Groove, Bang and Jive Around – Steve Cannon

[Blank Forms; 2024]

There are no laws in novels. Unlike in movies, there are no actors to worry about, no set conditions prone to real life trauma, no intimacy coordinator, no union rules, no need for declarations that no one was hurt or abused in the making. This is obvious, but it’s something I had to remind myself while reading the opening pages of Steve Cannon’s legendarily filthy Groove, Bang and Jive Around.

The novel’s main character is a fourteen-year-old girl named Annette. In the first pages of the novel she’s out late at a New Orleans dive bar called the Gumbo House, well past normal fourteen-year-old curfew. She’s with her boyfriend, Dip, but when she goes to the bar’s toilet (“turds floated in piss”) she’s accosted by a very drunk older man named Sleepy Willie. We learn they’ve had sex before—on a park bench, in the teacher’s lounge. Now in the stall of the bar bathroom, Annette gives Willie a blowjob. There are metaphors of pipes and baton twirlers. She even gets her ears and eyelids involved. Willie gets extra turned on by “the smells of beer, vomit and menstrual blood had been camouflaged temporarily by the smell of their bodies secreting odors from their pores.” Cannon’s sex scenes shift between arousal and disgust as if to short-circuit any easy reaction. Reflecting on the novel in a 2010 interview, four decades after publication, the author said he wrote this “dirty, filthy book” to explore “contradictions of American society and just have some fun.” While Cannon certainly seems to be having fun, the reader’s fun is a little less straightforward. The book is like a fucked up carnival funhouse—wild, destabilizing, distorting, sometimes nauseating, and always unlike anything else.

Groove, Bang and Jive Around was—fittingly—first published in 1969. At that point, Cannon was well-established in New York City’s bohemian scene. He was a part of the Umbra collective of Black poets, artists, and writers, including members Ishmael Reed, Archive Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and the poet who’d later be known as Amiri Baraka. When Cannon’s friend Clarence Major got a book deal with the Paris-based Olympia Press—notorious as the original publisher of censorship-bucking books such as Nabokov’s Lolita and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch—Cannon was envious and asked him to make an introduction. After being introduced, the publisher asked Cannon for one chapter and an outline. According to Cannon, he delivered what he thought would suit their tastes. This got him a book deal with Ophelia Press, the more explicitly pornographic imprint of the already transgressive press—an extreme inside an extreme. In 1971, the book was revised and re-released with the literary stamp of Olympia Press. Though its reputation as one of the “filthiest books in the world” gave it a cult status that “transmogrified the work into urban myth” according to writer Darius James, it’s mostly been out of print since then. Now the novel has been reissued for the first time in more than twenty-five years by Blank Forms Editions.

Cannon uses young Annette as a dramatizing figure through which to explore the contradictions of freedom and empowerment at the end of the radical sixties. It’s reminiscent of the part of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” where she describes observing a five-year-old child on acid given to her by her hippie mother. American literary critic Lee Edelman, who has extensively theorized the implications of the figure of the child, writes about how the question of who’s acting in a child’s interest and what they’re doing for them is not just moralized but politicized. This is especially true when it comes to sex. As Edelman writes, the figure of the child is subject to “cultural eroticization that appears as obsessive anxiety about the Child’s potential for violation.” Cannon’s Annette gets to the core of that anxiety. Unlike Didion, ever the conservative, who used the acid-riddled five-year-old to take a reactionary stance against the hippie movement, Cannon withholds judgment. Annette’s youth provokes questions: Is she empowered or violated? Free and willful or stuck in endless cycles of trauma? Can she be happy? What would that look like for her? Is it even possible in this world?

