“Black with N.V. (No Vision)” (Black Sheep)

From the second wave of the Native Tongues posse, Black Sheep’s critique of structural racism exceeds “conscious rap’s” occasional investment in a christian notion of “talent.” (The contrast between this standard of value and the brutal irony of “native” should be maximized here for refreshing reading.) First verse’s address to white people key: it’s not about retribution but redistribution of “opportunity.” Otherwise: it’s N.W.A.-time, what with all this labor on being “without pay.” As the less threatening option, being in “touch” with the superordinate group is the ground for reason. An early articulation of a “get yours” approach, but there’s an avoidance of petit-bourgeois aspirations; opportunity is: “a life for me/and generations to come within tranquility.” For a disposition in repose.

“Untitled” (Mauthausen Orchestra)

It’s the early 1980s, and industrialism is at its most obnoxious in terms of referencing Nazism and the Holocaust: William Bennett’s Come Organization already has released Buchenwald (1981), the collection Für Ilse Koch (1982), and the two controversially re-edited M.B. projects, Triumph of the Will (1981) and Weltanschauung (1982). And Maurizio Bianchi’s own Symphony for a Genocide (1981) belongs here, too. Pierpaolo Zoppo, a protégé of Bianchi, entered the mix in 1983 with Dedicated to Josef Goebbels, a cassette released on Andrea Cernotto’s Aquilifer Sodality label. There’s a bunch of trax, but no titles, so let’s listen to the opener, which runs about eight and three-quarter minutes. Zoppo is borrowing from M.B.’s early methods of appropriation and transformation; at the heart of the sound is some piece(s) of music, massively sped up and treated with shades of pink and white noise. It sounds like we’re within a sea of sonic data clogged inside a modem, churning and surging with no place to go. It’s an aural cocoon–a sound environment–but what does it signify? Though the trax has no name, the project’s title hyper-contextualizes our experience of it: first, given that Goebbels headed the Propaganda Ministry in Nazi Germany, and oversaw, among other things, the cleansing of atonal music from the Reich, one has to agree with the blogger at “Die or D.I.Y”: “Straight into the ‘Degenerate [A]rt’ exhibition it would have gone, and . . . Zoppo . . . would have been sent to a concentration camp, or just executed without trial.” One can imagine that the original, treated piece of music might be a Nazi march, a Strauss waltz, or even a recording of a tune played at the Mauthausen-Gusen labor camp by the original “Mauthausen Orchestra.” The whole tape, then, might well be a thumb in the eye (or ear). Relatedly, but more subtly, Zoppo certainly seems to be exploring the wide difference between the Nazi-approved arts and Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s earlier aspirations toward noises of violent, technological and social “renewal” in “The Art of Noises” (1913). In which case, we’re witnessing in this trax a fraught, high-stakes attempt to sever the historical link between such futurism and fascism, reclaiming the “infinite variety” of “thirty thousand different noises” as an unresolved challenge to governance.

“Complication” (The Monks)

Two-note chant by tonsured ex-U.S. servicemen in Germany announce the obvious to Americans: “you” sit at home while others, overseas, “kill for you.” Electric piano solo seeks logical through-line and repeatedly fails. “Constipation,” the singer calls it. Ethically, one calls this complicity. Politically: compartmentalized partisanship.

“Exit Does Not Exist” (Modest Mouse)

The whole problem with love is that it must have a sustained temporality and be dated simultaneously (located, engaged with, bound). Lover’s exhaustion in the face of singer’s insistence on documentation and verification contends that lovers never “do” anything really. Hence, loving the other has no otherwise.

“Hard Werken Fucked Over Man/The Reckoning” (Gary Lucas)

Beginning with concert vocals and sustained by a looping, minimal blues ostinato, the trax ends with backwards guitar. Disheveling the live/studio distinction, Lucas makes clear that work pervades stage and studio. Over the ostinato, various guitar solos are deployed (from Tubescreamer-like distortion to wah pedal to tremolo bar to tape manipulation), voicing these works as just technical variations. At two separate moments, all of this is interrupted (by “The Reckoning[s],” one assumes) with its alternating low, high, and midrange repetitions of the same phrase with an open-string drone. Life figured, at its base, as perpetual work. Homespun and high-end reflect this.

