Every Known Abuse: Politics With A Backbeat

[amalnahurriyeh]

Every Known Abuse: Politics With A Backbeat

A mixtape by Amal Nahurriyeh, amalnahurriyeh/amalnahurriyeh, amalnahurriyeh at gmail dot com

Made for fiercynn, for her generous donation to help_pakistan.

Content Note: Music on this mixtape contains explicit language, both curse words and racist language. In my quotations, I've left most language intact, but I've starred out racial epithets.

It's hard putting together a mixtape for someone! When I offered music, I suggested "music about politics that isn't traditional protest music," and fiercynn was intrigued. I hope this is as interesting as the concept!

This mix proceeds from my own political position, as a white feminist and leftist, born and raised in the US, whose musical taste and political perspective are deeply rooted in those places. It's also composed from my intellectual biases, towards examining life and politics primarily as about communication and language, in which all interests and desires are necessarily filtered through speech acts before they can enter the political world. Many of these songs are about speaking in political space, and coming to political voice. In fact, that's much of what I think "non-political" music can do for politics; it can enter into the conversation, become a new way of speaking about political life in ways that don't have to adhere to set narratives, or can speak across limited frameworks.

While all these songs have interesting politics, I also love them each as pieces of music. Political art only works, I think, if it is successful as art, not just as polemic. These songs are all awesome. That's what makes them useful.




American Terrorist - Lupe Fiasco ft. Matthew Santos

We're starting off with a sequence about "American"ness, in that particular USian framework wherein we assume that we stand for a whole hemisphere. And we're starting with Lupe Fiasco, who is one of my favorite contemporary artists. Like a lot of Lupe's songs, this one draws together a wide swath of contemporary American politics with a multiplicity of voices, circling around the idea of 'terrorism' to draw connections between different forms of violence that are foundational to the American experience. He begins by tying together foundational genocide with contemporary terror: "We came through the storm/Nooses on our necks, and a smallpox blanket to keep us warm/On a 747 on the Pentagon lawn/Wake up, the alarm clock is connected to a bomb." And, again, towards the end, he pulls together the long history of American racism ("Don't give the black man food/Give the red man liquor/Red man fool, black man n*****") and the American imperial impulse ("They ain't livin' properly/Break 'em off with a lil' democracy/Turn they whole culture to a mockery/Give 'em Coca-Cola for their property)".

Lupe is a Muslim. On this, his first album, he references it repeatedly, from the invocation of the bismillah at the beginning of the album, to the line in The Emperor's New Groove where he says "God, place me in your armor/I prescribe no partners," a classic invocation of tawhid. So here, when he says "Bibles and glorious Qur'ans/the books that take you to heaven and let you meet the Lord there/have become misinterpretated [sic] reasons for warfare," he's speaking as an American Muslim, arguing against the destructive interpretations of religious text that he sees permeating the contemporary landscape.

Jesusland - Ben Folds

Which makes a good transition to this one. I was raised in the Northeast, in the suburbs of a major city. That means that the public Christianity I'm familiar with is a peculiar thing, and highly secular. While I knew lots of people in high school who were "saved" or who were deeply involved with their churches, most of the time Christianity was kept out of the center of the community. As I've grown older and traveled more around the US, I've seen the way that a very particular line of conservative evangelical Christianity dominates the social space in much of the country. (One of my dearest friends lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and has had to dodge organized Christianity since childhood. My sister and nephew live in Dallas, and attend a megachurch there. It's weird, y'all.)

I think that's part of why I like this song. There is something...off, to my taste, about this sort of practice of Christianity. Some of it is cultural, in that Northeastern American culture is much more standoffish, and would never be so impolite as to ask you in public about Jesus. But some of it is that, as a practicing Christian, I am bothered by the way that this Christianity seems distant from the vital message of the Gospels. In what world is a multi-million-dollar megachurch, where every member of the congregation drives their own SUV to services and the message of capitalist individualism is preached at every turn, in obedience to the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth? When Ben Folds sings in the voice of Jesus in this song, he's singing the critique of American Christianity I want to sing. "Crosses flying high above the mall" means something is wrong with us, and I like how the song puts it.

