in a world that w—,” leaving us to guess how the sentence is finished. In “Fire With Fire,” J Wade provides fragments including lines like “feeling tortured/hell on earth/a tortured abyss” over a beat that applies so much sonic pressure it pulsed in my ears even after the song was over. “U N Me” is a romantically-tuned track that reveals black romance is anything but easy in an anti-black world. These are just a few examples, but the album is saturated with thoughts waiting to be deciphered by anyone willing to tune into the same frequency—a frequency not found on any radio.
By the end, Means to the Ends prompts more questions than answers it delivers. It is open-ended with inconclusive conclusions. But this is the nature of the existential fall it nudges us towards. Nothing about it is certain, but everything about it is honest. Honest vulnerability, in truth, is the means to the ends, whatever those ends may be.
