“I Don’t Like” (Chief Keef)

In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama declared that a “defining project of our generation is to restore [the] promise” of “the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead” despite the “accident of [your] birth.” With the introduction of the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, however, we’re encouraged to think structurally, from increased pre-school (“public savings” and a return on investment!) to “fair discipline practices” in schools and criminal court systems. Lest we think he’s appealing to crusty Baby Boomers in the former and white liberals/wonks in the latter, keep in mind that young men of color are a “drag on State and Federal budgets” that should be salvaged in order to “unlock their full potential.” (But as Michelle Obama points out, if her parents “did everything right,” their children would just “have a chance.” Slim odds, slimmer hopes.) Enter Chief Keef, avatar of Chicago lawlessness. There’s a whiff of racial discipline all around. Reviewers called his album everything from “irresponsible, unforgiving, and often infectious” to a representation of African American culture. How can young black and brown men account for themselves given these odds? Here, the trax flounders: snitches, whiners, pregnant women, wanna-be drug kingpins are all objects of derision. Then again, it’s also about cuckolding you. A monetization of the outlaw—both ways. Isn’t this what the whole conversation is about?

“Unlimited Capacity for Love” (Grace Jones)

After the loving community—an insomnia-induced incarnation desiring a prenuptial agreement for inclusion—hits the “floor,” singer wonders how one can “add another to love” without inheriting “classic” community’s exclusions. Lacerating kick drum and staccato descending bass figure point the way, repeatedly; it’s the rest/pause which can admit the rest of us (without worrying about dividends). In the reverse: apart from “hope” and “without pressured expense,” one should only fret about how to expend love without short-changing.

“Shook Ones, Pt. II” (Mobb Deep)

As a remix of an earlier, forgotten single often described as “sinister” and having “stakes in the streets,” it’s the claim that the trax is an example of “rap vérité” which proves (unintentionally) helpful. From jump, Prodigy exploits this: the listener is “stuck off the realness” of affect-less characters with gang loyalties. Yet the stakes of realness aren’t in the streets; they reside in those who are slumming it, vicariously rehearsing the rags-to-riches-to-rags (-to-grave) persona (and keeping their “shook” sensibilities at bay). But there’s no “halfway” engagement when “react[ion]s” between those of “no relation” are all this world asks of you. Moments of anxiety are nested within, manifested through questions of doubt (“do I deserve to live[?]”), motive (“thirsty for recognition”), and legitimacy (“I’mma live illegal”). Read against voyeuristic tendencies, the rub: “I’m creeping” beyond the “petty thinking” and watching you watching me.

“Sharia Law in the U.S.A.” (The Kominas)

Tit for tat. Taqwacore groups, inspired by Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel, The Taqwacores (1993), are “bad Muslims” who have adopted punk’s love of “deliberately bad music, deliberately bad clothing, deliberately bad language and deliberately bad behavior.” In the novel, the band Vote Hezbollah (actually, it’s a Muslimgauze album title) writes a song called “Muhammad Was a Punk Rocker,” in which it is affirmed that the founder of Islam “tore everything down” and “rocked that town.” In reading this trax, therefore, from perhaps the best-known group inspired by MMK, it’s important to remember that the irony is laid on with a trowel. What’s under investigation here is a certain axiomatics: the Islamic-American singer claims to have had the “cops chase me out of my Mother’s womb,” and “my crib was in State Pen before age two.” After that, adding insult to injury, “the Feds had bugged my red toy phone.” Given this post-9/11 neo-internment of Muslim Americans, everything else falls right into place: the singer turns terrorist and his hyperbolics are astounding: he’ll cut off a hand from every American man, and take the president’s daughter into his harem in order to have his “brother” anally rape her, for example. Finally, there’s one more turn in this struggle or game of tit and tat: the trax’s historical background samples imply either that America will respond to the song’s threat of Sharia terrorism in such a way as to return us to the “duck and cover” mentality of the 1950s (note the trax’s shape as a stray cat strut), or that such a neo-Cold War mentality already governed the treatment of Arab Americans since at least the 1990s. If the latter is the case, then we’re truly caught in a vicious circle. But axiomatics are not destiny, and taqwacore bands prove that American immigrants from the Middle East are more likely to become satirists than terrorists. And that’s dangerous to every form of institutionalized axiomatic analysis.

“The Big Payback” (EPMD)

Rapping’s not a “tribe,” but even if it was, it wouldn’t be “fancy” or adorned with the lust to enforce tribalisms. Impossible, but it’s the strategic maneuver that allows for agency: claiming minimal racial identity instead of having a “Romi-et-oh or Juliette romance story” over it. “No stunts,” “sorrow,” or “pity.”

