S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) This is not exactly an academic article. It is, instead, a particular sort of cut through a recently completed, experimental book manuscript entitled Your Songs: The Devil’s Traxionary (aka: The Black Book of Trax). The Devil’s Traxionary is not a book about the way music is consumed, but instead about how it might be. It’s a book of invective (but never personal). It’s a map (to territories found on few existing charts). It’s a book of sayings (which no one has yet adopted). It is an attempt to reinvigorate the question of popular (including rock, jazz, rap, soul, reggae, world) and avant-garde musics in relation to the political by extrapolating from recent conversations in post-structuralist philosophy. We could therefore make a long list of modes of music writing which The Devil’s Traxionary implicitly rejects. Instead, however, we might simply note here that The Devil’s Traxionary is a listing out, alphabetically by title, of 1,001 tracks by 1,001 different artists working since the dawn of electrical recording. Our form, therefore, is the one most favored these days by music magazines and specialty music books: the numbered list (e.g., “The 500 Greatest Rock Guitarists,” the “200 Best Heavy Metal Albums,” or the “1,000 Singles You Must Download Now! ”). We affirm its ultimate pointlessness as a form, and salute, in particular, the rock critic Dave Marsh’s several contributions to the foundations of this genre. Why not write a more traditional work of political philosophy? We have found that this detour of and through several years of passionate listening has changed the questions we ask and the suggestions we proffer. Musical tracks are surprisingly condensed, knotted, and oblique objects of study. But we also would insist that our choice of non-classical musics for our investigation is strictly arbitrary, and that the same sort of work might be accomplished by examining films, for instance. (In this way, The Devil’s Flixionary remains an open possibility.) The sixty tracks listed below constitute what we are calling the “Civil Liberties Cut” of The Devil’s Traxionary. These sixty entries take up not only what we might call “liberal” political-philosophical matters of rights and liberties, but also pesky questions regarding the insecure foundations of all civil liberties, the difficulty of determining “who” holds such liberties, and the ways in which those excluded from such civil liberties might begin to assess or address their situations. There is no attempt here at a comprehensive examination of such questions - rather, we present nothing more 310 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU than a few clotted sentences, fleeting aphorisms, and dubious puns. Risking cliché, we side with the version of Karl Marx who wrote of a “ruthless critique of everything existing.” Or, borrowing loosely from Ambrose Bierce, we too wish to issue a writ of habeas corpus for all thought which has “been confined for the wrong reason[s].” 1. “America” (Simon and Garfunkel) America is not “here.” Not in Saginaw, Michigan. Not in Pittsburgh. Not on the New Jersey turnpike. Americans, conceptually, are “empty and aching”-as radically incomplete as the nation state. In the first line, “marry our fortunes” references the Declaration, and the moment or origins where the founders performatively “pledge … our Fortunes.” If American is not here - yet/ still - then only a critique of the problem of these same foundations will suffice. 2. “Anarchy in the U.K.” (Sex Pistols) Easily overlooked that the singer barks, like Melville’s Ahab, a version of “Who’s over me? ” Is it the MPLA, UDA, IRA, UK? Finally, singing downscale, toward a theoretical point which gathers the particularities: “or just another country”? The details are irrelevant. Whether already existing or sought, by reactionary or insurgent forces, it’s (merely, emptily) the stateform. A repeating, structured sovereignty. 3. “At Last I Am Free” (Chic) On one level, a tear-filled loss of vision at the end of romance. But undoubtedly also: freedom thought as the inability to visualize, predict, and determine the future. That is, freedom, if it is to be anything of consequence, cannot be conceptualizable, theorizable. It “remains” insecure and unfinished, which is its promise. 4. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (The Mike Curb Congregation) Joan Baez sang it, in promotion of federally-based civil rights, just as antebellum antislavery forces sang it. But Northern conservatives love it too, with its invocation of nation-state justice without mercy. Uneasily, historically perched between sound-alikes “John Brown’s Body” and “Solidarity Forever” - between a memorial to him who “died that the slave might be free” and “the union” that “makes us strong” - this hymn can only be comprehended, perhaps, in the light of a sentimentalist discourse which finds its limit in a South which refuses to “feel right” (as Stowe would have it), and which therefore must be ground underfoot like bloody grapes by a wrathful God. The normative heart puts a hit on its pathological doppelganger. The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 311 5. “Beasts of No Nation” (Fela Anikulapo Kuti & Egypt 80) “What is united about the UN? ” Certainly not the “beasts of no nation,” who have been designated as nonhuman and inhuman (zoë) by the citizens of recognized nations (bios). But uniting they are, nonetheless, toward revolution. About which P.W. Botha says, on the album cover: “This uprising will bring out the beast in us.” Chilled, flatted groove elegantly and patiently awaits this revelation that those who hold the polis through sheer police power are mere predatory animals. At which point, perhaps, the bare life of the zoë might stand a chance of recasting the political from a perspective other than that of the national/ international citizen. 6. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (Public Enemy) “Lookin’ for the fence” that both encloses and profits off of stolen freedom(s). Cells/ ghettoes create revenge fantasies, but this is mutiny. Piano shards mark the state’s racial violence, and the “attitude” must be “exact” in anticipation of captors falling asleep at the wheel. The hour of chaos must not produce escape fantasies - which have been “thought before” - but, rather, a future without racial profiteering. 7. “Born in the USA” (Bruce Springsteen) “Nowhere to run” for beaten-down, second-class, working-class (presumably white) citizen. Prolonged, repeated musical emphasis on “born” signals irony, but necessarily advocates ius soli, or rights based on birthplace (rather than bloodline). Bordered populism in the American grain, and a far cry from a sociality of mere “being there.” 8. “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. 9. “Circus ’68 ’69” (Charlie Haden) Part of Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra project, track attempts to recapture the (literal) fallout after the anti-war plank was defeated at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. “We Shall Overcome,” played in freetime, and circus music clash with “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and 312 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU “Happy Days are Here Again.” The free time - the timing of the freedom to come - demands the temperance of the mass’ projection; the claim belongs as much in the amphitheater as it does in “The Battle of Michigan Avenue”: enemies of war still have enemies in this structure. Haden’s desire for “enlightenment,” as a result, lodges “creative thought” as the “dominant” force - bound by all its potential prohibitions. To borrow Ed Sanders’ desire to see the Bill of Rights written in “our own language” so as to avoid the dilemma of original intent: translation is the transition to dissipation. 10. “Countin’ the Blues” (Ma Rainey) Angela Y. Davis insists that this track is self-consciously African, in that counting equals magical conjuring (Nommo). Maybe - but it’s a stretch, bordering on a wish. More clearly: the gap between White Supremacy and colorblindness (when Memphis and Beale Street and everyplace else are “free”) can only be closed through acts of enumeration. 11. “Countless Backs of Sad Losers” (The Jesus Lizard) The lay of the land “lies like this”: the “dumb trusters” are in/ of deep shit. Avoiding scatological origins - as if this could be done, even by a “selfrespecting monkey” or feline - demands that one become a “lanced cyst.” On and within the political body, such a performance is tricky, requiring an interminable warring to stave off the recovery of said body (e.g. a final solution). It’s certainly better to not be curable and intermittent since the footprints on the posterior, exhaustive in their proliferation, may possibly avoid the “spring-loaded” solution of enforced (social) withdrawal. Knowing “places” in a prearranged landscape - apart from volitional posturing - is the first condition of a resistance without expulsion. 12. “Democracy” (Leonard Cohen) Recognition of autonomist principle that even the most unlikely are ready for (are producing, from below, in everyday life) an opening for democracy in the “USA.” Patriotism as perpetual adventism. 13. “Down Here on the Ground” (Wes Montgomery) Oft-panned track from Montgomery’s pop jazz period undercuts original’s romantic lyrical premise of “find[ing] some wings on my mind” in order to escape worldly oppression - think of Lou Rawls’ version. Obsessive octave strategy stresses the rooted-/ grounded-ness of both the ground and the “sky,” marking a freedom which we’re obliged to voice “here” despite being hemmed in by the architecture of dreaming. Marking all tones that can be sounded (covering the fretboard with every upper-register complement), The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 313 track ends with four bars of the same creeping figure, inclined towards another sense of freedom’s timing and location. 