Still Here at the End of the Broadcast

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This is someone else’s line, and I have carried it around for years the way you carry a house key that no longer fits any lock you own but which you cannot bring yourself to throw away because the weight of it in your pocket means you once lived somewhere specific.

I am thinking about this — the stories, the living, the gap between them — because it is eleven o’clock on a Tuesday in January and I am watching, for the fourth time this week, a video of a woman on a stage in Houston in 1986. She is wearing a white dress. She is singing “Greatest Love of All.” She is Whitney Houston, though she is not yet fully Whitney Houston, not the Whitney Houston who will become a national weather system, not the Whitney Houston whose voice will be repurposed in a hundred advertisements and a thousand karaoke bars and eventually, in the logic of American culture, consumed entirely by the apparatus that loved her. In this video she is twenty-two years old and her voice is doing something that I have watched forty or fifty times and still cannot describe with any precision, which is the kind of failure that makes a person keep watching.

I should say that I came to this subject sideways. I did not set out to write about television or pop music or the particular way Americans metabolize their performers. I set out to write about the Santa Ana winds, which were blowing when I moved to Los Angeles in September of 2019, and which made the city feel, as it always does when the winds blow, like a place that was about to catch fire or had just finished catching fire or was in the process of catching fire and had simply decided to keep going anyway.

The winds came and the power went out and I sat in my apartment in Silver Lake with the windows open and the air smelling like sage and ash and I listened to the radio because the internet was down and the radio was playing, of all things, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and I thought: this is it, this is the sound of a country asking a question it does not want answered, and it has been playing on a loop since 1971 and no one has changed the station because changing the station would require admitting that the question has an answer and the answer is not good.

Here is what I mean by the broadcast.

I mean the signal. The shared signal. The thing that Americans, for roughly forty years — from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s — could be reasonably expected to have received. Three networks, then four. A finite number of channels. Ed Sullivan. Walter Cronkite. Soul Train. The signal was never neutral. It was never democratic. It was built on exclusion, on the particular cruelties of who got airtime and who did not, on the laugh track and the censor’s hand and the sponsor’s veto. But it was shared in the way that weather is shared — everyone experienced it, even if they experienced it differently, and you could talk about it the next morning at work or school or church and know that the person you were talking to had seen the same thing.

The broadcast ended. Not on a specific date, though you could make a case for several: the day cable news split the electorate into separate realities, the day YouTube launched, the day the algorithm learned your preferences better than your spouse did. The broadcast ended the way the Roman Empire ended, which is to say slowly and then all at once and also not really, because the people living through the ending did not experience it as an ending but as a series of ordinary Tuesdays, each one slightly more fragmented than the last.

I am interested in what happened to American culture — to the shared dream, the communal hallucination, the thing we agreed to watch together — when the broadcast ended. And I am interested, specifically, in what happened to Black performance, because Black performance was the broadcast’s conscience and its engine and its greatest betrayal, all at the same time.

A partial catalog of things I have watched on my phone in the past seventy-two hours while lying on my couch in Los Angeles in the year of somebody’s lord 2025:

A thirty-second clip of James Brown at the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, doing a split so sharp it seems to divide the century in half. A four-minute video of Aretha Franklin singing “A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center in 2015, making Barack Obama cry on national television — the most powerful man in the world undone by a woman from Memphis who learned to sing in her father’s church, and the tears are real, and the performance is real, and the power is real, and all of it is also a picture, a broadcast, a signal being received in fourteen million different ways. A supercut of every time Don Cornelius said “love, peace, and soul” at the end of Soul Train, which was not a sign-off but a benediction, a man in a perfect suit telling Black America, every Saturday morning, that the party was still going, that the dancing had not stopped, that whatever the news said, the body still knew how to move.

I watch these on my phone. I watch them in bed. I watch them the way I imagine people once watched television — not for information but for company, for the sound of a familiar voice in an unfamiliar dark.

Joan Didion, writing in 1968 about the music of The Doors, noted that the weights were off and the weather was wrong and the narrative was no longer intact. She was writing about Los Angeles but she was also writing about the narrative itself — the American story, the one that said the center would hold, the one that turned out to be a story and not a fact. She recorded these observations with the clinical precision of someone taking her own temperature during a fever. The sentence as scalpel.

I read her essay about the recording of the Doors album in a rented house in Laurel Canyon and I thought about Motown, which was recording in Detroit at the same time, which was building an empire of Black joy and heartbreak and choreographed ecstasy in a city that was also coming apart, and I thought: these are two fever dreams happening simultaneously in the same country, and neither one knows quite what to make of the other, and the distance between them is the distance between what America says it is and what America actually sounds like when you press your ear to the floor.

