Welcome! My name is Luke McGowan-Arnold. I’m an African-American writer, musician, rapper, podcaster, provocateur and Internet troll. This Substack irregular notes (inspired by Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes) is simply one part of my extensive body of work. I’m from the beautiful Rustbelt city of Rockford, Illinois. I now reside in Philadelphia, my home for the last ten or so years, on and off.

I publish whatever I want on irregular notes. It is a place for my avant-garde explorations whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, a manifesto or something that is mostly real, but not completely true. If there’s anything unifying about irregular notes, it’s my tendency to write about things that I like. Although I’ll occasionally do a criticism, I think the “viral takedown” as an essay form is quite boring intellectually. I think it is more difficult to write critically about things you love. In general, I like to read (and write) fiction, listen to music, watch films and hate on social media. In terms of subject matter, I enjoy writing about nihilism, surrealism, capital, urban life, aging, the post-industrial conditions of the United States, riots, the trials of the avant-garde artist, rock music, African-American literature, loss, reading, rappers, youth, Frank Ocean, satire, social movements, masculinity and martial arts. If you like any of those things, you may find something you like somewhere in these notes.

I’ve produced a lot of writing over the past few years. There should be something in there for you, whether it’s an essay, a short story or a music recommendation. If you’d like to support me, please subscribe with money. It means a lot. I do not have a wealthy patron yet, so any little bit helps. Either way, I’ll be doing this till the wheels fall off. I’ve also included on this index some links to my music and my podcast, just for fun! My favorite pieces of writing included in this list are the two essays (Searching for Bigger and Nothing is Over) I wrote for the Metropolitan Review, my satirical writing for Lil’ Mama and my essay for the Chicago Review of Books. As this index is for irregular notes, the work on here varies widely in size, editorial input and quality. If you want to read my best work, go read those essays I mentioned earlier for Met Review. I plan to continue updating this as I release more writing.

Stuff from my personal Substack

Writing about Books:

How To Make a Bomb: Some notes on Phil Neel’s Hellworld and Marx’s Capital…there’s a lot about music in this one too though (2026)

Looking Out for the Universal: Notes on Urban Social Movements in Fiction (2026)

The Melancholy of the Age: Absolute Batman, Berlin and Metallic Realms (2025)

Why You Should Buy My Friend’s Book: Black Arms to Hold You Up (2025)

Reading into Writing: Coming of Age through Books (2025)

Lost in the Hinterland: Essay on Tess Gunty’s novel The Rabbit Hutch (2025)

Writing about Music:

Government App and It Don’t Work: An essay about my friend ZekeUltra’s rap album Tower of Babel (2025)

Novelist or Rapper I don’t like to choose (2026)
Earthquake Yellow: An essay on Jensen McRae and Marxist Literary Criticism (2025)

Luke’s Monthly Music #1 (2026)

Luke’s Monthly Music #2 (2026)

Writing about Film:

Antifa is Coming to Your Town: A Critique of Eddington (2025)

Unfinished Revolution: An Essay about how much I loved One Battle After Another (2025)

Yes, Beloved: An Essay about why I enjoyed Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025)

The World is Already Over: A Review of Neo Sora's Happyend (2026)

Writing about hating tech and social media:

I don’t think debating leftist politics online is useful for anyone: Some Followup notes on my essay Luddite Socialism for the Forge (2026)

Tragedy of the Endless Scroll (2025)

Get Off That Damn Phone: Writing About My Year Without a Smartphone (2025)

Wading into the Discourse is Boring (2026)

Writing about art/Manifestos:

TRANSMISSION FROM THE AFRO SURREAL

The Best Art in America from the 21st Century Left: A List for You People Who Like Lists (2026)

Watching the Smoke: 20 Rough Theses to Make Non (Sense) of Surrealism in the 21^st Century African-American Life (2026)

Random stuff/Misc:

Nihilism is a good thing for your politics, actually: An essay where I take shots at Rayne Fisher-Quann (2026)

Song of Roland (2025)

Fighting the Manosphere One Podcast at a Time (2025)

Lyric Essays:

Through the American Wasteland (2026)

To Be Alive at 19 (2025)

Fiction:

John “Boogie” Brown: A Short Story about Social Conflict in America (2026)

15 Tips for a Young Negro Bohemian (2025)

Fragments (2025)

A Letter about Beauty (2026)

Modern Problems (2026)

The Bank Robbers (2026)

Irregular notes:

Early July Notes (2025)

Late Feb Notes (2025)

Renaissance Man November (2024)

Late October Notes (2024)

Irregular Note 6: Rough Drafts, Digital Salons and Cultural Spaces (2024)

Irregular Note 4: Vote for Real Change: An essay on Matt Reeves Batman Movie (2024)

Early September Notes (2024)

Irregular Note 3: On Releasing Music and Philly Love Songs (2024)

Irregular Note 2: Grappling with Reality (2024)

Early August Notes (2024)

Irregular Notes 1: On Subtlely and Political Art (2024)

Late July Notes (2024)

Mid July Notes (2024)

Stuff from other publications on Substack

The Metropolitan Review:

Nothing is Over

Searching for Bigger

Lil’ Mama Satire:

Everybody Hates Riots

Is Hailee Steinfeld Black Now?: I Make Fun of Sinners in this Joint

Community Loving Radical: A Short Narrative

How To Write An American Novel

Interview with frank news:

Life Does Literally Just Continue

Discordia Review:

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and The Death (Or Not?) of African-American Literature

Writing for non-Substack publications:

The Forge:

Luddite Socialism

The Chicago Review of Books:

Black Resistance, Imperfect Utopias and the American Novel: Searching for Hope in Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain in a time of political despair

Podcasts:

Rough Drafts (available on all platforms):

Note: there’s over twenty episodes out so far so I’m just gonna put links to a few of my favorites so far. These will be Spotify links.

Episode with Ben Passmore

Episode with Ice City Maroon

Episode with ZekeUltra

Champagne Sharks:

Irregular Notes Episode

Music:

I play under the name Huey, the Cosmonaut. I make music that’s been described as “a mellower, Nuyorican Soul / Black Lily version of Chairlift or Blood Orange.” My band was described as a “genre-free and groove-heavy group.” I’ve played in bands and rapped all by my lonesome. My music is available on all streaming platforms. I’ll be linking the Bandcamp links as that’s where I get paid from. My most recent song was called Olipop. I also released several albums as well as a live session on WXPN.

Olipop (NEW RAP SINGLE, ITS HOT)

Philly Love Songs

Rustbelt Radio

Live from Germantown

WXPN The Key Studio Live Session

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I got robbed and lost my laptop recently. My whole year has been difficult – I have largely been stressed and annoyed; a knee injury earlier in the year has made it difficult to move around in some ways. I had about three thousand words of an essay about my experience with the alternative hip hop scene that were lost with my laptop. I’m approaching my 29^th birthday. Not a lot has gotten better for me professionally. I’m lucky enough to do work where I don’t have to ruin my body, beyond my newly developed wrist pain. Last year, I was also dealing with chronic pain.

As I’ve written before, I sometimes feel disillusioned when it comes to my professional life because many people I grew up with have abandoned their values. To whatever degree that matters, we all have to make compromises. That’s one certainty as you age. Losing my laptop is hard. Getting robbed by my neighbors is hard. Both things stressed me out. The second one also stressed my girl out, and I hate to see my baby stressed more than anything. Neither are devastating losses. But they are difficult. How does one move through these difficulties? I don’t know. I’m not someone who really believes in wallowing in self pity because many of my friends live in poverty, languish in prison, remain homeless, or are dead. But life has been hard this year.

I was working on a novel for the past couple years that I won a mentorship and some money for last year. Through the process of revision, I realized I disliked the novel I wrote. I have a second novel about my hometown that’s about seventy percent done. It was closer to eighty or eight five percent, but then I lost my laptop. I don’t like that novel very much. I wanted to finish it, but I feel less inclined to do so after losing some progress. I feel dumb for not backing it up on the Cloud, but I also hate Google. I doubt I will back stuff up despite this. I guess I have too much of that Frank Ocean type energy when it comes to keeping the hard drives with me. I just wish I hadn’t left the laptop on the train. With very little incentive beyond my own passion, I haven’t felt inspired to write more. I lost probably around twenty thousand words. I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to writing the stuff I had before. I miss those words.

I’m a writer because I can’t imagine doing anything else. Will it always be essays or fiction? Perhaps not. I started as a rapper and a songwriter, as I’ve written about elsewhere. But many of my friends from that time of my life are gone. They are in different cities, scenes, or states of mind. I can cling to nostalgia, but we all have to grow up. Writing essays about novels I liked and my own stories were a way for me to grow up and reflect on my youth. My first and second novels both center youth, repression and disillusionment in movements. They might be too similar: both are set in cities that lost industry and now house a rootless surplus population subsisting on service jobs and illegality, living alongside a deeply politicized but precarious professional class.

Through my fiction, I wanted to make sense of my youth and the movements produced by my youth. I didn’t understand why anything was happening. Why were the prisons being built? Why did the police kill? There were easy answers offered by activists, but they did not reveal the world. Meanwhile, politicians in both cities insisted that finance and the tech industry would save everyone, even if we knew that it was just a dream, like the present fantasy of AI-powered utopia. But our belief in these dreams makes sense: no one understands the economy. It’s only through study of these economic processes that we can come to understand our own world and our own losses.

The only way I’ve remained not totally depressed through the robbery and losing my laptop is by reading. So I began to read Capital by Marx again. There, he writes, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and the necromancy that surrounds the products of labour so long as they take the form of commodities vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.” For me, understanding why production disappeared from my hometown was a fundamental missing puzzle piece to understanding class society. It’s only through this study and understanding the greater losses faced in the region I grew up in that I can make sense of my reality, and those of other humans around me. Hopefully, I may write a better novel as a result. Or at least one I like a bit more.

I’ve written elsewhere about a profound sense of loss I’ve felt when it comes to the political movements of which I’ve been a part. I’ve lost comrades to addiction, prison, disillusionment, sickness and their own character flaws. I am not a doomer, as I think that’s an easy way out (I’ve written about this in the Melancholy of the Age). And yet, these days, I feel a lot of grief . The movements I was a part of as a teenager and in my early twenties have been co-opted or repressed.

Loss is an inevitable fact of life. All of human history is a history of loss – primitive accumulation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the everyday exploitation of proletarians laboring in the planetary factory. I’ve been reading Phil Neel’s book Hellworld; he writes about suicides of proletarians in China in a variety of sectors, from the production sites of factories to the truckers in the sphere of circulation. My favorite chapter of the book so far is “The Hammer and Sickle are Sleeping, where he discusses hanmai rap music. Hanmai is a streamer-based rap that developed amongst surplus populations in Northeast China. Hanmai translates quite literally to “shouting into the microphone.” As Neel narrates,

the region’s most successful exports in the 2010s were its fanciful livestream performances piloted by bored and futureless youth – mostly left-behind young men – who gravitated online for lack of anything better to do.

Neel’s writing about Hanmai reminded me of rap and punk music produced in places like my hometown of Rockford, Illinois. As I read Phil Neel’s description of Hanmai, I was reminded of Jesse McCarthy’s writing about trap music in his phenomenal n+1 essay, Notes on Trap. His essay, published in Fall of 2018, goes deep into how trap reflects broader American society.

Trap is the only music that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.

Core tenants of the neoliberal project and the Reagan revolution in the States as McCarthy refers to them were de-industrialization and the subsequent increased criminalization of surplus populations by the State. If you spend any time in any prison, you’ll easily realize that’s the case. Prisons are full of forgotten people from forgotten places. Music, like all art, is reflective of the economic and political conditions of the society that we reside within. While we can listen to a trap song and just appreciate the pulsing 808s, the production of this type of music emerges from specific conditions. But music is universal and so is deindustrialization as we learn from hanmai and trap. Reading Phil’s book really impressed upon me that the factory conditions I grew up witnessing were not distinct to my Midwestern American context. They were a universal feature of how capital flees and tears up places in its wake. In the wake of these processes, there is a sense confusion and collective loss. T As a young person talking to many communists, their insistence on the means of production and worker struggle was bizarre, as I knew from my own material reality and surroundings that the means of production had fled somewhere else. That analysis was often absent from conversations about the working class. What is worker solidarity when all of the workplaces are gone? Well, they aren’t gone, they’ve just moved to some city in China that remains distant and mysterious from our own day to day lives. I’ve tried to address this feeling in some of my fiction. Reading Neel’s Hellworld helped to explain how de-industrialization has to be understood in relation to the broader way that capital acts out upon the world.

De-industrialization is a key part of the American story, but it’s a bigger part of the story of capital. I grew up in a city where, apart from the occasional service or Amazon distribution center job, much of the proletariat across color exists as a surplus population. The Belvidere Assembly Plant, the last auto plant in the area if I understand it correctly, was shut down on March 1, 2023. I had a friend from that place and time who passed away this year. They were the first self-described anarchist I ever met. They froze to death. They were in that group of people left behind by capital. Instead of making rap, they made punk music, which is how many young white poor people in my town made sense of their reality. My friend was a fan of Pat, The Bunny, the folk-punk anarchist troubadour who wrote legendary joints like New Mexico Song or Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist or Proudhon in Manhattan. While I don’t really enjoy punk music, it’s something that exists for young people to make sense of their situations in the same way that trap music does for the Black and Brown proletarians, or Hanmai does for Northeast Chinese proletarians. like the Hanmai MCS, punks like shouting into the microphone. I liked my friend, so I loved their music. These types of music are angry at the system, but it’s an anger that’s often confused and sometimes nihilistic.

...hanmai also draws from lowbrow appropriations of classical Chinese literature and homegrown fantasy genres. The song ‘Got Drunk Alone’ (一人我饮酒醉) by mc Gao Di – made famous after being covered bymc Tianyou – is representative of the general trend, combining the tragic tone of love-scorned working-class masculinity with grandiose themes common across the genre: ‘defeating the emperor, fighting against fates, comradeship in wars, betrayal by betrothals. While the basic combinations evoke certain cultural trends in other rustbelts – horrorcore in the US being the most common comparison, complete with its own carnivalesque atmosphere and dark fantasy mythos – there is nothing quite like the peculiar lyrical recipe of hanmai, which evokes familiar themes of lost young men despised by elite culture, denied upward mobility, and unable to achieve basic human companionship (not coincidentally, hanmai songs are often held up as examples of ‘incel mentality’)...

Apart from one class where I studied capital (a rare thing in the academy, despite the over abundance of leftists), my college education didn’t explain why my hometown was fucked up. Even then, it wasn’t like we were studying processes of deindustrialization. Neel’s book was probably the first thing that I’ve read that thoroughly examines that process. The age old “organize the working class into a union” makes less and less sense as the proletariat in the United States is largely divorced from production, forced instead into gig work and service jobs which structurally are far less amenable to unions and the strike as an action. Reading Hellworld helped to reveal some of why certain cultural forms were popular for me and my friends as we resided in a city like Rockford full of the abandoned factories and without the glimmer of tech and finance that transformed places like Chicago, New York City, or San Francisco.

I mentioned that my friend who died wrote folk punk songs that were angry at the system. One of my favorite songs they wrote was called “How To Make A Bomb” where they sing about making a bomb and throwing it through a politician’s window. They describe feeling powerless as a Rockford teenager and their inability to go “march on D.C.” They literally sing about hating their life and feeling like a loser. Eventually, they acknowledge that marching on the capitol wouldn’t do anything anyway. This was just a couple years after Occupy. Yes, Occupy mattered in small ass Rockford. We had both separately participated in it. My parents had dragged me along to demonstrations. My friend had hung out in the park with the punks who were trying to do an occupation. In the song, my friend sings how “Man I hate the president but I don’t know why I hate the president.” It was pure teenage anarchy with little thought to any political vision or lived practice. The stuff about the president was interesting because this was Obama’s second term when my friend was writing those songs. It reminded me of a question posed by McCarthy’s on how trap’s development:

How will cultural history come to grips with the fact that the era of the first black presidency is also the era of trap — a metaphor for a suckering, illusory promise one falls for, only to realize things are worse than ever before?

My friend wasn’t a trap rapper, but they were singing about watching the bomb squad dance. My friend was also a product of the illusory promises of the Obama era. They were another person left behind. Obama’s promises to end the wars and free healthcare never came to pass. And things became worse than before. Finally, with an absurdist tone, my friend sings about throwing a bomb through the president’s window so they could fall in love.

They had another song I liked a lot about being against homophobia. It’s strange how their YouTube is still up and I find myself listening to it. In writing this essay, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to more than one song. I was scared when I was searching for “How To Make a Bomb” that the YouTube would be gone and, with that, more of my memories. My friend was just like those Chinese MCs, shouting into the Internet void, their YouTube page full of covers, originals and other creations for their 88 subscribers. My friend was a mainstay of the local punk house in Rockford, Disastr House, the first place I encountered communists and anarchists outside of books. We drifted apart as friends do, but we never fell out or anything. My dad called me to tell me that they had passed. There are still photos of us up on their YouTube as a cover for some of the songs. I was accompanying them on harmonica as they played guitar at an open mic spot with another friend I used to run with. Interestingly, that open mic spot tended to mostly have rappers, spoken word poets and was pretty Black. But my friend was always around. It was a place for the lost youth of the city, across cultures. A place where people shared their dreams and hopes in the midst of the dying rustbelt city. My friend that I organized it with was from a refugee family in Congo. It was the first place I ever rapped, where I spit some bars about hating the pigs over the Joey Bada$$ Survival Tactics beat. We were all just shouting on microphones back then, I suppose.