14. “Drunken Fist and the Apocalypse” (Fred Ho) For “every ever after,” the “apocalypse” of “white bandit’s” procurement of gunpowder will regenerate itself. Shaolin style, then, finds its perfect articulation in the “Drunken Fist” fighting style: idiomatic improvisation (in Derek Bailey’s terms). And for revolution to be “made,” the “dead weight” of “honor” and loyalty must dissipate. Asian America, as such, must exceed its own “shadows” and documentation while carrying it along. The problem of the war idiom, however, cannot be surpassed through pedagogy or the call to rebuild what has been broken (by an unavowed strict racial rationality). In the end, cultural integrity. After the end: revolution without etiquette. 15. “El Paso” (Marty Robbins) Prosopopoeia, in the sense of the dead returning to speak. Loving the Mexican is literally fatal. And in loving the Mexican, one cannot avoid a certain fate. Loving the Mexican, then, involves encounter with different sorts of fatalisms, but this is the old geopolitical story (from William H. Prescott to Cormac McCarthy). It’s all about locating American freedom and progress, tacitly or explicitly, through designation of a bordering land of the lost. 16. “Fight the Power (Parts 1 and 2)” (The Isley Brothers) Power reformulated as relentless, infinite attack on injustice (especially against “smiles in the making”) because “there’s no guarantee” of “an-other” tangible world in freedom. Part 1’s clavinet spirals and rotating hi-hat hack at threshold before equality, but this is a decoy argument. Pulsing bass (and it’s two-note rise that must first drop, then come up for air) in Part 2 warns that future will not be mere happiness following oppressors’ “downfall” but a perpetual commitment to critique at each possible moment. 17. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” (Taj Mahal) Recent pedagogical efforts to recoup slave song stress the cleverness of the oppressed by attempting to rehabilitate agency - which must initially appear in servitude. But much like Drexciya’s Grava 4, Mahal’s version hides the utopian impulse by exposing it (in the map of the path and the shape of the river). The “river bed,” serving as the “mighty fine road,” confounds present-day redemption narrative strategy by stressing the “dead” growth(s) of servitude: only going through the problematic of subjection will “carry” us to “freedom.” Incessantly asking white supremacy, rearranging Bhabha, “Tell us why you are there.” 314 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU 18. “Follow the Leader” (Erik B. and Rakim) How to plead when the “crowd’s the jury” (or when “those that oppose to be level or next to this” always enforce exclusion)? Never not guilty. The MC becomes the singular circle with “rhythm” wholly apart, beyond the “radius”; for now, he “remains the future,” but past the need for fury, our relations have too much rhythm or (homicidal) reason(ing). The social contract is unsalvageable. “Fearified” indeed. 19. “Freedom” (Jurassic 5) The self-enclosed track, that which sonically produces a “freedom” that can be grasped, preliminarily promises emancipation through oral culture. Eventually, a lambasting of those who want to “free Mumia Jamal” that end up “at the mall,” because their freedom is “incomplete and unsolved.” Capitalizing on the promise of the “whole” that comes with civil rights. A “civil” revolution. 20. “Freedom Suite” (Sonny Rollins) Perhaps Orrin Keepnew’s qualification of Rollin’s manifesto on original lp - which Frank Kofsky documents - is, in the end, true: the persecution and repression of Blacks - to the point where a group has “exemplified the humanities in his very existence” - demonstrates that this album is not about things like Little Rock or “the peculiar election laws of Georgia or Louisiana.” While suite’s first portion explores how one becomes related through emancipation (from tenor’s strict six bars of melody and two of improv to the more equal two/ two split for bass and drums), the second and third sections experiment with styles of utterance: call and response, unison, and blues preaching transitioning to hard bop rollick (with all possible duo combinations interspersed with the original three). Rollins’ Black example surely couldn’t bear witness to the particulars of the case when justice, in the form of comic suffering, becomes securable. Between instruments lies the unadorned transition, with everyone voicing anticipation. 21. “Free Will and Testament” (Robert Wyatt) Organ lamentation buoyed by plangent slide guitar. Life consists of being pushed “round a treadmill” by “demented forces.” Can such a field of force be evaded? “Disconnected” from oneself? (No, and no.) Or avoided by being’s dispersal? But now the trickiest part - the question of free will posed at the limit of being: “Is there freedom from will-to-be”? Worth asking, of course, because what would freedom consist of without being? “Who” might exercise it? Advocacy of suspension at the strange knot of being and nothingness: “neither born nor left to die.” The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 315 22. “Funkentelechy” (Parliament) Funk’s not about freedom of speech since that enterprise is grounded on the possibility of future dividends (or “possible