Free Doom

Will black music become an asset of empty political rhetoric or will you resist?

The ennui I’m feeling in the face of so much facile propaganda and representation™ does not entirely outweigh the dread and dismay I’ll feel if these ridiculous and, I believe, obvious ploys are terminally effective, and seduce my peers, my fellow Americans (imagine the harsh smirk in my tone here, the inverse of the politician’s cackle) into consenting to the abuse of their narcissistic parents. They just want you to come home for dinner every four years and tell them how well they did and express that approval with ballots cast in their name. They just want you to hear Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar on a ballad about freedom and forget where and who you are— maybe they raised you, their music did, maybe you owe them the shallow solidarity of mindless campaigning. Kamala Harris is not like us, but they are, Afro-American Cinderella or MK Ultra stories (depending on the mood you’re in, conspiratorial or aligned with self-abnegating ambitions of the self-appointed talented tenth. Why not both, simulcast as singing along in this case, tentatively, then full out). Freedom! Freedom! I can’t move, freedom cut me loose. I break the chains all by myself, won’t let freedom rot in hell. 

The use of this quick-fix anthem built on what now feels like contrived intensity as the Harris campaign soundtrack, the acoustics of the duopoly’s last stand, readied instantly on the week that an ailing and barely-there Joe Biden stepped down and ceded the candidacy to his vice president, is so spot-on calculating that it all feels like bad cinema. A terrible b-movie. Nothing is cheaper than the false sense of ribald abandon one can extract from a song with a bold, overbearing hook, which, when closely examined, could be about anything— the freedom to run a country like a corporation, the freedom to use black musicians as the currency and capital that keeps consumers buying from and trusting said corporation with their hearts, spirits. Are we discussing the freedom to exploit, the freedom to intensify foreign wars that U.S. funds, the freedom to let the identity markers of the new presidential candidate allude to progress they don’t amount to, the freedom to pretend this transition means anything at all, the freedom of white women across the internet to righteously proclaim support for a candidate who to them is symbolic, is their negro, their girl, their ‘lesser of two evils,’ the ugly slogan that leads us everywhere and no where. Hell. So hot it burns to ice. And you’re free to stay. That’s what it feels like being a discerning spectator at this aimless circus that should be ashamed of itself but is too busy rehearsing tricks, touring and expanding its congregation, part church, part clown parade 

What’s comforting is, everyone who will readily sell out to symbolism is loudly and proudly announcing it on the record this pivotal and very dull era, and somehow, especially those who once upon a time called for a ceasefire in Gaza, real leadership, someone coherent at the helm at the very least. They have sudden amnesia about the vice president’s complicity in these months of genocide denialism. Kamala can beat Donald Trump, is the logic, and white liberals will have done their perceived civic duty if they don’t let populism succeed as backlash against incompetent neoliberalism. No matter that both candidates answer to the same power structure, no matter that we’re at a circus/church in a tent revival meeting and they share a savior, and lure us into this ruined colosseum by pretending it’s a serious and high-stakes place instead of a site of laughable barbarism and jest that isn’t funny. This confounding series of intentional catastrophes could be why Sun Ra was so adamant in his conviction that discipline is paramount to whatever amorphous ideal people refer to as freedom. Freedom is the lie hypocrites pursue knowing they’re afraid to self-govern; discipline is what the brave souls who make their own rules demand of their days— the focus to see their personal systems of achievement and grace through, to enforce them and invent them simultaneously, while the free flounder and end up ceding their will to bureaucracy after their hedonism incites chaos and delirium. 

Here we are. Freedom, freedom—numb to the violations of our own soul it demands. Black music is being hijacked to conspire with the propagandizing of black life and thought and self-actualization. Kamala Harris is simply the crescendo of a radio hit, a counterfeit thrill perfect for on the road or high school cruising, canvassing as an impressionable graduate student like I did for Obama in ‘08. And if we’re convinced to sing along every time she plays, she may become one of the presidents at the end of a failed empire. It’s so boring I’m in disbelief that it exists at all, maybe I’ve achieved real freedom. Because the propaganda fails on me it leaves me either heartbroken, indifferent, or in another world where I can see them so clearly I can’t see them at all.  

—

At Hollywood Forever cemetery’s Masonic Lodge the same day this campaign ad is released, I’m invited to see a British harpist Nala Sinephro’s first ever Los Angeles show. She’s touring on the occasion of the upcoming release of her sophomore album. We stand around in a stuffy banquet room that smacks of lighthearted Hollywood funerals, for people whose ghosts we prefer to their real selves, and we’re in that limbo for just a little too long. Long enough for me to analyze the crowd’s demographics with a dejected interior moan, to feel the scene duplicate Esperanza Spalding shows I’d attended circa 2010 in New York, white patrons of the arts, deeply sincere, with good taste, dominate. This is fine. Freedom is loose and universalizing finally. Trite as this observation, this boredom. My friends and I know everyone there but still could feel like tokens if we let it sink in too deep. We don’t. We talk amongst ourselves. This feels like mingling at an empty buffet. We await the shroud of darkness and stage lights, the thrill of an ensemble to distract us from our surroundings. It comes. The harp’s lush foreboding strings touched in intervals that lift the skin from the bones and make us forget we were sweating amidst aloof and entitled customers just moments ago. Nala switches between acoustic and electric, strings, synths, and samplers. She’s backed by a small band featuring alto sax and drums. The set’s duration is about an hour but the portal it opens recurs over and over like the looping synths, before and since, always and never. Live music is all we have left, I decide, and its analogs as lifestyle, all that we can improvise and hide on set, off script. Empire, so futile, so dead, we play some of this music in cinema’s cemetery, nervously giggling as we leap over gravestones into the lazy-mooned L.A. night, a crescent, it resents itself for being so photogenic. Life in Los Angeles sometimes feels like one durational commercial audition and if you don’t land the part, you’re an extra regardless. The anxiety pervading waiting rooms and dancehall preambles like a disjointed pendulum is about casting. And the shows and spells cast here rule the nation’s subconscious. Even the way the light hangs in Hollywood portends the subtle dimming of the American eagle as it lands in filth. I got the part of writer; I see the riders under bright lights: Cheetos and Mescal, hip harp and kitten heels. But there is no escaping the gauntlet of the myth of freedom. You must hear every American promise as a threat, and puncture it with a riddle of bass, and become that threat’s nightmare and unraveling for strings— satisfied without it, in pursuit of the exact creative freedom that requires the old agenda’s aggressive dismissal. This choir or chrysalis of good oblivion is the new dream, it stays the anthems and subdues the ballads and goes whispering into Sammy Davis Jr. 's graveyard like a farmer racing the dawn to harvest. 

The law of the land had grown futile but that slow fugue made the land fertile again, and we were the ripe fruit falling.