“Not in Our Name” (Liberation Music Orchestra)

In memory of Charlie Haden, written on 14 July 2014.

The Not in Our Name Project (NION) diagnosed the American imperial order in 2002 as a spatiotemporal problem: Afghanistan-Iraq-the West Bank in a continuum of U.S.-inflected terror/policy decisions and Japanese American internment alongside the detainment and interrogation of Arab Americans post-9/11. And a similar strategy shaped the project’s self-definition and the enumeration of role models: abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, Vietnam War draft resisters, and the refusal of Israeli reservists to serve in the Occupied Territories. The Saul Williams-penned “Pledge of Resistance” commits “to make common cause with the people of the world” and stops short of calling for a general strike by refusing, as a group, to “supply weapons and funding” for foreign wars. Yet this all came to an end in 2008 with the disbanding of the project’s “national office and related infrastructure.” In some ways, everything here was on the verge of getting it on. (George Clinton, by the way, would have your “funky mind” freed “out into another reality.” And as Clinton knew, other realities have been and are already here as one continually imagines (and practices) being the “people.”) Charlie Haden’s and Carla Bley’s Liberation Music Orchestra deals with the NOIN’s central bifurcation problem—(dis)owning one’s nation-state—through difference. A Latin-inflected tune involving passages with synchronized horns, the key sonic decision is to allow each instrument a solo. The duration of each solo sometimes runs against type, and the instruments involved straddle the (non-) traditional, with the tuba solo as the most extreme example. Much like the album’s cover photograph, we can be both under the banner and at the helm of an organization’s varying structure through time. Haden, then, knew this as well: the Liberation Music Orchestra’s personnel may change, but it’s an inclination requiring stamina, adjustment, multiple voicings, and perpetual practice/praxis.

“Could It Be Magic?” (Barry Manilow)

Begins with metaphysics, and ends in a command to be subsumed completely, or a wish to be subsumed. Echo chamber chorus threatens totality. Extreme violence of idealism.

“Repeal the Blues” (Ray Noble & His Mayfair Dance Orchestra)

Possibly the Dale Carnegie message of 1939: “good news” comes after the decision to “repeal” and exile the blues. Assuming a ban(ning) logic, bells toll amid trumpet flares at trax’s end signal positive town-by-town change. What’s really spreading is alcoholism, where happiness is indecipherable despite and because of the neutralization of inhibitions—merely a compensatory structuring to make the “blues” inhabit an inhospitable place. Not quite the stateless state, the blues, as such, is unelectable; a high court without appeal(s).

“I Feel Love” (Donna Summer)

Stanley Kubrick launched Nietzsche into space in 1968 when he appropriated Richard Strauss’ introductory “Sunrise” theme from “Also sprach Zarathustra.” Deodato’s version of “Zarathustra,” from 1972, gave it a cool, rumbling electric piano machine sheen, and filled it full of moody, twilit solos. (It makes for wonderful counterpoint in relation to the astronaut stories of Barry Maltzberg and J.G. Ballard.) Third in this series is 1977’s “I Feel Love.” Giorgio Moroder first cites the Strauss/Deodato matrix between, roughly, 0:10 and 0:34, and it’s the key to the trax’s associative and aspirational power. Additionally, like so much of the most memorable output of Kraftwerk, the melody seems to hotwired to a vehicle’s engine and chassis. But it’s not a bicycle, car, or train, or even a rocket; it’s closer to an interstellar dildo or orbital fucking machine, and the conjunction of stars, pistons, and multiple orgasms is both controlled and cosmic. In the Patrick Cowley megamix, the trax is once again opened to something like soloing: sequenced squirts and squiggles that punctuate the endless motoric pulsing. Moroder, apparently, didn’t care for it. But Nietzsche might have approved of the effort to accentuate the singularities of his ecstatic starchildren.

“Hellhound on My Trail” (Robert Johnson)

Perpetual/purposeful motion as response to determination from without. The “within” as potential and aimless travel as condition of the future. Absolutely confronting Jim Crow but also pleading for giving apart from economy of generosity. “My company” as something to be “kept” by another: the only possible retreat for now.

“Good Guys & Bad Guys” (Camper Van Beethoven)

Slacker cosmopolitanism that places false contingency at the core of identity production: “[I]f you didn’t live here in America/You’d probably live somewhere else.” Kick back, “be yourself,” and sing (y)our song—since you’re living under Old Glory. But “folks like you and me” don’t seem to make any decisions whatsoever. Professionals do, be they licit or illicit. Countries do, too, but they’re entirely repressive. Even Randolph Bourne believed in the potential of positive law (dual citizenship and migration without restrictions)—despite the WASPy chauvinism. Life as a case of premature withdrawal.

“Empower” (Downset)

“Empower” scream hemmed in by slabs of silence: the moment of Butlerian agency that occurs in a loophole/hitch, unanticipated by power. An attempt to “recheck the mind set”–not castigation–without recourse to affect (“can’t give up no love”) or investment in nationalisms (“what’s been dead”). Less a plan than a documentary moment: potential(ity) battles “slips,” faith in representation, and martyrdom.

“Legend of Paul Revere” (Paul Revere and the Raiders)

From humble origins in Idaho, the little band that could makes good in the world, through sheer power of earnest pleading to radio stations to “play our record.” Homespun, twangy. Then Dick Clark arrives. And: “Come to think of it, our business manager’s our biggest fan.” Charting the fall into the market. But, following Shershow, a false nostalgia for popular culture’s “original” outside position disenables meaningful politics. Legerdemain.

“Exploration vs. Solution, Baby” (90 Day Men)

Setting up the ten pins of the “unseen,” “concrete,” and “individual” against those earthly powers perpetuating the “divinity” of the group. If the future is, as vocalist claims, wholly about exploration, then getting into “Judas”/traitorism is the first commitment. Caveat: aim high and punch upward.

“The Beast” (Twisted Sister)

Metal has birthed so many beasts. Hundreds of metal trax invoke the “Beast,” and each one, consciously or not, finds its roots in the Great Beast, the Victorian mage Aleister Crowley (rhymes with holy). Crowley’s mother, Emily, called him “Beast,” and set him on a path to magickally overcome the Christian era and its morality and enter a new aeon in which “every man and every woman is a star” (Liber AL). In the wake of Crowley, this “beast” was hybridized with paganism, nihilism, anti-modernism, and therapeutic individualism and bestowed onto metal as a fundamental legacy. In metal’s looking-backwards eutopianism, one affirms the “beast” set free from the church and the state (any remainder tacitly becomes prey). In this way, metal attempts to recover an original beast, self-named, rather than ascripted by steeple and rotunda. Beasts without sovereignty. And yet, and yet. . . . Twisted Sister’s claim regarding the “nature of the beast” remains tethered to clerical inventors (to understand the beast, we must “listen to the [Judas?] priest”) and the sovereign’s original ban (against “this Cain”). And sovereignty, as Derrida suggests in The Beast and the Sovereign, has always already shown its beastly side, whether one reads Hobbes or Rousseau. In all this beast talk, one searches for something more, or something less, than a mirror for magistrates.