I think my friend’s music as subject from the Rustbelt and my political origins in a place like Rockford were connected. My first experiences with the Left were not non-profits run by celebrity activists, academics jerking themselves off, or opportunistic “organizers” claiming allegiance to the community. Instead, I found myself among proletarians of all colors who found incomplete political ideas to adequately grasp the daily horrifying losses they faced. Anarchism, Trump, socialism, Bernie, punk and a host of other ideologies all blended together in an incoherent mix. I talk about how my experience of communists, socialists and anarchists was through day-to-day time spent in a proletarian city like Rockford, Illinois. I learned recently that, over the course of fifteen years or so, there had been numerous walkouts from my high school in protest of school conditions and other issues. Another friend from back then that I no longer speak to was the first person who introduced me to Chief Keef’s music. Drill music. He also used to hang around our open mic space. They called Chicago Chiraq and we called Rockford Rockghanistan. As McCarthy writes,

Trap indexes the fever dreams of a declining imperial power. It irrupts within a wounded unconscious, seeking scapegoats, boasting, lashing out, categorically refusing any sense of responsibility for its actions. The frustrations and failures of military adventurism on the frontiers and borderlands are internalized; they find sites for expression in the fractured,neglected wastelands at the periphery of the power capital, in the ghetto, the hood, the slums, the bricks, the barrio, the mud, the bando, the trap house. The metaphors of imperial fantasy, of limitless power and wealth — and its nightmare, endless, and pointless wars without issue — cross-pollinate and mutate.

My other friend had a lot of illusions about the world. I remember we argued when he told me he, as a Black man, would’ve voted for Trump just like Kanye. He described himself as a “capitalist” once, I think. It made no sense, as his mother was stuck thoroughly in the proletarian classes. He was raised in the ghetto of Northern Illinois. He was the first person to introduce me to Gucci Mane. He identified as a member of the red pill reddit for a while. Not an incel but incel-adjacent. We tried to make rap music once. The hook of the song was him saying “IN THE TRUNK.” It was probably inspired by some of the strange edgy Tyler, The Creator songs that were coming out then. I think my friend is a coder now, somewhere. I think Amazon. Self-taught. A natural born hustler. Just like the rappers we would bump. He had some of those imperial fantasies about becoming rich. Dating a white woman. As Phil Neel writes in his eighth chapter, The Great God Development, we may have just reached the zenith of imperialism; the whole world system is enveloped by various capitalist blocs seeking dominance over one another. There is nothing “late” about this stage of capitalism or imperialism. We’ve just reached the heights. Loss compounds again and again. Trap music will never die. I miss that friend. He was scared when the riots erupted against the police in my hometown. He bought a shotgun to defend his property. Meanwhile, in the search for the historic mission, the proletariat drank tear gas, smashed police station windows, and looted jewelry stores across the Rock River Valley.

I will always return to alternative R&B when I’m sad. So here’s the obligatory Frank Ocean reference. Much of loss comes with aging. As I approach 30, I’ve been thinking about how Frank Ocean dropped his magnum opus Blonde in his 28^th year. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around to dropping anything as cool this year. But one of the reasons I love that album is how it focuses on the loss of youth and innocence. He has two simple lines in his song Ivy:

I ain’t a kid no more

we'll never be those kids again

I didn’t really understand those lyrics when I was eighteen. I thought I did. But I was still a kid then. But I’m not a kid. Neither of my friends are kids. One is dead, another is somewhere else. Finally, I’ll leave with a Dijon quote. While time fades, we all fade ourselves and grow into unrecognizable people. As Dijon sings in his 2017 track Stranger,

What if you change?
And look at me like I’m a stranger?
Oh, what if I don’t change?
What if I feel like this forever, is forever now?

I’ve changed a lot, just how the world changes. The factories disappear. The data centers are built. Your friends die or vanish. Lovers become alien. I’d like to think most of those changes are good, at least when it comes to myself. Maybe they aren’t; maybe they are just inevitable, like the end of industry in the Rustbelt. But the pain from loss is forever. And we’re all strangers stuck in the writhing mass of capital.

In all honesty, this year has sucked in a number of ways. I’ve taken numerous losses. But my spirit cannot be squashed. For that reason, I present to you, Luke’s Monthly Music September Edition. Five songs and one album for your auditory pleasure. There’s a lot of guitar music on this one cause I’ve been feeling blue. If you were curious about my picks in June, check it out here.

Song 1: Gold - DERBY

For each of these lists, there will be some sort of Dijon/Mk.gee imitator or someone in that kinda vibe. The last list I wrote it was doggone. For this list, it will be DERBY. To be clear, his music is distinct in it’s own ways particularly in how he engineers his vocals. I don’t know much about DERBY aside from the fact that single Gold is a great song. The guitars chug. DERBY’s voice is run through a number of effects. It has a bit of that alt R&B and rock vibe with a little country twang. If you like Dijon, this should bang. While DERBY’s vocals are nothing to write home about in comparison to Dijon’s, the production is beautiful. To be clear, DERBY can sing, but it’s not what makes the song. My favorite part of the song is where the drums cut out and the final chorus comes in. He sings “I’m already outside, I got the radio blasting, been screaming all your favorite lines over again.” It’s addictive. The album Slugger is a full of small songs like Gold. If you want more, check out that album.

Song 2: Kuzco – Camden Malik

I first started bumping Camden Malik’s shit as he was a frequent feature on MIKE’s songs. Kuzco is a banger that is perfect for cruising from his 2022 release The Blues. Malik has a couple songs with King Carter from MIKE’s 10k label on this record. I used to ride around to his shit. His beat selection is full of joints that crack through your speakers. Malik has a number of iconic bars on this one. His flow dances all over the beat. I dunno how else to address it.

“You just want the money

you just want the Benjamins

me too

married to the hustle we in love

yeah I said I do

why I ain’t pick up the phone

bitch you know I’m on the move

in this bitch like Kuzco cause I found a new groove”

Music that narrates how many Black folks gotta hustle in various underground economies as a result of the de-industrialization in the United States can often feel samey or played out, but Malik keeps it interesting. The other bar I really like from this song is “Mama worried bout the world, told her stop watching the news, slavery was a law so I gotta break the rules.” He says it plainly and connects criminality now to the struggles of the past. If you want more raps about hustling in the desperate American wasteland with a bit of humor with beats that ride, check out Camden Malik.

Song 3: Wya – Indi

Indi is a mystery. I’ve read one interview with her on Substack, but she is a bit of ghost on the Internet. She’s Nigerian and based in London, I believe. At least a release event she did for her EP was in London. Her music is a mix between hyperpop and R&B. Wya has vibes reminiscent of PinkPantheress but it’s moodier. She’s also a better singer. Wya as a track is vibey and feels perfect for some club or late London nights. The hihats in this joint are incredibly well programmed. The vocals blend effortlessly with the beat. Her vocals are layered, full of small harmonies, and sound full of heartfelt yearning. I’m really into a lot of the songs she’s dropped on her EP krystal fever as well. There’s a bunch of music coming out of London that I really like. Indi is just another artist that proves that the avant-garde is in the UK. I want to get out there and do some music journalism. Why is the shit they are making so good? According to the interview, she also produces her own shit, which is dope.

Song 4: We Aint – Chloe Hotline

Chloe Hotline is the self styled Queen of Midwest Bounce from East Cincy. Savan put me onto her shit a couple years ago. I really love the album opener “We Aint” from her latest project Chloe Hotline 3. It begins with a grand synth string melody and bouncy ass drums full of explosive claps. She bears her soul on the track with an earnest vocal performance. My favorite lyric is where she sings how “Thinking about if I land stuff, I might just need that (gun racking sound) on me.” It’s an opener full of heart. The whole project Chloe Hotline 3 is worth your attention.

Song 5: You Hold Me – Evil Adeline

I was an Evil Adeline back when she was making music as Addie. You Hold Me is a banger that begins with some autotuned vocals and nothing else. It’s really good songwriting full of great guitar chords. The track is incredibly well produced. It kinda reminds me of some of my favorite Indigo De Souza songs. It differs from her earlier stuff as Addie as the amount of production that undulates under the surface of the track takes it to another level. The hook is simple but heart wrenching. “You hold me when my girl is gone.” She’s touring this September so go check her out if you on the East Coast or Chicago.

Album: Diamond Jubilee – Cindy Lee

This was one of my favorite albums of the past five years. It isn’t available on streaming. It’s just a big two hour YouTube video. The whole album sounds like an old school soul radio station from a distant time that never really existed except for in the pages of a comic book. The guitars are so warm sounding. The vocals are crisp and remind me of driving around the Twin Cities or another distant city in the Midwest. If you like listening to Numero Group playlists of Eccentric Soul from different cities, this will be your jam. It’s interesting because parts of the record do just sound like some old soul band that made two songs on some label that no longer exists anymore. The record is ephemeral even by it’s lack of presence on streaming services. My standout tracks are the title track, Dreams of You, All I Want is You, and Wild One. I really prefer the first CD of the project. I hardly listen to the second.

As always, what have you been listening to? Let me know if you rock with any of these artists!

1. African-American art exists in an uncertain period. The post-racial Civil rights era is gone and now we are bombarded by AI images of Malcolm X shaking hands with Charlie Kirk in Heaven. Some “Black” narratives are fixated on the past while others with the future. Both of these perspectives are troubling. The Black historical drama and it’s derivatives relies too much upon nostalgia or historical determinism while Afro-futurism has struggled to cohere a real critique and seems to be mostly focused upon empty aesthetics. The Afro-future is just another simulacrum.

2. The novel remains one of the primary forces to me when it comes to interpreting the surreal. We’re not really creating anything. We’re just being spoken to by the universe and putting a few words down. What is fiction? The line between the real and the fictitious never existed. Memory is a elusive dancer.

3. Unlike many of my contemporaries on the American Left (including those in the Black Radical Tradition), I found myself first amongst militant nihilists rather than revolutionary idealists. As someone with a distinctive African-American or Black subjectivity (depending on who you ask), there was something perverse about the easy answers offered by the sanctimonious campus Left. The Left was terrified by the fires lit by Black youth in the highways and poor suburbs that seemed to signal a break with history. That’s where I find the smoke. Meanwhile, the nihilists fought the fascists to a standstill in the streets. The nihilists were more honest about the conditions, and continued to be brave out of spite for power.

4. My dad told me he feels that we’re in the worst it’s ever been and I replied “When you were 26, you were living in Philadelphia, and they dropped a bomb on MOVE.” The oft repeated refrain “ICE has guns, we have whistles” is just another variation on the same theme. Violence and non-violence have always played out in this country with the same symphonic resonances. Stokely decided he was sick of getting arrested, as he yelled out for Black Power and for the courthouses in Mississippi to be burned. Eventually, the whistle blowers may join Stokely in history. Or perhaps they won’t? I am not one to say. Political prescription is useless which is why so much of the plans laid by online political strategists fall flat. It reminds me of D. Scott Miller’s statement that...

   1. “There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.”

5. It doesn’t make sense to write about afro-surrealism as a coherent ideology or shared set of practices. Instead, I’ll write about afro-surrealist acts. An act gestures towards the afro-surreal in my view, even if the work itself does not take on afro-surrealist as a label. Perhaps labels especially for self described Black art or writing can often be inhibiting. Through my navigation of afro-surrealist acts, I hope to present a gesture towards surrealism rooted in an African-American cultural experience.

6. Music has always been a core part of how I’ve interpreted the world and how the surreal touched me. The first time I found the surreal was somewhere in a cypher, even before any kind of political awakening. I wrote raps to the Survival Tactics beat. I studied Capital Steez as a sage and mourned his passing. As the years continued, I found myself a member of the strange lofi/abstract rap scene. I watched MIKE play in backyards in Chicago. Talked socialism out with JPEGmafia in Wisconsin. My brothers and I free-styled in front of crowds as we raised money for whatever progressive cause it was at that time. The avant-garde rappers were the ones I found myself around and listening. This probably had to do with their ethical and artistic and political commitments. The Black avant-garde seems to be have co-opted as it always does. Sorry, referencing Gaza isn’t enough for me to care about those boring bars over Alchemist beats. Communist rappers with zero connection to any kind of movement prance about in front of white crowds. It’s just another marketing ploy. Millionaires who rap like they maroons. The Black Panthers used to press these soul singers. Despite that, Black music remains the through line. It’s filtered through the digital space. Lyrics and beats that touch our dreams. I think the music coming out of Michigan is some of the most surreal. Rappers like BFB DaPackman, Babyfxce E, BabyTron, or Teejayx6. They don’t put on radical airs. But they describe the strangeness of life. I was listening to more perfect by Crashprez in 2015, not anything Kendrick was dropping, though no disrespect, his work always made more sense. HIT DA DJANGO. He said “Netflix the death of our friends” and he couldn’t have been more prescient. I wish the rappers had listened. But the TikToks are supposed to free us, I guess.

7. At nineteen, I watched smoke rise from a burning limo. From that moment on, any political solution seemed ludicrous because the world itself was far too strange. As I waited in the jail and then went home, I couldn’t understand how everyone could go back to regular life after witnessing fires in the streets. My political journey began on the streets of D.C. where I was baptized like so many others in tear gas and pepper spray. The youth in Nairobi, Ferguson, Chicago, Lagos, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Garoua, Atlanta, New York City, Maputo,Antananarivo, Oakland, Douala, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum and countless other cities will not stop running towards the gun fire and smoke.

8. My friend told me a similar story about witnessing the students during the Estallido Social in Chile. I remarked that political resistance is so rare to see in the United States, so it makes sense, that sometimes to see your reality clear, you have to leave it. In late July this year, I walked through the Bogside and stared at murals of the Republican martyrs.

9. It’s Hell on Earth, and the city’s on fire
   Inhale, in Hell, there’s Heaven

   There’s a bull and a matador dueling in the sky

   Inhale, in Hell, there’s Heaven

   from Frank Ocean’s Solo off his album Blonde

10. 3-D Printed Fully-Automatic Glocks. Burning liquor stores at a riot. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Communists who keep seeming to disappear. Leaving your wallet in El Segundo. The strange feeling you get when you are sitting alone in a Crown Fried Chicken waiting for your food. Underground kick boxing tournaments hosted in neglected warehouses on the edge of the urban metropolis. Scraps of surrealist acts.

11. I’ve been personally bored of afro-futurism and speculative literature in African-American literature for a while. I won’t name titles, but for whatever reason, all of the popular African-American and other writers from the African diaspora are obsessed with the future. I don’t think it’s useless as a frame, but it struggles. It struggles at least for me because D. Scott Miller explains, the horrors have already happened. The four horsemen rode in too long ago to recall. The future has been around so long, it’s the past. This unites with my critique of afro futurism. I think afro-futurism often dovetails with a set of politics in terms of how it predicts a better world. I do not personally think that believing in an better world is a useful project, intellectually or artistically. Don’t mistake me for an Afro-pessimist, though! A prospective project of afro-surrealism is distinctive from afro-futurism. The original European surrealists understood their work to be the unity between dreams and reality. The surreal. In many ways, the afro-surrealist project remains the same in my view. It is a melding of the reality with the unreal. I think this is where at least in my view afro-futurism struggles as art. It is too fixated upon futurity and other worlds that it cannot grapple with the real and when the dreams enter the real.

12. People love Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books. I am one of those people. But I worry that readers take the wrong things from those books. They see those books as prescriptive politically. Butler teaches that we should all create go-bags and form communes in the woods and try to survive the ongoing crises. Rather than understanding that the ongoing crises will transform us and our subjectivities, the cult of Earthseed seeks to preserve the world. To simply survive it. For all of the arguments about Butler as prophetic, her books to me speak to a disappointing future, where people continue to trod along in their menial lives and a belief in “the stars” as some grand destiny. There is nothing surreal about Butler’s vision. There is nothing in the Parables that brings the dreams into reality. Lauren’s dream is a sad one restricted by her world. Most of the Black dystopian writers suffer the same fate. They are too crushed by reality to let their dreams enter reality.

13. Can’t press rewind, life is like the movies, baby
    Pray you don’t use me, baby, pray they don’t shoot me, baby
    Only way you’ll lose me, I been feeling loopy lately
    I keep it on me, I don’t use the safety, nah (Nah)

    from Vince Staples’ Rose Street off his album Ramona Park Broke My Heart

14. Freedom dreams as a concept are troubling. They are some of the most important ideas that govern Black intellectual life whether it’s among the writers, the video artists or the communist writers. But dreams are just dreams even if you adorn them with freedom. They aren’t necessarily free. Freedom dreams to me are just another afro-futurist or speculative project with little grounding in reality. They fixate something better in the future somewhere rather a thing that may enter into our present reality. My own pleasant experiences with Robin Kelley aside, the freedom dreams that were offered by so many of those Black leftist intellectuals I looked up to failed to account for reality. What is a freedom dream to the Black proletariat hiding in the restroom, so he doesn’t have to go back to work in the Amazon factory? The Black radical and socialist journals do not have an answer. i don’t either. But I’d ask questions. There’s nothing freeing about a dream itself. Dreams must touch reality. I’m sick of all of the art about a better world or nostalgia for the CPUSA, the Panthers, or any other past artistic/political movements. What do they tell us of the smoke? Of the fires? Of the forgotten youth in Baton Rouge? Very little I’m afraid.

15. In terms of fixation on the past, I trouble with historical stories most of the time as they often treat the past as some far away thing. Music, literature, art, politics, culture...it was all better back then. Or maybe it was all worse and look how far we came. The problem is that much of the art that centers itself around history fails to understand how history lives with us now. Baldwin was amazing because he wrote for his time. We must write for our time now. Surreality engages with the slippages between time. I’ve been nostalgic though, who hasn’t?

16. In the original plan for this essay, I wanted to chart some sort of grand historical narrative about surrealism in the African-American tradition in the original version of this essay. But that was too much work, and didn’t make sense at all once I started thinking about it. I think D. Scott is correct that Invisible Man is perhaps the most important book that remains foundational to how we all think about a surrealism rooted in African-American culture. My other four offerings would be Black No More by George Schuyler, Ark of Bones by Henry Dumas, Oreo by Fran Ross and Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. I can’t express enough that Reed might deserve just as much as credit as Ellison for breathing air into this shit. There’s a reason he live in Oakland. For something a bit more contemporary, Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Black Arms to Hold You Up exists out of time. Probably the best thing to make sense of the past forty years.

