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Think Forrest Gump. Now take away the bus stop bench and the box of chocolates. Amp up his IQ by a few dozen points. Triple his output of words per minute. Put him in front of a wall ablaze with graffiti art, darken his skin a few shades, add a hip-hop soundtrack from Run-D.M.C. circa 1982. You’re getting close.
Like the fictitious Gump, Michael Holman is blessed with a lifelong knack for being at the epicenter of cultural upheaval. “I’m that zeitgeist that seems, through no fault of my own, to always be where things are. Whether it was growing up as a military brat and traveling through Europe in the 1960s, being in New York for the birth of hip-hop and punk rock, I’ve always been in the right place at the right time.”
Friday evening, March 24, Mr. Holman will share some of those experiences in a world-preview performance of his new multimedia spoken word production, “Confessions of a Subculturalist,” at the Southampton Arts Center.
“This is about me sharing this crazy, eclectic variety life that I’ve been lucky to live,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about this without sounding full of myself, but I guess that’s the nature of this beast. I’ve always been in the right place at the right time. And I think my spoken word performance reflects that in an emotional way. It tells the story of an artist growing up, and all the influences that made me what I am.”
Renowned as an artist, writer, musician, hip-hop impresario and filmmaker, Mr. Holman, 61, has been collecting material for this show his entire life. Born in San Francisco, he spent his early childhood on U.S. Army bases in Europe, where, he noted, “it was a really important time to be a world citizen. It wasn’t long after World War II, there was peace and prosperity throughout Europe, and I’m a child of a military officer, which was like being a child of the centurions in an empire.
“My father’s career afforded us this incredibly expansive life—culturally, historically, geographically and socio-politically—because we lived in so many different places in such a short period of time.
“Being the family of an army officer put us in the center of a growing political, anti-establishment movement—namely, the anti-war protests. All this stuff is feeding into my young mind. It’s the time of the civil rights movement, and being a young black kid growing up in Europe, seeing what was going on in the U.S. from afar, that was a mind-blower.”
In Europe at that time, he said, “black people were kind of new and exotic, and came along with the package of being a savior from the Germans.”
In 1966, Mr. Holman’s father was deployed to Vietnam while the rest of the family returned stateside. It was a bit of a culture shock. “It was the dawn of the baby boomers, the go-go ’60s, the explosion in pop culture and pop music. It was a highly charged time, leading up to ’68, which could arguably be a really important time in human evolution, in terms of human awareness.
“Rock and roll was a vehicle that helped transform so many things. The protests; it was the voice in many ways of the youth movement that changed so much. We eat differently because of all that happened in California in the ’60s. It changed the way we look at food, at politics, the way we dress, the way we thought of other people. Rock and roll was the soundtrack that accompanied those changes.”
Fast-forward through the 1970s. Hip-hop and Michael Holman were both coming into their own. He was in San Francisco for the Summer of Love, lived in Los Angeles when glam-rock hit the pop scene, and moved east to New York just in time for this new performance art form to hit the public consciousness.
Along with the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mr. Holman formed an art noise rock band, Gray, that performed at iconic venues like the Mudd Club and CBGB in New York, and The ICA in London. He later co-wrote the screenplay for the 1996 biopic “Basquiat,” directed by Julian Schnabel.
“What happened in the 1980s with hip-hop was not dissimilar to what happened in the ’60s with rock and roll,” he said. While rock and roll was a soundtrack and cultural touchstone for the huge baby boomer population in the ’60s, Mr. Holman said hip-hop gave cultural integrity to a new generation of kids.
“Hip-hop was the next step. Where R&R was middle class, disaffected and disillusioned white suburban kids who embraced rock and roll and used it to change their lives into something more expansive, hip-hop became culture—not just music, but dance, art forms, performance.
“It started in the south Bronx, and what they created was a movement. They created a disco scene in the parks for these middle school kids who were too young and too impoverished to go downtown to the discos. They were the avant-garde of the hip-hop culture. You had all these DJs looking to entertain somebody with their disco tracks and their mom and dad’s old records—soul, funk, novelty—that they were playing for these kids. It grew and grew, and lent voice to working-class and poor ethnic kids, black and brown kids, and as time went on, kids all over the world.
“For all these kids, hip-hop delivered something to them the same way The Doors and Jimi Hendrix had delivered something a generation before. It was a political voice that spoke to them and made it easy for the kids themselves to embrace this culture, and practice this culture in a way suburban white kids couldn’t do.
“It was far easier to start writing rhymes and make a name for yourself as a rapper in the ’80s than it was to start a band in the ’60s because the tools were easier to acquire. All you needed were two turntables and a microphone. Kids everywhere picked it up, and they rapped about their problems and their dissatisfaction. Hip-hop is massive. Hip-hop softened the ground for Obama. My speculation is there’s going to be a hip-hop politician soon.”
This won’t be the artist’s first time performing in Southampton. A little more than 10 years ago, he displayed some of his paintings at the Parrish Art Museum, and accompanied that show with a spoken word performance. Several of his paintings feature deconstructed pieces of a Confederate flag.
“I have all kinds of reasons for doing those pieces,” he explained. “Even as a black man, I’m a son of the Confederacy, and there were Confederate soldiers in my family. There were some 10,000 black soldiers who fought on the Confederate side.”
“My work is all about unpacking American history. History is not what we think it is. It’s not binary. History is very messy.”
Mr. Holman said he decided to revive his show when the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, acquired his archives last year. “I have a lot of dance footage, and my archives are up there with Martha Graham’s and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s. I’m really proud that my work is next to theirs. At the moment the library acquired my archives, I knew that I would dust off my spoken word thing and incorporate the archives into it.”
After opening in Southampton, Mr. Holman will bring the show to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center on April 20.
Michael Holman will perform “Confessions of a Subculturalist” on Friday, March 24, at 7 p.m. at Southampton Arts Center, 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton. Admission is $10. For tickets, visit confessionsofasubculturalist.bpt.me.
on Mar 21, 2017