funkability” funded by “high finance”). Rather, funk is always fully realized and can “be scored everyday”; and it’s surely not “domestically produced” or given, but a given, free of charge. More succinctly, funk is a predisposition without a constitution and an affirmation of a possible being decoupled from sovereignty. This would be the freedom which can never be granted or purchased, and the dissolution of any (self)governance is premised on everyone “hav[ing] change for funk” or, more directly, untethering pleasure from self-care. 23. “Geronimo’s Cadillac” (Hoyt Axton) “Something’s wrong” with the police’s cars, while the governor’s runs just fine - away from the reservation, squarely placing the blame of dispossession on the executive and regulative/ enforcement branches of the law. This is out of step since plenary power (and treaty making/ breaking power in general) emerges from the strange relationship between the legislature and judiciary - conveniently, a relationship of mere assent. Singer’s yearning to take the more sympathetic path and ride with all the modern Geronimos out there mirrors Justice Frankfurter’s resignation in Galvan v. Press: white supremacy is bad, but the law’s foundation in racial domination is too deep and institutionalized to be overturned. The central figure of the warden, then, provides the ultimate inspiration: one must be “brave” to initiate redistributive justice. 24. “Guerillas in Tha Mist” (Da Lench Mob) Lacking the ability to concern themselves with the freedom to posit freedoms, city dwellers pay no mind to the “brand new apartheid.” The right(s) to do this is an empty space, marked by the nature show sample’s mention of social partitioning as “sport”; in a complementary fashion, mc’s “laying in a cut,” inhabiting the wound of a body of compelling interests. The understanding that must come: the “killa guerilla ain’t a killa” of anything, save the deployment of freedom enacted to maintain internal border patrols. 25. “Hey Joe Where Are You Going” (Surfaris) The first recording of “Hey Joe,” and perhaps the most undecided since Joe really can’t make the decision (to seek out his estranged lover, to murder her, or to escape the inevitable lynching). “I guess” riddles the track, and the only place to escape is to “where all those men are free” (and not the “Mexico” of later versions). Like the confused authorship/ copyright, no lineage, no endpoint, but only a question of who holds/ does the deed. 316 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU 26. “A Horse With No Name” (America) The journey into the desert represents a politicized movement to get under the problem of naming and interpellation. The desert not a wasteland, but a place with teeming “life underground,” seeking out “heart” below the process of subjectification. Resistance which does not neglect the fundamental exclusion: the anthropological foundations of the “political.” 27. “I Am the Law” (The Human League) The near-divine implantation of the moral order through the figure of Law. This Law sings a doomy synth ballad to you and me, reminding us that “evil” is “within these walls” (our own bodies, perhaps) and that therefore the Law must remain ever vigilant. It’s mad love, after all, that Law feels for us (“I’m a fool for you”) when it structurally provides us with a Hobbesian ontology of man against our better judgment. The question is, which precedes which: evil or the Law? Was it Law that, in the first place, made us human, all too human? 28. “I Am Woman” (Helen Reddy) Charting nine months (and a few days) after the ERA was sent to the states for ratification, the track is pocked by the same temporal limit. Seven years, surely, won’t be enough to guarantee anything but defeat since the womanas-“embryo” depends upon “mak[ing] my brother understand” for its birth. Accounts are settled here, and the experience of “pain” produces “wisdom” (in abjection) and “hope” (based on the “gain[s]” accrued under patriarchy). The salvage: acknowledgment must travel with an end-game of gendered presence. The open-ended ratification process of the Twenty Seventh Amendment proves that (structural) gestation, while glacial, opens the door to further consideration, but this is still within the register of positionality. “Numbers,” certainly, can be ignored - a politics of faith and compassion. 29. “In My Own Time” (The Patterns) The first verse of this International Artists track (penned by the Bee Gees) remains the most interesting: the singer once received an “invitation” to come to the “United Nations,” but “that was when I was somebody.” Being somebody in the international community involves a temporal recognition/ leveling: one cannot participate so long as one remains “in my own time.” There are no singularities in the family of nations, and no figures not judged present (i.e., precisely co-temporal with the “modern” and the “civilized”; cf., Justice William Johnson’s concurrence in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia [1831]). The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 317 30. “In Praise of Learning” (The New Singers) One of the very first American communist tracks with attractive Bertolt Brecht lyrics. The “power” to be seized through revolution can only be located it its massive dispersal (from the “dole” to the “prison” and “kitchen”). Reveling in exposing the forgery of capitalist/ totalitarian legitimacy - “Point with your finger to every item/ Say that you want it explained” - the call hits the snag of mistaking pluralist knowledge production as the guarantor of liberty (while it’s only the inauguration of monumental independence); this is the “bill” that must be “pick[ed] up”: in service to the organizing principle of interpersonal admonishment. 