17. Leimert Park, Oakland, Memphis, New Orleans, Jackson, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, the last few Black parts of New York City, Houston, Baltimore, the last few Black parts of D.C., Atlanta (especially at night), and a couple other cities I haven’t visited, but I’m sure qualify. Space is the place even if the place is not in space. And probably shouldn’t be in space, considering my prior critiques of Octavia Butler.

18. But the reality was that the present was the only thing that ever made sense even when it didn’t. I found glimpses of the surreal in my reading as life continued. The television show Atlanta remains one of the few examples of the Afro-surreal that seemed equivalent to the political acts of my youth. It was because Atlanta is the present. Glover’s later music where he stopped being a incel obsessed with Asian women touched the afro-surreal occasionally. Not every moment, but he touched the strangeness of the current moment. Vince Staples and his television show manage to do similar things as Donald Glover’s show. In some ways, I think he executes it more clearly than Glover does, but since he was second, Staples has gotten less praise. I may need to write something separate, but I don’t really enjoy watching television. Both shows are located in the present. So much of what composes African-American is talking and thinking about the past. I suppose the problem was that the past is happening at the same time that present is. And then that brings us to the afro-futurists. I used to be among them. But the future doesn’t exist. We can dream about Black people in space, societies based on mutual aid, some elusive “community” where we all love each other, or whatever socialist fantasy people want to engage in, but those things were always far less interesting to me than the metaphorical fires in the street and in the skies. In terms of art, the Afro-surrealist was thing that I’ve found that makes precisely because it doesn’t make sense.

19. I wrote a manifesto about Afro-surrealism. I dunno if I agree with most of it now, but I agree with the general confused thrust towards something that’s intangible and yet present like our dreams.

20. Assymetric unconventional extremists – Roaches don’t fly,

    You don’t have to be here if you don’t wanna

    from Armand Hammer’s Roaches Don’t Fly off their album Haram

I’m gonna tell you guys a brief story about a white rapper named John “Boogie” Brown. They called him Boogie cause he had a weird dance he’d always do. My sister Monica never called him that, so I always remembered him as John. When people were looting during the riots a couple years ago, he was the first one breaking into the Vans Store. He yelled something like “fuck the police” and started throwing boxes of size eleven Old Skools into the crowd. Before that, I used to see him downtown when I was skateboarding, he’d be the only white guy in a crowd of Black and Latino dudes. He’d be spitting some corny battle rap bars and then doing that wack-ass dance. I think John mostly dated Mexicans. My homie Jordan sees him sometime at car meets these days. He’s always posted up with some baddie, apparently. He was my sister’s age, they went to the same high school. They went to prom together as friends. He never tried to holler at my sister though cause she told him when they met in their sophomore honors english class that she “didn’t date wiggers.” I don’t think people like John really exist anymore. How many white dudes you know these days who rock a Cavs Snapback, a pair of beat up neon green Osiris shoes and some True Religion jeans? Not many. I think John’s step-dad was a sheriff or maybe just a regular cop for the city. Monica told me he used to beat John. He would sleep on the couch in my parent’s house some nights in the summer after the sheriff kicked him out. Eventually John had enough so he ended up living with his grandma, who was the last white woman that lived in the Black-ass East Side. My sister Monica went over to his crib once and punched his grandmother cause she said some racist shit. I don’t think John was even mad about it. He just shrugged and smiled as his grandma screamed. After high school, he drifted around town. He hadn’t done super well in high school, even though he was well liked. John worked a bunch of weird jobs, so I’d see him around. He was a magician, postal delivery man, DJ, weed dealer, janitor and an MC for a poetry nonprofit’s open mic nights. Either way, I think he was unemployed during the riot. That shit was crazy. My sister Monica was there. She was a part of the activist group that organized the protest. She’s about ten years older than me. My homeboy Jordan and I went there to cause some trouble. I can’t lie to you. I’m more of a Malcolm X type, you know? My sister and her friends just wanted to make speeches. But we were trying to get some free shoes and free anything, honestly. We also wanted to smack a cop. She started attacking John talking about some you putting Black youth in danger when she caught us dragging clothes out the Nike Store with him. Monica got a lot less cool when she became an activist. More respectable and less fun. I missed when we used to watch Scooby Doo, play roleplaying games, ride bikes, do graffiti, and do fun stuff like when she took me to the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. A lot of the times we’d do stuff like that, John would be with us. I remember he dressed up as the Joker for the midnight premiere. Him and my sister loved playing Halo together and listening to Paramore’s music. But once she got back from college, all she ever wanted to do was talk about the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, and feminism. And like, I don’t mind talking about those things sometimes, but it got so bad after Monica went to college. She got so annoying. Anyway, she started shaking John while we continued to take stuff out the store. The security guard had joined in on the looting. He said something like I don’t get paid enough for this shit. John was never a big dude so he was getting flung all over by my sister. I remembered then that she used to do karate classes back in the day. She began to cry and yell about how fucked up John was for putting me and Jordan in danger, but we didn’t really feel in danger. We had just gotten some new shoes. That shit was dope. She just thought we were some dumb ass kids. To be fair, we were. Monica let go of John and kept yelling at us and telling us how we needed to go home. We didn’t listen to her. We had our skateboards and had already broke a bunch of windows. We had t-shirts across our faces. Some of the white people who were dressed like ninjas had started lighting stuff on fire. One of my Monica’s pro-Black activist friends was screaming at them to stop and he got punched. We didn’t want to leave. Monica kept screaming while we built barricades and threw broken pieces of concrete at the cops next to those weird ass white kids in all black. I bet they were from the suburbs. Eventually, we got teargassed so bad that we had to leave. Jordan got separated from us and ended up in jail, but got released cause he was a minor. Monica washed my eyes and covered for me. Told Mom and Dad that I left the protest as soon as she told me to before all the ignorant shit. So she’s still kinda cool. John ended up doing a couple of years in jail cause he punched his step-dad in the face at some point during the riot, as well as instigating the looting. Monica wrote a facebook where she blamed the riot on privileged white people, and said that all it did was damage POC owned businesses and distract from the real goals of the protest. I never really thought of John as privileged. Goofy, sure. But privileged, I dunno. His grandma never had money. People in the comments of the post tagged John. Unfortunately, the police had been watching my sister’s Facebook cause she was a well known activist in our town, so they grabbed John up at his grandma’s. Jordan saw him get pulled out of his house and into the squad car. It looked like they had beat the fuck out of him. Either way, while he was locked up, one of his girlfriends helped him record a mixtape over the prison phones. The mixtape’s name was Came From Nuthin’: The True Story of a East-Side Hustler. Most of it was bad, but there was this song called Cash Cow that kind banged. It was mostly good cause a local rapper me and Jordan liked named $weetMoneyLo was featured on it. He was also there on the streets with us throwing stuff at the police and yelling “I’m proud to be Black” every two minutes. I dunno if John is really that similar to the original John Brown. I remember from class that the original John Brown was basically a white dude that hated slavery so much that he started killing slave owners or something in Kansas. And then, Fredrick Douglass funded him to go start a slave revolt in Virginia. They were supposed to raid an armory to provide arms for the slaves. I think Harriet Tubman was somehow involved too, though she didn’t end up going. My sister’s friend John is different, though. He mostly broke into that store cause he was bored, I think. Just doing ignorant shit for it’s own sake rather than some lofty ideals like Monica’s activist friends, but none of them carried a ten year old to safety after the tear gas started flying like John did. Monica eventually moved out of our hometown. I think she felt bad for getting John arrested, but couldn’t work up the courage to say sorry to him. I don’t hear from her much these days. She told me I was toxic awhile ago, but she’ll still call me on my birthday. I miss her so much. I hope she visits soon. Anyway, a few years later, John eventually got this Puerto Rican girl pregnant and now he works at UPS as a forklift operator. Every so often though, I’ll see one of his videos on Instagram. He still doing that corny ass dance.

Some of my first writing for a publication was about music. At 20, I wrote about Nostrum Grocers and how Elucid rapped about Stokely Carmichael in their song ‘98 gewehr for a Swarthmore College magazine. I wrote about my boy ZekeUltra’s album on here last year and how it relates to the Black proletariat in Philly, Black artistry and literature. I also wrote a bit about some of my favorite contemporary socialist and abolitionist music (in addition to other art) in this post. The plan is to talk about my five favorite songs and one album/set of songs I liked this month. I’ll probably write about four to six sentences on each.

Song 1 – things 2 make U smile – rian brazil

rian brazil is one of the wunderkind from Europe. This song is good as I love his earnest and indecipherable vocal delivery over rough piano chords and incalculable drum breaks. His vibe kinda reminds me of the other British artists I’m into like Jim Legxacy, sade olutola and dexter in the newsagent. Internet music from Britain continues to enchant. Something about it over there, man.

Song 2 – sibeeria – doggone

This list partially began started because people asked to write about the Dijon imitators I jokingly be listening to. Doggone is one of them. I’ll share more of them in the coming months. He’s got good guitars, better production, solid songwriting and a great voice. He seems to be from the Midwest, he sings about Toledo in another song. I love the lasers on this song, the drums and the little distorted guitar riffs. If you like Dijon and Mk.gee, you’ll be into this guy. His stuff is distinct enough, it doesn’t feel like a copy. He’s always singing about someone named William. I chose sibeeria cause it sounds a bit different, but if you really want Mk.gee vibes, go listen to the song William. He also makes weird Instagram videos. I love a weirdo on the Internet. Fewer and fewer of us.

Song 3 – Lane Changing – SOB X RBE

The next three tracks are all partially inspired by my trip with Maurice. For those of you who don’t know, SOB X RBE is a group from Vallejo. I met a Black Mexican from Vallejo at the iconic Oakland bar Thee Stork Club. I asked him for recommendations on Bay Area shit, he told me to check out SOB X RBE and a few other artists. I had heard their song on the Black Panther album which I liked, but I started bumping their first album after getting the recommendation. Lane Changing, a song from their first song has a hypnotic 80s vibe and some crazy bars. The group doesn’t exist anymore, but you can feel the wild Bay Area energy pulsing through the beats and raps. Oakland was the city that arguably birthed the anti-police movement of the 2010s and you can hear it. Boots should’ve put some of their songs in his movie instead of that weird carnival ass music. I might’ve actually liked I Love Boosters.

Song 4 – Look Alive – BlocBoy JB ft. Drake...produced by Tay Keith

Our first big stop on the country-wide tour was Memphis. We listened to a bunch of Memphis rap. Look Alive was the first song that introduced me to Tay Keith’s iconic production and tag. The beat is hard as fuck. Rest in Peace Tay Keith, the best producer of the past ten years. He defined the 2020s sound. I played a playlist of his hits at my Juneteenth cookout. He produced so many of the best songs, it’s kinda insane. Just go listen, he probably produced at least one thing you liked if you like hip hop. Gone far too soon, another one of thousands.

Song 5 – Sexy Soulaan – Monaleo

One of most iconic stops during the tour was Houston. I understand why ‘leo made this song after going. All the non-Blacks to the back! Stop saying the n-word! Anyway, this song goes and is my Juneteenth pick. She practically floats on the beat when she spits “all the cute Black girls streaming my shit, ego so big niggas feeding my shit.” All I wanna do is feed my girlfriend’s ego, so I relate to it.

Album – Casts of A Dreamer – 454

454 is an icon. If you want to hear what music from the future sounds like, go listen to 454. His stuff is unworldly. It’s been described by some as plugg. To me, it’s something that could only created from the SoundCloud era. His music almost feels inspired by hyper-pop sometime. Standout track for me on the record is Mike Carroll. His vocal style on the track kinda reminds me a bit of Zeelooperz delivery, but then he’s doing something else entirely. My favorite part is when he says “East side kinda scary, west side kinda lit.” I can’t really describe the whole album as it changes a lot track by track, but I encourage you to listen.

Okay, that’s the post. What have you been listening to? Let me know if you rock with any of these artists!

I had a note go viral recently. I’m not going to link it because it is dumb, even if I’m right. I wish it hadn’t gone viral, as all of my opps came out the woodwork. I enjoy my peace. I don’t even like sports like that, but I enjoy a good sports riot video any day of the week, unlike many of these miserable leftists. Anyone who reads my Substack will know. Either way, it had me thinking about how the DiscourseTM is so boring and meaningless when it comes to the real world. Except the discourse is the real world, as I am always complaining to my girlfriend about the stupidity happening online. Despite this, sports are things that people have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy regardless of whatever anyone says on some random website. But these arguments are all aesthetics, not politics, we’ll get to that later, though. Part of this was prompted by how I’ve had multiple people I do not know write whole responses to small notes I’ve written. But why do we fixate on these strange discourses? And what is to be gained from that?

Very little except algorithm fame, I suppose. The logics of the market. The aesthetics of the algorithm cloaked in the correct language. But politically, nothing at all. But how does this relate to the avant-garde spirit more importantly?

I’m always thinking about the spirit of the avant-garde and how to embody it. My first understanding of the avant-garde before writing this essay was an understanding that the avant-garde were the most advanced and experimental artists who historically operated outside of the bounds of bourgeois art society such as the salons. However, as I read more, I learned that that term avant-garde comes from a military idea. The avant-garde was a unit that did reconnaissance in front of the army. It’s always been a term associated with the Left also in the 19^th century. Notably, according to Poggioli’s first chapter in his book Theory of the Avant-Garde, he argues that there were two “avant-gardes” that were artistic and political while being closely associated with the revolution in 1848 and the Commune in 1871. However, eventually this unity between the artistic and the political disappeared.

“Thus, what had up to then been a secondary, figurative meaning became instead the primary, in fact the only, meaning: the isolated image and the abbreviated term avant-garde became, without qualification, another synonym for the artistic avant-garde, while the political notion functioned almost solely as rhetoric and was no longer used exclusively by those faithful to the revolutionary and subversive ideal. The point was reached at which anyone who still used the phrase outside the ambience of the political left was led to qualify it with special adjectives and attributes, as if to underline that, in this case, one was dealing not with a technical term but with a generalized publicizing or propagandistic image.”

I’d argue this separation continues to exist today in the small online and literary context I exist within, for whatever that matters. Much of the political left is bound by the market logics of social media. An array of leftist influencers, artists and commentators have appeared, devoid of any artistic avant-garde artistic capacity. They have unclear socialist or abolitionist politics without the bite of a revolutionary event like the Commune. That’s why many of them ignore the past fifteen years of anti-police rebellions. In the opposite direction, the most interesting voices in terms of literature and art remain largely apolitical or outside of an explicit left perspective. Sam Kriss is one who comes to mind immediately with his strange writing style that was detailed quite well in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s essay on Kriss in The Metropolitan Review. I’ll come back to that later. The small online and offline journals remain the most interesting places artistically, wholly separate from the influencer baiting big journals and influencer writers. Some of this has to do with how mass culture exists now because of social media.

To go back to some more theory, theorists such as Walter Benjamin wrote about how fascism organized the newly emerging proletarian around aesthetics rather than around questions of who controlled production. He talks about this in his text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin states how,

“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”

The right to “express yourself” has only become more commonplace now with the advent of social media. You no longer need complicated mechanisms of production to produce “art” or better understood as “content,” you can just go live on TikTok or write a critique on Substack as long as that critique serves the algorithm and popular discourse. In addition, art and reality itself is cheapened by the algorithm. This relates to Benjamin who writes about how the aura of the art decays in its mechanical reproductions. The de-materialization of everything exists upon the Internet, like it or not. It’s all floating images.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced

Think of the people who post the books they are “reading” with no reading occurring. We all know a few! Or the infographics which dumb down, simplify and mess up the arguments of complex texts. So many examples in the social media age. At least according to Benjamin, much of the mass culture that decays art leads to fascism. While fascism in our current moment is a complicated term, I’d argue that things are at least tilted towards authoritarian ends, even amongst those against those authoritarian tendencies…just google anarchist influencers, they exist! Not to mention, these apps are still data-harvesting machines built around the logics of the market. The masses now see their chances to become influencers, instead of seeing the need for any kind of social transformation. Mass culture facilitated through capitalist technology leads from Benjamin’s perspective to a set of politics rather than anything emancipatory, even if the fascist politics wear a red flag. People understand “expressing themselves” online as the true freedom rather than any sort of critical analysis about their own social circumstances, even if the content they produce seemingly involves “critical analysis.” They lack the avant-garde spirit. They are just doing another brand of content. It is just more slop for the algorithm. One could and should say the same easily about this essay. We’re all caught in the machine. Slop, slop, slop, all turning in the widening gyre.

For instance, Substack is understood by most of it’s users, even the leftists, as a shimmering almost magical thing that delivers news, hot takes and comedy. The obscuration of how apps like Substack are created is directly related to how many people who buy devices like iPhones or Macs do not understood that these devices are composed of varying types of minerals that had to be harvested and then the devices had to be built in factories. I think Marx talked about this? Hmm. This is increasingly the case in places like the major post-industrial cities (most of ‘em) in the United States, as most of the production happens elsewhere. Similarly, Substack exists in a place where the actual creation of the app is obscured from the consumers. It’s part of why you get ridiculous activists making demands of Substack as if their opinion matters when the Substack is a VC- funded firm first. The illusion that many on the Left have about why social media is actually their friend or something is a longstanding problem that exists largely as a result of the feigned closeness between social movements of the 2010s and early social media companies. I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Why does this matter when thinking about the avant-garde? The thing is that aesthetics have been totally introduced through the means of social media, which is ultimately just another form of mechanical production, into our political world. So much of what composes “political” discourse online and increasing across the meat space is defined by the aesthetics that are offered up by the Internet. Even the radical presences whoever on these websites (including myself) exist largely as simply the aesthetization of politics which helps to obscure the actual productive forces that compose society.