North American Scum - LCD Soundsystem

After two srs bsns songs about American identity, here, a funny one. I recently found myself talking with my students about my ambivalence about being an American. On the one hand, of course I'm an American. I've lived here since I was born. So have my parents, and their parents. I've always lived in the same part of the country (kinda; the span is about 5.5 hours driving distance, which, in USian terms, is nothing). As much as I love many other places in the world, this is where I'm from, and this is where I'm most likely to spend the majority of my life. But I also recognize that being an American, particularly a white middle class American, makes me the recipient of an enormous amount of privilege, which I reject as amoral. I am the direct descendant of the Native genocides, of the slave trade, of the exploitation of poor people of all colors (including my Irish ancestors) to build capitalism, of the Monroe Doctrine, of American expansionism, of the Cold War, of the capitalist/democratic hegemony, of wars of choice from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. I am an imperial citizen of the 21st century, sitting on top of the heap. My blue-eagled passport is the ultimate sign of global privilege. How's that strike you?

This song is as ambivalent as I am, only it's funny about it. "In the end we make the same mistakes all over again" could be the United States's epitaph, if you think about it. And the verse about New York is pretty much perfect: "New York's the greatest if you get someone to pay the rent/and it's the furthest you can live from the government/some proud American Christians might disagree/but New York's the only place we're keeping them off the street." And, come on. It ends with "Don't blame the Canadians!" How can you not love that?

Points of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer - Linkin Park and Jay-Z

Ahaha, there is so much I can do with this one. SO MUCH. So let me take it bit by bit.

First, I want to call attention to the "mash-up" format of this particular track. This was an MTV-produced fusion, part of a series they did in the early 2000s, of bringing together groups across genre to perform together. My brother was a big Linkin Park fan, and we both liked Jay-Z, so we acquired this quite quickly. What interests me about this particular track is that the merger of a white group that fuses a form of rap with hard rock and one of the most important performers in black music today causes some awkwardness. On the one hand, Jay-Z dominates this song musically; it's all his words, with Linkin Park turned into a back up band, and their lead singer (I'm not even bothering to Google here, sorry) reduced to doing one of Jay's verses. But on the other hand, the insertion of a white group into this makes the whole first verse awkward; if you know the original, you'll catch the switch from "rap mags try to use my black ass" to "those mags try to use our ass" and the deletion of the word "n****" in the line "rags to riches, we ain't dumb."

Second, let's look at the politics of the second verse. It's a model encounter between black masculinity and the state--the white cop, again played by the white voice of the Linkin Park singer, is so patently discriminatory. There's the sense of the state's arbitrary power ("You was doin' 55 in a 54 [miles-per-hour zone]"), the casual racism ("Are you carryin' a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are," "Aren't you sharp as a tack? What are you, some kinda lawyer or something? Somebody important or something?"), and the absolute willingness to escalate to reconfirm that power ("Do you mind if you look around the car a little bit?...We'll see what you say when the K9 come"). And yet, here is a black subject that can (and does!) speak back to that power; "I ain't passed the bar, but I know a little bit, enough that you can't illegally search my shit," he says, and he even mouths off to the cop: "Cuz I'm young and I'm black, and my hat's real low? Do I look like a mindreader, sir? I don't know." Even though the cop is able to use the repressive power of the state to "win," there's a lesson of resistance here. (And I'd argue this is continued in the video to Dirt Off Your Shoulder, from the same one of Jay-Z's albums, which specifically shows young men of color, arising after a random stop-and-frisk by cops, common in Jay-Z's home community of Bed-Stuy, 'brushing off their shoulders" in a gesture of rejecting the state's capacity to suppress their existence.)

Third, the last verse. Now, I have a problem with the words "bitch" and "ho" in hip-hop; without belaboring the point, women are rarely given full status as human beings in hip-hop written by men, and are frequently treated as objects and, in fact, the proper targets of physical harassment. But--and here is a big but--I think that these discourses aren't uncontested, even within mainstream masculinist hip-hop. Certainly, the refrain of this song is not promising: "99 problems, but a bitch ain't one" again posits women as units of exchange between men. (See: Gayle Rubin, and/or every other Marxist feminist in the 1970s.) But there's something else going on here, something that this last verse captures. "Once upon a time, not too long ago/n**** like myself had to strong-arm a ho" does not start out well, but it keeps going. "This is not a ho in the sense of having a pussy/but a pussy having no god-damn sense, tryin' to push me." And he goes on to clearly describe the "ho" in question as a guy, someone who isn't sufficiently respectful and would force him into a situation of having to defend himself and incur state sanctions (i.e., imprisonment). Now, calling "lesser" men, those who can't defend themselves, women, is an old misogynist trick--it's no good if it's got girl cooties, so calling a man a woman is the greatest insult. But if you read this text in dialogue with Dirt Off Your Shoulder, again, you've got this new line: "Ladies is pimps too/Girls, brush your shoulders off." Just as much as men can take on the "ho/bitch" position, can fail to stand up and be appropriately male, women can be pimps, can embody the preferred masculinity. (And among the moments in which characters in the videos use the "brush your shoulders off" move is one where a woman responds to catcalling by unlocking her far-superior car, dismissing their harassment.) This openness to the gender of the bodies occupying these roles represents, IMHO, a new freedom for the work of gender roles and dichotomies in hip-hop, and certainly progress if you're comparing it to, say, Big Pimpin', a Hov song from three years earlier.

