“Black with N.V. (No Vision)” (Black Sheep)

From the second wave of the Native Tongues posse, Black Sheep’s critique of structural racism exceeds “conscious rap’s” occasional investment in a christian notion of “talent.” (The contrast between this standard of value and the brutal irony of “native” should be maximized here for refreshing reading.) First verse’s address to white people key: it’s not about retribution but redistribution of “opportunity.” Otherwise: it’s N.W.A.-time, what with all this labor on being “without pay.” As the less threatening option, being in “touch” with the superordinate group is the ground for reason. An early articulation of a “get yours” approach, but there’s an avoidance of petit-bourgeois aspirations; opportunity is: “a life for me/and generations to come within tranquility.” For a disposition in repose.

“Black and White” (Three Dog Night)

Written in in response to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and later recorded by Three Dog Night in the aftermath of the school busing case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), this trax seems to be straightforwardly liberal in orientation, emphasizing literacy and integration in equal measure. Most important, perhaps, is the trax’s triumphal relation to Supreme Court decisions and their enforcement in every town, burb, and city in America (“this I the law of ALL the land”). But let’s take a closer look at the scene of inscription: “The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write.” Songwriter Earl Robinson’s original recording had a later, counterbalancing verse (“The slate is black, the chalk is white, the words stand out so clear and bright”), but Three Dog Night removed it. So the message, on balance, is not quite color-blind: instead, it charts a power reversal grounded in a historical overcoming. Our future, here, involves blackness writing its own story onto the parchment remnants of white supremacy.

“Negro Observers” (The Butthole Surfers)

Preemptively establishing a dislocated, disaffected white subjectivity (which doesn’t even know a “they” or the difference between “thick or thin” blood), track transitions to a more attenuated voice. The Negro observers are “big and strong” but evidently “don’t know what goes on” and must attempt to make sense of the (literal and moral) vacancy of white spaces. Longing for a studious (and continually impos[ed/ing]) Black estrangement, then, undergirds anti-racist visions; overblown saxophone is on to this formulation, signing off its observance of this phenomena.

“Summertime” (Lena Horne)

Porgy and Bess opens with this lullaby, in which Clara’s child is lulled to sleep with promises of ease and security. In the context of the opera, we know that none of this is true: the craps game is about to begin, Clara will die, and the baby will be passed on to Serena. It will become just another child leading a life of danger and contingency on Catfish Row, staged within Gershwin’s sociological imaginary. But cut off from the larger work, and sung as a stand-alone standard, we can hear something else in “Summertime,” and it’s slightly more comical: eutopian plenitude (cotton and catfish, and generalized wealth) cannot prevent the intrusive, raw desire of a bawling infant (and praise be that, someday, it will be off on its own). Life itself interdicts its own perfection.

“Volunteered Slavery” (Rahsaan Roland Kirk)

Nothing is solved by acts of congress/Congress. Gendered (and racial) performativity experimented with, demonstrating how, for example, singer’s claim that women “be free” “by spending all day in bed with me” eventually leads to his plea of “don’t take it away”: supposed volitional freedom creates distraction, indicating failure of the performative without clear direction. “We all know” this, and double-instrument solo, at its end, produces screeching white noise underpinned by spaced-out, staccato jabs. Single-ness and identity will always know its place.

“Choice of Colors” (The Impressions)

It’s 1969, and Curtis Mayfield queries the implied African American male listener regarding the status quo. How did you come to value African Americans over “black folks not of kin,” and family over your “brother’s woman friend”? Who taught or told you to strongly value a “black preacher” over a “white teacher”? And, in general, how did you get so race conscious? Mayfield is preaching a kind of colorblindness to his listeners (“if there was no day or night, which would you prefer to be right?”), and two things stand out: first, the singer knows full well that what social science called “insularism” is actually a portfolio of public sphere projects designed as a survival strategy in a world dominated by race. So, in order to change course, the winds must seem to be blowing a bit differently. One must feel the optimism that a “better society” is on the way. (If that’s not true, and if LBJ’s “New Society” is really cooptation of revolutionary energies, then perhaps the Black Panthers have got it right.) Second, and more complicating, is the line, “People must prove to the people a better day is coming for you and me.” Why do the “people” appear twice, and who’s proving what to whom? Mayfield, in essence, is calling for a self-work upon one’s own internal divisions. Since everyone can see both sides of the argument, everyone is necessarily two-faced on this question. You need to stand in a mirror, at twilight, and convince the other of color that the time is nigh.

