Harmony Holiday, haunting back

by Angelique Rosales Salgado

What can we make of sabotage? The kind that is deviant, intuitive, and cunning, uncertain about repair but searching for leverage that declares release, enables it. What seeds transformation other than infectious energy—running, ruining, rioting; consider prophecy intervened upon. In vengeance, in approximation of ruin, in tender disintegration, in crisis, does it find renewal?

Disaster struggling for attention not a riot or a ruins but a paradise of ruins¹

Known as a poet, and by way of poetry's rigor and rhythm, Harmony Holiday is as prolific a writer as she is an archivist, filmmaker, dancer, interlocutor, and critic. Her practice fixates on themes of music, ancestry, death and rebirth, celebrity, and the visual and literary languages of Black sociality / life. What she calls the “interdisciplinary t(h)rust in Black cultural production” sees her practice disseminate between the page, the (back)stage, the archive, the gallery, and now, the party.

Harmony's first solo exhibition BLACK BACKSTAGE (March 21‐May 25, 2024), co-organized by Legacy Russell and I, debuted this past spring at The Kitchen in New York City. Comprising a new short film, a series of text and image-based screen prints on fabric, and a sonic composition set within an environment of installations, the exhibition transformed the idea of the backstage into both site and specter. A space where Harmony positions collective improvisation and the life it endures, without codification, as the root of Black music, theater, dance, and performance. She lingers with and within the backstage frequently, not just as a place to go, end up, or return to, but as an ever-evolving, indeterminate presence and orientation. In BLACK BACKSTAGE, she assembles her research, archival practice, image-making, and writing alike into an immersive visual grammar.

Installation view, Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE, he Kitchen at Westbeth, March 21‐May 25, 2024. Photo by Kyle Knodell. Courtesy of The Kitchen.
The project, in its prescience, is ongoing. It builds upon Harmony's latest book MAAFA (2022), an epic poem that follows a Black female (anti)hero's journey. The term maafa is a Swahili word meaning “great disaster” or “terrible occurrence,” often used by Black people across a global diaspora in reference to the enduring legacy and epigenetic trauma of the transatlantic slave trade.² The work itself deals with the archetypes and sounds that form in and of the ruins after genocide and displacement, spilling into how Black music is born from these ruins and becomes their archive(s). Forthcoming in May 2025 via independent publisher Semiotext(e) is Harmony's “book of essays and muses” called Life of the Party —an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, and a record, a script, a ledger for the exhibition.


Harmony thinks as an artist, but witnesses as a poet. Her poetry, prose, and criticism achieves a clearing that breaks the spell of archetypes, reworking new ones onto considerations attuned to lyrical intensity, tone, and cadence. Her work on the page includes five collections of poetry, an in-progress memoir Love is War for Miles and a forthcoming biography on Abbey Lincoln. These are amplified by her recurring Substack Black Music and Black Muses —a space unrestricted by the demands, wishes, and timelines of the music industry. Daughter to “cowboy-musician” Jimmy Holiday, Harmony was born in Waterloo, Iowa and grew up in Los Angeles, California where she is currently based after stints in the Bay Area and New York City. Her father's birth name was James Brown; as he developed as a soul singer and realized he needed a new name, he picked the surname of a woman whose music he adored. “By inheritance or luck,” Harmony writes that she “live[s] in [Billie Holiday's] name.”³

The mythic bears on Harmony's work just like it does on the city of Los Angeles. She entangles myth, archetype, and biography, finding pleasure in allowing each to lose their distinction in her writing: “secrets that can only be contained in poems.”⁴ Their convergence holds all kinds of desires, resistances, and fracturings that can remain fugitive in her practice. Harmony's essay “Driving with O.J. Simpson” evocatively mirrors her family to that of the football superstar's, revealing his trial's impact on her and on a mid-'90s era of LA.⁵ The title of Harmony's third collection of poems Hollywood Forever (2017)—a book wherein the legacies of figures like Miles Davis, Martin Luther King, Prince, Malcom X, Billie Holiday, and Michael Jackson are distilled into poem and image unseparated—actually takes its name after a cemetery in Santa Monica. “As America becomes more cemetery than republic each day, its satisfying to objectify it the way it has objectified us,” Harmony says of the book in an interview with BOMB Magazine. What fantasy is more obscene than a static forever in which the current world order plays out in an eternal reel?⁶