To return to avant-garde. I don’t believe we can simply ignore the presence of the online space. It obviously impacts the real world in numerous ways. However, I think that a member of the avant-garde should seek to subvert the space and the existing market logics. This would mean forgoing an intellectual trajectory that favors following popular discourses. For instance, my most popular article was written about how much I liked the film One Battle After Another. In the article, I gave two different small sentences that addressed some of the critiques that were levied against it. The reason that article was popular had to do with how it addressed the “discourse” and followed market logics rather than forging an independent avant-garde path when it came to criticism.

Instead, I believe at least for myself we should be like the dadaists in how Benjamin describes them in relation to film and other media.

“Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions—though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production.”

The dadaists as Benjamin describes attached less importance to the sales value. Their work was useless. We should endeavor to make our own work as useless as the Dadaists. I like the fiction and literary criticism published on Substack more than the leftist takes on community, as much of it evades the algorithmic imperatives. While I’m not advocating complete divestment for those of you who use the platform to make money, the goal should be to do strange things on here, basically. Stuff that offends. Things contain obscenities and uselessness to parody the studied degradation of the artistic forms. In Lambert’s essay on Sam Kriss I mentioned earlier, he discusses how Kriss evades the rationalist understanding of what many people believe writing to be.

“Kriss is increasingly resorting to outright fictions. He is no longer a writer of “takes” so much as parables. Thus, an essay about population collapse takes the form of a made-up Victorian political economist called Thomas Hooper Cooper, and a recent polemic against the U.K. law enforcement’s fun new technique of arresting the elderly at peaceful protests involves a long excursus about a made-up 16th-century theologian named Laurentius Clung. The obvious analogue from the history of literature is Borges, with his extraordinary pseudo-essays recounting the lives and works of men like Pierre Menard, Nils Runeberg, and Herbert Ashe. But to Kriss’ enemies, the technique is an abuse of writing, something devious and irresponsible.”

In the creation of something wrong, Kriss creates a bizarre kind of style that mimics and pokes fun at the depressing algorithmic reality in which we live. This can offend both sides. You can see how his work has parallel with Dadaists. He writes almost to parody the LLMs. He’s recently beefed according to Lambert’s essay with techno-authoritarian Curtis Yarvin, despite much of his own writing appearing in right-wing publications. For these reasona, to be amongst the online avant-garde, I’ve endeavored to write strange stories and essays on my Substack and in other places that seek to evade the algorithm. For example, here’s an anecdote from the podcast we went on...

“During our tour of the West Coast, we wandered into a Brick and Marx, a leftist bookstore owned by an old Boomer white communist named Wisconsin Pete. He had been arrested for hiding some of the most under-analyzed group from the 1960s the Pleathermen, they were the knock-off version of the Weather Underground who tried to look like the Panthers but they were too broke to afford the actual leather jackets. Wisconsin Pete after escaping prison, founded a small bookstore in the heart of an unnamed city in California that sits somewhere next to the pacific ocean! Either way, Pete had invited a Black organization known as the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization who claimed to be from the legacy of Pleathermen. Their goal was to turn their neighborhood into an Oceanic Autonomous Zone. A tall afro-communist named Edwin with yellow locs and a Mexican girlfriend began to protest. He argued that instead of building a network of hydroponic systems to make a juice business, the brothas from the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization needed to focus on training their cadre with a new method of African street fighting he had discovered in an alternative dimension locked within the San Fernando Valley. He said the name of the fighting form but I couldn't comprehend it. It was in a language unknown to man. He offered to train them in the form for the low price of 200 dollars a session. A real deal! He said he had stuffed a local sheriff's deputy in his Mexican girlfriend's trunk to prove the effectiveness of the fighting form. Instead of accepting his offer, the leader of the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization Hosea declared that Edwin was a social fascist and endangering their informational session. That lead to the Wave Guard (the paramilitary formation that served under the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization's command) attempting to seize Edwin. Edwin used his secret fighting methods to disarm them. Some of those guys were big, but he moved around them like a shimmering beef patty at the Jamaican restaurant you can't remember. Unfortunately while Edwin was fighting the Wave Guard, his Mexican lover-girl had gotten together with Hosea, the head of the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization. HE STOLE HOMEBOYS GIRL!!!! Hosea and his latina mami rode off into the Sunset determined to build a beautiful multi-racial society modeled after The Houston Federated Communes. Edwin was down for a while, but suddenly, Wisconsin Pete told everyone that he had never really believed in slavery and he was selling the bookstore to the university. Some of the feminist academics at the UC-???? were interested in archiving the “problematic histories of the past.” We tried to interview anyone in the store, but they all said social media was a co-insurgent tricknology and even tried to steal one of our mics. Luckily, my homeboy had picked up a few moves from watching Edwin. We caught our Amtrak and headed out the city in shame. Hopefully, we would find something better in the Houston Federated Communes. We heard they had Nigerian/Vietnamese/Brazilian fusion food.”

Or perhaps another story from my youth that I recalled when I was back in Rockford.

“Back in my teenage years at Auburn High School, I was in the middle of several feuds between different warring leftist families. Think Romeo and Juliet, but with more red flags and instead of swordplay, people would shoot Glock 26s at each other on the football field. No one was ever hurt though cause everyone missed intentionally so they could keep beefing. There were several sword fights cause no one could afford ammunition. Either way, I was kinda a Mercutio type character in the drama between the warring factions. I liked everyone involved though sometimes I’d also just leave school early to hang with some Ex. Nation brothas (they started they own group) as they sold bean pies by the side of the road. Those brothers were not into the leftist stuff cause they saw it as comparable to begging the white man for things. I would attend the communist balls that were hosted in the lunchroom after the 3:45 dismissal time. We would dance to Drake’s One Dance while the head of the basketball team would recite sections from the Manifesto. This was before AI. Occasionally, I’d find my way over to the classroom where the queer anarchists listened exclusively to Alex G and the early Weeknd stuff and Yung Lean. I was trying to romance a beautiful woman named Tamia with a phenomenal brazilian buss down. She was besties with my homie Monica. It didn’t work out cause when I tried to spit to her about my David Graeber knowledge, Tamia told me that Graeber was eurocentric and I should have been reading C.L.R. James. She left with a smooth ass brother who had read Facing Reality back to front forty eight times. In my melancholic mood, I turned on Frank Ocean’s strawberry swing which I had downloaded off Datpiff.com. Either way, I found myself back at the communist party and they were now playing Migos’ Bad and Boujee to link up with my friend Monica who was reading report-backs from the Occupy Oakland encampment. Unfortunately, DeWayne from the anarchist contingent got into a sword fight with Dennis because they were both in love with Monica. For a bit of background, Monica was a fetching council communist who existed like myself as a floater between the two scenes. Monica began to cry “I can’t choose between the two of you” while they fenced across the gym to Rihanna’s Work ft. Drake. I spilled all my emotions tonight, indeed. Very astute, Mr. Graham. Either way, I was busy reading some Habermas when Monica came up to me and told me she had been accepted to Bryn Mawr College and had decided to renounce men in favor of being a lesbian. I thought that was a quite suitable decision. We absconded in a boosted Toyota Camry. Some say that DeWayne and Dennis are still dueling to this day. I’m not sure, I missed the high school reunion. Monica doing good though. She lives in West Philadelphia with another beautiful Black woman. They do pottery on the weekends and conduct Audre Lorde reading groups during the day in Clark Park. And me, well, I’m still humming those old drake songs as I practice different parries and lunges that I remember from back in the ol’ days at Auburn High.”

My own interests are obscure and invalid. I take aim at both the right and the Left (but mostly the Left because that’s where I reside.) I do not engage in the discourse. I wrote long stories about things that may have never happened. I tend to write about things that I like, instead of doing takedowns. I troll well known smart leftist academics. I make lots of jokes. I spell things wrong. I make grammatical errors intentionally or not. The avant-garde takes nothing serious, short of the struggle, and if the struggle is happening, I won’t be online talking to you, an online denizen. That’s when you don’t hear from me. Or perhaps, I am just taking a nap with my beautiful girlfriend. Either way, the algorithm is boring. The discourse is boring. I am boring. You are boring. Until we do things that are more strange and esoteric and outside of the market, we will be stuck in a horrific cycle of boredom. That boredom looks awfully fascist, authoritarian, undemocratic, evil, nasty or whatever word you’d like to use. So let’s imagine something else with our words, notes and deeds.

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A reminder that I am about to embark upon a cross-country odyssey with my friend Maurice to work on our podcast Rough Drafts. We leave in the next couple of days. We were funded by the People’s Media Fund in the Greater Philadelphia area to interview writers, artists, academics, filmmakers and organizers across the North American continent. Our podcast is broadly about artistic/creative processes, American subjectivity, masculinity, and social movements. We read a lot of books for each episode so readers are encouraged as guests. Check us out everywhere you can stream podcasts like Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We’ll be broadly in the West Coast, the South and the Midwest. We will also be continuing to traverse the East Coast after the fact. If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast or host us, please message me on here or email us at rough.rough.drafts@gmail.com.

I finally published my only political essay under my legal name at the Forge. First of all, I can’t thank Akin enough for his editorial advice. We went through many drafts. I did want to write a bit of a follow-up about the essay to clarify some of the ideas for myself and people on here. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link! You can also read this essay and get the gist, but that article is far better. This will likely be my last post for a month or so as I’ll be on the road doing interviews for my podcast Rough Drafts. I cannot wait.

On this Substack, I write about literature, music, movies, comic books and art. I do write about politics in the sense that everything is political, much to the chagrin of the “apolitical” lit-bros, but I don’t advocate for specific ideologies or tactics unlike many of my contemporaries. If I do advocate for something, it’s probably a healthy skepticism of everything. For those of you who know me outside of this platform, I would be eager to share my politics with you. But I am uninterested in re-litigating left-wing debates online unless it’s in the form of satirical short stories. I regularly encounter leftist influencers on this platform or others who regularly advocate for whatever brand of socialism, communism or anarchism they enjoy. They condemn or endorse shoplifting, voting, marching or whatever other tactic is popular to talk about that day. I am not interested in doing that. I’ll criticize and laud literature forever, but once politics it enters with real world stakes, I am uninterested in the online discourse. The only other time I’ll comment politically is to correct incredibly inaccurate reads of Black history, which remain quite common in an increasingly illiterate moment despite our perceived “information age.” But I’m trying to move away from even engaging in that type of discourse. If you see me doing discourse stuff, comment and tell me to stop!

Awhile ago, I adopted a Luddite perspective for political reasons more than anything else. While not staring at a screen all day adds benefits to my life in numerous other ways, my main criticism related to how phones and social media have destroyed social movement capacity and knowledge. They also inhibit human freedom, but that’s another conversation. That’s why when people will ask me what I think needs to happen, write critiques political figures like Zohran or Hasan, or whatever else, I exit out of the conversation. Again, those are all things I am happy to talk about in real life, but not over the Internet, especially with strangers. Otherwise, my engagement with politics online tends to be unserious, sardonic and absurd.

The tech-critical position is probably one of the most unpopular ones on the Left and society as a whole. It puts you at odds with almost every type of person, regardless of their chosen ideology. My article in the Forge was rejected initially by an editor when it was pitched, likely because of the arguments it made. I lost over ten followers on Instagram the day I posted it. There’s a reason for this. The Left and progressive social movements over the past twenty or so years has sustained themselves increasingly on these platforms. Sometimes, they adopted the platforms first. In some odd ways, they may even see their own destinies tied up with the destinies of our tech-overlords. Perhaps that’s why our moment feels hopeless as the curtain has been pulled back on the insidiousness of tech. But social media and modern social movements have always been joined to some degree at the hip. For example, in 2015, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wore a shirt that said “Stay Woke” while talking with Black Lives Matter associated Twitter activist Deray McKesson. It couldn’t be a better representation of our problems now. The situation has only gotten worse.

Twitter marketed itself as an ally to social movements against oppression like the Arab Spring and BLM. People understood these social movements as products of these technologies, rather than understanding them as the product of long-standing historical struggles against oppression. Leftist influencers abound everywhere now, you can find every flavor of politics you desire on TikTok. There are even people who build platforms critiquing people like Deray. It’s all a big circle. Until the Left and social movements can recognize the error in understanding VC-funded companies as allies, they will struggle in a variety of ways. I had to realize this conclusion for myself which prompted my separation from these platforms in terms of serious political engagement. I had a couple of comrades who were already off social media that helped encourage my move to a flip-phone.

People develop weird para-social relationships over the Internet. I’ve had people from other continents write “political critiques” of me because they didn’t like a thing I said about a movie. These online para-social relationships for many people are stand-ins for their lack of intellectual relationships in the real world as we live in increasingly atomized times. While I do not think spamming “talk to your neighbors” is always the best idea as some of our neighbors can be people with idiotic or dangerous ideas about the world, but talking to people in real life is always a better option. The sad fact is that most people who encounter leftist ideas now find and exclusively engage with those ideas online. The result is that unless the Left leaves behind the screens, many of them will have little to no commitments politically in their daily lives beyond said screen. I do wonder if the political hot takes mean anything if you don’t do act in any way outside of talking about the latest viral drama. As I’ve written before, my favorite parts about Substack and all social media are when I leave the digital space to meet people outside of the blue screen. I’ve interviewed a bunch of people from Substack and it’s been wonderful. I’d never trade that for more online interactions.

For my article with the Forge, my homie Sarah Thankam Mathews recommended I read a book called Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci. The book details how social media interacted with protest movements of the early 2010s. She mostly focuses upon stuff like the Arab Spring, but it’s quite applicable to movements like BLM or Occupy. I do a better job talking about her book in the article. In many ways, social media was understood for a long time as a good thing for social movements. It is less clear that this is a consensus now, though I think my position remains radical. While the book isn’t entirely anti-social media, it makes a strong case, at least to me, for why we should treat these technologies with more suspicion. Don’t take my word for it, though, go read it. It’s available online. Anyway, a lot of this has to do with how the leftist influencer (like Deray), buzzy Tweets/Notes and the IG infographic has become the main vector of intellectualism amongst the left. I am not immune to this, another reason I argue strongly against developing your politics online. I will admit that the online nature of politics caused problems in real life organizing spaces I was apart of when I was in my teens and early twenties, so to be real, I’ve always had an aversion to the surveilled nature of the Internet. People will often ask me what I think on this website and I remain intentionally evasive. Am I truly a communist? Am I a socialist? Am I an anarchist? A Black nationalist? Who knows? It doesn’t really matter for my writing about how art and literature makes me feel and it’s historical context. I also have no desire to market my writing based on some niche ideology. Building a platform on the Internet is a different thing than building a political movement. I wrote about this in my piece on the Forge,

“...as the Leftist influencer is focused upon building their individual brand on a platform rather than a collective movement. While building a personal brand is not inherently wrong, as there are many good writers on social networks, the logics of building a brand and building a movement are different. Increasingly over the past fifteen years, Left-leaning influencers now substitute for organizations with political education and strategy in decisive moments. And visibility substitutes for organizing infrastructure and the development of practical skills.”

We all gotta make money, using social media is a way to do that, but if that exists at the detriment of a broader political culture for leftists/progressives/whatever, I think it should questioned. Unfortunately, the nature of all social media platforms even Substack enables people to think less critically. Sitting down and reading W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction by yourself or with friends is not the same as reading my note about it even if I am incredibly smart. Individual brands also suck in my opinion for intellectual culture, generally. I believe that political institutions like The Forge or literary institutions like The Metropolitan Review better serve to develop collective political understandings and literary styles, respectively. The individualized political culture of platforms like Substack reduce critical thinking skills, in lieu of real cultures of intellectual debate that are not incentivized by takedowns that fuel the algorithmic money.

One of my favorite novels is American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I’ve reread the book many times in my life. To be clear, Gaiman is a bad person who used his fame and wealth to abuse women, which has left an indelible stain on his work for me. That’s also another essay. Either way, in American Gods, there is a “New God” called Media who talks about how people sacrifice their time to the television. But now the television itself is portable and never-ending. The smartphone and social media should be understood in similar terms to television. The Left, despite it’s supposed critiques of Silicon Valley, still worships at the feet of the tech gods with our ever increasing sacrifices of time and attention. The dire reality is that the tech industry increasingly shapes every part of human life. Nothing is free from it. It dictates our relationships through dating apps, our engagement with the economy, our transportation, our livelihood and almost everything else. Perhaps our it should not dictate how we think through our struggles for human freedom?

I do love writing and sharing my ideas about how literature, art, music and other such things make me feel. I dunno if I’ll always need Substack or the Internet to do that, hopefully one day I won’t. Sometimes those feelings I mentioned relate to my political views, undoubtedly. Despite this, I much happier to live my life similar to the bohemian characters in the novels I enjoy. There is nothing romantic about arguing about politics online with strangers. However, many of my best moments in life were spent arguing with close comrades at parks, bars, restaurants, beaches, cookouts, house parties, porch hangs, and other such things. I cherish those memories. I don’t cherish anything about these screens.

A Question:

How do you create a literary avant-garde in an era of increased atomization?

An Answer:

Well, what an interesting query. Let’s begin by examining why atomization has occurred and it’s political ramifications in a country that is not exactly the same as, but also not unlike the United States.

The place I imagine is multi-cultural and huge, a powerhouse of industry, a land of ideals, even if the land was taken by force. Either way, it was the center of the world when it came to making things. There were many factories creating notebooks, iron, jeans, paint, waffles, washing machines, towels, concrete, soap, oil based products and DVDs. And the people there used to work in these factories. But not anymore. Unemployment and underemployed stretched across the country. It killed towns first and then the cities. People bought less and started putting needles into their arms to distract themselves from their wretched lives. As the factories disappeared, on the South coast, radio-phones were developed in what was to be called the Electric Delta. The radio-phone industry was supposed to save everyone, but it mostly just resulted in the radio-phone company shareholders getting rich while everyone else worked for a pittance. The radio-phone transmissions made everyone unhappy, but also helped the numb the ache of their lost jobs as well as numbing the ache of existence itself so they weren’t all bad.

