“No Love Without Hate” (Sunz of Man)

Purportedly part of the soundtrack for the alleged Malvo sniper shootings, professing the 5% knowledge of holy black masculinity. With only the mind “free,” dualism of war/peace favors the former in the mode of Black complacency/suicide; put another way, survival becomes a “revolutionary war” unto itself. Seeking the “black nation” that can be “absorb[ed]”; submerging the necessity of taking arms in order to purify, but never exceed, the white supremacist state. To mind, much more has been taken in the name of purity. The ballot in this formulation, though, is the bullet.

“Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (For 52 Strings)” (Rome Symphony Orchestra)

The gift of the lament need not be representational in order to give (itself) over: bodies, decisions, and stockpiles); surely, the air-raid sirens, buildings imploding, and two tone-cluster passages mark time, but the destruction never creates a silence. At the zenith of this Penderecki piece’s zenith (twenty-five total seconds), a single violin sounds, sustained without adornment/ornamentation. Barren, all fifty two strings sounds approximate pitches and durations, holding at bay that memorialization which aggrandizes certitude. Like the 2003 Hiroshima commemoration, the generation (of shared listening) should compress distance while remaining proximate: close enough to the event for commitment.

“Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” (James Brown)

Overall strategy to document (and eventually attack) the hitch/delay: the “one” is muted (surrounded by two bass notes), main bass line hobbles before the “four,” and community is waiting for the “comer[s].” “Don’t wave your hand” if you’ve “been plugged in” to the white hierarchy; revolution through active unplugging—“Don’t let ’em do it”—to avoid distractions. Free-form guitar solo and main, picked riff (no hammer-ons) lay down the formula: attack the smooth, middle-class aspirations with stiff uppercuts. The fifteen-rounder doesn’t have to last a lifetime, but you better commit to going the distance.

“The Hungry Intruder” (The Small Faces)

Stan, who’s on a quest to discover the meaning of life (or, at least, the missing part of an evening’s half-moon), explores the outermost limits of hospitality. During his travels, a fly alights on his shepherd’s pie, and asks for a bite: without it, “I could die.” The fly is an “intruder,” and in his hungry haste has overstepped the boundary marking the limit of the stranger. And, of course, flies are often considered pests, as well as carriers of parasites, bacterial disease, and viruses. Stan might be tempted to swat it quick, since the meal may be tainted. But his rejoinder is surprisingly open to the other: “Take your fill, take nothing less.” (Mind you: the fly can’t have it all, because Stan needs to eat, too.) Stan’s reward is a flight on its back to visit Mad John, who may know the world’s secrets. But one already has been revealed: “living” alongside others involves taking your chances. A plague of flies is no fun, but worse would be an ecology without them.

“To Beat or Not to Beat” (The Horace Silver Quintet)

It’s difficult to see the relation between the Arthur episode (season 4, episode 7b) of the same name and the trax, what with the cartoon’s focus on the dangers of performative versatility and the general busybody-ness of friends. Same with Hamlet, in which the division or break between states is considered, contextually, inevitable. In both texts, an awareness of the law–of gravity in the former or of law’s tardiness in the latter–leads one down these analogous paths. Silver’s treatment isn’t enamored of subjection, and we’re asked to focus on the force of the beat. Spatially located and loosely arranged, this is a formal hard bop tune. (Unlike his “Song for My Father“–whose bassline was wisely lifted by Steely Dan for “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number“–this trax eschews boogie and avoids romantic notions of place.) Unfaithful to the citation, too, is the piano solo; ascending and falling twice, it meanders at high and low registers, ending further down the scale than where it began. Be(at): one is never and always emplaced, (actively) occupying and occupied.

“Take the Time” (Dream Theater)

Dismissal of physical world for revolution “within.” Disembodied monadism as way to find “new voice” and “new law”: prog inversion of “Amazing Grace,” but god doesn’t care. The decision to “take the time” equates subjectivity with self-sufficiency; closed system logic denies social to craft solipsistic refuge. Fetishization of “invention” with denial of (inevitable) lineage.

“River Deep-Mountain High” (Ike & Tina Turner)

Moving past the stock, insipid metaphors (I’m a puppy, you’re my rag doll, etc.), the attraction of the track long premised on inability to hear its coherent architectural foundation (its abyssal bottom, provided by Spector). Recently, and within “pop,” perhaps only W.C. Hart’s Circulatory System tracks function this way, with the 4 or 8 tracks compressed and recompressed to the point of invalidating depth perception (telescoping out and out again, a la House of Leaves). Relation to the other as endless, and without ground.

“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.

“Something for Nothing” (The O’Jays)

Both Rush and Joni Mitchell are worried that others, who have done nothing, desire to have “something” or “everything.” These are the takers, and they aspire to grab it from the song makers. Dire Straights wrote about these folks, too, but with a hint of masculinist satire: laboring men want “money for nothing,” just like the “little faggot” on MTV. But let’s step back a moment and remember that once upon a time all property came from nothing. One day everything was held in common, and the next–poof!–there was stuff. “Something from nothing,” as the Foo Fighters say. And once there was stuff, property became “theft” as Proudhon’s famous, “perfect” maxim reminds. Anyone who had anything was now a robber. Yet the O’Jays remind us that the capitalists still dream of “something for nothing” like Twain’s Tom Sawyer at the whitewashed fence, producing pure surplus value. We might say of this stack of trax that they finally have little in common. But they do have “nothing” in common, which in all these cases stands in for the communal–both missing and forgotten.

“Bird Seed” (Whitehouse)

Peter Sotos collage of voices of prostitutes, abused children, parents of kidnapped and murdered children, and the ubiquitous, soothing voices of social workers and media interviewers. Sexual abuse has been “hidden in the closet too long,” says one voice. While this taped testimony is “out,” perhaps, it is being disseminated within something else: a legal buyer’s market for the pornographic, under cover of a media-induced “therapy” of expression and positive thinking. In an abuser’s pecking order, the State and the media come first.