Sometimes absurdity is the perfect context for trying to get a better understanding of something serious. Such was the case Wednesday afternoon, when Adia Victoria appeared on Adult Swim’s livestream call-in show FishCenter Live.
The roughly hourlong program from the network that brought you Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! features guests, usually musicians, superimposed over footage of a fishtank. They perform a few songs and chat for a while with the hosts, who don’t appear onscreen, as well as callers. There’s a kind of disarming awkwardness baked into the format that guests typically lean into, with mostly lighthearted conversations.
There were a couple of songs to kick things off Wednesday. With help from guitarists Mason Hickman and William Tyler and keyboardist Peter Eddins — all carefully distanced from each other — Victoria played an as-yet-unreleased song called “Take It Easy” and “Mortimer’s Blues,” a shapeshifting elegy for a cat who was her companion during some difficult times. Then, Victoria sat down with a sketchbook and took some questions, about things like where to get good burgers and the albums that inspired her as a teenager. Some of the questions went deeper, as when the hosts asked about what Victoria misses during the pandemic. Near the end of the stream, the hosts addressed the wave of protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer, asking, “What’s this moment like, in your eyes?” Victoria gave detailed and thoughtful answers.
“I feel like my body’s trying to figure out how to exist in this,” she said. “It’s a lot, and it’s intense, and I am very cognizant of the fact that I am black. This is especially traumatic for me. I have to remind myself: ‘You are allowed to feel, as a black woman, trauma. And it’s OK if you don’t know what the fuck to do.’ Because I don’t know what the fuck to do — you give money, you march, you scream, you yell. The frustrating thing about being a black woman is that this system was never for me to correct. You’re kind of just waiting on everybody else to act like fucking human beings. People just refuse to, and they keep refusing for, like, 400 years. It’s just a huge refusal and it’s exhausting.”
Then, she discussed the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition, a group that’s advocating divesting from policing and investing in education, health care and other community services. The issue took center stage at an 11-hour Metro Council meeting Tuesday night.
“What a profound lack of faith in your people,” said Victoria, referring to the heavy focus on policing in Mayor John Cooper’s proposed budget.. “What a profound lack of empathy, that the thing you would invest in most is putting them in cages. … Hammer your local representatives, get a look at that budget, see where your money is going. We are paying them to kill us.”
The show wrapped with one more performance. Accompanied by Tyler improvising nimbly on acoustic guitar, Victoria read a poem she’d recently written, “A Black Woman’s Abridgement of Robert Penn Warren’s Segregation.” The piece is a remix of sorts, taking lines from Warren’s 1956 book, which features extended, candid interviews with white Southerners that shine a light on the roots of racism.
“These are the people that need to be explaining what the fuck this shit is,” said Victoria to introduce the poem. “I don’t need to explain this. I can’t explain it. I don’t do it.”
