Eric A. Ponce

Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a brilliant fictional oral history that explores music, race and the cultural ties that bind us together. As a music journalist with experience at Essence, Entertainment Weekly, Getty Images and LIFE, Walton brings behind-the-scenes insight to the story of a 1970s rock ’n’ roll duo and the reasons they vanished from the spotlight. Here she discusses the legacy of Black women in rock and the strange ways that music moves us.

Music is notoriously difficult to write about. Was creating these characters and their art daunting to you? How did you face the challenge?
I’m not a musician myself, so there were times in writing this novel when imposter syndrome did strike. But leaning into two things helped to ease that anxiety: what I’d observed of artists and their zeitgeisty moments from working in entertainment journalism and, much more primal than that, the passion I’d felt as a teenage fan.

My professional experience helped me pose questions that placed Opal & Nev in a context as politically aware artists and performers, but it was nostalgia for the bands I have loved over my life that fed the most obviously musical parts. There’s a moment in the novel when the journalist character, Sunny, recounts the first time she heard Opal & Nev at 14 years old, and she likens what she felt in her body to a fear response. That’s directly inspired by a few personal experiences: feeling a scream build in my throat during certain parts of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” or fighting a weird urge to escape a van I was riding in with friends when someone slipped The Velvet Underground & Nico into the tape deck, or literally shivering every time Thom Yorke’s vocals crescendo at the 3:20 mark of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” 

Something in those sounds and those images thrusts me into taboo territories, scary and thrilling all at once, and I approached writing about music in this novel from that fan’s perspective, as an investigation into what that something might be.

 “I approached writing about music in this novel from that fan’s perspective, as an investigation into what that something might be.”

In what ways has music impacted your writing?
Rhythm is crucial. For this novel especially, which has so many characters, I wanted each to have a signature sound and phrasing.

Also, I used to be obsessed with lyrics, so songwriters have had an impact. Back when there were such things as cassette tapes and CDs, whenever I’d get a new album I’d pore over the liner notes, burning the art and the words into my brain. The best songwriters had a way of describing universal emotions—love, grief, angst, fear—in unique and sometimes puzzling ways. I went through a heavy R.E.M. period in high school, and I would play “You Are the Everything” over and over and over again, trying to understand what Michael Stipe was going on about and why I felt so moved by it, and then the music itself would enhance the emotion to 11. 

My favorite songs have always been layered like that, in sound and meaning, and as a writer I strive to do a similar kind of layering. There’s the text and the subtext and the tools of craft (like pacing and, again, rhythm) that make a scene sing.

ALSO BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev.

What reasons did you have for placing Opal & Nev in the specific musical context of the 1970s? There is a lot of nostalgia for that era in pop culture today. Did that impact your choice?
When writing, I thought a lot about my parents, both huge music fans, and the stories they’d tell me about the house parties (or “sets,” as they called them) they’d go to when they were young—how their whole reason for getting together would be to listen to, say, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as a deep and communal experience. So I wanted to dream into that time, into my parents’ youth and their fandom (especially around “message music”), because I feel connected to that.

Plus, the early 1970s was a fascinating, fertile era for rock. So many different subgenres were either just on the verge or approaching a heyday. You had Southern rock, art rock, funk, the folk coming out of Laurel Canyon and very early versions of punk. I wanted to put Opal & Nev at the heart of that cacophony.

Some of the riskiest, most exciting art has emerged from tumultuous times, so sociopolitical history was also something I was looking at as a context for Opal & Nev. I imagined them hitting during a peak moment of American exhaustion, rage and disillusionment—a climate that definitely echoed during the years I was writing.

 “The triumph of Tina Turner is not only her personal emancipation from an abusive marriage, it’s also how she fought for success in a genre overtaken by white men.” 