Billie Holiday during her last recording session, New York, March 1959. Photo by Milt Hinton.
On a scenic register, Harmony takes up how the vagaries of fame, capital, and industry (in the shadows of Hollywood, as much as anywhere else) “hunt and haunt” Black music and performance. Haunts are the universal muses.⁷ Celebrity, then, is the material outcome manufactured by these social phenomena—synchronous, pervasive, and inextricably linked to the complicity and consumptiveness demanded by white spectatorship. Fame and capital covet and sanction ownership, inflicting projected selves and expectations (read: exploitation) upon artistry and creative freedom. “I like the term muses in the sense that it has a lot of valences to it,” Harmony recounts to me on the phone. “There is this cryptic use in it; something about it feels rebellious, to use the term as someone who it has acted upon. Black culture is the muse of the past two centuries.”⁸

These concerns and intentions evolve in Harmony's deepened engagement with a more insidious industry archetype—the handler. The word itself sort of obfuscates and evades its own definition, as ubiquitous as it is specific. On paper, the handler is like a round-the-clock “manager” for an artist, particularly a performer or musician. TikTok users are probably the most unflinching source of information on the term (Google won't get you very far), naming how their primary goal is to know about your ins and outs, your whereabouts, and to wield their power to make decisions that uproot any alignment in your “path.” Harmony's recent Substack essay “On Handlers (1)” mythologizes the origin of the handler through Nina Simone's rendition of the song from the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, “I Loves You, Porgy” (1959). They are “a trusted traitor who tempts, taunts, tempers you,” Harmony writes. In effect, control cosplays as care, timing, and discretion. “Your image sells myths called ′units,' merchandise, and so you are given sweet luxurious surveillance, the kind that mimics companionship.”⁹


Dorthaan Kirk, far right, at a party with Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone at Amina Baraka and Amiri Baraka's home.
How visceral and unsettling the writing is here takes it past a speculative realm. A handler wants his hand or fist in the mouth of the muse, cranking and culling.¹⁰ “Hungry ghosts”—Harmony's other name for them. She continues, proposing that we consider grounding what she is talking about in real experience, in a “someone” who is more discernible than they are made out to be. The “who” in question:

Handlers besides the divas husbands [Nina Simone's, Aretha Franklin's, Whitney Houston's, Billie Holiday's]—those deadbeat managers who make you think you need them to make it to gigs, all fake friends and jealous lovers of those dying of fame, anyone who believes a sex party can solve the crisis of sensuality, Clive Davis, Sean Combs [note the prevalent gender dynamics at play], Ye's dentists, the silent billionaire backers of artists, the shady curators who answer to the backers, all the PR teams of those dying of celebrity, most of the people on any celebrity's payroll.¹¹

As much dissent as it is retribution, this exploration drives home the notion of what Life of the Party, as a phrase and a “talking book,” really means. “It's the life force that you are literally cannibalizing to run your shit,” Harmony says, “and how that can look being backstage.”¹² The text will go from performance, and writing related to performance, to expanded imagery, annotations, and writing related to being behind performance. Her essay that meditates on Thelonius Monk and doubled as the score for her newest filmic work by the same name, Abide With Me (2024)—narrated for the screen by her dear friend, poet, and theorist Fred Moten—will be included in the book, along with a long time coming essay on Lonnie Holley. Fantasy, pleasure, and power become a little more cruel in the context of how Harmony troubles this (after) party (the party itself becomes the archetype), where depravity—disguised in an erotic sense as sensuality, trust, access, freedom—incentivizes itself and becomes pathologically consumptive.


Cover image, Life of the Party by Harmony Holiday.
(New York: Semiotext(e), May 27, 2025)
There is a specific kind of interior consciousness to Harmony's work that makes you think language might be capable of doing just about anything. Leaping beyond writing about ideas, every part of her writing reads as an idea in and of itself. Her versatility as a critic, able to see and convey the same curiosity and vulnerability in herself, as in other artists and collaborators, understands the need not only to engage critically or document, but to protect. It is a visceral sensibility that only comes from “taking your ass somewhere.”¹³ From knowing, and not necessarily caring, that the reader might arrive without a prior understanding of the thing you are talking about. But, that they will stay for your voice. It is an unrestrained and devoted attentiveness that finds lineage in the legendary Margo Jefferson, and the late greats Greg Tate and Amiri Baraka. From Baraka, with whom she shared a friendship after first meeting in 2009, Harmony writes that she learns to “transition from belief to thought to idea to condition to action to living, breathing, event… comprehend[ing] and occupy[ing] the controversial space wherein the militant and the taboo meet and circle one another in a ritual harvest dance.”¹⁴