31. “In the House Blues” (Bessie Smith) On one level, her missing man means the blues are in the house. On another: even the expression of affect within the house (“feel like hollerin’ murder”) might lead to “police squad” invasion. Privacy and the fourth amendment have no meaning for second class citizens. Quite simply, there are no thresholds. 32. “Invisible Sun” (The Police) Unusually downtempo, with a descending melody line threatening to fall into the abyss. It mimics a lyric rich in negative theological implications: absent Sol means that all demands by the dominated are phrased like Bartleby might (“I don’t want … .”). Crucially, only a liquidation of man, made in God’s image, will suffice: “they’re only going to change this place/ By killing everybody in the human race.” 33. “I Started a Joke” (The Bee Gees) Singer radically out of step with the world, telling jokes that make everyone cry, producing the planets’s laughter through tears. This figure appears to be a massive inbecile or boor … or at least is categorized as one, and thereby serves as the excluded foundation of the planetary polis: “I finally died, which started the whole world living.” It must be insisted: all community, all culture, and all political life in general is founded upon the death of an other. 34. “Justice (Where are You)” (Juan de la Cruz Band) “In the midst of desperation” when justice finds a habit in martial law and terrorist bombings, it becomes clear that all kinds of “factions” tend to populate the “minds” of the Philippine masses. The work (of the Moros and New People’s Army, for example) of countering Marcos is misguided, not realizing that “giving up this life” - of a martial law which secures U.S capital inflows and of counterinsurgencies that speak in/ through a wreck(age) 318 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU of resistance - necessarily means an initial period of “surprise.” This could take the form of a non-“scorn[ing]” counterinsurgency, much like Hammond pulses which decay in the audible spinning of the decaying Leslie cabinet sound: machinery sounding off by merely being powered up. Justice inhabits such a space of unfunctionality. 35. “Malcolm, Malcolm-Semper Malcolm” (Archie Shepp) Tunes give rise to technicalities, songs complicate things; perhaps this explains Charlie Parker’s aestheticized and distanced “whistle[s]” for white America? Malcolm resides eternally in “little” form, in 1945 and on the precipice of incarceration. The initial throbbing importance of bass’ chording eventually sputters into pizzicato flutters, ending in a combination which stresses the security (state) of the alpha and omega. The chirping mid-section, temporally, will continually be reiterated in other incarnations, proving that “other Malcolms” (Shepp’s words in the liner notes) will be generated in this mode - further evidence of the racial war (of maneuver mistaken by reformists for position). Once these replicating positionalities wear thin and the “semper” becomes ‘for now’ is when things get interesting. 36. “The Message” (Grandmaster Flash the Furious Five, featuring Melle Mel and Duke Bootee) OK, it’s a message. To whom? Five verses, with the first four focused on the dangers, for Whites, of the chickens coming home to roost: “Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge.” (Hear the minimalist bassline/ keyboard dread.) And a call to provide ghetto (“jungle”) children with what’s missing: apparently, it’s a “state of mind.” So the choice is between society’s production of bare life, which might well “hijack a plane,” or providing each and all with a sense of individuated territorial controls (sovereignty/ decisionism). To the Whites, in other words: share it or lose it. But, given the pathologies promoted here as evidence, is it still arguable, as C.L.R. James announced, that “every cook can govern”? Can a theory of mortal wounds and a proliferation of democratization be made coextensive? 