Didion could hear the Doors. She could hear the Beach Boys. She could hear the white side of the signal, the part of the broadcast that was about entropy and disillusion and the failure of the counterculture. What she could not hear — what the essay, for all its devastating precision, does not hear — is Marvin Gaye asking what’s going on, is Stevie Wonder asking if the world is a place worth keeping, is Aretha demanding respect with a force that was not countercultural but something older and more serious, a force that had been asking these questions since before the counterculture existed.

This is not a criticism. It is a diagnosis. The broadcast was always two broadcasts, running on the same frequency but received by different antennas, and the signal that one audience heard as the sound of everything falling apart was the signal another audience heard as the sound of people who had been building in the margins finally being heard in the center.

I want to talk about Don Cornelius.

Don Cornelius created Soul Train in Chicago in 1970 and moved it to Los Angeles in 1971 and hosted it, in that deep, unhurried baritone, until 1993. Soul Train was a dance show. It was also, if you watched it the way I watched it — which is to say with the volume turned up and the couch pushed back and my socks on the hardwood floor of my aunt’s living room in Columbus, Ohio, trying to learn the moves I’d seen the dancers do the week before — something more than a dance show. It was a proof of concept. The concept was that Black people could be on television being themselves, being beautiful, being silly, being sexual, being joyful, being alive, and that this aliveness was not a deviation from American culture but its purest expression.

Every Saturday. For twenty-two years. Don Cornelius in the suit. The dancers on the floor. The Soul Train line, which was a corridor of improvisation, a gauntlet of style, a place where the body said what the mouth could not say and the camera could not help but watch. The line was democratic in a way that almost nothing else on American television was democratic. You stepped into it. You danced. You were seen. That was the whole thing. That was enough.

I tried once, at my aunt’s house, to replicate a move I had seen a dancer do on the show — a kind of gliding turn, almost liquid, the shoulders going one way while the hips went the other, as if the upper body and lower body had agreed to tell different stories simultaneously and somehow both stories were true. I was nine. I fell. My aunt laughed so hard she knocked her iced tea off the arm of the couch, and the glass shattered on the floor, and she looked at the broken glass and then at me lying on the hardwood and she said, “Baby, your body is writing checks your feet can’t cash,” which is, I have come to understand, a fairly precise description of what it means to be a critic. You watch the dance. You feel the dance in your body. You try to move. You fall. You write about it anyway.

Cornelius killed himself in 2012. He was seventy-five. He had been in pain for a long time — physical pain, the kind that accumulates in a body that has been performing for decades — and on the morning of February 1st, in his home in Los Angeles, he ended the broadcast. The last thing he said, according to people who knew him, was not “love, peace, and soul.” The last thing he said was apparently nothing, because the end of a life, unlike the end of a television show, does not come with a sign-off.

I think about this more than I should. I think about the distance between the public benediction and the private silence, the gap between what a man says on camera and what he does when the camera is off, and I think this gap is not a contradiction but a fact about performance, which is that performance is not lying — it is choosing which truth to broadcast, and the choice itself is an act of love, and the love is real even when the signal stops.

Here is another fragment. File it wherever you like.

In 2016, the year everything cracked open, I was living in a studio apartment in Oakland and working at a magazine that no longer exists and spending my evenings in a bar on Telegraph Avenue where the jukebox had been replaced by a Spotify playlist controlled by an iPad mounted to the wall. The playlist was algorithmic. It learned what the bar wanted. What the bar wanted, on the nights I was there, was a particular kind of melancholy — Radiohead, Frank Ocean, Bon Iver, Solange — and the algorithm provided it with the eerie competence of a bartender who pours your drink before you sit down, who knows your sadness better than you do and has monetized the knowledge.

I remember thinking: this is the opposite of Soul Train. This is the anti-broadcast. No one in this bar is watching the same thing or hearing the same thing or dancing the same dance. We are all wearing earbuds or staring at our phones or listening to a playlist that has been calibrated to our individual despair. The communal hallucination has been replaced by seven billion private hallucinations, each one curated, each one accurate, each one completely alone.

And then Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” came on, and a woman at the bar started singing along, quietly, and then another woman joined her, and then a man at a table near the window, and for about ninety seconds there were five or six strangers in a bar in Oakland singing the same song at the same time, and the song was about trying to get away from a feeling that will not leave you, and the singing was off-key and beautiful and it was, for ninety seconds, a broadcast — a shared signal, a thing we all received at the same frequency, in the same room, at the same time.

Then it ended and the algorithm moved on and we all went back to our phones.

What I am trying to say — and keep failing to say, which may be the point — is that the end of the broadcast did not mean the end of the need for it.

What I am trying to say is that Black performance — the singing, the dancing, the styling, the preaching, the joking, the mourning, the sheer physical fact of Black bodies in motion on American stages — was never just content to be distributed through a signal. It was the signal. It was the reason the signal mattered. Take Soul Train off the air and you still have the line. Take the line off the television and you still have the dance. Take the dance out of the studio and you still have the body. The body remembers. The body does not need a broadcast to know what it knows.