In the epilogue to this new edition, poet and artist Tracie Morris, who was mentored by Cannon, expresses this concern: “She’s far too young. That’s the first, second and last thing I think about when considering Annette.” It’s hard not to think about it. Though the style is musical, colorful, and full of hilarious imagery (“He looked hornier than the Pope at a lesbian nuns’ orgy”), there’s little of Lolita’s mannered frillery and aestheticized distance. Groove is far from anything that would be published today in a culture where art’s morality is intensely discussed and decried in public forums as a way to channel helpless feelings and real world outrage. I was out of shape to deal with its provocations, which left me huffing and panting along the way, wishing for breaks that rarely arrived. There aren’t enough trigger warnings in the world. Toilet sex is a baseline that Cannon attempts to outdo with every new scene—there’s incest, bestiality, and seemingly endless sexual partners and positions for young Annette.

But I’m reminded again that it’s just fiction. Cannon is savvy enough to wink at readers when Annette and Dip drive through the streets of New Orleans. After passing seedy bars with names like “The Dirty Boogie,” “The Funky Butt,” and “The Bucket of Blood,” they encounter a violent car accident—mangled bodies, a headless baby. Looking through the window, Dip marvels at it and says, “That shit’s really outside.” Annette shakes her head and responds, “What a crazy world. Sure you didn’t make it all up?” Dip didn’t, but Cannon did. Though the opening chapters hew close to realism, this is not the real world. Cannon’s metafictional wink reinforces his permission to imagine what might be disallowed in normative society and gives readers permission to suspend the rules by which they judge what he’s imagined.

Groove exemplifies what the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque” in literature. Carnivalesque literature is anarchic, anti-authoritarian, profane, grotesque, and hilarious, inverting and loosening up strict or stagnant ways of thinking. In Bakhtin’s famous study of François Rabelais, sixteenth-century Europe’s most ribald and scatological writer, he makes a case for such art: “It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.” This is the other side of the disturbance I felt when reading Cannon’s novel. Instead of having my existing beliefs reaffirmed, I’m forced to think anew.

For example: Annette encounters a group of men known as the Jive Five at another dive and tells them everything that’s happened to her over the course of the night: sex with Dip, her father, her brother, and a short-stay motel proprietress named Bertha. “They had listened attentively,” Cannon writes. “They didn’t know if they were supposed to agree, or put her actions down.” This perhaps ventriloquizes the reader’s struggle with a need to judge. Are we meant to appreciate Annette’s agency or denounce her exploitation? Annette doesn’t give an answer. Instead, she gets inspired by the music to take her clothes off and dance sexily, capturing everyone’s attention, attracting more people into the bar. Unsurprisingly, things escalate: There’s a fight, someone pulls a gun, the bar catches fire, cops arrive, and Annette runs naked into the streets, chased by a crowd. In front of the Holy Ghost Church, a car door swings open. Someone calls for her to get in. She’s whisked away to a mysterious destination. From this point on, the novel’s loose tether to realism is released, somewhat relieving the stress of imagining a girl like Annette in our real world.

The car takes her to a secret sex cult ceremony presided over by a woman named Marie. Marie tells Annette that her parents aren’t who she thought they were: Annette’s mother was one of Marie’s sisters and her father is the white “Governor” (presumably of Louisiana, but it’s not specified). She’s then chauffeured to the Governor’s plane in a black Rolls-Royce. There’s a motley crew onboard, including a reverend, a priest, and stewardesses named Virginia Dare and Susan B. Anthony. There’s also a rooster, gifted to the Governor on a diplomatic visit to Haiti to meet dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. In actual history, Papa Doc’s rise to power and reign of terror were supported by the US to thwart communist developments. Cannon employs a light touch with these political elements, but they’re indicators of the roiling evils underlying this depraved world. Specters of Haiti—like New Orleans, a bastion of Black freedom continually scarred and debilitated by white colonial power—recur a few more times in the novel. The Governor worries that Papa Doc has put a curse on him “because of the President’s stupid failure to lay some dust on the Haitians,” as if feeling guilty for not being more complicit in his terrors.