What specific influences did you have for these characters? How did you envision their performances and recordings?
In the earliest days, I imagined Opal and Nev broadly as avant-garde images. My short pitch to friends was, “Imagine if Grace Jones and David Bowie made weird music together in early ’70s New York.” Then as I started writing—detailing their childhoods, weaving in history, thinking about what circumstances might have believably brought such opposites together—they started to shift. 

By the time I was sketching out Rivington Showcase, the disastrous concert that launches them into the spotlight, I realized they had to shift again, dramatically. The way I imagined it: They come into that gig one way and come out the other end transformed.

I imagine their post-Showcase performances and recordings to be edgy, loud and provocative. I’d call their sound proto-punk—not part of a wave as it’s cresting but in the ripples that come before. My goal was to position them as unique and experimental, making music that can’t yet be named or categorized.

The Rivington Showcase results in devastating racial violence. What intersections do you see between music and race? Do you think music can be a place for reconciliation, or is it just another battleground?
So first I would say that there’s music, and then there’s the music industry. Speaking purely about music and its potential: “Reconciliation” is putting a lot on it, with implications I don’t intend, but I do think music builds connections between people. Rock ’n’ roll is especially interesting to think about in those terms: It is so obviously rooted in Blackness, born in our church choirs and blues joints and further teased out by Black artists like Little Richard, and yet it still managed to reach masses of young white kids. This, despite the systems set up to rigorously separate them from us.

But it gets thorny when the industry—meaning the money-making structure that packages and promotes that same music—enters the picture. Racial bias is baked into the business of music, the same way it is in any other aspect of American life. Disparities in compensation, race-based categorization and the blatant appropriation that too often results in total erasure—these are just a few of the things that have sandbagged Black artists while elevating white ones. And this is why so many Black folks—myself included—do not really mess with Elvis. The issue isn’t his music (at least not for me); it’s the lack of respect in calling him “King.”

This is not to say that white artists who’ve borrowed from Black ones are doing something inherently wrong or sinister; everyone is influenced by somebody who came before. But the ones I admire the most, beyond simply loving their music, have been crystal clear in naming their influences. And even at the height of their own success, they’ve challenged the anti-Black biases of gatekeepers. (See this 1983 interview with David Bowie for a master class in what I love to see.)

My utmost respect, however, is reserved for the Black women who’ve tried to break through in a particular genre while being gaslit into believing they don’t belong. For me, the triumph of Tina Turner is not only her personal emancipation from an abusive marriage, it’s also how she fought for success in a genre overtaken by white men. On the flip side of that, I wonder what might have been for an artist like Betty Davis, who left the industry altogether when executives tried to change her sexy, in-your-face image and package her in some other way. I felt the resonance of both women’s stories recently, as I cheered to hear that Brittany Howard had won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song for “Stay High.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Dawnie Walton is one of our 2021 Writers to Watch: Women on the rise. See the full list.

Given the dearth of knowledge and literature about underground African American bands and artists, what Black rock stars can you point readers to?
OK, so confession: I’m still stuck in the past. The thing about digging into little-known histories is that you keep discovering gems. So for those also looking to learn more about influences and pioneers, I’ll recommend a revelatory book published just last fall: Black Diamond Queens by Maureen Mahon. It puts a spotlight specifically on Black women in rock—the huge names, yes, like Tina Turner and Brittany Howard, but also LaVern Baker, Claudia Lennear, Devon Wilson and Marsha Hunt. I devoured this book and ran down Spotify rabbit holes countless times.   

Documentaries are also a great way to geek out. I’ve loved They Say I’m Different (about Betty Davis), A Band Called Death (about three brothers making punk in 1970s Detroit) and 20 Feet From Stardom (about background singers, including Merry Clayton, who contributed heavily to the rock canon but never got their due). Every once in a while, I’ll see who’s new and next on Afropunk’s digital platforms; they’ve got music premieres, interviews, mixtapes and more featuring a dizzying array of Black rock artists. 