Some of the people weren’t allowed to work in factories for most of the country’s history because they were deemed to not be a part of the dominant classes due to their status as members of an ethnic/racial minority. They were considered the “last hired, first fired” as some would say. As the robots began to automate production, more and more of the jobs disappeared for everyone, but most prominently for the racial and ethnic minorities. The gradual shifts in the economy confounded the communists who venerated a figure named Henry Cantor, a renowned writer and economic theorist. He would be considered similar to a mix of DuBois and Marx in an American context. Anyway, the Cantorists found themselves beset by the contradiction, how were they to organize in the factories if the factories themselves were disappearing to other countries where the corporations could pay people less?

Some of Cantorists decided to elect socialists into office in order to expand the rapidly deteriorating welfare state. They also prayed that unions would magically appear. They did not. Meanwhile other Cantorists found themselves stuck in prison due to their transformation from proletarian ethnic/racial minority subjects into members of the growing surplus populations beset by an ever expanding police state. The chief of the Federal police had promised to “wipe out” the ethnic/racial minority factions of Cantorists, so it was all quite tense for a while. But it was all dreadfully dull also, to be clear. Cantor had written that economic changes marked a break in the existing order and lead to crisis, but instead of crisis, everyone just complained, cried, zoned out or raged on their radio-phones. Many of the Cantorists were okay economically, as they came from the middle classes (whatever the hell that means) so their jobs were not impacted to the same degree. Basically, many of the Cantorists did not and had never worked in the factories. This didn’t stop them from desiring a social change or even a social revolution. For example, another faction of the Cantorists broke from the communist tradition and found anarchy. They became bored of sitting in the Cantorist meetings where the socialists would pontificate endlessly about the importance of unionizing the radio-phone distribution centers while never actually organizing those places themselves. Predictably, the radio-phone distribution centers had high turnover rates and terrible conditions, not to mention the fact that most Cantorists were unwilling to leave their jobs in public service, universities, and publishing to organize the proletarian mass. Instead of listening to the socialists, the anarchist faction nicknamed “the commotionists” joined the spontaneous rebellions of the surplus populations against the rising power of the police and the prisons. The commotionists also shoplifted from the grocery stories owned by the radio-phone companies, which lead to a public denunciation in Modern Problems, the most important Cantorist journal. These divisions about what to do with the old economy lead to the different Cantorist factions spending time writing long polemics accusing one another of being revisionist, adventurist, counter-revolutionary, and other such things. As you can imagine, between the radio-phones, the increased levels of repression and unemployment, many of the Cantorists took to writing novels to relieve themselves of the boredom, fear, and ache of modern life.

These novels were often quite boring and took on a form called self-concoction that you and I would consider to be similar to what some call “auto-fiction” today but with a Cantorist political-economic analysis in most cases. The editor of Modern Problems, Julia Winfrey, a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, wrote a long treatise calling the self-concoctionists petty bourgeois liberals who were too enamored with their own artistic ambitions. The self-concoctionists were tied up socially with some of the commotionists I mentioned earlier, as everyone was fucking each other just how everyone fucks now. Sometime I wonder if all politics is just secretly a way for people to fuck. But the commotionists were often not erudite enough for the self-concoctionists, despite their shared attraction. The anarchists maintained strict programs of abstinence, armed training and eight hour consensus processes. They found art to be a “bourgeois frivolity” most of the time. Despite this, the self-concoctionists found themselves often next to the commotionists when the surplus populations rioted as striking no longer made any sense. At the revolts, the self-concoctionists would find themselves reciting poetry, playing the grammo-zam (an instrument that crosses a saxophone and a dictionary), yelling incantations at the police, taking footage for their narrative short films, and overall just being a nuisance. Meanwhile the angry anarchists and even angrier sections of the surplus populations threw rocks, lit trash on fire and looted the convenience stores. Julia Winfrey wrote another article in Modern Problems about how riots lead to “low social trust” and why the self-concoctionists were engaging in idealist romanticization of the “criminal underclass” through their participation. Either way, the self-concoctionists were eventually forced out of the commotionists political meetings for always suggesting a series of writing workshops, instead of learning how to throw elbows at the fascists. Oh, I should mention the fascists.

Well, as people lost jobs in the factories, some of the previously employed from the dominant ethnic and racial groups got mad. They got very mad. And they blamed their job loss on the racial and ethnic minorities. It was an unfortunate situation, but that was what was happening. One of them was this guy named Harold Hopper. Harold Hopper and his family had always worked in the auto-plants, but then the auto-plants disappeared. Unfortunately, Harold Hopper’s mortgage didn’t. He ended up having to work as a delivery driver for one of the radio-phone companies. The pay was much lower so he didn’t get to see his kids as much and his wife left him. Harold was not reading Modern Problems as the journal mostly circulated in the universities and on the socialist forums online. Harold liked to listen to his radio-phone between shifts. On his device, he’d learn about how the ethnic and racial minorities were supplanting workers like him. He grew to resent their food, their music, and their style of dress. He worried that his daughters might date an ethnic or racial minority one day. The complicated part was that some ethnic and racial minorities were doing better than Harold Hopper. Not all of them as many were in prison, but a racial and ethnic minority middle class did exist. Obviously, not all racial and ethnic minorities occupy the same position in society, but I think you catch my drift. Either way, Harold Hopper eventually joined one of those fascist groups that promised to bring things back to the way things were. Harold would go out and shout at women from the racial/ethnic minorities on the bus stop for wearing their traditional clothing. He never did anything to the men as he was scared that they would stab him as he viewed all ethnic/racial minority men to be fabulously good at violence as they were all in prison or headed there in his mind. Harold claimed he didn’t hate the racial/ethnic minorities, he just wanted them to assimilate.

There were many debates in Modern Problems about how to reach people like Harold. The commotionists were less interested in reaching people, they wanted to punch people like him in the face, which is why they were training martial arts. This confounded the self-concoctionists who really didn’t like to exercise most of the time. They ended up founding their own journal in the back of the commotionist print shop. The anarchists allowed it because one of the self-concoctionists was secretly bourgeois and helped pay the rent. The self-concoction journal was called Modern Dreams, as they were slowly moving away from a vision of self-concoctionism as something that was thoroughly rooted in material reality. Their new self-concoctionism was rooted in a subconscious understanding of reality. To the Cantorist clique at Modern Problems, this was even more problematic as it strayed even further from addressing questions of how to organize people like Harold Hopper or other members of the vanishing proletariat.

So to answer your question, I have no idea how to create an avant-garde movement other than probably writing and reading a lot like the self-concoctionists. Perhaps you might also recite poetry in the midst of an explosive social revolt. But who am I to say?

Occupy Oakland General Strike on May Day, 2012

A reminder that I am about to embark upon a cross-country odyssey with my friend Maurice to work on our podcast Rough Drafts. We were funded by the People’s Media Fund in the Greater Philadelphia area to interview writers, artists, academics, filmmakers and organizers across the North American continent. Our podcast is broadly about artistic/creative processes, American subjectivity, masculinity, and social movements. We read a lot of books for each episode so readers are encouraged as guests. Check us out everywhere. If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast, please message me on here or email us at rough.rough.drafts@gmail.com.

I’ve written a bit about coming of age and how that relates to politics. Much of my fiction these days deals with growing up. In the ever globalized urban world, we come of age in ways that are often quite universal. High school graduations, exploring abandoned buildings in the urban landscape, running from the cops, sneaking into 18+ shows, crushes, friendships falling apart, finding new interests, and people moving away are all common things in our young lives. These also are all events that happen throughout Happyend, a film by Neo Sora. In addition to being a more traditional coming of age story, the film narrates a political coming of age for some of the characters. Events that also punctuate the film include protests where police turn violent, sit-ins against school administrators, and political meetings with older people. I found this intensely relatable. My high school girlfriend and I attended rallies for socialist politicians, read political theory and took part in social movements. Adolescent doesn’t really end in high school, but it’s a fundamental part of our development. As someone who politicized in high school, a rare thing for people in the United States as most radicals find their politics in college, the film really hit a chord with me. I found myself grinning as the protagonist Yuta attends an organizing meeting cause he got a crush on the radical baddie in his class, who is introduced as she makes a critique of the police. Because truly, who amongst us has not? I think the way that the film illustrates the romance of political movements and personal political transformation is quite unique especially in an American context. Coming of age stories are often devoid of a political character, focusing instead upon nostalgia, rather than understanding that part of youth is having an eye towards the future, as all political movements do. Back then, I found myself drifting away from some friends because of my politics, the film points to that in ways that are tragic, bittersweet, melancholic and romantic just like life.

The film follows a group of five friends although it focuses a lot of it’s time on the protagonists Yuta and Kou. In the broader world, the film is set in the “near future,” there is a right wing prime minister of Japan who is using the threat of frequent earthquakes (perhaps an analogy for climate change) to impose authoritarian measures across the country. In this near future Japan, the State and Capital restructures themselves in the midst of crisis, and that’s word to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Unsurprisingly, these authoritarian measures often target non-Japanese nationals and the youth. Throughout the film, the rise of right wing xenophobia, increased police power and an AI powered surveillance system Panopty are the main drivers of the film’s plot.

The film really captures a ton of things I’ve been thinking about in regard to how art and politics often conflict. The two central characters Yuta and Kou are both into Djing, but as the film progresses, Yuta gains political interest. He is frustrated with Kou’s apathy. Yuta remarks at one point something along the lines like “Don’t you think about anything other than music?” And the reality, as someone who grew up playing music and being in music scenes, I often felt that way. The film having a criticism of music scenes is fascinating as the orthodox position on the Left these days goes something like “art is resistance.” The idea that art can be a stand in for political organizing is ridiculous. I think it’s important that artists themselves recognize the limits of their vocation. A song or a painting cannot force a fascist out of power. Narratives about “art as resistance” should be understood as ultimately recuperative. It is not to say that art is not fundamental to make sense of our personal lives, but to locate it as a site of resistance is delusional. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I wouldn’t understand myself without certain albums or novels, but those things do not stand in for organized resistance.

They again argue about apathy after Yuta attends a demonstration that is repressed by the police. Kou remarks that “The world is already over.” In many ways, Kou’s subjectivity is typical of a nihilism that often seems to infect the artistic classes. I’m not against nihilism as I’ve written other places because I think it’s often a legitimate expression and reaction to our current conditions. When Kou says this, we should take it seriously as it’s a popular position. Despite this, the political situation even if we choose to ignore it, finds us eventually. Kou and the gang steal music equipment from their school and set it up in a abandoned area. While Kou and Yuta bring a final subwoofer to the spot, Yuta is harassed by the police as he’s not a Japanese national. Throughout the film, there’s a lot of commentary on the right wing turn across the world that’s hostile to “foreigners” in an increasingly globalized Japanese city. Either way, Yuta leaves with the police as he has to provide proof of his legal residency, so Kou goes on alone. When he gets to their spot, their equipment has been thrown out. The formerly abandoned spot that they were using to store their gear is being developed to build earthquake proof buildings. Even if you avoid it, politics will find you, perhaps in the most uncomfortable or even violent ways.

But one of the things that the film highlights throughout is how lots of regular people are content with oppression and allowing themselves to be dominated. Fumi, the radical baddie, fumes at a meeting to their radical teacher Okada about how her generation is completely apathetic. She is not exactly wrong. There are repeated moments where students defend the surveillance system Panopty, blame the troublemaking on students of non-Japanese students and generally just go along. Even in the film’s climax, where students take part in a sit-in to demand that their principal gets rid of the AI surveillance software, one student almost ends it because they are tired. The reality is that social movements are torn apart by their own participants first and foremost. One thing I encounter frequently on this website is invocation of abstractions like “organizing the community” or whatever. The uncomfortable reality that many leftists seem unwilling to understand is that the “community” itself can be fascist or just simply uninterested in their left-wing vision of the world. I do not mean to say this to discourage people from organizing politically, but the uncomfortable reality is that people are not just automatons. Lots of people who are oppressed or exploited have ideas about struggle or resistance that many on the Left would find objectionable. This isn’t to say the oppressed don’t have a stake or ability to resist. As an example, Yuta and Fumi end up organizing the sit-in with other students considered to be foreigners, even if not all of them join.

It’s fascinating that this film has been written about as science fiction as all of the technologies present in the film exist in real life. Face identification is a technology that exists. Happyend reminded me of the better episodes of Mr. Robot. Our reality is cyberpunk, what’s the point of speculating? We can just write about reality. The idea of the “near future” setting is fascinating because the near future could just be a year or two from now. The film takes on somewhat of an anti-tech position, which is rare generally, especially in left-wing media. The main goal of the student protestors is resistance against a surveillance system. Increasingly, the forces of domination rest upon digital technology. In general, art these days is uncomfortable to acknowledge this. Maybe it’s because most artists rely on tech. Despite this, there has been a rise of widespread resistance to AI data centers and Flock cameras in the United States. Another reminder that the “near future” that’s depicted in Happyend is just our reality, although it’s a more positive one. While I’m supportive of people taking individual actions against tech like getting rid of their smartphones, collective action against oppressive tech is the solution in a longer term sense. It’s nice to see that depicted.

The film grapples with a growing anti-tech animus that animates many of us. Towards the end of the film, the student protestors sing a song they learned from the radical group their teacher Okada was a part of. The refrain is “The best person in the world is a computer.” The impersonal cold computer driven logics of capital that drive our society are parodied with this song. While engaging with Peter Haff’s idea of an independent technosphere that has developed independently from forms of human social domination in his wonderful book Hellworld, communist geographer Phil Neel talks about how “Haff’s hypothesis gestures in the right direction, insofar as it emphasises that emergent, supra-human forces follow their own dynamics, which exceed and diverge from the needs of the species from which these forces have emerged.”1 I think the part idea that the “best person in the world is a computer” kinda connects to this in the sense that the computer logics that govern our society are increasingly alien and hostile to the needs of most human beings. It’s refreshing to see a movie that gets at this. Again, if our reality is a cyberpunk dystopia, why make art about a speculative future? The present will suffice.

The film is not perfect politically. The action that the characters take is a small one. Even Fumi remarks that their actions are not enough when you think about the whole political/social/economic structure. Yuta tells her to lighten up or she won’t make friends. But I think searching for politically perfect films is boring. Happyend is a warm film filled with love, resistance and friendship even in the midst of the cold ugly computerized world we inhabit.

There’s a lot of cultural writing about the end of woke as it exists. I don’t fully understand what woke is. It’s still unclear as it has changed meanings. I dunno if I experienced woke as the meaning of that term has shifted so many times, but I experienced the social movements of the 2010s and their less beautiful outgrowths in the campus setting. Both of these things seem correspond with woke even if they were decidedly different things despite their conflation. As I’ve mentioned offhand before, I won entry to a Manuscript Revision Workshop late last year for my unpublished novel. My novel follows a young African-American man who is immersed in an urban social movement in an unnamed East Coast city. I chose not to locate the novel in a particular place or time, because I think the experiences within a social movement are quite universal. While my novel explores some social dynamics particular to the American context, I am less sure that these particularities makes sense to write about too specifically. The police kill and people riot in every place and time. Stories like mine could take place in London, Santiago, Mexico City, Lagos, Paris, Oakland or a thousand other places we do not know the name of. While I began, revised and finished drafts of my novel far before I ever saw One Battle After Another, the timelessness of social struggle in that film is something I think my novel was similarly trying to work though. Much of the contemporary African-American literature I encountered was rooted in identity, but with little concern to the universal concerns of a modern subject, so let’s get to that.

In all urban social movements across the the 20^th and 21^st centuries, there are rebellions, prison sentences, petit-bourgeois subjects forsaking their class trajectory, fist fights, proletarian expressions of rage that clash against leftist orthodoxy, periods of burnout, nihilistic attitudes, avant-garde musicians, problematic men, annoying meetings, and lots of confusion. There is, despite what folks would like to tell us, a particular kind of universality that emerges in the midst of these struggles. Ferguson is not so different from Athens. It is only as the social struggle recedes that differences reimposes themselves. This isn’t to say that differences in identity or politics do not matter in the midst of a social struggle, but the reality is that these differences are mediated even if uncomfortably or violently through the struggle. To some degree, a great historical novel may succeed as a work of art if it excels in it’s ability to describe the universal as it occurs in a particular setting. The urban social movement contrasts strongly with the experience of the highly politicized college setting. While there is often overlap between those subjects produced by the university, and those who fight in the urban social struggle, there is often many differences. This is a part of my problem with narratives about “wokeness” as much writing about those phenomenon particularly in regard to identity collapse deeply complex issues into easy buzzword-based attacks.

I initially wanted to use this essay to talk about revision process and what that was like, but it ended up being a longer treatise on thinking through a novel’s ideas. I can’t thank my mentor Ran Walker enough. His guidance was so critical to developing and editing the book, especially when it came to dialogue. The fascinating part about working with Ran was that his feedback was different from prior readers, as many of those readers had known me back during the times that I initially based some of the book’s events on. While the book began in 2022 as an auto-fiction project, as I was reading stuff like Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, Nico Walker’s Cherry and Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, the book quickly shifted into a third person limited that followed a protagonist who is quite different from myself. I had heard somewhere that auto-fiction was popular, so I was trying to figure out my own style. Cherry of all of the auto-fiction texts was the one that spoke the most to me, as it presented a subject of history impacted by the Iraq War and the economic devastation of the Rustbelt. I can directly relate to the second thing. I was attracted to auto-fiction in how it dealt with awful interpersonal dynamics, these dynamics for me were often the product of campus social justice cultures, that contrasted with the urban social movements I’ve described before and in other writing. I’ve revised this book over five different times as there are probably six drafts sitting in my drive.