37. “Military Cut (Scratch Mix)” (Grand Wizard Theodore) The crucial question here, as a salvo of early scratches bombs a lowdown, low-key groove: what sort of violence is scratching? Is it akin to a military (hair)cut, bringing the troops together into a single look/ community? Is it like the cut of the saber or bayonet? Or is it closer to a cut in/ to the military (budget/ mission)? The voice of military authority stutters the announcement that all is “ready on the right” flank: “ready on the ruhrrr-, ready on the ruhrrr-.....” Attacking the right of the right to produce what’s “right” through might; or, original violence against state violence. The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 319 38. “Minus” (Robert Hood) Three pulses present, but only one “emerges,” properly. High timbre triad reproduces itself (with fundamental bass pattern), drops for one minute while hollow (heart)beat surfaces/ intrudes, and then returns in the midrange to consume the interloper. Emergence “irregular”: a baker’s dozen with arrhythmia. The consolidation of internal empire demands subtraction in order for everything to add up; in this case, the production of a veneer that smothers (the off-beat) insurrection. 39. “Mississippi Goddam” (Nina Simone) “Everybody knows about” U.S. White supremacy and apartheid. And “everybody knows” that gradualism (“go slow”) is code for “more tragedy.” Whiteness’ muteness, therefore, not a mistake, or a matter of education. Singer aspires to write a “show tune” concerning all this (with wit and oompah piano accompaniment), “but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” There is no broad-way in a world where “I don’t belong here/ I don’t belong there.” Anachronism as rebuke to totality. 40. “My White Bicycle” (Tomorrow) Anarcho-inclined Provos in Amsterdam propose, in August 1964, to leave thousands of bicycles everywhere, in order to reconceptualize urban movement. “These White Bikes would belong to everyone and no one,” according to the plan. Brit psych-rockers’ tribute comprehends the limits of such free space thinking: while the theoretical rider is mobile, under cover of “darkness,” and conceptually autonomous (he literally doesn’t believe in the “police,” for example), the cops will always “find some charge” even though “it’s not thievin’.” Splintering feedback reigns as the confrontation occurs, and free space is registered as necessarily the site of battle. 41. “Negativ Nein” (Einstürzende Neubauten) Double negative: double refusal. In part a response to double impasse of the refugee’s political “asylum/ exile.” Voice accompanied by mic-stand rubber fasteners, turned to percussion instruments - haunting the voice with the thought of a different sort of ground, neither that of the traditional, sheltered citizen-to-come, nor the subordinated subject of banishment. 42. “No Love Without Hate” (Sunz of Man) Purportedly part of the soundtrack for the alleged Malvo sniper shootings, professing the 5% knowledge of holy black masculinity. With only the mind “free,” dualism of war/ peace favors the former in the mode of Black complacency/ suicide; put another way, survival becomes a “revolutionary war” unto itself. Seeking the “black nation” that can be “absorb[ed]”; sub- 320 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU merging the necessity of taking arms in order to purify, but never exceed, the white supremacist state. To mind, much more has been taken in the name of purity. The ballot in this formulation, though, is the bullet. 43. “Old Age Pension Check” (Roy Acuff) The invention of social security “turned this country upside down.” All forms of needless striving dissolve: “drug stores will go bankrupt,” because people will feel well, and women will no longer need “cosmetics” to lure a husband. The attempt, today, to privatize the system is premised on our interest to “own” our own future; concerning this, Bush Redux says: “we’ve got to understand the power of compounding interest, the importance of savings, and the beauty of ownership in the American society” (3/ 1/ 02). But Acuff had hoped for a “second childhood” in which responsibility wasn’t premised on possession. Otherwise, we’re all just going back to work (on our leisure). 44. “O Superman (For Massenet)” (Laurie Anderson) There’s no fear or doubt concerning the speed or presence of global travel/ conquest, except at the outer border of the nation’s space; paying “as you go” to insure landed sovereignty secures this possible opening of intrusion. The “planes” will always come in this formulation, patrolling the skies. Enforceability: when “love,” “justice,” and “force” fail to serve, there’s always “mom” to lean back on, nurturing America’s home-boundedness. And to quote from Massenet’s Le Cid, the Superman/ Lord is “indistinct, yet always present”; the “hand that takes” will, post 9/ 11, make the “appointed rounds,” forcing the hand of every anticipated dissent. 45. “Penitentiary Philosophy” (Erykah Badu) Prisons are meant to break the “will” - or at least make it “weak” - but unlike “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla’s predicament, the gist of the just is for Black men and women to assume the “stool” of power to reinstate the fair-play of the “rules.” “Warrior princess,” a decidedly un-matriarchal figure who comes from the other “sun”/ son (one of undeniable compassion), suggests that once a “bridge” is built to yoke together the people, it should be destroyed. But what of the landlock? “Evil” must test the good, but this is a structural problem, and track could be thought imprisoned if not for the ghetto’s missing piss pot possibly serving as the sign of absenteeism: the golden shower may only be enjoyed if recalibrated for mutuality. 