The reserves of memory are a contested space,

There you go again even begging your memory to behave like a promise¹⁵

where I find Harmony fluttering, navigating the depths of Black remembrance. Courting loss into presence and disillusions, fantasies, grievances, or affections unshared into insistences. In a physical realm, she looks for and identifies what is loose through listening—soundplay. Some truths can be heard but not seen; truths that don't heed to our facing them before becoming. These are my obsessions seduced into a second childhood.¹⁶ She unearths and samples speech (shouts, voices, whispers), bits of performance recordings, murmurs backstage, interview excerpts, and rehearsal ongoings to create durational sonic compositions.

I'm addicted to the archives that hold and withhold them like unasked and unanswerable questions, whims, impossible to assimilate until a part of ourselves breaks open to allow them in as this hope to comprehend what we are witnessing that is gone and reemerging in the same moment all the time.¹⁷

Paradise of Ruins (2024) is one such hour-and-fourteen-minute-long sound work forming part of her latest series in BLACK BACKSTAGE. Hear Tina Turner banter backstage with one of The Ikettes about the way she has been looking at Ike (“nobody ever looks at Ike,” she retorts at Tina), or Michael Jackson deliberate about fame in a 1987 interview: “sometimes I want to sneak into places and not have any hoopla,” or John Coltrane talk about how the saxophone as an instrument “brings you to your limits,” or Azealia Banks live on Instagram from a New York City street corner yelling, “Bitch… Girl, it's not me, sis! It's not me!” when a fan approaches her, or Ye on the interview series Drink Champs exclaim and repeat, “I'm Michael now! I am the richest [Black man] in history.” In sequence, forming an unrelenting, inconclusive chorus—“these snatches of the taboo and tainted margins of Black music”¹⁸—enveloping the gallery. The piece is a sort of prelude to a future album accompaniment Gospel-rendition of MAAFA that Harmony is developing with producer and composer Kelman Duran.


Still of Abide With Me, 2024. Digital color video with sound, 37:31 minutes.
Narrated by Fred Moten. Courtesy of artist.

Still of Abide With Me, 2024. Digital color video with sound, 37:31 minutes.
Narrated by Fred Moten. Courtesy of artist.

Still of Abide With Me, 2024. Digital color video with sound, 37:31 minutes.
Narrated by Fred Moten. Courtesy of artist.
“Im in a position to see where words and music rely on each other, to avenge where music wants to go but can't,” Harmony continues.¹⁹ Her arts collective and publishing imprint, Mythscience, broadens what this pursuit asks of music. Mythscience reissues and reprints work from the archive and presents a performance and conversation series at the club-venue 2220Arts + Archives in Los Angeles, where Harmony curates an archive of griot poetics. Last August, on the occasion of James Baldwin's centennial, she presented an intimate solo performance of new material by saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts, followed by a closing DJ set by Kumi James (BAE BAE) featuring some of Baldwins record collection.

Baldwin is a recurring figure in Harmony's research and writing—someone who she calls the life of the party. Her one-man play turned film, God's Suicide (2020), “takes Black male vulnerability as its central subject.” By way of archival research as personal history, it focuses on Baldwin and her father: “Two Jimmys I love and who teach me their startling immortality daily deserve the space to discuss their demons as much as their gifts.” It is constructed around Baldwin's rarely acknowledged five suicide attempts to examine the interplay between creative and destructive forces in a society structured by white supremacy. “How does [Baldwin's] lust for death complicate his effectiveness at life, his legacy?” she asks in an essay titled “Preface to James Baldwin's Unwritten Suicide Note,” proposing, “The versions of him who almost went under… are the ones in need of our love and recognition.”²⁰

What made you want to die? What let you live? What does survival mean to you?²¹

James Baldwin, Abbey Lincoln, and Max Roach attend the premiere of For Love of Ivy at Loew's Tower East Theater, New York, July 16, 1968. Photo by Ron Galella.
Harmony and I have remained in continued conversation ever since her solo exhibition in New York City. Our exchange of attitudes across coasts, as friends and collaborators, often riffs on how life structures performance and vice versa. With a group of friends and artists, we've recently started a bimonthly series of microreviews of live work on Substack called Performance Review —an archive or inventory in real time (ritualized remembering by storytelling) that will evolve into a project in print.²² Voice and gesture feel unabridged no matter how she and I chat. Harmony can be cryptic but all the more divulging when trust insists on it; playfully withholding, instead, if she senses a shift in the room. Her skepticism is also generous. Frequently questioning art's collusion with propaganda and American politics in the mainstream, or contemplating someone's character because of their proximity or surrender to the same empire. The widening silence of the genocide denialists already revving their retreat into deeper fragility as if victims of circumstance themselves.²³ It comes from the integrity and rigor her own work wants of her, and in turn, asks of others.

