‘SAMO’

WHAT in the world does SAMO mean, you may wonder.

According to Franklin Sirmans’ book In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip Hop Culture: SAMO (for “same old”) marked the witty sayings of a precocious and worldly teenage mind that, even at that early juncture, saw the world in shades of gray, fearlessly juxtaposing corporate commodity structures with the social milieu he wished to enter — the predominantly white art world.

Yeah baby, we’re putting aside the Manyaks of UPV, Mango Jam’s latest faux pas on social media, COVID-19 pandemic, ABS-CBN no franchise issue, and Republic Act 11479 or the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 – at least for the moment – and we’ll talk about the art and music of eclectic artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

For the uninformed, excerpts from the online encyclopedia a.k.a. internet:

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. He first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s where rappunkand street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.

By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.

Basquiat, some say, is the Pablo Picasso of his generation, the hip-hop generation, and his life has all the clichés of what an artist’s life should be – controversial, edgy and a meteoric rise to fame and fortune with an early tragic ending.

He has an exotic name, ethnic origins and looks. When he was 13 his mother was committed to a mental institution and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions.

Due to his mother’s instability and family unrest, at 15 Basquiat ran away from home. His father banished him from the household for dropping out of high school.

Basquiat stayed with friends in Brooklyn. He supported himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards.

As expected, Basquiat’s art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstractionfiguration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.

Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism.

My first encounter with Jean-Michel Basquiat was a few years back when we were still based in Manila. After having my usual caffeine fix at Café Mary Grace at The Block in SM City North EDSA I found Moi  wondering into the Uniqlo Store in the mall. I vaguely heard of Basquiat as a musician and his band, the industrial bebop sometimes fugue to trip hop Gray, but not really familiar with his artworks. I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon a display of a line of wearable art by Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirts with his authentic signature and art of course. The artwork printed on the T-shirts where hip and one of a kind so typical Basquiat; I bought four t-shirts and I still have and wear them often.

That’s how I got acquainted with Basquiat his life, art and music.

And we segue to his foray into music. In New York sometime in 1979, Jean-Michel Basquiat and performance artist Michael Holman founded their industrial-sound band, Gray. Jean named the band after Gray’s Anatomy, a reference source for his paintings and to capture the haunting, machine-like ambient music the band wrote and performed.

Besides Basquiat and Holman, other members of the original group were Nicholas Taylor and Justin Thyme (aka Wayne Clifford). Vincent Gallo was a member of the band for a short period of time nearer the end of their first incarnation.

Although Basquiat was heavily influenced by jazz, particularly bebop, the band’s music can be at best described as eclectic from industrial bebop, fugue, trip hop to electronica coupled with poetic vocals and groovy beats. 

In the band Gray, he played the synthesizer and the clarinet, and made Steve Reich-style sound experiments, looping snatches of audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

During that time Basquiat was friends with Debra Harry of that seminal punk band Blondie, rubbing elbows with the late David Bowie and his then girlfriend, unknown aspiring singer Madonna.

He was into drugs of course and despite attempts at sobriety, he died on Aug. 12, 1988 of a heroin overdose at his art studio on Great Jones Street in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood. He was 27 years old.

He was once asked about his art and he replied: “I don’t know how to describe my work, it’s like asking Miles (Davis), how does your horn sound?/PN

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