The complications of multinational pop: This song first emerges as a Swedish-language solo recording by Frida. In this trax, she gives comfort to an old man whose sweetheart has passed away. Once it became clear the trax was going to be a big hit, the song fans out into both Spanish and English versions. The Spanish version, with lyrics by RCA-Argentina employee Mary McCluskey, is the weaker of the two: here, ABBA sings to a man who has seen war and has survived because of the “protection” of the stars. The English version, with lyrics by Björn, is far more intriguing and risky: now Fernando and the singer are veterans of a fight for “liberty” across the “Rio Grande” river. Björn eventually will claim that the song is about Zapata during the Mexican Revolution, but this makes no sense: Zapata’s forces never entered U.S. territory. On the other hand, Pancho Villa crossed the border several times, as did General Mariano Arista at the start of the War of North American Invasion (known to the north as the Mexican-American War). It’s finally possible to hear the track as a fantasy Reconquista, through immigration or at the point of gun barrel, with the stars aligned for the future downfall of the white interlopers. Thus, the Spanish version appears to be a sop to Latin American political and market forces. But this still fails to explain how the English language version turn into a Samuel P. Huntington fantasy.
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“Cop Killer” (Body Count)
Adjacent to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s appeal before the grand jury announcement in the Michael Brown case, President Obama ventriloquizes in a white paternalist voice: protestors must respect the lives and property of others. The right to free speech, also mentioned by both men, animates this whole discussion and serves as the third prong of the appeal. (See Dan Quayle’s, George Bush’s, and Charlton Heston’s censorious statements/actions after this trax’s initial release.) What they don’t see is how lives and properties—this life’s properties as life’s only current guaranteed property—are imbricated. What, at first blush, serves as a revenge fantasy for Ice-T and Body Count (“tonight we get even!”) reveals a confusion of time central to the oppressed’s resistance. With the murderous fantasy in plain view, the singer sympathizes, “I know your family’s/momma’s grieving.” About to happen/already happened: the text of premeditation is both immediate and longstanding, with a repetitious fantasy fulfillment animating the writing and performance. Yet if one has a (local) monopoly on the use of force, premeditation should be considered planning; fantasy is prelude to systemization. And this might help explain a particular sleight of hand constituting white supremacy in which black lives must be (ab)used and eventually neglected in the name of civil protest. (Keep in mind that in his Autobiography, Malcolm X describes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategy of non-violent protest as a way to “dramatize the brutality and evil of the white man against defenseless blacks.”) With odds like that, it’s difficult not to agree with Michael Brown’s step-father in spirit and “Burn this motherfucker down!”
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