While I think the auto-fictional qualities of the stuff I was reading back when I started the project were inspirational, it quickly became clear to me that my characters were distinct entities from myself and my friends. The problem with the auto-fictional protagonist in most cases is that he is consciously disconnected from the historical moments. He is too self absorbed to consider anything beyond his own interiority. While there is not anything wrong with being concerned with interiority, the reluctance of most male auto-fictional to engage with the historical moment is a weakness of will. Authors who proclaim their work to be “apolitical” are political in their inability to not address the weight of history and thus modernity. My choice to not use a first person voice was intentional. One of my early readers told me to revise the book in first person. But I think the third person voice makes it clear that the protagonist and other characters in my novel are subjects of history, rather than the empty talking heads so common in much auto-fiction.

However, I was more interested in writers like Ellison, McKay, Wright and to a lesser degree like Rooney who wrote explicitly about subjects in history. While Rooney’s characters remain largely separated from the historical forces, they are at least observant of what’s going on. I remember listening to an audiobook of Normal People at a gas station in some unknown American town while I was getting gas sometime as I drove across the country. In the novel, Connell remarks the necessity of violence when it came to a protest that Mariame tells him about. Despite this, he never truly reckons with his own position beyond lamenting his class status in relation to his lover’s. In a better example from the 20^th century, you could look to the young proletarian African-American intellectual protagonists tied down by the weight of the racial histories in the United States written by folks such as Ellison or McKay. African-American narratives where protagonists are beset by the weight of history are rarer than ever. The main two examples that I can think of that directly grapple with the long histories directly are Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump and Black Arms To Hold You Up by Ben Passmore. Both stories follow a Black protagonist who is trying understand his place in relation to Black history, particularly African-American urban life. What is a young African-American to make sense of themselves when Fred Hampton has been murdered? When so many freedom fighters are gone, what remains for them? Can you find hope in a socialist organizing meeting, the fires of a riot, art, Black nationalist armed groups or assimilation? Perhaps something else entirely.

Political repression is not an uncommon experience across the globe even for people who are not racialized as Black. Bolaño’s character and self stand-in Arturo Belano who re-emerges across his work is a child of the doomed revolution in Chile. Belano is a freewheeling bohemian who is searching for meaning and past poets in light of the coup. Other characters in Bolaño’s work recount stories of their experiences of political repression. As a good example, there is the story of the character Auxilio in The Savage Detectives who survives the army’s invasion of UNAM in 1968. This part of the novel was later turned into the novella Amulet. The invasion of UNAM preceded the Tlatelolco massacre where Mexican armed forces open fire on unarmed protestors in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The image I used for this article is from a demonstration in 2025 commemorating the killings in 1968. The weight of history hangs heavy over the image. There’s a universal quality to the photo, black masks and clashes with the police are not a rarity anywhere these days in the United States. Apart from the Spanish on one riot cop’s helmet, the image could be taken from any-town, USA. Fascinatingly, the tragedies of repressed political movements is not something that many novelists wish to take part in writing about these days. The Black movement against police violence that I was a part of as a youth is largely gone. The working class participants have been killed, imprisoned or just went back to work. Meanwhile, many of Black leaders from the nonprofits have just moved on to whatever is next for them career wise. A lot of them are just writing bad takes on movies and celebrity culture on Substack it seems. What is an African-American intellectual to do then? The weight of history is heavy. Perhaps the answer is following bohemian pursuits like Arturo Belano.

Revising the manuscript was fascinating as I spent large amounts of time working through the more undeveloped ideas within the novel, in particular, the character’s relationship to music. A common feedback from Ran was that he wanted the music to be more present. It made sense. Music was often a way for my friends and I to express ourselves. We didn’t see the art as separate from the urban social movement even if functionally was. In some ways, my own movement into my novel and musical explorations were ways to make sense of the repression and ongoing right wing backlash since 2020. I’ve been listening to the new Dominic Fike single “White Keys” over and over as I wrote this essay, music fills the space within my mind as I write. I told my girl that I sometimes just want to go back to being a musician. To some degree, it is less difficult to find Black music that grapples with the weight of modernity. The blues through R&B and rap are still alive. Who can forget Nina Simone’s song Why? (The King of Love is Dead) or 21 Savage’s more recent “Nothing New” or Polo G’s “Wishing for A Hero.” As Nina sings,

Will my country fall, stand or fall?
Is it too late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?

Polo G and 21 Savage similarly lament King’s death and the emptiness of modern life over fifty years later. What is that if not the universal? As I’ve complained about before, so much of “radical literature” focuses upon futurities rather than the crushing realities of the present. It’s why speculative fiction and Afro-futurism is popular. In my view dealing with the future is easier than writing directly about the horrors of modern life. Hip hop and Black music as a whole remains a beautiful clarifying force.

I was doing another set of revisions in 2024, I was obsessed with two novels Martyr by Kaveh Akbar and The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty. These novels were not written by African-Americans and yet they evoked something in me similar to how James Joyce has with his work Ulysses. In the end, all of these works confront the weight of modernity to varying degrees of success. Cyrus is a character who is Iranian, but feels alienated from his identity as he lives in Indiana. Blandine, the protagonist of Gunty’s novel finds solace from her horrible Rustbelt life through out of body experiences and becoming obsessed with mystics. Both of these novels are less precise than they could have been when it comes to addressing the weight of modernity, but it struck me how they both evoked something in me, even if I found the endings of both novels odd with their respective emphasis on a metaphysical experience. But perhaps that’s a part of it. Life is quite metaphysical. Either way, I am really enjoying Ulysses, it reads like life. We should all be trying to write like that. Revisions can help find our ways to it.

ROUGH DRAFTS REMINDER

A reminder that I am about to embark upon a cross-country odyssey with my friend Maurice to work on our podcast Rough Drafts. We were funded by the People’s Media Fund in the Greater Philadelphia area to interview writers, artists, academics, filmmakers and organizers across the North American continent. Our podcast is broadly about artistic/creative processes, American subjectivity, masculinity, and social movements. We read a lot of books for each episode so readers are encouraged as guests. Check us out everywhere. If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast, please message me on here or email us at rough.rough.drafts@gmail.com.

Before I was a writer, I was a musician. This is not very surprising for my own intellectual trajectory. I follow in the long line of African-American male writers such as Ralph Ellison who talks about how music has shaped his own writing. He talks about this in his introduction to Shadow and Act, a collection of essays published in 1953.

“When the first of these essays was published I regarded myself – in my most secret heart at least – a musician. This was the result, in part, of a complicated, semiconscious strategy of self deception, a refusal by my right hand to recognize where my left hand was headed. Actually I had been devoting as much time and energy to reading and writing as to music, and was passionately engaged, night and noon, in acquiring the basic knowledge and skills of the novelist. Thus, the earliest, most agonizingly written pieces presented here were the results of a crucial conflict raging deep within me...In this sense, writing was an acting-out, symbolically, of a choice which I dared not acknowledge. Indeed, I repressed it beneath my old concern with music and my current involvement in the intense social and political activity which claimed so many of us who came of age during the thirties.”

Ellison is one of my favorites for a reason. The raging conflict between the musician and the writer inside of Ellison is an experience that resonates personally. Throughout my time on this earth, especially in the past several years, I have found that conflict in my personal life abound with how music and writing interact. In ways, I’ve found the need to repress certain parts of myself. There’s not enough time in the world. I’ve seen the musician-writer dynamic rarely written about elsewhere apart from Ellison. In addition, he also draws his writing into contention with his political work in the 1930s, which is a constant tension for myself, albeit I am not a member of the Communist Party. Was Ralph a multi-disciplinary artist? I am unsure, although it’s certain that lots of good art can come from Left. He talks about idolizing jazz men in his youth, in the same way that myself and many other young Black people idolized rappers. I never wanted to be a writer. Hip hop was my first musical love, before I even started playing Bob Dylan covers. I wanted to be a rapper or an alternative R&B singer. Somewhere between Capital Steez, Frank Ocean, early 2000s produce-rapper Kanye West and Chance, The Rapper. That’s what I desired in my youth, even if I often denied it to myself. Fascinatingly, in the same intro, Ellison makes repeated reference to “the renaissance man” that inspired him and other Negro youth to dabble in different intellectual pursuits. The jazzmen could be understood as an inspiration for this dabbling. Ellison puts it quite well, “despite the outlaw nature of their art, the jazzmen were less torn and damaged by the moral compromises and insincerities that have so sickened the life of our country.” One could make a similar argument about the African-American musician today.

In some ways, the musician is the most pure archetype of an African-American experience post-slavery. The absence of the musician in many modern African-American novels is problematic, but that’s a separate conversation. I’m not even gonna speak on some of the popular edgy writing that claims to be in tune with the rhythms of the Black youth, but lacks any knowledge of the social oppression that produces the music. Most writing I’ve encountered in contemporary lit that engages with rap or hip hop culture is just gimmick. Barely anyone writing literature cares about the rappers in the way that Ellison cared about the jazzmen. One of my first non-political pieces of writing was an essay on milo and Elucid’s Nostrum Grocers record I wrote for a campus magazine back when I was 20. I’ve tried to write a few things since, but regardless of my efforts, G-Herbo isn’t a poet worthy of analysis to most literary folks, even those who claim to care about diversity or whatever. He and other Black working class artists are either cheap entertainment to be ridiculed and copied or thugs to be ignored and chastised. But I think of them as outlaws with more moral clarity than most of this society, as Ellison said.

To compare my music to my writing, I have largely been entirely self taught when it comes to making music apart from some time in a choir and piano lessons for a few years as a kid. These experiences provided me with a basis in musical theory, but my own execution musically was quite poor. Not to mention I had a choirmaster who when the choir would miss notes who would yell at us animatedly, so for a few years music inspired feelings of great anxiety. Ironically, many years later, the same choirmaster would see me performing songs on my guitar on the street, and would stand nearby for a while tell the passerbys “that’s my student.” Either way, I’ve never understood my love for music and writing to be a gift. It often weights on me like a curse cast by a scorned lover. It is hard to balance a consistent practice in both things. As my writing career has found more success, I have found less time to play guitar and sing my beloved soul music

It seems that being “multi-disciplinary” is in, these days, at least from the panel. Maybe just as way to market oneself. While I was inspired by the panel, I do think that the distinctions between poetry and creative non-fiction feel less hard than the weight of being a musician and a writer. But perhaps I am just being judgmental. For those of you on this Substack, I do not talk much about my experience as a musician. My first job in high school was working as a performing musician across my town in Rockford, Illinois. I helped record a friend’s song that went semi-viral in our hometown. That same friend and I hosted an open mic night for several years during our time in high school. I played in one band in high school and another one in college. One of them was a straight up hip hop band, while the other was a combination of folk rock, R&B, and hip hop. Amusingly, after having exhausting experiences with these two bands, I wanted to become a solo artist. I was currently facing a lot of prison time, a standard story for many African-American musicians. After my charges were dropped, I spent time working on learning how to make beats on Ableton. From that, my Huey, The Cosmonaut project was born.

This project has lead to countless releases ranging in genre. For a while, my solo project was a band which played all over Philly and on a local radio station. I never made crazy money as a musician, but for a while a fair amount of my income came from college shows, selling t-shirts and other random music money. I like to tell people that my two real jobs have been working as a musician and a writer. To be honest, looking at my past twelve or so years of employment, those are the jobs I’ve worked the most consistently in. The kitchen jobs, the library tending, the after-school roles and the warehouse stuff was all just an interlude. I’ve been a variety of roles in my musical life. I’ve done songwriting, guitar playing, rapping, audio-engineering, band leading, producing and singing. I miss it so much these days. But it’s hard to do all of those things yourself. While I think all art and frankly anything that requires effort does have an immense amount of self direction, collaboration is the key, especially when it comes to making music. One of my favorite parts of writing is giving and receiving feedback just how you give and receive feedback during a freestyle session

Like Ellison, in some ways, my writing was a product of my political development. I wrote political theory because it seemed necessary as an action for the movements that I was a part of. But like Ellison, for a long time, I saw my heart as truly a musical one. I am unsure now. Can you have a multi-disciplinary soul? My favorite singers seem to. I read that Frank Ocean is making a movie. Not to mention he designs jewelry and dropped a magazine awhile ago. One of my favorite contemporary soul singers Dijon was an english major. He also acted a little bit in that movie everyone hates for no reason. I feel like his soul is definitely multi-disciplinary, he might even describe himself that way. He cares about words, for sure. Attention to words is something that my favorite rappers and singers have always cared about. It makes sense I care about those things, too. I never saw songwriting as connected completely to poetry though, even if I loved all of those Dylan songs. Chance, The Rapper’s most recent album Star Line was promoted using videos that emphasized the text in the songs. He even brought this aesthetic to the live show, with the lyrics behind him. There’s something about the words as important even as they collide with the musicality. Is Chance multi-disciplinary for that?

I don’t really have answers when it comes to what it means to be a multi-disciplinary artist. For me, it’s mostly been a poor economic choice rather than a good marketing strategy. The title of this essay comes from a rap lyric I wrote. I’ve both written albums of music and novels. That has got to be worth something, even if it’s just my own personal satisfaction. But what do you think? Are any of ya’ll musicians and writers? I imagine quite a few of you might be. Do you have any favorite authors who also managed to make great music? Or any great musicians who wrote a good book or essay? Please send some recommendations, so I’ll feel less unfortunate when it comes to my own predicament. Either way, I want to write prose that reads as well as Frank Ocean’s Blonde sounds. Perhaps I’ll try to make a few more songs in the meantime as I’m figuring out how to do that.

A reminder that I am about to embark upon a cross-country odyssey with my friend Maurice to work on our podcast Rough Drafts. We were funded by the People’s Media Fund in the Greater Philadelphia area to interview writers, artists, academics, filmmakers and organizers across the North American continent. Our podcast is broadly about artistic/creative processes, American subjectivity, masculinity, and social movements. We read a lot of books for each episode so readers are encouraged as guests. If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast, please message me on here or email us at rough.rough.drafts@gmail.com.

Either way, awhile ago, I was thinking about how much art and literature that I enjoy and write about was stuff produced by those on the Left from the 20^th century. Despite this, the conditions we live under are quite different than from when a lot of my favorite novels are set. While a lot of the art from our contemporary era that I enjoy is produced by people who don’t share my politics, there’s a good amount of stuff from the Left that is good! It is a bit boring to see that all leftists on Substack desire to do is critique what’s popular rather than charting a new independent path. I figured I should do a list of my favorite left-wing art in the United States that’s been produced in the 21^st century by people with real politics. Not Substack socialists, but folks tied up with living breathing movements that have touched American political consciousness beyond the digital sphere. The political tendencies range from socialist to communist, from anarchist to abolitionist. Regardless of my own feelings about people’s political orientations, all of the artists come from places that I think are interesting politically and artistically stimulating, even I disagree with them. I’ve included music, comic books, poetry, novels, film, television and music. Half of things ended up being music, but that gives all of you literary people reasons to go write more literature and poetry. I did read a novel to add it to this list, but I didn’t like it unfortunately. These are not full reviews, but just a bit about the art, the politics surrounding it and why I liked it.

1. The “Bread and Roses” cover that Lucy Dacus did at Zohran’s inauguration. “Bread and Roses” is a left-wing classic. I think it encapsulates a particular political and cultural milieu coming of political age. Dacus is a part of the group Boy Genius and has her own solo song-writing career as well. I remember listening to her song “I don’t want to be funny anymore” back in college, way back in 2016. Ten years later, in some ways, encapsulates how the millennial socialist indie rockers are no longer just hanging out at Bernie rallies, they now occupy the halls of power. The Brooklyn synth accompaniment truly hammers in the fact that there is a new socialist movement in America’s urban centers. They fight for bread, but also roses, and those roses often take the form of beautiful indie rock songs. These new socialists read Jacobin, go to DSA meetings in North Brooklyn and listen to Phoebe Bridgers. I wish them all of the best. It almost made me believe in socialism again.

2. Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Black Arms To Hold You Up is something I have to mention. To not hide my biases, I worked as researcher on this comic book. Ben is a self identified New Afrikan anarchist, so the book narrates the history of Black armed struggle with a trace of absurdism as Ben’s fictionalized self travels through history commenting on it. Black anarchists are a relatively new political tendency emerging in the late 20^thcentury, so this is one of the first major creative works to come about from Black anarchists. In the book, Ben makes a variety of fascinating arguments about living in the long shadow of the Black Radical Tradition of the 20^th century. In many ways, the book encapsulates how Black radicals in this current moment are searching for a new trajectory politically. What is a Black radical to do when there is no Black Liberation Army to defend them? When there is no plan for a Republic of New Afrika? These are questions Ben asks. Perhaps, as Ben suggests, they will have to look to history to figure it out. I’ve written more about it here, and I interviewed Ben on my podcast about it.

3. I enjoyed Sarah Thankam Mathews’ novel All This Could Be Different. Sarah is an organizer who was involved in an organization called Bed Stuy Strong prior to her creation of her novel. Bed Stuy Strong is described on their website as “a group of neighbors helping care for each other and organize to meet each other’s needs in a spirit of solidarity.” The spirit of mutual aid and caring for one another is a big part of her novel that follows protagonist Sneha and her group of friends in Milwaukee. I’m a sucker for any Rustbelt city setting, especially one that mentions Riverwest Public House. I remember when I was first searching for literary novels that dealt with left-wing politics, even those that are different from my own, I found her book. Sarah tells a story about a group of friends living imperfectly in the Obama years who aspire for something better. The book does not prescribe clear political answers, but rather describes love and existence in the midst of life under capitalism in the post-industrial Midwest. The characters are often unsure if anything will truly change. For instance, after Dontre Hamilton is murdered by the Milwaukee police, one character remarks “I went to the march though I’m not sure what marching will do.” The novel continues to asks questions about the imperfect nature of our political imaginations, as at one point, the protagonist Sneha scoffs at the idea of her friend creating a commune. Despite the doubts, the book lands on friendship as one answer for the political moment, which I vibe with. Searching for answers politically, rather than prescription or doomerism, makes for far better art in my view.

4. Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You and I’m a Virgo. I will say that I am quite partial to I’m a Virgo as the surrealist elements and slower pace hit harder for me. The critique of healthcare industry is also really poignant. My favorite things about this film and television show are the how they both illustrates the surreal quality of Black proletarian life in the Bay. Boots has a strong cultural understanding, which is unsurprising since he was a rapper for a long time. I love an artist who is an artist first, political person second. I am less into some of the manifesto-esque sections from both pieces of work, but the fact that Boots has a communist analysis is useful in his ability to depict amusing situations existing in capitalism. Again, the stuff I most love about Boots’ work is how he gets at the strangeness and absurdity of Black proletarian life. I often find a lot of Black art that makes fun of white people to be boring, but his stuff remains solid when it comes to that as it’s tied up in a deeper critique of the racialized nature of capitalism now that often involves poking fun at white tech-bros. Those targets for satire make sense, considering how the Bay’s proletarian cultures have been steam rolled by techno-industrial “progress.” Either way, he writes incredible characters from the Black working classes that exist today, not fifty years ago. Boots’ characters work in fast food restaurants and call centers. He is very tapped in to what’s happening right now. After all, communism is the movement that abolishes the present state of things. I also just got love for Oakland as a “Blues city”, and his shit is so Oakland. I honestly could write more on his films, but I don’t have enough time or words at the moment. I’ll just have to wait till his release of his newest film Boosters.

5. Another product of the Bay area, albeit from a different political tendency, is the poetry of Joshua Clover. While I was once accused of being a Joshua Clover acolyte by Catherine Liu on this website. I only met the guy once, but he was really lovely. He was basically like “I’m not a political theorist, I’m just a poet” or something when he I saw him do a talk in Philadelphia. Dude was mostly talking about the anniversary of the George Floyd uprising, how he hated police and why we should be empathetic to the oppressed when they fight back. I prefer his poetry to his political theorizing even if the political writing about riots and circulation struggles is also quite good, as his poetry really captures who he was at that talk, I think. Red Epic, his book of poems, is some of the most beautiful writing about. “Transistor” is one of my favorite poems from the selection. In the poem, Clover writes “There will be a revolution or there will not. If the latter these poems were nothing but entertainments.” He is resolute. Clover comes out of the anti-state communist and anarchist milieus of the Bay area. His poetry is the poetry of the Oscar Grant rebellion, Occupy Oakland and the various other Bay area struggles. There were photos of him in Black bloc posted after he passed. Days before he died, he caught on video stealing signs from a TPUSA event. Unsurprisingly, much of his poetry concerns mundanity, communism and urban life. The poetry is so Marxist, but in ways that don’t feel corny. Rather than making poems about Lenin, Clover writes about waiting for the train, communes, all types of pop music, the passage of time, California, friendship and Coca-Cola bottles full of petrol. There’s also a bunch of European references that I did not understand. The work is all terribly romantic and caring in the best possible of ways, just like Joshua.

6. Speaking of poetry, it would be a good moment to mention Noname’s wonderful album Sundial. Noname is a rapper from Chicago who comes out of the spoken word scene. She was politicized a little bit before the pandemic which prompted her to start the Noname Book Club, a radical book-club that hosts monthly readings of various kinds of books. They also send those books into prisons and have chapters all over the world. She was working on fighting the literacy crisis way back in 2019. Ya’ll hate on the woke era, but I remember when everyone wanted to be a part of the Noname Book Club. I am unclear where exactly she falls politically, I think it’s somewhere between socialist, Pan-Africanist, abolitionist and communist. She’s been tied up with groups like Cooperation Jackson and the Black Alliance For Peace as well as her own organizing efforts with the book club. But to me, Noname’s art has always been more interesting than her politics. Her album Sundial is classic Noname self aware and sexual raps over jazzy beats, while she raps more about the broader socio-economic conditions than previous projects like Telefone. While I prefer Telefone as a project, it was produced before Noname was politically conscious. The reason that her music works so well for me as a rapper with politics mostly has to do with the fact that she was a good rapper before she became a communist. The controversy with Jay Electronica’s feature on this project and her defense of him, is indicative of how Noname cares about hip hop, not just pushing a political message. So much of political “music” is just people trying to fit into a niche rather than being artists who just have politics. She pokes fun at herself, terms like “BIPOC,” and Superbowl concerts on the album. What other rapper can spit “W.E.B. Stay with the boys,” while sounding completely sincere?

7. I am definitely showing my Chicago music scene loyalty. I thought about putting Vic Mensa and Chance, the Rapper on the list, but I had too much Chicago music on here. But for whatever reason, Chicago has produced so many rappers and singers with solid politics who also happen to be great at making music. Jamila Woods is one of those artists. Her album Heavn, which features Noname and Chance on tracks, and tons of production by Peter Cottontale. It’s an older album released in 2016 on Soundcloud. Remember that era? I miss it. It’s peak BLM-era music. The tracks recall organizations like BLM-Chicago, Assata’s Daughters and BYP-100. The two standout tracks are “VRY BLK” and “Blk Girl Soldier.” Both songs are rooted in a abolitionist type politics. She integrates the cadences of a chant I used to hear on the streets from BLM activists where Woods name-drops Black radicals such as Ella Baker, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, Assata Shakur, and how they taught “us how to fight.” If you want to understand more about the abolitionist political tendency in the BLM era, I recommend you read Barbara Ransby’s book Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. While I am not that nostalgic for that period or those politics, it does take me back. So many people on this website shit on abolitionists, but don’t really understand the politics of that tendency. Either way, the music also recalls a time where Black women’s politics were rooted in fighting back against power on their own terms, which feels absent in this era of “rest as resistance” or whatever. She proclaims “You take my brother, I fight back” on her song “VRY BLK.” One of the interludes called Assata’s Daughters features children reciting the “Assata chant.” The political songs that I mentioned do not take up all of the space, instead much of the record, is about love, self affirmation and loss. The album is incredibly rooted in Chicago as a place, which I love more than I can describe, especially in regard to the gospel influences on some songs. The project recalls nights of love beside Lake Michigan for me. Chicago is one of the most romantic cities on the planet. She captures that. As she sings on “LSD,” you gotta love me like I love the lake, and she wasn’t lying at all.

8. Finally, I’ll bring it back to the DSAers in New York State. The album 11:11 by the band Pinegrove is a wonderful addition to the list. The band Pinegrove exists in the space between emo, alternative rock and country so I’m obviously a fan. Evan Stephens Hall, is a card carrying DSA member, and was involved with the Sunrise Movement also if I remember correctly. The album 11:11 grapples a lot with the ennui of things continuing to get worse particularly around the climate. He sings about calling his Senator and it not mattering. I am sucker for any art that grapples with collapse. Hall is an amazing songwriter. Orange remains the stand-out track for me. Hall sings “I try to laugh, or sleep it off. That awful feeling something’s off.” So much of music is attempting to distract from this feeling that everyone is possessed by, but Hall faces it head on. The sky is orange and we all know why, as Hall sings. The pessimistic feeling of his music is something I could relate to, even if I don’t share the politics. As Hall sings on another track, “No one’ll care if we spend our lives up.” Like, that really touches something in me.

   The music is so introspective and the songs sounds like poetry.

I hope you enjoyed the list. Do you have any work that’s been produced in the 21^st century that I should add to the list? It doesn’t have to be explicitly political, but it should be produced by someone with ties to a real life political organizing tendency. As I say often, it is very easy to complain online about the state of the world, but going out and touching the world is infinitely harder. Doing that and trying to make good art is even more difficult, but it can be done, I think.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past couple of weeks thinking about nihilism in regard to our political situation. While I wouldn’t identify with nihilism myself, I have a healthy suspicion of anyone with a real investment in hope, because most of the time they are trying to sell me something. In some ways, that puts me often in the camp of the nihilists as opposed to the hopefuls. What people are selling does’t matter, I remain skeptical. It could be a socialist mayor, crypto-currency, AI powered utopia, reparations from white people, some kind of communist revolution or even nihilist despair. To be clear, the nihilism I came up around was a politically self described anarcho-nihilism, their anarchist texts were things like Desert, Blessed is the Flame or Letters of Insurgents. A good thing about anarcho-nihilism was that it remained rooted in a set of shared political principles even with the recognition or certainty that “anarchy” might not come to pass. While I don’t really share those beliefs, hanging around some nihilists taught me an important lesson about thinking and examining through everything in the world critically. As opposed to a nihilist, I remain a healthy skeptic trodding through the strange promises of the world.

I think my favorite literary protagonists are skeptics. I think of the narrator in Invisible Man or Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye. A more recent example would be Edie in the novel Luster. Another example would be Bartimaeus from Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Sequence. Bartimaeus in some ways is the ultimate skeptic. He’s a thousand year old Djinn who has served numerous cruel magician masters over the course of history. In the world that Bart inhabits, magicians rule over the non-magical people (aka commoners in the books) through enslaving Djinn and other magical spirits from the Other Place, a magical realm. However, in the last book, Ptomley’s Gate, Bartimaeus reveals his knowledge of this history where magical empires rise and fall, and why he’s so skeptical of human goodness. I get where he’s coming from. His acerbic wit and observations animate the novels in beautiful ways.

I like to think of my role in the world as a flaneur. A flaneur is a stroller or loafer who observes modern urban life. I wanted to write a bit about how I’ve observed the digital world pushing certain kind of moralistic scripts upon the young Left, even in their own sincerity. I remain skeptical about it all. I was describing my unpublished manuscript to some friends. It follows a flaneur who floats through a city meeting radicals, musicians, and other strange characters. When I wrote it, I was grappling with my experiences around political people that I often found corny, even if I have a deep love for the social movements I emerged from. A part of that love is a skepticism that seems absent from the hope-pilled leftists on this website. Skepticism also just makes for better novels in my view.

I don’t talk about political organization or strategy on this Substack, but I do talk about political affect. The way that we feel about the historic times that we reside in is far more interesting for me than political discussions about what ideology we should follow. I think that a lot of the political affect I’ve observed from the Left in the moment is a sense of hopelessness. I’ve written a bit about this my essay The Melancholy of the Age. The fascinating part is that some of that melancholy’s accompanying political inaction has receded to varying kinds of action. Despite the political actions, the melancholy remains. I think of Rayne Fisher-Quann’s essay

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Centrist imaginations

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9 months ago · 1007 likes · 45 comments · rayne fisher-quann

Centrist Imaginations that discusses her involvement in anti-ICE activism. Her exploration of anti-ICE activism was far more interesting to me than critiques of the centrist right, as she attempts to grapple with contradictions on her team. She describes attending an anti-ICE protest.

“My friends and I rolled our eyes at the flippant signs and the handful of people taking pictures, and we cried afterwards at how little we had accomplished, how powerless we felt. It didn’t feel like the revolution. But it wasn’t a party or a game or a Disney ride, either. The people around us were mostly angry and sad, marching slowly in the freezing cold, some holding photos of dead people and missing children. That’s what got me, really: I’d see a few dumb posters and teeter on the edge of feeling superior to the whole thing, and then I’d see another photo of a dead person clutched in a pair of mittens.”

The fascinating part about this essay is Fisher-Quann’s admission of sadness about powerlessness from the protest. While she contrasts it with The Free Press’ claim that anti-ICE activism is some kind of fantasy, it’s clear that Fisher-Quann is describing a political affect rooted in shared sense of hopelessness, and perhaps even shame when it comes to “how little we had accomplished.” She waffles between feeling superior to an ultimately empty protest, but then is reminded of the dead. I understand it as my favorite part of her essay as it adequately describes an affect that not just Fisher-Quann and her friends are feeling, but leans into that affect rather than offering an answer of hope. I wanted more of the writing about the complicated feelings of going to a march and being like “this sucks and isn’t helping nobody.” I want less of the defense of Instagram “de-arrest” infographics, especially as a person who trains martial arts and has been arrested.

I’ve harped on at length about my annoyance with left-wing political commentators because for all of their bluster for their team, most of the writing often drips with a sense of despair. Even though the Left is often derided by the Right and themselves as constantly critical of one another, the reality is that amongst much of the left-wing writing on Substack there is a shared orthodoxy of hope. This hope is often thrust onto abstractions. Left wing Substackers make broad exhortations about “community” or “white people should do something,” while making references to political conditions that have long since elapsed. Well, except Reconstruction, but none of ya’ll want to read DuBois. There is a refusal to deal with the present beyond appeals to the necessity of “doing something” and bearing witness. This brings me to Fisher-Quann’s closing paragraph.

Sometimes you watch someone die on your phone and you can’t do anything for two days but shake and cry. You go to the protests. You send the money. You join the Signal group. It’s not perfect, this stuff, but it’s real. Everyone knows it. You can feel it vibrating in the air, the feeling that no one knows what to do with their pain and fear and anger, their ache to live in a different sort of world than this one — everyone is pawing desperately in the dark for some better way forward, some way to help each other through. We struggle through this failure of catharsis together. We try to figure out what we’ll do next. That’s real life; that’s politics.

Again, I don’t want to give off the vibe that I’m hating on Fisher-Quann as I did like this essay, but her action items feel like they were directly ripped from an Instagram infographic on “how to be an ally” or something along those lines. Unfortunately, in this section, she strays away from the earlier doubts with a determined belief in a collective “we” figuring it out politically. Even much of the way she translates her critique of the Free Press remains rooted in an Internet centric trend oriented way to think about the present moment. Her reference points are Didion and books by Free Press journalist written about the Left, rather than things from the Left itself. It is clearly mediated through Instagram discourses rather a longer appraisal of American history. Her admission that these methods aren’t perfect but they are real is where I take issue with the essay. Fisher-Quann believes that these actions have to mean something even if they are completely meaningless. Her hopeful conclusion is a common one I see amongst left-wing commentators. They are unwilling to be skeptics even of their own actions or even movements. Even the collective wes are strange to me as social movements are always composed of people with differing visions of the world who are often “pawing desperately in the dark” for completely different things. It is not to say that Fisher-Quann is an opportunist, I understand her to be sincere, but I think her claim that leftist politics at least the ones she espouses exist in any more real fashion than The Free Press is a bit of a stretch.

In regard to these differences and as an example, much of my annoyance with claims about nihilism has come from Black Substackers writing notes that are telling white people they aren’t allowed to be nihilistic or something. Obviously, some white people are going to eat this up as they wish to be degraded due to their own strange psycho-sexual relationships to Black people. A similar but different psycho-sexual feeling animates the Black influencers who seem to have a fixation upon telling white people to behave. That’s a whole other essay that I will never write cause ya’ll will cancel me. But the claim that nihilism or hopelessness is a white attribute is a bit silly. While I won’t get into Black nihilism or Afro-pessimism as philosophies, throughout the African-American musical and literary tradition, there are deep wells of despair that often result in death. I think of Leadbelly’s song Goodnight Irene where he sings about his desire to jump into a river and drown. The vision that Black struggle is one thing is corny. Like everything, there’s a multitude of expressions. The belief that despair and nihilistic feelings are purely the product of whiteness is boring. It’s also a strategy of Black race whisperers who seek to sell white people something. Hope by way of sending money to those Black influencer’s CashApps. And shit, I can’t knock the hustle. But don’t pretend that being mad at white people on the Internet is politics. They’ll keep being white even if they send you money. In some ways, Fisher-Quann’s rightful rebuke of the Free Press is just another version of this kind of leftist scolding, which remains uninteresting to me. I just don’t care about the opinions of folks like Bari Weiss to even dignify them with a response. But maybe that’s just cause I live in Philadelphia.

My Substack doesn’t claim to have political answers or offer any type of strategy other than getting off that DAMN phone. I’m also not arguing for any kind of political inaction, either. Go to the protest if you feel inspired, but if you don’t feel inspired, why are you going? Is it just another social script? I am just merely seeking to describe a phenomenon. Fisher-Quann and her peers differ from the anarcho-nihilist activists of my youth. The nihilists in my youth had zero faith that any of their actions would lead to “something better,” and then often lost the moralism. They still acted in ways that I found to be dignified, independent of a desire for “community” or a “future.” I don’t know if it’s a necessarily useful posture to be nihilistic. But I do think that what I learned from them was the importance of being skeptical if someone is trying to sell you something, even if the product they are selling you is hope.

Hey friend,

I told you that I wanted to write about beauty cause men don’t write about beauty anymore. I wanted to write about everyday things. The mundanity that brings me happiness and fills me with awe. All men do now is make podcasts and hate women, at least according to you. You told me it’s hard for you to think anything is beautiful in the world because everything feels so bad all of the time. I’ll try to remind you of those beautiful things, I guess.

For instance, that night where you were looking out from Morningside Park in the city after attending an event for a grad school program you can’t afford. I didn’t know there were hills in Manhattan. You told me about them when you said you were frustrated that you couldn’t pay for grad school and you were sick of feeling like you had to sell yourself to institutions. But you descend the steps in the park ready to face whatever comes next. Conversations with you and other friends break me out of confinement. I often feel shut inside of my room between work and my own inability to listen to my body. I’ll be cleaning my Glock listening to you or another lesbian homie tell me about a sapphic relationships with a girl who can’t figure out if she straight or not. We’ll talk for hours, and then I’ll realize that I’m relaxed enough to go to sleep. It’s the combination of taking my gun apart, cleaning each little piece, telling you that you gotta just tell that girl you love her, and then slowly reassembling the pistol. Your little sister went to a anti-gun violence protest when she was fifteen, so you had to give her a copy of Negroes with Guns, so she’d understand why you and I were at the rifle range the day before her birthday.

