Notable for a couple of reasons: the first (of many) trax to loop a drumbeat (The Honey Dripper's "Impeach the President") and often positioned as the most significant single to come from the Queensbridge projects. Don't be seduced by the romantic local angle that claims this is a special or blessed place; it's a project, after all, and MC Shan notes its increased militarization. World weary, fighting against those who "grab" your "heavy chain" in order to "restrain." Also an investment in straight living, a crew that reaches for "goals," and being led by he "heart": the irony of ambition co-appearing with subjugation. But more interesting is a declaration of and investment in the conservation of violence amidst state abandonment: "And if you start some shit you had better run." Like the extreme vocal reverb, sounding the barriers with a warden's velvet glove. Popular sovereignty, American-style.

Recently eulogized by old lefties on the grounds of extraordinary performance--note the participatory section of "Freedom" is a call to clap along to a traditional spiritual--Havens is often positioned as the selfless black performer, exhausting himself so that Woodstock could gracefully begin. Underneath this ramshackle portrayal lies Havens the dystopic optimist. Ramped-up midrange in lead vocals confined and shrill; background singers move left to right (but always stay in sight). The ending: dissipation, with a touch of drum-taps. Perhaps this also puts to good use Whitman's throwing off of "costumes of peace with indifferent hand"? If so, we're on a war footing, far removed from transcendent identification/collaboration. Don't "turn around," keep "pushing through" this "illusion." Fastidious--not self-congratulatory--laziness as strategy.

Astrofuturism, as described by De Witt Douglas Kilgore, is a 1950s configuration that manifests American destiny in the intellectual space between a dying colonialism and the utopian promise of a raceless future. It is fundamentally a White discourse. Afrofuturism also takes root in the 50s (the key founding figure is almost always Sun Ra), and explores the (outer) space between a certain afrocentrism and its total ironization (Underground Resistance, for instance). It is fundamentally an African American discourse. Recorded in 1951, “Rocket 88” is both astrofuturist and afrofuturist in orientation. It emphasizes the derangement of the senses, motion, speed, and an open space for “cruisin’” as preconditions for achieving escape velocity (“joy”). It further figures the “futuramic” Olds car/rocket as a techno-prosthesis, and the backing track sounds the soul of the machine (think of Brenston’s horn as the car horn, and the blown-out guitar distortion as the V8 engine). Old jalopies make funny “noise,” the singer insists, but this . . . this is a flat-out racket. 

The MC's show intro (also a common Kool Keith strategy) as preparation for war. Front- and back-end samples tells us that we're situated at its possible finale (sampling the start of the Death Star destruction sequence from Star Wars). But what's to fear, and why are 55,008,009 people watching the drama? Maybe this: the present path to freedom--marked by cannibalism (nod to Dr. Dooom) and "capital law"--locked into the project of emancipation. We've gone "very far," but are constantly "not yet nearly." In order to understand our relation to (an)other, freedom must have currency beyond "Break[ing] North"; and freedom precedes us--beyond known articulations--but we don't yet recognize this. Here's a strategy for exposure: reduce rap to garbage (see Ced Gee's automaton rapper or Kool Keith's more recent "Goodbye Rap"), be "[t]here to damage," and get rid of any sequels. What's relation after this? Our "we," as presently constituted, "vanish[es]."

Sampling the deep second half of King's "I Have a Dream," track wants it every which way (and loose). As a plea for interracial love--or the tolerant embrace of it--the central contention that "beauty" can be "black or white/Yellow or green" forgoes (under the guise of an intellectual abandonment) the calculus of race, which must permeate all conversations if the only other option is that it populates some/none. (Side-note: Stefani's orientalist harajuku investment performs the imperial sleight-of-hand by taking a style that's "so distinctive, like DNA" and then engaging in product placement for her derivative clothing line--double-damning duped consumers.) Can anything/anyone be "beyond Martin Luther [King, Jr.]"? Not through bisexual jungle fever, that's for sure. But for us: if and only if (contra King) the thinking of institutional racism eludes the analytic of affect's grasp. The track: a perverse restrictive covenant.

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 bass line 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?

Helium-addled rapper's electronically processed delivery stresses the virtuality of performance and the divisibility of voice. But it doesn't end with the hipster tribalism of De La Soul's proclamation that, instead of "keepin' it real," one should be "keepin' it right." What's "right" in relation to math? Einstein says: "Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality," despite his ultimate desire to learn about the "properties of real objects." The ground shifts in the track, since "what's right" bears no certain relation to reality or the present. The gesture must be made to the "real" (see Quas' "number thing" for an affirmative, specious, and hyperbolic recounting of personal history), but this is old hat rehashed and re(hearse)d. It's about elevation "beyond explication" with the regularity of horses "dropping' shit." More pointed: it's being able to enforce a "divorce" from a particular "mind state." (Potent)iality.

Black British bubblegum from 1971 reveals the fundamental, generational identity of rock’n’roll. Just yesterday, “little Don” had been listening to his parents chirping in the nest. Next thing you know, he’s being playfully taunted by some girl, who tells him that his folks are now “far, far away” (he left them, or they died, but the facts don’t seem to matter). What’s important is that the time has come for a new tune, now that baby has ontologically flown the coop.

From Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “And it is an accident that a man is pale (for this is neither always nor for the most part so), but it is not by accident that he is an animal.” Also, no one ever asked to be born, and, yes, in that sense, too, it’s an “accident” that I’m White, you’re Black, and that the society we both live in remains racially ordered. So, as rational animals, let us take up our historical responsibilities dialogically. Let’s start by tallying our grievances and generating the worst sorts of false equivalences (shades of Haggis’ Crash): the violence of Sherman’s March is roughly the same as that of slavery, and the Reconstruction left incomplete (“rubble” all around) is similar to conditions in today’s 'hood. Paisley’s addressee (barista LL Cool J serving up a truly tepid shot) is figured as “not to be (White),” but the odd locution of “not to be” hints at something more troubling: the other in this dialogue has not completely overcome its designation as a “natural slave” across four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex. LL sets the terms for the track’s ivory and ebony reconciliation (“the past is the past,” contra Faulkner, and “let bygones be bygones”). But dialogue has not begun so long as one of the interlocutors keeps trending toward invisibility.

Read the lyrics here.

The controversy involving the conflict between the achievement of a culturally-specific dance and the white supremacist practice of "adapting" material really comes down to this: if people of color could really name themselves, when would this ever be a possible conflict? The irony, perhaps, is that the original Filthy Frank video has no leader (but an alternation between an extremely excited Bernie/Berne dance and the Butthead hump); the meme: all iterations require a leader or, more directly, motivation to break from alienated movement. The track? Purportedly a riffing off of Dutch House/Dirty Dutch among other genres/techniques, with a repeated bipartite structure alternating rooted and mobile (within the measures) bass patterns. Baauer himself claims ownership of the song, which squares the imperative sample's source (an indictment of endorsement deals, in part). How about a way below this? If for each other, then even a citation is unfaithful to the original.