“New World in the Morning” (Roger Whittaker)

Here, it’s preferable to speak of a “new world coming on” rather than a “new world in the morning,” and the difference seems to stop just short of an ideological edict. After all, it seems to be lexical and not conceptual. Things, as they do, get thorny. The narrator’s arrogance—why even sing a song about something so self-evident?—seconded by the testimony of an old man with a decades-old dream: we will banish the diurnal in the name of the cataclysmic. The latter “comes,” and you can sense it. Shed your dreams of change within your serial existence and enter the realm of “thought,” which is divorced from the quotidian and assumes immanence. A possible response could begin with a worry: if yesterday and tomorrow are banished, how could one be mindful of (and ethical toward) difference?

“The Bitter Withy” (A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl)

This English ballad, uncollected in the Child Ballads, presents a startlingly human picture of the youthful Jesus. He likes playing ball, he resents his mother’s punishments, and he’s quick to anger. He also drowns three rich boys who insult his lowly status, and he does it by conjuring a Moses-lite miracle: a sun bridge is projected across a body of water, and it collapses as soon as the rich boys try to cross over. So Jesus is both absolutely human, and he’s also ready to revolt: proto-politically, he aggressively takes the side of the poor. But he’s also absolutely terrifying, a possible bad seed, and definitely someone you don’t want to cross. As his final act here, while Mary is whacking him with a switch from a withy tree, he curses the tree (the whole species!) and makes it suffer a rotting death from the inside, from the “heart.” Some might call it overkill, but perhaps that’s human, too. A bit of a celebration, then, of a pleb who won’t take shit from no one and nothing.

“London” (Nicky Thomas)

Probably most famous for being third in line (but the most successful) to record “Love of the Common People,” Thomas shifts from smarmy community-building to an immigrant’s plaint here. It’s a move from a coercive optimism for the poor to an embodiment of living death in which those of means “don’t care if I freeze to death and die.” The “promised land” is a set of shifting goalposts, each subsequent one narrowing the chances of survival. Salvation, too, is a false panacea, with your preacher soliciting money to go to the “holy land.” We’re implored to “give no money to that lying, cheating man.” But this shouldn’t be mistaken for either a sunny worry about equality (i.e. “we all go or no one does”) or a desire for deeds that match the (national) creeds. “Saturday night” proves formative for the trax’s critical dystopia; parties that are “outside” enjoy the practice of aggressive, excessive exchange. Come Sunday, we institute an economic austerity from the bottom up.

“To Composer John Cage” (Anthony Braxton)

What did Braxton learn from Cage? Little, perhaps, but that’s not a problem. Cage’s legacy primarily is one of compositional indeterminacy (short-circuiting the composer, but not the composition), whereas Braxton seems interested instead in refiguring Cage as an improvisor’s avatar. That is: Braxton creates oblique scores, like Cardew’s Treatise (in this score, the letter “G.,” a line, a crossing, a shaded block, a dotted barrier, and the notation, “4%”), which thrive on deciding, each time, that which is in principle uninterpretable according to a verifiable rule. One way, then, to hear the myriad skronks, foghorn soundings, runs, and even screams into the alto: the unescapable decision, always with reference to an ultimate undecidability.

“He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” (The Crystals)

Sanger’s got nothing on this. Sandwiched between the releases of “Uptown” and “He’s a Rebel“— the transition from lionizing the common, alienated working stiff to affirming the sensitive rebel—Spector’s most unsuccessful single takes dead aim at the foundational violence of the betrothal’s gift: the landed man. Spiraling strings, especially at the song’s center, explain this problematic logic by centering on the “care” which induces the “glad” somnambulance of the “tender” self.

“I Wonder” (Rodriguez)

Without this song—the one often sung by South African White friends as an un-national anthem during apartheid—without this song, no ancient cults of Sixto Rodriguez. It’s his one underground hit record (though never a single), and it is a tower of weird. Opening peregrinating bassline says we’re on the streets, checking out the entrance to her apartment while vaguely musing about soldiers, class, and race. If the revolution is a kind of romantic love (Warren Beatty’s Reds, for example), then its first wonderments are like a bad breakup’s hangover: obsessing over her sleeping habits, running through her list of awful friends. In relation to the State of Apartheid, were even its children of privilege like spurned lovers?

“Strawberry Letter 23” (Shuggie Otis)

One would probably want to worry about the numbering and disregard the LSD theories about the song for the moment. What makes #23 special? Nothing in particular, it seems. Letters are co-authored (anticipating another), and their meaning(s) resonate in unintended ways. All of this makes imagination (the sense of traveling toward an other) both impelling and dispersed. But: this experience comes from #22. So, #23, like the repeated descending arpeggio (with initial pull-off), is a missive about trax as ground(s) for flight. Only “sit[ting] in[side]” for a few moments, at ease: freedom as disposition (and to be spent).

“Philosophy” (Ben Folds Five)

The tour-guide of empire lashes out at those “too high” to “get the job done.” Philosophy becomes moment of violence in the name of a ground/”mortar” and possessive individualism. Self-effacement a ruse and assimilation demanded via shiny, happy piano.

“C.R.E.A.M.” (Wu-Tang Clan)

C.R.E.A.M.: “cash rules everything around me.” Laid back, groovy sample goes round and round, demonstrating no exit from the money nexus. All sides of town the “New York Times-side” or, better, the Wall Street Journal-side. Inspector Deck: “Living in the world no different from a cell.” Late in the track, the sample pauses, opening a hole. Escape route implied but can only be conceptualized from the within (no outside position for too easy moralizations….cf. The O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money”).

“Señorita” (Justin Timberlake)

As chapter one, verse one of Timberlake’s solo career, it’s also ground zero for the (anticipation of a) post-racial future. If you recall his running for cover after 2004’s “Nipplegate,” it’s realpolitik when it comes to salvaging a livelihood. This serves as a baseline of Timberlake’s racial politics, which carries over to the trax in question. Holding “real love” in his hands, singer declares that Latinas “still deserve the crown” and, deep inside, are priceless princesses. We know this is all a canard (and racial pandering) to get laid by the end of the song. More importantly, though, it’s the faux updating of a multiracial call-and-response, which “they don’t do . . . anymore.” Structured, gendered girls/guys section takes the cake, with Timberlake’s affected black vernacular, condescending falsetto, and interruptions of the women half the time marking the furthest edge of allowable participation. The man who sings in line does no time.