SlowDrag

Mendi + Keith Obadike’s collaborative practice exists at the intersection of sonic, visual, and literary traditions, often highlighting the resonant histories embedded within these forms. For Counterpublic 2023, SlowDrag is a sound installation consisting of cars moving through the St. Louis Place neighborhood playing numerous simultaneous remixes of an interpolation of the song “Black Angel Blues” created by the artists, further reinterpreted and remixed through a collaboration with local music contractor and event producer Mvstermind.
Rooted in associations of the intimate slow-drag dance form that has persisted from the early blues through to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, SlowDrag carries this history forward by engaging St. Louis hip-hop producers and sound system culture. To open Counterpublic 2023, the work is “performed” by dozens of cars with custom speakers. Their sonic procession relies on the shape and form of the St. Louis Place neighborhood to determine the route as it moves through streets actively undergoing the stresses of displacement and vacancy. Here, SlowDrag announces itself as a sonic intervention—and celebration—meant to enter into a heightened intimacy and creation of new relations in the public spaces of St. Louis.