Her diction is soft, you could say dry, but perceptive, sharp, loud with candor, wit, and laughter. She toys often with astrology, how it's fun to use before it gets cultish: “Sometimes the way the cosmic order works, especially during retrograde, you dont have to say much to get all the information you need.”²⁴ Harmony's conviction (she would call it a Taurean impulse) seems to prolong or subvert whatever retrograde means in this sense, wherein seeking out or understanding what you need isn't just intuited but contended with, and nurtured in company. The very Black polymaths that she obsesses over and finds herself in company and collaboration with (ancestors and contemporaries, interchangeable)—sharing confessions, troubles, friendship, heartbreak, intimacy with—are as much reflections of the pluralities of her work as they are of herself.


Muhammad Ali and Gil Scott-Heron backstage at The Roxy, Los Angeles, 1977.
Photo by Bruce Talamon.

Grace Jones and D'Angelo at Giorgio Armani exhibition opening reception, The Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 17, 2001. Photo by K Mazur.
I remember Legacy once describing Harmony, in her practice, as an “agitator” and I like that word; it exists outside of the didacticism that fails to hold both lived experience and imagination, and the fissures between the two, as forms of knowledge. “It seems impossible to heal without retribution,” Harmony says, “ I was starting to feel on a spiritual level that someone has to watch out for the soul of things basically.”²⁵ In other words, who looks after legacy? And why shouldn't this work be in constant pursuit of the present? In conversation with artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis, scholar Tavia Nyong'o suggests, “The ruse of representation is thinking that we'll ever compensate for the lack [historical rationality] finds in us by filling in the gaps and propping dead and decaying institutions up.”²⁶ This lack finds Harmony making new forms of herself, tearing at the structures that try to contain her. The “risk adversity” coaxed by academia, for one. The tacit but very real ceiling that the literary and publishing worlds impose on poets, another.

Carrying a spirit of delusion is often what is radical in the face of a quote-unquote art world whose institutionalized norms deny so many daily realities, reinforcing and pouring into the supremacist logics they emerge from to begin with. Belief here is strategic and insurgent, holding just enough of the right kind of deceit and dissent to collectively undo and reimagine the institutional frame entirely. Rather, despite the existing conditions that try to stifle experimental work, a disruptive ethic empowers a more generative type of risk to emerge—one that suspends, tests, or surrenders to the limits of a certain kind of care, together. By which I mean, taking care of one another. Art (in its emergence and becoming), and live work in particular, creates the presence and slippage necessary to deepen the measure of our lives, our attention, breath, desire, if we are open enough to throw ourselves into it.

Continuously looking for ways to trouble the process of writing to feel like she's grappling with it in a more physical way, Harmony asks, “Why arent we all doing more embodied work?”²⁷ For her, calling upon the body means creating a space for ideas to give permission to put things together in ways society is always butting up against, deputizing style and language while doing it. Her one qualm with becoming a writer, she notes, was that it would “not be strenuous enough.” [Laughter]. “I just get to a certain point where things need to move energy—the collapsing of all the identities that genres carry, but above all that, how does it actually feel?”²⁸


Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. "Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey's Cry" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1972. Photo by Fred Fehl.

Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. "Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey's Cry" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1972. Photo by Fred Fehl.
She is now dreaming up a future project that sets out to reimagine Cry, the 1971 ballet in three sections by visionary Alvin Ailey, choreographed for legendary Judith Jamison, and featuring music by Alice Coltrane, Laura Nyro, and Chuck Griffin. Her premise is to stage the body (her body) in a filmic and diaristic process as she learns the work's choreography, creating a durational recording shaped by the indeterminant scale, sensations, and cycles of training, rehearsing, aging. Harmony's first entry into artistic creativity was dance: I write first from instinct, but because I grew up dancing ballet and other forms with the intensity of any would be child actor who doesn't know quite what mire she's appeased when she goes on stage or across the floor.²⁹ Harmony tells me writing is just like air to her. Not unlike this, writing brings her back to a sense of why she wants to experiment. “As agency — as an act with consequences,”³⁰ in Toni Morrison's words, considering how and what writing might retrieve, compel, or affect beyond the page. What if we carry everything we've escaped with us, as haunt, quiet rage, unresolved tension with God or spirit or some yet-unnamed realm, which has named us its marks?³¹

