“When the President Talks to God” (Bright Eyes)

An investigation of the relationship between earthly and heavenly sovereigns, circa 2005. What happened when George W. Bush spoke to God? At root, there is a conversation. (Listen, no funny business with the “Does he ever think that maybe he’s not?” easy-substitution move!) Is it overly scripted and traditionally top-down? Or is it constitutionally performative, with a “fake . . . drawl” emerging in the proceedings? One way of thinking about this is in “Of Sanctification,” where the Methodist Church speaks with one voice: the Holy Ghost’s presence allows one to “love” fully and “walk in [God’s] holy commandments blameless.” It’s a relationship with shifting/sliding superiority, but there’s a durable sense of power-sharing. W. is/can’t be God, and the inverse holds true as well. (This is a belief that requires intense discipline, for sure.) In not being able to abide by this, the trax demands its sovereign(s) be moral, fair, and caring—a defanging. Caution: teeth grow back, and the prosthetic ones grind just as well (with proper adhesion).

“God” (John Lennon)

Somewhere between “All You Need is Love” (1967) and “Across the Universe” (1968), John Lennon converted from hippie to a man both harried and barricaded: the open advocacy of “love” for everyone transmuted into the defensive doctrine, “nothing’s gonna change my world.” (Bowie’s cover version of the latter on Young Americans appropriately encodes it as the ravings of a coke fiend). 1970s brooding, pained “God” takes this one step further and couples it with a strong dose of nihilism: a loss of faith in all kings, religions, and rock’n’roll, including the Beatles. All of these are now seen as myths and phantasms: “the dream is over.” But Lennon’s is an incomplete nihilism that continues to assert a Cartesian shot of truth with a splash of intersubjectivity: “I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality.” Lennon here gets hung up on the same limit that has plagued all popular forms of nihilism: the “I.” Stuck with this seemingly ineluctable consciousness, nihilism never has a chance.

“Definition” (Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star)

Kweli is in the middle of “e-Kweli-ty”; likewise, equality is constituted between points (in relation) and not at them (as the nodes of an economy). Being “without a history” within the “industry” is embraced because we’re always “live from somewhere.” The complication arises when the promise of an afterlife is offered as motivation for becoming a “visionary.” “Vocab” bombing’s victory of substitution.

“The Queen Chant (Li Liu E)” (Martin Denny)

While this could be taken as a typical Denny-esque track which adds, in his words, the South Pacific’s “excitement” and “languor,” it’s the latter’s oppressive and stifled listlessness (produced by island exotica music in general) that’s up for discussion here. Structured as a set of linear solos, the swaying tempo becomes a violent swinging, dizzying the (colonial) experience with, eventually, a hard bop-ish insurgency (and response). The final three solos (drums, bongos, and bass) drive it home with sharp intervals leading to high-end fade-outs—making use of muted tones all the while—marking the homeland as (originally) nothing but over-harvested and exhausted in all registers.

“Brazil” (Esquivel)

Concrete/ambient tour of the city street, and of the many bar bands which each play a variant of the self-tropicalization standard, “Brazil.” This is, then, Esquivel’s take on the figure of the flâneur, or walker in the city. Baudelaire, for example: “His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd.” Esquivel charts the stakes of this desire to fuse into community and registers its necessarily violence in the club fight which erupts at the end of the track. Which doesn’t have to amount to the retrograde Benajamian position on the crowd or the mob: “Brazil,” it’s clear, is each time different (musically multiple and variegated, “within” itself).

“For What It’s Worth” (Buffalo Springfield)

Chilled, pox-on-both-houses music. “The man” is ready to clamp down on the kids, with his pistol. But the hothead revolution kids are not alright, are paranoid, and are quite simply “wrong.” Parental instructions for “children” to stop, cool down, listen to others. Dialogue as submission.

“So Bored” (Wavves)

“Bored” is enunciated like the end of each couplet in Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians’ “Balloon Man.” Much like the latter, the trax centers on staging an example. (Unlike Hitchcock, it’s not concerned with identity production and explosion.) Alternating between first and third person limited, we witness the staging of ennui. Malformed embodiment: “skin like dirt” that’s both “sun kissed” and “burnt.” Neither actively pursuing nor straying far from whiteness. Overdriven instruments and vocals sound primarily in the midrange. Shared nostalgia for dissatisfaction, reanimating the realization that “life’s a chore.”

“Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” (Mickey Newbury)

The “hippie cowboy” strikes where it hurts. While the Kenny Rogers & The First Edition’s later version is more well known, the original’s commitment to both sitar at the beginning and tape manipulation at the end signal that the stakes are a bit different. Any altered state here is premised on a warped negligence; your “mind” should be elsewhere and soaring. Just make sure to check in once in a while: lubricate social relations, follow “sign[s],” and “unwind” as others are wont to do. Testify to the intensity of experience. Make sure that your mind is “broke[n]. And always be packing a spare “you,” since it’s the best you can do on a daily basis (given the legal limits). Be here now and then.

“Unfinished” (Can)

The orchestra tunes up, getting ready for Schubert, perhaps. But it’s not an unfinished symphony because it did not have a finish in mind (indeed, a version with the first section moved to last place would be very kosmiche, and hence more conventional). A thrummed guitar line rises and snakes amid faerie dustings; avant percussion and faux concretemusic emerge and merge; the keyboard whomps; and finally harps (?/!) begin to glide upward. Fin. But no: this (in)congruity of sections remains at loose ends.

“Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” (Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon/The London Opera Chorus)

John Adams begins The Death of Klinghoffer with this massive, swirling chorus, followed by the “Chorus of Exiled Jews.” Between centuries of Jewish diaspora, and the Palestinian diaspora, inaugurated by Israel in 1948 (when “Israel laid all to waste”), one implicitly is asked to confront, right from the beginning, the undecidable. Or, perhaps, to find a ground for reconciliation in the large fact of shared, non-repairable dispossession and loss. Deciding anything, from here on, can only take place with reference to this incalculable, embedded relation.