“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!”

“Are We a Nation?” (Sweet Honey in the Rock)

Since separation is togetherness’ necessary partner—otherwise, why argue?—and togetherness through separation is unacceptable, where are we headed? This boycott-oriented trax in response to Arizona’s SB-1070 is aligned with The Sound Strike collective of artists who encouraged the active marginalization of Arizona from the music marketplace. Come May 2012—a month before the Supreme Court approved of the de facto “driving while Mexican” provision of the law—the boycott transitioned to an embrace of contact, engagement, and a more laissez faire attitude. (Now, it’s pretty much the same as Artist for Action’s stance, without the active pedagogy or artist adulation.) Problem solved? Not quite. Singers invoke the Declaration of Independence, ask rhetorical questions, define “nation” as that which “join[s] heart and hand,” and generally follow MLK’s “constructive, nonviolent tension.” This is a growth narrative. Yet a combative posture is assumed, and a symbolic violence is simultaneously the heart of seeming platitudes, especially when one must “dare” to “stand for justice.” These moments—all moments, really—demand this unity in antagonism, infinitely.

“Bi” (Living Colour)

“Bi” could be an indication of psychopathology (if it appears after and even before a declaration), an original state (Freud), a natural proclivity (Mead), a set of desires beyond the binary (Garber), or a final, evolved status (after the churn of taking sides). (And there are at least least eight types of social scientific characterizations that discursively circulate, each with varying degrees of a subject’s investment/praxis.) On its face, it’s a neither/nor; with “tensions and the passions double amplified,” bisexuality is non-dispositive at its limit. Over life, decisions accrete, tendencies seem to appear, and behavioral scales are developed. Amid all the anxiety over a proper diagnostic, we actually need a “closet for the whole world to live in.” The stakes, then, haven’t been made high enough to avoid the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” But, contra MLK, it’s about “making [un]real the promises of democracy.”