The plane gets hijacked and diverted to a utopian community called Oo-bla-dee, founded by someone named Papa Doc John (an uneasy mash-up of the dictator and the white New Orleans pianist Dr. John, as Morris notes in the epilogue). “There were no cops, politicians or other lowly creatures in the Land of Oo-bla-dee,” Cannon writes. “Hence, no welcoming committees or ticker-tape parades or speeches at city hall. The people ran their own lives.” It’s an abolitionist idyll, channeling the countercultural political wishes of the time and still resonant today.  But it’s not a total resolution. Some of the more loathsome figures from the plane get violent comeuppances. The children of Oo-bla-dee adore Annette. She meets the Princess of Oo-bla-dee and realizes she’s her actual mother. Her father wasn’t the Governor after all, she learns, but a God who appeared as a “natural man” to the Princess.

Annette is effectively crowned in the land of Oo-bla-dee. According to Bakhtin, “the primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king.” This creates an upside-down reality that playfully distorts the outside power structures, showing “the joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) position,” Bakhtin writes. Though the carnival crown may have no real power, it underscores how arbitrary any real crown is. Annette seems a bit ambivalent about it herself. The book ends with the young boys of Oo-bla-dee watching her story—the story we’ve just read—as a show on TV, suggesting that even in this utopic place she’s not fully in possession of herself. She finds a coffin in the Princess’s palace and looks into it. “Immediately she knew what it was all about,” Cannon writes on the last page. “There lay history turned on its ass, stone, cold grey, with red, white and blue Identity Crisis marked across her chest.”

If this felt relevant at the end of the radical sixties, it’s even more prescient when considering the decades since. Cannon isn’t interested in moralizing; instead, like his close friend Ishmael Reed, he uses the tools of absurdism to push the contradictions of culture and history to their extremes. (Incidentally, Cannon paid tribute to a dialectical approach—one of the signature conceptual tools of Marxism—with the name of his only son: Karl Marx Cannon.) This is why Groove feels so wild and fresh now, even when compared with recent satirical novels. It’s deeply “wrong” by almost any moral measure, yet neither wrongness nor correctness is its point. “My oldest sister read that book and she couldn’t sit down for a week,” Cannon said about the book. “She had to read that book standing up.” Discomfort is the mission. Comic madness is the method. After reading Cannon, there’s no going back to the world you came from.

It’s rare to be so destabilized by a work of art. Cannon offers a real challenge, one that made me question my values and those of the artist. There are no handrails to hold onto, no pre-cooked thinkpiece morals. These days, algorithmically-driven culture industries have become especially skilled at delivering exactly what will keep people comfortable, even in their outrage. By reissuing Groove, Blank Form Editions has brought back one of the most potent examples of carnival consciousness in America’s literary history. At the end of the 1960s, Cannon was processing the eruption of freedom movements—civil rights, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, hippie drop-outs—while showing there’s no easy escape from the question of what to do with your freedom once you have it.

In her epilogue, Morris wonders how such a sweet and amiable person could write a novel as filthy as this. “I don’t even recall Steve cussing a whole lot,” she says, “beyond his pointed and moderate heckles from the bar of the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe when a reading wasn’t up to snuff.” Talking about the book on stage with Morris at the New School in a 2010 interview available on YouTube, he’s as gleeful as a teenage boy, seemingly still amused by what he got away with. Cannon was a beloved community-builder throughout his life. He mentored many writers such as Paul Beatty, Eileen Myles, and Gil-Scott Heron. In 1991, decades after joining and leaving the Umbra collective, Cannon and artist David Hammons founded a literary magazine and art gallery called A Gathering of the Tribes, based out of his East Village townhouse. Though he had to sell the townhouse in 2006, the organization continued hosting events and promoting avant-garde art, as it does today even after his death. When we talk about separating art from the artist, we’re usually trying to make sense of “good art” made by a “bad person.” In Cannon’s case, the trouble goes the other way: What do we do with a piece of art so “wrong,” made by a person so obviously good? The more one learns about Cannon, the more interesting it is not to separate the art from the artist. Where did Groove come from? As Cannon remarked about his conversations with Sun Ra, admiring the extent of his friend’s imagination: “If he says he flew into space, then I guess he flew into space.”

Chris Robinson is a writer from North Carolina living in Brooklyn.