“Society’s Child” (Janis Ian)

Thirteen-year-old songwriter Ian notes that the conclusion, in which a white girl from New Jersey tells her African American crush object that “I can’t see you anymore, baby,” was motivated by a sense of logic and realism: “I don’t think I made a conscious decision to have the girl cop out in the end, it just seemed like that would be the logical thing at my age, because how can you buck school and society and your parents, and make yourself an outcast forever?” Intriguingly, the trax suggests that “one of these days” the singer will overcome society’s pressures to conform, and will buck the system. But let’s also remember that even those who refuse their parents and peers are also part of the “system,” too, and that the concept of “society” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s hands, for example) accounts for both conformists and refuseniks. Indeed, as renegade African American historian J.A. Rogers documented in a mountain of publications, the social world has sexually crossed color lines in all times and places. So this trax documents not “realism” per se, but merely Ian’s particular probability. Another logical realist, down the street, didn’t manage to write a song, but already is packing her bags.

“Immigrant” (Sade)

In a couple of ways, we’re asked here to think about issues of translation. For the trax, the key is a simple—but not simplified—ethics defined as the relation between the least of us (immigrants) and the “toughest among us” (“natives”); the previous phrase is sung in an extreme monotone despite the general lushness of the orchestration. What is the price of being included? What lies beyond—“too much”—the threshold of tolerance when understood in relation to pain? (And perhaps tolerance is predominantly about the experience of pain as much as it is being a pain.) At this level of discourse, things count because of the imposing odds. From an immigrant child’s first lesson in “the fact of blackness” to his “dignified” manner in the face of it to our relative ease in a world where it’s “hard enough/Just to make it through a day,” we’re asked to sympathize while our privilege is idealistically negated by our squeamishness of self-suffering. In a geopolitical vein, things are counted similarly by the United Nations; it’s the vantage point that differs. Noting the “complex interrelationship between migration and development” in their “Declaration of the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development,” the General Assembly says it’s about “synergies,” though. Things must be square between the rights to movement/livelihood and “development.” (In other words, let there be remittances!) Sade’s allusion to the story of Joseph yokes the two contexts together, with the body and blood of the immigrant wed to the center.

“Nonpareil” (Scott Joplin)

It can be difficult to figure ragtime. On the one hand, it’s considered a gesture to classical music—especially marches—due to its fairly orthodox approach to form and rules of harmony. (Some, like Ann Charters, have even recorded the trax in question in a more “classical” style.) Another: it’s a more “refined,” hence more respectable, version of cakewalk and coon songs. It’s also positioned as a bridge music, conduit to jazz (or “African American classical music” in more aspirational nomenclature). The same problem surrounds this trax’s title. Does it mean unequaled? Not in a genealogical narrative. Unparalleled? Perhaps, though that would completely minimize how syncretic musics are. Incomparable may be the best translation, even though we can always hone a developmental narrative of Joplin’s works and American music more generally. Things may work best this way: racialized and admired, from the gutter and the opera house, out of a respectable tradition and emanating from brothels. African American expression as both a historical index of an unequaled and evolving white supremacy while also a singular sonic node that bleeds into others.

“Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)” (!!!)

To legally dance in New York City, an establishment needed a Cabaret license until 2017. And when an establishment applied for one, they’d have to be approved by the fire department and a Community Board. With a history often centered on Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaign. the hazy origins of the law—that its institution and enforcement in the early twentieth century is related to segregation—allow alternate evasion strategies to emerge from the shadows, such as how gay bars routinely evaded the law’s enforcement. (And why Giuliani as “Julio”?) With so many layers of approval and overbearing officiousness, !!!’s focus on the “piggiest pig[’s]” stutters when it equates NYC’s situation with Footloose. There’s certainly paternalism in common, but there’s no ban. And there’s no generational conflict to exploit. It is, though, a question of what a just measure is, especially in light of NYC’s selective enforcement. The creation of an illicit dancefloor can be theorized aggressively, as Autechre’s project shows. It can also advocate for counterhegemonic praxis, as with the focus here on dancers sharing “nothing more than this very second” because mortality is always a beat away. Unlike Oliver Wang’s notion of dancefloor intersubjectivity, we shouldn’t claim that we “barely understand” what happens on the dancefloor. We listen and watch for its utopian possibilities and manifold realizations.

“Rock the Casbah” (The Clash)

Rock music inherently dissolves (Iran’s) monarchic/theocratic ordering, and even liberates crude oil from the rock (the other kind). Shakin’, cruisin’, rockin’, wailin’, jivin’ all free the street. No cliche spared, as the Middle East learns to party all the time. Rock antithetical to jet fighter planes, finally. (Tell it to Top Gun.)