1. Harmony Holiday, MAAFA (New York: Fence Books, 2022), 47. ↩


2. Direct quote; Originally published in Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE at The Kitchen at Westbeth (March 21‐May, 25, 2024), Exhibition Pamphlet. ↩


3. Harmony Holiday, “Letters,” Harper's Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/letters-may-2024/ ↩


4. Harmony Holiday (@Harmony_Holiday), Twitter, September 21, 2024. https://x.com/Harmony_Holiday/status/1837646958212878807?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet ↩


5. Harmony Holiday, “Driving with O.J. Simpson,” The Paris Review, July 19, 2024, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/07/19/driving-with-o-j-simpson/ . ↩


6. Direct quote; Harmony Holiday by Farid Matuk, BOMB Magazine, July 26, 2017, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2017/07/26/harmony-holiday/ ↩


7. Direct quote; Harmony Holiday, “Spectacular Brooding,“ Black Music and Black Muses, Substack, May 14, 2021, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/spectacular-brooding . ↩


8. Harmony Holiday, Angelique Rosales Salgado, personal communication, August 2024. ↩


9. Direct quote; Harmony Holiday, “On Handlers (1),” Black Music and Black Muses, August 20, 2024. https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/on-handlers-1 ↩


10. Ibid. ↩


11. Ibid. ↩


12. Harmony Holiday, Angelique Rosales Salgado, personal communication, August 2024. ↩


13. Harmony Holiday, Angelique Rosales Salgado, personal communication, August 2024. ↩


14. Harmony Holiday, “Amiri Baraka Changed My Life, Celebrating Amiri in Sonics this April,” Genius, https://genius.com/Harmony-holiday-amiri-baraka-changed-my-life-celebrating-amiri-in-sonics-this-april-annotated ↩


15. Harmony Holiday, MAAFA (New York: Fence Books, 2022(, 83. ↩


16. Ibid., 17. ↩


17. Harmony Holiday, “Please don't cut me off in the middle of this prayer.” Black Music and Black Muses, Substack, December 5, 2022, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/please-dont-cut-me-off-in-the-middle?utm_source=publication-search ↩


18. Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE at The Kitchen at Westbeth (March 21‐May, 25, 2024), Paradise of Ruins (2024) Liner Notes, ↩


19. Harmony Holiday, Angelique Rosales Salgado, personal communication, August 2024. ↩


20. Harmony Holiday, “Preface to James Baldwin's Unwritten Suicide Note,“ Poetry Foundation, August 8, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/open-door/80254/preface-to-james-baldwins-unwritten-suicide-note ↩


21. Ibid. ↩


22. “What It Is,” Performance Review, Substack, October 1, 2024, https://performancereviews.substack.com/p/performance-review ↩


23. Harmony Holiday, “For Bisan Owda, a Living Avenging Angel in Gaza,” Black Music and Black Muses, Substack, November 5, 2023, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/for-bisan-owda-a-living-avenging . ↩


24. Harmony Holiday, Angelique Rosales Salgado, personal communication, August 2024. ↩


25. Ibid. ↩


26. Tavia Nyong'o, “Sharpening My Tools: Ligia Lewis,” Spike Art Magazine, Spring 2021, https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-sharpening-my-tools-ligia-lewis . ↩


27. Harmony Holiday, Angelique Rosales Salgado, personal communication, August 2024. ↩


28. Ibid. ↩


29. Harmony Holiday, “On Keeping a Talking Book,” Black Music and Black Muses, Substack, June, 6, 2024, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/on-keeping-a-talking-book . ↩


30. Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate Lecture” (Stockholm, Sweden, December 7, 1993) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/ ↩


31. Harmony Holiday, “Nala Sinephro,” 4Columns, September 6, 2024, https://4columns.org/holiday-harmony/nala-sinephro . ↩

Photo by Deonte Lee.

Angelique Rosales Salgado (Ciudad de México, México) is a curator and writer based in New York City. Their curatorial, research, and creative practice is grounded in queer study, and focuses on performance, experimental dance, collective work, and time-based media. They have curated, produced, co-organized, and supported numerous exhibitions, commissions, live works, online programs, and artistic projects. Currently they are curatorial assistant at The Kitchen, and have held curatorial positions at Pioneer Works, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.