Outside of journalism and academia, do you see a place for music literature?
Of course! Music has drama and romance and, I’d even argue, a little mystery. (How else to describe that “X-factor” that makes somebody not just a talent but a star?) It sparks our emotions and is often hard-wired to the most formative moments of our lives. That’s great fodder for riffing and remembering, and thus great fodder for fiction. Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and of course the last section of “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. I’ve loved how these writers work with music in very different, very literary ways.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Some stories are meant to be told out loud. Check out our starred review of the audiobook for The Final Revival of Opal & Nev.

Did you ever have musical aspirations yourself? Please, go into all the embarrassing details!
Ha! Well, when I was about 10, my mother inherited an upright piano from family friends and enrolled me in lessons. The teacher’s name was Mr. Head, he looked like “All in the Family”-era Rob Reiner, and he gave lessons in the music store at one of the malls in Jacksonville, Florida. I took maybe a year’s worth; for some reason, the only songs I remember learning to play in all that time were “Goodbye Old Paint” and another called “Flyin’,” which had an illustration of a hang glider on the cover of the sheet music. 

I don’t remember much else about playing, except that I would dread practicing because I was impatient. I couldn’t seem to get my fingers where they needed to be, and all the while the metronome mocked me. Then, on the night of a big recital, I broke out in the chicken pox. The end!

Author photos by Rayon Richards

Life has become a lot more complicated since Bryan Washington started writing his debut novel, Memorial. The United States is contending with a global pandemic, civil unrest, climate change and a contentious political atmosphere—but not everything is terrible. This past winter, former President Barack Obama included Lot, Washington’s 2019 collection of short stories, on his year-end reading list—a bump that placed Memorial high on many lists of the most anticipated books of 2020. Lot also recently won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, an annual prize given to a fiction writer who is 35 or younger.

“For the most part, things are going good in the immediate vicinity,” Washington says during a Zoom call to his home in Houston, Texas. But especially regarding Memorial, things seem to be going great. The book has received praise from authors like Jia Tolentino and Ocean Vuong, who called Memorial “a new vision for the twenty-first century novel” that “made [him] happy.” It’s apparent that Washington has struck a chord within the literary community, but Washington especially leans in to the latter part of Vuong’s praise. “As weighty as that particular diagnosis is, the fact that it made him happy means so much, if not more, to me, because it is a tricky novel tonally,” he says. “I was trying to hit a mark that was not quite straight down the middle.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Memorial.

Memorial focuses primarily on the intricate relationship between Black day care worker Benson and his boyfriend, Japanese American chef Mike, two young men in love who are being torn apart by the separate forces of their lives. On the same day that Mike’s Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives to stay with him and Benson in their home in the Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, Mike announces that he’s leaving. He’s going to Osaka, Japan, to visit his sick father—“Just for a few weeks, he says. Or maybe a couple of months”—leaving Benson and Mitsuko behind. The two reluctant roommates form a bond, sharing delicious meals in their one-bedroom apartment, while Mike journeys to the other side of the globe. Emotionally and physically, the young lovers are drifting apart, a process that readers experience in intimate first-person narration that alternates between the two men.

Memorial makes the reader feel a lot of feelings and ask a lot of questions, not just about the book’s narrative but also about the state of love and relationships today. Washington grappled with many of these questions while writing the book, but there’s one question he says he wrestled with the most: Will they or won’t they stay together? This quintessential back-and-forth between Benson and Mike is what drives Memorial. “I always had that question in the back of my head,” he says, “knowing that I would have to answer it, even if I didn’t know what the answer would look like from the outset.”

“Within the various traumas that people experience, you still have the things that make you laugh and the things you enjoy eating and your crushes and your first loves.”

But Memorial is bigger than any one question, and Washington’s motivations for writing the book show deep respect for his myriad communities and found families. When he began drafting, Washington realized his book would “not have a lot of thematic or plot [comparisons] in contemporary American literature.” Rather than being disheartened by this absence, however, he embraced it. “The fact that it’s a departure is what encouraged it,” he says.