When I watch Whitney Houston singing in Houston in 1986 on my phone in Los Angeles in 2025, I am not watching television. I am not watching a broadcast. I am watching a woman’s body doing something extraordinary with air and muscle and memory, and the fact that I am watching it on a four-inch screen thirty-nine years after it happened does not diminish it, though it changes it, in the same way that reading a letter from a dead person changes the letter without diminishing the handwriting.

I have been in Los Angeles for six years now and the Santa Ana winds still make me nervous. They make everyone nervous, or at least they make everyone who has been here long enough to associate the winds with fire, which is everyone. The winds come and the city dries out and the hills turn the color of old paper and you can feel, in the air, a kind of waiting, as if the landscape itself is holding its breath before deciding whether to burn.

Didion wrote about this. She wrote about it better than anyone, with sentences that were themselves a kind of controlled burn — precise, hot, contained. She wrote about the Santa Anas as a metaphor for California living on the edge of its own dissolution, and she was right, but she was also writing about herself — about what it feels like to be a person whose nervous system is tuned to the frequency of collapse, who hears the crack in the signal before anyone else can.

I understand this. I live here now. I hear the cracks. But I also hear what Didion could not hear or did not hear or chose not to hear, which is the music coming from the other room — the room where Marvin Gaye is singing, where Don Cornelius is dancing, where Whitney Houston is opening her mouth and making the air do something that physics can describe but language cannot, and the music is not a response to the dissolution. The music is older than the dissolution. The music was here first.

A brief catalog of performances I return to when the signal fails:

Mahalia Jackson at the 1963 March on Washington, standing behind Martin Luther King Jr., shouting “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” — the moment when a gospel singer rewrote a political speech by insisting on transcendence.

Prince at the Super Bowl in 2007, in the rain, playing “Purple Rain” in the rain, which was either the most obvious choice in the history of popular music or the most audacious, because the rain was real and the guitar was real and the purple light was real and Prince was standing in all of it grinning like a man who had arranged the weather.

Beyonce at Coachella in 2018, Homecoming, the drumline, the yellow hoodie, turning a music festival in a field in Indio into a historically Black college homecoming, making a hundred thousand people — most of whom had never attended an HBCU — feel what it felt like to belong to something that specific, that joyful, that old, that new.

Nina Simone at Montreux in 1976, “Stars,” alone at the piano, singing about wanting to be a star and knowing she already was and knowing it did not matter, and the loneliness in her voice is the loneliness of a person who has been broadcasting for twenty years and is not sure anyone is receiving.

I have watched all of these more than once. Some of them dozens of times. I am not studying them. I am returning to them the way a person returns to a house they used to live in — not expecting to find it unchanged, but because the act of returning is itself a kind of knowledge. You learn what you have lost by standing where it used to be.

These are not artifacts. They are not content. They are evidence that the broadcast was never the point. The point was the performance — the body on the stage, the voice in the room, the moment when a human being does something so particular, so precise, so excessively alive that the signal becomes irrelevant. You are no longer watching a transmission. You are watching a person. And the person is still here.

It is late now. The Santa Anas have died down. The air smells like jasmine and exhaust, which is what Los Angeles smells like when it is not on fire. I have closed the Whitney Houston video. I have closed the James Brown video. I have closed the Don Cornelius supercut. My phone screen is dark and the apartment is quiet and outside the window the city is doing what it always does, which is humming at a frequency I cannot quite name, a frequency that sounds like traffic and Spanish-language radio and someone’s bass line leaking through an apartment wall and a dog barking in the canyon and the palm trees moving in whatever wind is left.

I moved here because I thought I was chasing the signal. I thought Los Angeles was where the broadcast lived — the city of cameras, the city of screens, the city that invented the American practice of turning life into content and content into money and money into more content. What I found was a city where the broadcast had ended so completely that people had stopped noticing, where everyone was producing their own signal and no one was receiving anyone else’s, and the loneliness of this was not tragic but ordinary, which is worse, because ordinary loneliness does not announce itself. It just sits in the room like a glass of water on a nightstand.

But then you hear something. A song from a car passing on Sunset. A woman humming in the grocery store on Hyperion. A kid on the bus playing something on his phone without headphones, which is rude, which is inconsiderate, which is also — and I mean this — a broadcast. A sound that enters the room without asking permission and rearranges the air.

I am still here at the end of the broadcast. We are all still here. The signal is gone, the screen is dark, the wind has stopped, and the question Marvin Gaye asked in 1971 still does not have an answer. The dancers on the Soul Train line are still dancing — somewhere, in the footage, in the memory, in the body that remembers what the broadcast forgot: the point was never the transmission.

The point was the song. The point was the body. The point was the room full of strangers who, for a few seconds, all heard the same thing.

Love, peace, and soul.