“I Cover the Waterfront” (Connee Boswell)

Max Miller’s wonderful insider memoir of San Diego newspaper reporting is turned to song in 1933, but utterly repurposed. At first, it seems a conventional love trax: waiting at the docks for the beloved to sail into port. But something isn’t right: why doesn’t he write, and let her know which boat he’ll be on, and what day and time? Why the need to watch the whole of the sea and its shore continuously? There’s a certain misanthropy at work here (“away from the city that hurts and mocks”) as well as a lurking, water elementalism. Indeed, we’re in close temporal promixity to H. P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” written in 1931: “Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage” among “great watery spaces.” “I’m covered by a starless sky above,” the singer laments, and “I see the horizon, the great unknown.” The last chorus is sung the most forcefully, however, as she begins to assert her rightful place at the edge of posthumanist cosmology.

“With Arms Wide Open” (Creed)

Grammy-winning natal futurism. Hopeful father on birth day envisions the difference that will come, in time, alongside subjectivity unfettered by hate. Title’s prelude to a hug also foreshadows enclosure: education through smothering. The singer’s “one wish”: the son doesn’t turn out “like me.” In love with (tortured) creation.

“Two Tribes (for the victims of ravishment)” (Frankie Goes to Hollywood)

War as sporting event (“a point is all that you can score”), and thereby fit for a kind of anthropological analysis, via the metaphor of the “tribe.” None of this amounts, however, to an anti-war or progressive position: wars are promoted or fought for symbolic point-scoring purposes (see the 2003 Iraq War); and even superpower wars are anthropologically buttressed (see Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations). Thus, this attempt to shame the combatants, or to sway “enlightened” public opinion, unmasks nothing we don’t already know (and might even work as a football anthem).

“Black and White” (Three Dog Night)

Written in in response to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and later recorded by Three Dog Night in the aftermath of the school busing case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), this trax seems to be straightforwardly liberal in orientation, emphasizing literacy and integration in equal measure. Most important, perhaps, is the trax’s triumphal relation to Supreme Court decisions and their enforcement in every town, burb, and city in America (“this I the law of ALL the land”). But let’s take a closer look at the scene of inscription: “The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write.” Songwriter Earl Robinson’s original recording had a later, counterbalancing verse (“The slate is black, the chalk is white, the words stand out so clear and bright”), but Three Dog Night removed it. So the message, on balance, is not quite color-blind: instead, it charts a power reversal grounded in a historical overcoming. Our future, here, involves blackness writing its own story onto the parchment remnants of white supremacy.

“Stone Crazy” (Buddy Guy)

Presently positioned as the object of Jimi Hendrix’s affection, it’s also become common knowledge that Leonard Chess initially constrained Guy to sideman status and fairly tame guitar tones. But the beginnings of Guy’s (amplified) overdrive can be heard here in 1962. Restrained initially, the lines/runs slowly become more direct and shrill; in the solos, the distortion emanates from the note’s floor/base and occupies the majority of registers. The narrator’s main complaint: he’s betrayed by a lover who thinks his “little heart is made of iron.” Even his daughter knows this isn’t true, so it’s willful abuse. But this leads to a complaint about labor and location: slinging guitar in the North isn’t compatible with the clothes he’s accustomed to wearing. So, he’s going “back down South.” (But that’s not gonna happen; he’s just started ripping the top off of blues amplification, and the song goes on to be released in different forms on almost 50 different albums/compilations.) Devastated, overwhelmed, and speaking from a contractual/obligatory positioning, seeking an appropriate climate is a luxury. After the plaint: a throbbing, throttling identity whose work—levied at the point of a finger—begins.