One major departure from other queer fiction is the way Memorial handles trauma within the story. “There’s a way that narratives in contemporary American literature—if they do feature queer characters, and especially queer characters of marginalized communities—are trauma-based,” Washington says, “and it was very important for me not to center trauma in the midst of the novel. . . . Within the various traumas that people experience, you still have the things that make you laugh and the things you enjoy eating and your crushes and your first loves and the acceleration of relationships and the deterioration of relationships. I wanted to find a way to center community without solely underlining the traumas in the story.”

Decades of literary discussions and debates preceded Washington’s creation of a book like Memorial, and he’s aware of the special place it holds in the chronology of queer literature. From Langston Hughes to James Baldwin, all the way to contemporary writers like poet Danez Smith, the conversation around how queer characters and communities are depicted in American literature has been going on for a long time, and Memorial continues that lineage. “A lot of other people had to have written the books that they wrote in order for the possibility of a novel like Memorial to even get to the precipice of publication,” Washington says. “It feels nice to be able to contribute another facet, I hope, to the conversation.”

Washington’s unique place in literature isn’t something he’s overly concerned about, though. It was only after writing Memorial that he could look back and ask himself which writers he had been in conversation with. During the writing process, he just wanted to make the best book he could.

In fact, when I ask him what books inspired him, he can’t think of any. All that come to mind are films. He mentions the 2019 dramedy The Farewell, starring Akwafina, as a standout inspiration, particularly for its relationship with the audience. “We get the events and we get the things that happen,” Washington says, “but we aren’t told how to feel about it.” Films like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood helped him to be less proscriptive in his writing, and to strike a balance between showing and not showing.

Another goal of the novel was to foster communication with readers, making them think critically and deeply about modern love and relationships. Washington describes this as an especially difficult part of the writing process, as he tried “to find a way to direct every conversation and every gesture . . . toward not answering [the reader’s] questions. I don’t think I’m really interested in answering questions so much as lengthening the conversation, so that the reader can take what they have and do what they want with it.”

I pitch him a metaphor, about how experiencing art is like hearing a gavel strike, a moment to decide whether or not to pass judgment. “I’m certainly interested in holding the gavel, but I don’t need to be the person who actually makes contact with it,” Washington says. “I’d prefer if that’s the reader. The final judgment can be what they want. Then the narrative relationship becomes symbiotic, and it’s not just me saying this is what happened.”

“I feel like narratives that really stick with me are those that allow space for the readers.”

This consideration of the individual reading experience isn’t new in the world of literature, but it transforms Washington’s intimate novel into an opportunity for reflection, for the reader to glimpse into their own mind, rather than some kind of indoctrination by the author. However, this style of storytelling stands out as unique in the information age. When so much mass media is trying to tell us what to think and do and buy, it’s refreshing to be encouraged to think for ourselves.

Books like Memorial, which require emotional investment and internal inquiry by the reader, hold a lot of power, and Washington wields it with grace. It’s not that he doesn’t have the answers to the questions he raises in this book; it’s that he’s more interested in all of us searching for them together. “There is a difference between a narrative that simply refuses to illuminate what it’s going after, and a narrative that comes to a logical conclusion that is still open to the world of the reader by way of their personal experiences and that allows them to fall into that world,” he says.

Empathy is the goal here. All these open-ended questions encourage readers to understand the characters’ motivations and their own reactions to those characters. “By the end of the drafting process,” Washington says, “I felt as though I understood where [the characters] were coming from, but I didn’t need to like them. . . . If I knew where they were coming from, I had a better understanding of why they did the things they did.”

To Washington, shifting interpretative authority to the reader is a vital element of literature. “You really don’t need to answer every question for a reader or for someone in the audience. As long as you are extremely calculated in how you are giving information and details on the page, everyone will end up in the general pocket,” he says. “I feel like narratives that really stick with me are those that allow space for the readers.”

Author photo by Dailey Hubbard