If you're asking me? Check around 2:39 in the linked video. There's your causal mechanism.

Er, having tl;dr'd like a fucking maniac on this one, let me just say: I dislike the anti-discursive gesture of "Shut up when I'm talking to you" at the end. Fundamentally, while I like the musical 'collision' here, I'm just not a Linkin Park fan. Their contribution is fine, as long as no one ever talks. There, now I'm being anti-discursive.

Mr. President - Janelle Monae

Now we move into the activism portion of the mixtape! Technically, the songs of Metropolis: The Chase Suite are not meant to be about our world. But, fuck that: this song is for us in the US, right this minute, a petition to our political world. The album appeared in August 2008, so the question remains, is this song being sung to George W. Bush, or Barack Obama? "We can’t go starting wars with hearts of hatred/Our nation's greed won’t make it better/Or quiet the fears in our hearts" certainly sounds like Bush; so does "Can we talk about the education of our children? / A book is worth more than a bomb any day." But "Times are getting harder and we need you to be like Moses/And lead your people through" certainly evokes the oracular discourse that surrounded Obama, even during his campaign; so does "Use your heart and not your pride." In the end, as I've said before, I think it's important that this is a song that can carry us between the Bush and Obama presidencies, that can demonstrate that new eras are never all that new, and that novelty is always possible, even in the dark moments that seem like they might last.

Stolen Car - Beth Orton

"You said you'd stand for any known abuse/that ever happened to anyone but you," this song goes. Sandra Bartky, in her book Femininity and Domination, writes about the white activist women of the 1960s and 1970s who devoted their time to civil rights work and anti-racism, without ever daring to speak out and think about the effects of gender discrimination on their lives. She frames this, in intersectional terms, as the problem of the "guilty victim," who is conscious of both her privilege and her victimization. "To know oneself as a 'guilty victim' is to know oneself as guilty; this guilt is sometimes so profound that it sets a woman up for political manipulation. When this happens, she may find herself caught up in political agendas or even in political organizations that speak only to her guilt and not, at the same time, to her need; indeed, she may have been recruited on the basis of her guilt alone," Bartky argues. "Trained anyhow to subordinate her needs to the needs of others, a woman may be so overwhelmed by the discovery of her own complicity in such evils as racism or imperialism that she denies herself permission fully to confront the real discomforts of her own situation. Her anger is mobilized on behalf of everyone else, but never on her own behalf. We all know women like this, admirable women who toil ceaselessly in the vineyards of social justice, alive to the insults borne by others, but seemingly oblivious to the ones meant for them." It's easier to stand for the abuses of others, than to stand for those like you, because it's easier to admit guilt than to admit victimization. If you're guilty, you still have some control.

This is also a song about exhaustion, which brings me around to the central question for so many social movements: burnout and activist exhaustion. How long can you be angry for a living? How long can you live, broke and exhausted, never winning a thing? What do you do when you simply can't stand for every known abuse anymore?

(In my case? Graduate school.)

The Pointless, But Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed - Dar Williams

And now, the lighter side of activism, particularly student activism. Rule of thumb, guys: Don't date your fellow activists. Of course, this is impossible; when you're deeply embedded in student activist communities, of course you're dating other activists, because who else do you meet? Plus, your politics are an essential component of your ethical self: you need your potential partners to match on those criteria. So you end up deep in political menage-a-trois like the one in this song.

The other thing: student activism is often absurd. Not that students don't make real and meaningful political change, on their campuses and their communities. But the hot-house environment of campus activist communities means they breed ever more warped views of what the world is, and what politics is. So you end up with "Students Against the Treacherous Use Of Fur" (SATUF? Dar's totally right) and the Hemp Liberation League duking it our for social space.

The last verse is so perfect, in so many ways. First, that the narrator hasn't lost her critique, but now positions herself as a fine upstanding citizen ("because I am a horticulturist/I have a husband and three children out in Lexington, Mass"). She is tired of her normalcy, but can't get back to her student radicalism, and, more importantly, doesn't want to. And what are her alternatives? Apparently, a cult. How do we escape the relentless drill towards normalizing in our lives? Can we get out? The message of this song is no, but: maybe we may be marched into conformity, but we don't lose all of ourselves in the process.

