“Scatterbrain” (Jeff Beck)

Look here, it’s King Crimson. Over there: Herbie Hancock. Then, The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Underneath, it’s George Martin. The album gets more involved, too, with Stevie Wonder giving two tracks to Beck, while Phil Chen sits in throughout. For a performer used to being stuck the middle (between Clapton and Page in The Yardbirds, for example), it’s not unthinkable that these citations could be so much dross. But a scatterbrain isn’t a dimwit in this case. The outro is introduced by a climbing, John McLaughlin-like run jumping one step upward with each repetition. A quick blues figure pivots, transitioning to the finale. A skittering, palm-muted jog segues to a pinch-harmonics-punctuated solo over the re-emergent McLaughlin line. On top and beneath–as a solo artist indebted to the generosity of others–this scattered-ness is given over and eventually gives out. Like the harmonics, one “sounds” only after the note has struck. Overwriting the underwritten, and agreeably obliged.

“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.

“Do It Clean” (Echo and the Bunnymen)

In the verse/chorus tension/release, an inkling of how to defuse or short-circuit pragmatic calls. “Where?” for example, is answered: “here,” “there,” “everywhere,” “nowhere.” Deictic dislocation, and absolute dissemination without position. And what did you “do with it” (whether a “handful” or a “barrel”-full)? “I did it clean.” In other words, he did it all, every drop, to the bottom and the limit, with no instrumentalist attachments.

“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.

“The Passenger” (Iggy Pop)

Theory of the tourist, rather than the refugee. Monumental egotism of the world as possessions: both the sublime stars and the picturesque city in ruins. All “under glass,” behind a window, consumed from a moving position of absolute privilege and safety.

“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.

“Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground” (Blind Willie Johnson)

On September 12, 2013, Voyager 1 became the first Earth-made object to enter interstellar space. Perhaps more importantly, the “Golden Record,” curated by a Carl Sagan-led group, is affixed on its outside, offering what has been deemed a “global anthology” of Earth life as conceived in the early 1970s. Containing images, sounds, music, and “spoken greetings” in fifty-five languages, the LP was also meant to serve as a document of our shared “cosmic loneliness.” And the contents of the disc (folk-ed trax, especially) parallel the problem the record was to solve: how to bring people together by transcending difference that redeploys difference in order to communicate our “diversity.” Along with “Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven, Blind Willie Johnson’s piece represents the blues on the disc. Marked by forlorn humming and at the edge of speech, Johnson’s trax resists what Jeffrey Carroll deems the “directly expressive [and ‘wordless’] . . . rhetoric of the interjection” (When Your Way Gets Dark: A Rhetoric of the Blues). If one invests in the “emotion” of sound, what’s abandoned is the articulation of abandonment that emerges from a homeless wanderer. And this isn’t Simmel’s “stranger,” who serves as a marker of and diagnostic for group belonging, but a manifestation of isolation articulated toward the other. “Meaning” isn’t present as such. What is: the disturbance of being at home in this world. Or: the alien-ness that comes from (punishing) relation.

“Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (Phil Ochs)

The “shadiest” shade of political opinion, liberal politics only appears in relation to interest (self and economic). Accrual crucial to this formulation: wisdom and experience antithetical to being “young and impulsive.” Singer declares two formative concepts within such politics: “too far”-ness and “safe logic.” The “lockbox” as stranglehold, and the spacing of the social secured, with a smile.