The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University announces a colloquium talk with Prof. J. Griffith Rollefson on Wednesday March 5 at 6PM:
J. Griffith Rollefson: “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries
Title: “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries
Speaker: J. Griffith Rollefson (University College Cork, National University of Ireland)
Date: Wednesday March 5, 2025
Time: 6-8PM
Location: 701C Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus, Broadway at 116th St.
IMPORTANT: NON-CU Affiliates (those without a Columbia ID) must contact Aaron Fox by email at [email protected] BEFORE MARCH 3, 2025 to obtain campus access for this event.
This talk is drawn from Prof. Rollefson's book project, which he is completing as a visiting scholar in the Music Department at Columbia, “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries, which demonstrates how Black music is, in both idea and practice, a countermetaphysics of the West. Building on Paul Gilroy’s thesis that the Black Atlantic is a “counterculture of modernity” and Dr. Funkenstein’s formulation, “They say the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill, baby / Well, call me the big pill,” this book considers Black music as an alternative, restorative, and corrective to Eurocentric regimes of rationalism, empiricism, logocentrism, teleology, and their standard-bearer, white supremacy. To do so, The Big Pill proposes a new metatheory of Black music Prof. Rollefson terms “gap theory”—making a focused argument about the binary collapsing metaphysics of Black music that works through and against 300 years of Enlightenment binaries from mind/body and civilized/uncivilized to form/content and langue/parole, thus prophesying new developments in the physical sciences that are calling into question our reliance on the binaries of past/future, particle/wave, and space/time.
In so doing, The Big Pill takes seriously the affective, embodied, and seemingly irrational claims of Afrofuturist artists ranging from Sun Ra and Ishmael Reed to P-Funk and Janelle Monáe, suggesting that Black music offers its communities a glimpse of the first principles of things that lay shrouded behind a violent and oppressive Western metaphysics that misunderstands and obfuscates despite its ostensible projects of transparency and empiricism. The book examines the phenomenological “ratio-nality” of swing rhythms in relation to the three-fifths compromise; articulates vodun balanse to Monáe’s Afrofuturist entreaty to “tip on the tightrope”; maps the instrumentalization of human resources on Bad Brains’s “Soul Craft”; digs into the “metaphysical etymology” of hip hop’s Nation of Islam-inflected “words as weapons” ideology; and tracks the development of Black music’s “illness” discourses from ragtime to hip hop, concluding that spacetime is indeed “illmatic.”
This talk will focus on Chapter 2 of the book, “Time is Illmatic”: Disability, Ratio-nality, and Hip Hop Illness,” and Chapter 4, “S/Wordplay: Martial Arts and the Metaphysics of “Words as Weapons” in Rap Music,”
Speaker Bio: J. Griffith Rollefson is Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland and has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and UC Berkeley, where he also served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar. His first book, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ruth Stone Book Award and his second book, Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age (University of Michigan Press, 2021), explores the Jay-Z and Kanye “luxury rap” album in all its prophetic contradiction. Griff is founding co-editor (with University of Cape Town’s Adam Haupt) of the community-engaged open access journal Global Hip Hop Studies and from 2019 to 2024 was Principal Investigator of the €2m European Research Council initiative CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, developingtheory, methods, and digital infrastructure for the interdisciplinary field of hip hop studies. His current projects are an open access multi-authored textbook titled, Planet Rap: Global Hip Hop and Postcolonial Perspectives; a monograph stemming from the ERC research titled, "Hip Hop Interpellation: Intertextualities, Archetypes, and Gems of Knowledge in the Global Cipher"; and a monograph titled, “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries, currently in development with University of Chicago Press.