Sick Day - Fountains of Wayne

And with that, we transition to the class politics portion of the mixtape. *fetches her red beret* This is a very subtle song about the anomie and silent suffering of the white-collar classes in modern urban America. The commuters sliding in and out of New York ("Lead us not into Penn Station" is among my favorite lines in all music ever) never have access to the great cultural diversity of the city; they do their jobs and go back to New Jersey (for those who don't know New York, Penn Station is where trains from New Jersey arrive and depart, and the PATH train is the subway that connects Manhattan and the immediate suburbs in Jersey), cut off from any of the complex notion of New York we see in, say, North American Scum. They lead lives of quiet desperation, desiring each other, longing desperately to opt out of the march of commercial middle-class life, but with no potential for resistance. There's no hope here, but much beauty.

Spaceship - Kanye West ft GLC and Consequence

While the story in Sick Day reads as unequivocally white, Kanye's version of the despair of the laboring classes is distinctly black. Kanye comes from a highly-educated, middle class background; his father was a black nationalist and is a professional, his mother is a college professor. The College Dropout is an album that speaks from this position. Kanye's gotten more and more removed from this narrative as he's gotten more and more famous. And also more and more cracked out, OBVIOUSLY. But College Dropout is a fucking brilliant album, anti-establishment and critical while still rooted in the black middle-class experience.

This is a song about working at the GAP, failing to gain the recognition you think you deserve, failing to break out of the traps around you. The daily observation of the bosses ("Take me to the back and pat me/askin' me about some khakis/but let some black people walk in/I bet they show off their token lackey"), the impotent desire for revenge ("after I fuck the manager up/then I'ma shorten the register up"), the small points of resistance ("Saw him on break/next to the no smoking sign/with a blunt in the mall"). All three of the rappers crave success: "The kid that made that/deserves that Maybach." But none of the three figures in the song receive it within the song's arc. And they're not guaranteed it outside the song, either: of the three, Kanye is the only one who got famous.

The intro to this song on the album says, "I've been working this grave shift, it's like a slave ship." Of course, the connection to the narrative of slavery draws deeply on the black experience in the US. But, this being the Marxist portion of the evening, I want to point to the concept of wage slavery, of being totally bound to a paycheck for your survival, and therefore unable to divorce yourself from that system in your own best interest. Under conditions of capitalism, we are not free, not as long as we are bound to our bosses. It's the institutions of the welfare state, or of private wealth, that liberate us from those imperatives. Kanye got his Maybach. Me, I'm living on my wife's unemployment payments.

Gulf War Song - Moxy Fruvious

Back to activism to close it. I've put this song on a mixtape before, because I love how subtle it is, how circular and quietly deliberative. It's a song about the horrors of war, and its incomprehensibility from our quiet First World easy chairs. But the reason it's on this mixtape in particular is its rhetoric about the difficulty of political speech across differences. "What can we say?" is its refrain; the pacifist and patriot of the first verse are the peacenik and warhawk of the last, as if we are watching the space of politics collapse in front of it. "Is that how it always will be?" the ask in the last line. I hope not; I really, really do.

Final Straw - R.E.M.

I both opened and closed this mixtape with songs I love, by artists I love, because, for me, politics is a labor of love, a hard-won project that succeeds only by the passion of its participants. Michael Stipe's voice has always been one that spoke to me; he was perhaps my first queer idol, and his voice was crucial to my self-development as a queer youth, and the notes of politics in his writing have only gotten more clear as time has passed. This is one of the very few songs written by R.E.M. that could unequivocally be called a "protest song," even if Welcome to the Occupation or Ignoreland clearly have political resonance. Without too much commentary, I want to end with a long quote from the song.

Now love cannot be called into question.
Forgiveness is the only hope I hold.
And love- love will be my strongest weapon.
I do believe that I am not alone.

For this fear will not destroy me.
And the tears that have been shed
It's knowing now where I am weakest
And the voice in my head. in my head.

Then I raise my voice up higher
And I look you in the eye
And I offer love with one condition.
With conviction, tell me why.

Download the mix, track-by-track, here.

Comments

[fiercynn]

EEEEEE! I haven't even been able to read all the descriptions yet - I have a final exam in, um, two hours, EEP - but I am so excited to listen and read your thoughts more thoroughly! Just wanted to let you know that I'm downloading and hopefully will be back asap to comment properly, just after academic nonsense is not longer getting in the way. :D