46. “People Say” (The Meters) Reduction for expansion in order to exceed majoritarian politics. Meaty eighth note jabs in main riff become stilettos by end; same time: gorging on The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 321 privilege (“the food is getting high”) to be met by riot (“destruction is in the air”) because it institutes criminality (“they breaking in your home”). Eighth notes segregated (one/ two/ three and four). The “right to live” fully realized at moment this counting ceases to be accounted/ wished for; doubled instrumental break like a tidal wave that ends in a flattened note: deep decimation. 47. “Persepolis” (Iannis Xenakis) In the liner notes to the latter-day remixes of “Persepolis,” the choice between “authoritarianism” and “religion” (in Iran, for the Shah) must be made by “art.” There’s an original confusion in making this distinction: aspiring aristocratic sovereignty possesses its own fundamentalism - of population distributions and the horizontal “mass” which must go un(der)represented. Xenakis’ “active knowledge,” a futures market for the arrested development of (children’s) succession, attempts to lock in this state security, but timbres bleed onto one another and mark the most altruistic “common” knowledge as non-derivative. Granular synthesis and the precision of probability leak out; “hope,” trailing Levinas, “hopes for the present,” and the forgiveness which constitutes time’s movement provides “salvation” as such. 48. “El Picket Sign” (El Teatro Campesino) The farmworker strike in the fields becomes interminable, as growers die and “another became a grandmother.” The picket sign an ongoing attachment (“with me all my life”), and even replacement for persons. Permanent resistance as cardboard-thin, flat refusal of the intolerable, without resort to subjects. 49. “The Prisoner (Eight By Ten)” (Spring) “Earth’s illuminated centuries/ Can’t enlighten penitentiaries.” This is to state the obvious … that the Enlightenment and its promise of universality is haunted by its incompleteness, and here by the shadow that is the modern prison system (which here might well be modernity itself). In a liberal register, this recognition simply suggests that one must work harder at the question of inclusion. But Spring, perhaps, has something different in mind. The strangest musical feature here is the telegraphing mellotron keyboard, percussively breaking up and interrupting the typical, totalizing wash of the tape loop, and reinforcing the “Can’t” of the chorus. The Age of Reason fatally relies upon an exclusive measure. 50. “Run Nigger Run” (Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers) White sharecroppers are part of the “hornet’s nest” of white supremacy but only to protect the plenitude within the landlord’s domain. The knowledge 322 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU of theft coappears with a “rope swingin’ ‘round” Blacks’ necks and the “black snake” - even this folk knowledge is vindictive. Two asides from the thief - representing the logics of racial recompense and intraethnic divisiveness - are also bound like the vicious fiddle atop the monotonous bedrock of the banjo ostinato; there can be no exit from this servitude through legal and folk knowledges. What gives (now)? Regimented, pointed thievery to clip the rampant ramblings of deed-ships. 51. “Society is a Hole” (Sonic Youth) Of course, political science begins by declaring its objects: preeminently, the State and Civil Society, with the latter understood as fundamentally non-State associations and movements, taken as a whole. Here, one of two options: philosophically, society is the absence that undergirds the State’s presence; and/ or, experientially, it’s a kind of torture chamber which “beats my friends’ big heads” (listen to the dull, drummed throb, without discernible movement/ melody). So: neither a free space (i.e., separate and distinct from the State [John W. Burgess: sovereignty is an “original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject and over all associations of subjects”]), nor free. At this jointure, it may well be political science itself which needs critical excavation. 52. “Soldier Without Faith” (Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force) A fib. “Soldiers” exist to protect vested interests, and the “without faith” is a reinvestment in kinship structures to counteract State’s warmongering. Singer claims, after the battle, that he doesn’t “want to be around,” but can’t give the location/ space that is antithetical to the “home” to which he is headed. Lamenting complicity while - as the backing rhythm line during guitar solo suggests - glorifying one of the fundamental tenets of nationlogic: brotherhood (over a corpse). 