“The Seventh Son” (Willie Dixon)

According to W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” By invoking the tradition of the “seventh son,” a figure of creative power aligned with werewolves, witches, and sorcerers, Du Bois makes clear that double-consciousness is more than alienation and deficit; and, in Willie Dixon’s case, he can heal the sick (i.e., grasp doubleness as a double-edged sword), raise the dead (produce a history of and for Africans and African Americans, for example), and even predict the future. And all of these powers have something to do with the experience of being racialized and the special knowledge of language that it provides: “Now I can talk these words that sound so sweet/I can make your little heart even skip a beat.”

“All About that Bass” (Meghan Trainor)

Not to bypass the obvious—this review eventually ends up there, volitionally—but what if this trax isn’t about booty pluralism? It’s about a confidence in the reality of things (no Photoshop, please). And a kind of self-assertion premised on excessively gratifying your lover just through sheer embodiment. (The politics of the self and active debasement are fascinating here, though too mutualistic to serve any political purpose.) It’s also concerned with how to voice the lower end from those with lower ends. In a way, Trainor inverts the “lower frequencies” of Ralph Ellison by removing the dread implications (for the listener) of really letting (it) go. With 50s homage, things may be too clean here (or to hear). Q-Tip, on The Low-End Theory, would say that successful communication needs “floss” to get to “the grit and the dirt.” Maybe that’s the difference between transformation and (white or self-?)adulation: the desire to get shitty about it. A thong through it all, then, splitting the muck of the center.

“Computer Age (Push the Button)” (Newcleus)

As Newcleus enters the world in 1984, it seems as if they’re hostile to technology while depending on it for the production of their music. From a galaxy where “music and dancing are against all cosmic and computer law,” they discover a “place where they could be themselves: a place like Earth.” The simile is where it’s at: to be one’s self is to inhabit a not-Earth which is apprehended through a (receding) earthly experience. Against dominative “programmed” rationality, then, is the trax’s primary position. (Secondarily, there’s a concern that computers are taking the place of the “Lord” in our lives; this probably should be bracketed for now, since such “programs” are virtually indistinguishable.) Losing the ability to “program my machine” is the first step in losing a form of control over one’s life. And it’s this point that reveals one of the trax’s most promising aims. Much like Detroit Techno’s repurposing of pre-configured hardware and software, we’re at the precipice of an alternate practice: deprogramming traditional notions of programming by a continuing commitment to reprogramming. In contemporary parlance: jailbreaking the “walled garden” brick by strategic brick.

“Computer Age (Push the Button)” (Newcleus)

“Kawa-Liga” (Hank Williams)

It’s all about a tree that has been cut, modified and commodified—turned into a red, cigar-store Indian. On the one hand, the tree, in the form of the brave warrior, aspires to human status. It wants to “show” something to the world—to speak and interact, for example, with the wooden Indian maiden across the street, peeking out from the antique store. But it also remembers a time before commodification, “when he was still an old pine tree,” communing in the forest. Perhaps this is the whole of the problem of the stereotype. It necessarily tends toward hardened inertia, and yet there is no clear alternative. Yes, one can fight stereotypes, and replace nasty, old types with seemingly benign and corrected new ones. But no matter how proud one is of these achievements, petrification begins again with representation and the market. A kind of reverse-Pinocchio strategy remains strangely plausible, however, and it starts by pining for the unformed.