ABSTRACT
Spike Lee is widely acclaimed as one of America's leading filmmakers. One of the less celebrated of Lee's interventions is Do It A Cappella, a "filmic tour" of mostly black vocal harmony styles that premiered in the PBS Great Performances series in 1990 and was subsequently released on compact disc. The show involved a number of well-known and also less well known African American acts such as hip-hoppers True Image, the veteran Persuasions, and the six-piece gospel group. The fact that an Anglo-African and a black South African choral group teamed up under the auspices of one of America's most controversial filmmakers is not accidental. Diasporic performances such as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" provide eloquent proof of the impossibility of seizing on music as a means to sustain an organic blackness. They support the notion that black ecumenes operate within an impossible logic of sameness and difference.
