The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 30

Every now and then I write these notes…and something happens right afterwards that makes me wish I’d waited just five more minutes.

Last week I wrote the issue…happy to be on time for the first time in a bit…pressed send, only to be exposed to This is America.

With Lemonade, Beyonce created an entire (visual) album, dropping it without anyone even knowing it was on the way. What Glover does with This is America isn’t new. But at the same time, Glover—and Hiro Murai (who, not coincidentally, directs Atlanta)—takes Beyonce’s magical realist strain and ups the realism a notch.

…

The day before, Glover performed on Saturday Night Live, as the guest host and, as Gambino, as the musical guest. I was most struck by Saturday.

In the late eighties early nineties, Johnny Kemp released a party track called Just Got Paid:

Just got paid; it’s Friday Night

Party hunting, feeling right

Booty shaking, all around

Know one thing; I’m getting down

[Verse 1]

Check the mirror; I’m looking fly

Round up my posse, jump in my ride

Radio rocking a monster jam

Feel the rhythm, pump up the sound

Glover takes Kemp’s idea (I just got off of work, the weekend’s about to start, and about I’m about to get it in), and adds one element. We don’t know what the worker who “just got paid” in Kemp’s song does…but from the fact that the worker didn’t just collect a check, he has his own car (“jumped in my ride”), and he got paid, we can presume he’s a professional. In Glover’s case?

God this 9 to 5 keeps on killing me

I wanna leave this place all the time

Talking to my boss, he just can’t feel the dream

That’s the chance to let me blow your mind

[Bridge]

Can’t take a break (and you know that’s right)

Money is tight (and you know that’s right)

It’s on my mind

This worker isn’t the same worker portrayed almost thirty years earlier by Johnny Kemp (as an aside, when looking up Kemp’s song I came across ZZ Top’s 1972 song with the same name—a far more melancholy song as you’d surmise by when it was written). This worker is precarious. Gambino performs the song on SNL in the 21st century equivalent of a blue light party, with almost a dozen people lounging, playing dominos, drinking out of red cups (not exactly sure how red cups became a thing but I know at least when I see them all I think of are various types of drink concoctions). He dances throughout.

I conceive of “Saturday” and “This is America” as a two part performance. If “Saturday” is about using dance to evade the back breaking soul killing work-week, “This is America” is about the political economy (and the imperial power) built to take prime advantage of that dance. I’d even go as far as to say it’s the same figure in each song.

…

I finished most of Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air before his Red Emma’s presentation. It is a well-written deeply researched history of the New Left, written by someone who was there (Elbaum was a member of the New Communist Movement). With recent events, Verso decided to re-release it along with a new foreword by Alicia Garza. One of the things he wants to do is use it as a kind of primer—what mistakes did people in that period make? It’s clear that in hindsight they got the seventies pretty much all wrong—they’d used the political victories of the previous several years (the civil rights legislation, the ending of the vietnam war, the taking of cities) to predict the overthrow of the state. They thought the revolution was really coming. But given their youth, I’m not sure how much they could’ve done differently. Given not only what they knew, but given what their capacity of knowing was (here i’m talking about their age, but also the relatively weak infrastructure they’d developed), what could they have done differently? What could they have gotten right? What could they have done about The Chicago Boys for example? The Business Roundtable? The 1971 Campaign Reform Act?

….

So I’ve a friend who ran the grand canyon. In a day.

I came across this article on ultra marathons and endurance. Whatever you think about ultra marathons and the people who run them, if there’s anything to be learned about the work the mind has to do on itself to get the body attached to it to work, it’ll be learned from this group. The thing that strikes me and will strike the book writers, the musicians, the artists, the dreamers, among you, is the role that expunging doubt plays in endurance. Getting into the flow required to perform almost any task with the minimum amount of effort requires that one put doubt aside. Getting into the flow required to run 10, 26, 100, 4700, miles (or the artistic equivalent) requires a persistent set of actions designed to get you into that flow, combined with a profound belief that the work will be done.

And while I talk about art above, I’d go back to the sixties radicals. While they made a whole bunch of mistakes, I wonder. If they knew they were at the end of a cycle…would they have stopped? Maybe their belief in the revolution and their inability to suspend that belief is the thing that allowed them to keep going?

….

In 1872 Julia Ward Howe led a Mother’s Day for Peace anti-war demonstration accompanied by what became the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Today is Mother’s Day. While brunching, texting, calling, sending cards, etc. it’s worth recalling that.

Summer is coming.