53. “Somebody’s Watching Me” (Rockwell) The expansion of panopticism comes with a double consequence: there seems to be no center to such endless gazing (it might be the I.R.S., the mailman, or even the neighbors who are behind it all), and, without a coherent locus for purposes of blame, a self-diagnosis of paranoia runs amok. The question is: can a simple restoration of the “right to privacy” resolve the matter? The short answer is, “No.” Epistemologically, “we” are not, at bottom, constituted privately. And, politically, privacy rights mandates a border patrolling that cannot be distinguished from paranoia. Justice demands reference to a deeper or prior state, in which privation means more than being cut off from others; rather, privation-as-absence, which endlessly exposes. The Devil’s Traxionary (Civil Liberties Cut) 323 54. “The Star-Spangled Banner” (José Feliciano) Phrased and bent blues-wise, as if he was singing “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and met with open hostility and calls for Felicano’s “deportation” in 1968. The anthem always links the state of war to crystalization of (a bordered and an exclusive) nationhood premised on the gaze. As Ronald Reagan might say, it was mourning in America; but, at this moment, only José can (you) see. 55. “Summertime Blues” (Eddie Cochran) Regime of work unassailable. United Nations offers no assistance, refusing to recognize teenage summer-fun fan as a bearer of rights. Right to be lazy non-adjudicatable within liberal (labor-stressing) ontology. 56. “Togo Brava-Brava Togo Suite” (Duke Ellington) In perhaps the oddest articulation of the suite in his career (from The English Concert), Ellington departs from the logic of the “Far East Suite” by registering an impressionistic glimpse of “100 miles of beach … facing the equator.” While stressing the naturellement of American jungle drums and the stride of “amour, amour” (doubled in French no less), the postcolonial imaginary, from the metropole, demands amnesic tourism. Like Sylvanus Olympio’s desire to see no French Legion veterans in Togo’s state army in 1962, the decision of equality within the nation demands purity, akin to DuBois’ Dusk of Dawn “savage.” It ends up in the same logical location, however: behind, alongside, and before/ ahead of civilization. Freedom’s heterogeneous chastity, and the steady march of universal recognition. Togo “faced,” brava to the fullest extent, drunk (like General Eyadema) with the convenience of conferred power. 57. “The Traitor” (Herbie Hancock) The disloyal minimizes collaboration. Enmeshed within and stuck between ephemeral sides/ channels - bass’ pops and guitar’s funk comping - the keyboards join the groove in between solos, never sid(l)ing. Puttering synth in middle attenuates loyalties by dissolving until notes’ consistency recedes, broken up into discrete parts. The traitor, here, is solely concerned with timing, locking the groove and forestalling (chordal) progress; no receding, either: the confidence of now. 58. “Two Sevens Clash” (Culture) Evidently, the apocalypse can only be legislated (and does not partake of an enumerated schedule). Jamaican rioting on 7-7-77 (four sevens and double the destruction) detracts from the main way this world will end: the realization that only a “housing scheme” - of peoples, of sovereign nations, and of 324 S COTT M ICHAELSEN AND A NTHONY S ZE -F AI S HIU a more global system - holds the world at bay. And what will remain after it all is nothing really new. Garvey’s fulfilled prophesy of the Spanish Town prison closing is met with singer’s disbelief/ surprise, and only the admonition that “you better do right” applies in the revolutionary context: where can we locate ourselves without a prison (and an IMF loan due)? 59. “Wakare No Isochidori” (Club Nisei) Released the same year as the McCarran-Walter Act, the track’s initial vocal melody closely mirrors the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose popular roots, as we note elsewhere, extend to “John Brown’s Body.” The right to citizenship could be the basis of a new abolitionism - the JACL position - save McCarran’s 1950 Internal Security Act which extracted illegal Chinese immigrants’ confessions in a trade-off: legal status for the names of family members (and potential Communists). Formulaic laborer’s wife’s lament shifts ground, claiming that the “final meeting” at the docks is a permanent farewell: sojourning is no longer an option; to love “in hope” results in love remaining within, landlocked. Hence the JACL’s bind: the securing of citizenship rights demands the swig of quiet assent (and amalgamation to prove it). 60. “The Yodeling Ranger” (Jimmie Rodgers) In one of his final recordings, the lonesome wanderer/ brakeman/ cowboy is transfigured into a member of the Texas Ranger “band” whose “heart is light.” And paramilitary terrorizing of Tejano and Native populations brings on the new form of yodel: “I sing when I am in danger, trust in my trigger hand.” For Rodgers, then, the shortcut answer to underclass and working class alienation is to get on board with of armed white supremacy. In effect, the State racially divides and conquers by managing and parcelling the Blues. “Never lonely long” no more, with so many folks to shoot at.