And sometimes, I be riding my bike, as I listen to Sally Rooney audiobooks to buy groceries at five in the morning cause I can’t sleep. Her latest book, despite the haters, does have beautiful prose if nothing else. You met this white hipster literary lady that told you Sally Rooney had bought a castle, and you were like damn I can’t even afford healthcare without state assistance. I’d love to live in a Castle on some Redwall shit. I’m working all of the time and it’s still never enough to pay for everything. The words of the novel twist around me as I slowly bike through the awakening city. But that was the winter and now it’s the summer and your homeboy is grilling and he pours Miller High Life on the burgers while keeping some E&J on the side table for his own personal consumption. You don’t drink but the idea of a beer on a hot summer day matters for whatever reason. Much of our lives are taken from us, but there’s something about a beer flavored burger that cuts through all of the bullshit.

To return to small beauties in the privacy of our rooms, you read comic books late into the night, they get so good that you fall asleep and dream about the characters. You dream of a Gotham City apartment that’s affordable where you can listen to the trains rumble past you and not have to worry about working the next day. And well, I dream of Christmas gatherings in Smallville, Kansas. Clark Kent is trying to use his x-ray vision to look at his presents but Ma Kent has lined them with lead.

You told me you loved the way that your body felt after sparring for a bunch of rounds. Some people think gym culture is bro-ey but you like being able to express your masculinity in a space like that. I don’t understand it but you love coming home and feeling your body ache all over. I don’t really like the gym but I like that you like it, so I’ll come to your fights and cheer you on even if violence is a bit triggering for me. There’s something about being hit over and over in a totally not masochistic way that feels good for you. And I don’t get that, but I get you.

And then, it’s like six years ago and I’m in some old colonial park with some beautiful girl telling her about how I became a socialist. And she’s like “yeah okay, wow that’s so interesting.” She has these little golden brown curls and caramel eyes. I bought her a copy of Batman: The Long Halloween cause she told me the 1989 Batman movie with Jack Nicholson was her favorite movie. I literally crossed a bridge that had been closed by the Parks Department to meet up with her. You used to tell me that I was always doing too much in relationships. You are probably right. But you’re somewhere else probably practicing with alternative inversions and finger placements for major seventh chords with your band. You don’t really know what genre it makes but it’s incoherent enough to mean that you’ll never get to be on a Spotify playlist. But I had a homie who got four million streams on a song and he’s still living with his Grandma. I can’t even hate on brodie though, he’s still putting in work. But four million streams isn’t a whole lot of money especially over the course of eight years.

And we were driving then you saw one of the men who sexually harassed you on the street while you were just trying to smell the flowers. I told you to stop the car and then we got out, embarrassed him in front of his neighbors and let him know if he ever did something like that again to anyone, we’d beat the shit out of him ourselves. Ah, summer is beautiful. I’m glad he didn’t have a gun.

And you keep telling me about the labor organizer with the podcast who you are in love with, but she never gets back to you on Signal in a timely fashion. And I’m in love with some girl who lives in Austin, Texas but it’ll be years before we see each other cause I’m trying to get my money right. I don’t want her to visit and see my mattress on the floor. I spend all of my money on rent and therapy so interior decorating is hard. She’ll probably end up with some white guy who has money, and I couldn’t even blame her really. But the labor organizer gets back to you, and ya’ll kiss in the park, and it’s magical but then you don’t hear from her for another six months. I told you that I don’t think you should pursue people who don’t treat you with respect no matter how cute they are, how many A24 movies they’ve watched, or how much Cedric Robinson they’ve read. You told me that I shouldn’t be trying to tell you how to run your life.

You and I have both been arrested for shoplifting cause we both think that commodities are bullshit. You told me that sitting in the holding cell of Macy’s was scary. I told you that they didn’t even take me to a cell. Paid a fine. I just got banned from that grocery store chain for the rest of my life. Laughed at the cops. Then I took a selfie outside of the store a few months later. We both ride our bikes all over the city. I used to drive but then my car got hit by a bus. Sometimes I’ll ride behind you and we’ll both take our hands off of the handlebars and fly.

I decided to freestyle at the party my boy is throwing cause he’s moving out of town. I told you about how he got robbed at gunpoint by some dude a few years ago and the time I had to bail his ass out. But anyway, my home-boy ends up throwing on “Time the Heart of the Donut” which is my favorite Dilla beat of all time. You told me that my taste in rap was corny when we drove across the country to visit your mother and I played Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides and rapped the whole thing live as you drove lazily on the Turnpike. I said that “young negroes such as yourself just don’t appreciate real hip hop.” You were born a year earlier than me.

I know things are hard right now. I hate watching the news. A lot of our friends like to pretend that nothing bad is happening. Another group of our friends hope that in a few years after an election things will be better. One friend just posts long rants on their Instagram about how everyone is bad and there’s nothing we can do. We haven’t talked to them in a while since they got sick. And some of our friends don’t carry their cell phones with them, keep tourniquets in their backpacks, and stockpile water.

We are both so tired. When we were younger, you showed me a video about how companies would clear cut the jungles, so they can harvest lithium. They do this so we can use our shitty little electronic devices to watch shitty little videos. The videos tell us how terrible we, everyone we love, and the world is.

I understand how you feeling. But there’s beauty in all of it. I’d be happy to share those beauties with you for the rest of my life.

Love you forever,

your friend

P.S. I hope that the labor organizer calls you back.

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897

The afro surreal abounds in every part of OUR lives. Small ways. Enormous ways. No ways at all. It rebels against order making that seems so constant in art and THE WORLD. It is the switch on the Glock. It is the howl of the saxophone on a late night on a cold planet like that one episode of Cowboy Bebop. The copy of Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth lobbed at the police man.

A PUNCH/BULLET/SPIT/CRITIQUE/MANIFESTO AIMED AT THE FORCES OF ORDER...

DISORDER, JAZZ, HIP HOP THE BLUES???? A THOUSAND DIFFERENT METHODS STUCK INSIDE OF THE WORLD. NOT JUST MERELY VIOLENCE...tho what is the world without that? IT IS ALSO BEAUTY>>>>>

Speaking swahili as we practice boxing next to Lake Merritt. Reciting Zeelooperz lyrics out loud as a Tesla burns on 676. MAKING LOVE TO YA LOVER AS THE SUN RISES AND SOME R&B PLAYING. THE BLUISH SKY IN GERMANTOWN. Listening to Wayne Wonder or Migos on THE RADIO AS YOU ROLL THROUGH THE PINES IN ATLANTA. Shooting guns in the desert as you listen to lofi beats. Watching the homies smoke a spliff or blunt or bowl next to the calm calm waves of the Pacific Ocean. WATCHING OLD STORMZY FREESTYLE VIDEOS. FIRE IN THE PARK FIRE IN THE PARK FIRE IN THE PARK.

THIS IS NOT A MANIFESTO AS THE AFRO SURREAL CANNOT BE CONTAINED BY ANYTHING WITH A MANIFEST>

THIS IS A A MESSAGE MESSAGE message . . . bzzzzzzzzzttt

The afro surrealist is uninterested in being legible. This message will be understood by many as idiotic. He or she or they (the afro-surrealist) has no desire to acquire white allies or speak “truth to power.” The afro surrealist wakes up in a mansion of the Black bourgeoisie or an encampment of the houseless and feels at home at the strangeness of both. THE AFRO SURREAL PERMEATES EVERY PART OF WHERE WE ARE. AS D. SCOTT SAYS (shoutout to the OG), THE FUTURE HAS BEEN AROUND SO LONG IT IS NOW THE PAST. ALL WE HAVE IS THE EVER BURNING PRESENT >>>>>>>>>

Some episodes of Atlanta can be understood through the Afro-surreal even if that BROTHA IS OFTEN CONFUSED. Who hasn’t talked with a strange Nation brotha on the BUS OR TRAIN? Or watched an invisible sports car drive fast? Something unexplained. Strange. Odd. Weird. Bizarre. Nonsensical. Who hasn’t spent time with the afro-surreal?????

WE ALL HAVE.

The afro surreal is uninterested in anything but the present. WE CALL THIS PRESENTISM. Presentism is the ability of the afro-surrealist to root themselves in the strangeness of everyday life faced by the racialized subject. It is Fanon and Wilderson, Robinson and Shakur and DuBois all rolled into one as you sit outside of your favorite chicken shop. IT DEFIES WORLD MAKING. WORLDMAKING IS FOR THE AFRO-FUTURISTS, THE AUTHORITARIANS AND THE STUDENTS OF REALISM. THE afro surrealist has little desire to make a world as THE AFRO SURREAL flows and dances through the world as it exists now. THE AFRO SURREAL IS Like THE WAVES AS PEOPLE WADE IN THE WATER LIKE THAT OLD SONG.

For those of us who have witnessed urban samurai, nothing but the present has any interest for us...

REFERENCE POINTS FOR THE AFRO SURREAL AND PRESENTISM

BLACK SKIN WHITE MASKS
VINCE STAPLES RAMONA PARK AND THE REST OF HIS DISCOGRAPHY AND HIS SHOW

DAYS IN SAN FRANCISCO WITH A PAST LOVER AND NOW INCARCERATED FRIEND
IM A VIRGO BOOTS RILEY

BOUNCE MUSIC...SHOUTOUT AND RIP TO MAGNOLIA SHORTY

MUMBO JUMBO

SOLANGE A SEAT AT THE TABLE

THE AFROSURREAL MANIFESTO D SCOTT MILLER

SOUL SAMPLES ON A EARLY 2000s YE BEAT

FREESTYLING IN A BASEMENT WITH YA BROTHAS

SITTING IN MACYS JAIL
INVISIBLE MAN

GRAFITTI THAT SAYS DEATH TO THE WHITE WORLD

ARPEGGIATED HIHATS

JACOB LAWRENCE PAINTINGS MANNNNN

DANCING TO PHILLY CLUB AT THE RAVE AS A FIRE BURNS NEXT TO THE RIVER
BLACK ARMS TO HOLD YOU UP

THE MUSIC OF SLAUSON MALONE

THE IMMIGRANT FLEA MARKET WHERE YOU GET SOME FRESH NEW KICKS

PRINCE PRINCE PRINCE PRINCE

THE MUSIC OF JAMILA WOODS...WE ENJOY TINY GARDEN WITH DUENDITA

STUCK IN THE DMV WITH AN OLD WOMAN WHO UNDERSTOOD THE WHOLE GALAXY

CRYING TO NONAME’S VERSE ON COCOA BUTTER KISSES

THE JAZZ JAM AT THE ETHIOPIAN CAFE
SPIKE LEES MALCOLM X

THE MUSIC OF 21 SAVAGE

DRUNK PRAYER MAVI

STANDING ON THE CORNER RED BURNSSSSS

THE RIOT THE RIOT THE RIOT THE RIOT

ARMAND HAMMERS WHOLE DISCOGRAPHY
FRANK OCEANS BLONDE

JIM LEGXACY AFRO POP REMIX OF MILEY CYRUS...ITS FIRE THOOO

SAMPHA’S VOICE

GWENDOLYN BROOKS, THE POETRY

WHITE BOY SHUFFLE BY PAUL BEATTY

USING SECRET DEADLY MARTIAL ARTS TECHNIQUES ON A WHITE NATIONALIST

THOSE OLD SOUL RECORDS THAT YOU NEVER REALLY UNDERSTOOD

LIL MAMA’ BLOG

MAY GOD BLESS YOUR HUSTLE MIKE

GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN NOTES ON A TRIBE CALLED QUEST

THE MUSIC OF PHAROAH SANDERS

JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE IRT

TAKING YOUR LOVER TO THAT BLACK HISTORY MUSEUM THAT NO ONE RECALLS
NOURISHED BY TIME EROTIC PRO BIOTIC

DIVINE DAYS

JOEY BADA$$ SURVIVAL TACTICS VIDEO RIP CAPITAL STEEZ KING CAPITAL

LATE NIGHTS WITH THE HOMIES
TRAIN RIDES THAT STRETCH INTO THE INFINITE

BREAK

These are just a few small points on the graph/notes on the fretboard for you to navigate within. The AFRO SURREAL IS NOT RESTRICTED BY BORDERS MADE BY MAN. IT SPREADS JUST LIKE JES’ GREW DID IN OUR ELDER ISHMAEL REED’S SEMINAL NOVEL. THIS NOVEL ESPECIALLY THE LAST 30 OR SO PAGES IS IMPORTANT AS IT IS HISTORICAL AND RELEVANT TO PRESENTISM.

PRESENTISM AS AN ASPECT AS THE AFRO SURREAL IS AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT IN OUR VIEW. THE AFRO SURREALIST DOES NOT FEAR THE PRESENT AS MANY OTHERS DO THE AFRO SURREALIST DOES NOT FEAR THE PRESENT AS MANY OTHERS DO. THE AFRO SURREALIST LOOKS AT NUCLEAR WAR, FASCISM, CONCENTRATION CAMPS, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, GENTRIFICATION, AI, CLIMATE CHANGE, GROWING OLD, THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY, LOSING LOVE, AND ANY OTHER ELEMENTS AS ANY FLANEUR DOES. THE AFRO surrealist IS NOT AFRAID OF THESE THINGS.

A million different Black communist journals rejected this manifesto. They were afraid it would render the work of our ol’ buddy Karl irrelevant. While we enjoy Karl’s contributions, we are afraid that our communist colleagues lose themselves in their theorizing about the proletariat while the proletariat and the lumpen are too busy creating scam rap in order to fund their expenditures. We find ourselves more in step with the proletariat whatever strange antics they enjoy than any sort of MARXIST OR SOCIALIST OR ANARCHIST OR COMMUNIST. THE AFRO SURREAL SURROUNDS ALL AND EXTENDS BEYONDDDDDDD. I

PRESENTISM IS CLR JAMES MIXED WITH THE TENACITY OF YA FAVORITE DRUG DEALER AND HOODOO PRACTICITIONER PLUS A HINT OF THE NEGRO ESCAPE ARTIST...

PRESENTISM is a BLUES MAN LIKE ALONZO HICKMAN, JAZZ SINGER LIKE BILLIE AND A MC LIKE MF DOOM!!!!!

The afro surreal speaks to the New Afrika that exists in every little moment of life uncaptured by the AI DATA COLLECTION MACHINE THAT SO MANY OF YOU HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH. THE AFRO SURREALIST LOSES HIS PHONE IN THE RIVER, IN THE SUBWAY, IN THE BATHROOM, IN THE SPACE SHIP. HIS CELL PHONE IS GONE AND WILL NEVER RETURN. THE AFRO SURREaLIST IS LOST IN THE CITY JUST LIKE OREO FROM OUR SISTA FRAN ROSS NOVEL. SHE HAS NO DESIRE TO RETURN TO order...

The ATONISTS wonder where they can find the AFRO SURREAL. They have attempted to capture it. No one can contain it no matter how many prisons they build. IT BLOOMS LIKE THE FLOWERS. FLOWS LIKE THE RIVER. The strange beauty of everyday life cannot be understood adequately. THE SMOKE BLOOMS AS THE RIOT EXPANDS AND CONTRACTS. A Ski mask across our faces as we bump a local rapper with only 3 listeners as he names the cops over a drill beat...we are fighting those cops in the streets. CYBERPUNK BUT THIS AINT NO VIDEO GAME>>>>>>>>>>

IT IS ONLY IN THAT MOMENT THAT YOU KNOW IT IS ALL TOGETHER. LIKE JAZZ. LIKE THE BLUES. LIKE THE ROAR OF SATCHMO’S TRUMPET. LIKE HOW NINA BE SINGING MISSISSIPPI GODDAMMMMM...LIKE THE TIGHTEST OF LOOPS BY J DILLA.

THE AFRO SURREALIST WITH A PRESENTISM FLAVOr HAS TO MAKE SENSE OF THE REALITY. IT FLOATS IN BETWEEN THE REALITIES THAT ARE CONFUSED. FIRE AND WATER ARE CRITICAL. FIRE FOR THE LIFE WATER FOR THE DEATH FIRE FOR ANGER WATER FOR REFLECTION WATER AND FIRE WATER AND FIRE WE HOPE THAT MAKES SENSE.

WE WANT TO LIVE IN THE WAY THAT JAMES BALDWIN WRITES ABOUT JAZZ IN ANOTHER COUNTRY.

Our scribe Common raps on Be (Intro).......

I WANNA be as FREE as the SPIRITS of those who LEFT

I’m talking MALCOLM, COLTRANE, my man YUSEF

Through DEATH GREW CONCEPTION, new BREATH and RESURRECTION

nothing could B more appropriate...

(END MESSAGE FOR NOW NOW NOW)

However, then, I watched Highest 2 Lowest. I am conflicted, while as I believe the film is by no means perfect, Highest 2 Lowest succeeds as a work of art primarily in how it tackles the complicated nature of race and class in 21^st century New York City, in the third decade. This is a rare and mostly unnoticed feat. It features a phenomenal performance by one of my favorite actors, Jeffrey Wright as Paul, Denzel’s driver. Paul is going to be the main focus of my review. I think Paul is a relatively unique character in a modern survey of Black film. I’ve written previously before for the Metropolitan Review about how contemporary African-American literature and art fails to deal with the conditions faced by the Black working classes. In some ways, there is no better place to set a movie about the contradictions of the Black bourgeois and the Black proletariat than a place like New York City, as the contradictions are the most clear there.

New York City has gentrified dozens of times over. Despite that, in many ways, the film is a celebration of the city as it exists now. Throughout the film as you watch, it’s very clear that this is New York in 2025. It is not a nostalgia trip. One of my favorite scenes was the Puerto Rican Day Parade which reminds us that not all of the culture has been erased from New York City just yet. A picture dealing with this new version of New York reminded me of a film I saw last year at Black Star Festival in Philadelphia called Love, Brooklyn, which grapples with the changing demographics and class character of the city from the perspective of an aging Black journalist in Brooklyn. In many ways, Spike is an artifact from the past era of Black working class Brooklyn which seems to be a memory.

Predictably, the film follows David King (nicknamed King David), played by Denzel Washington, a member of the Black noveau riche. Even more unsurprisingly, his money has come from working in the music business. He lives in a high rise penthouse in downtown Brooklyn, a hallmark of the Black bourgeoisie. I think about Jay Z’s lyrics and his overall story from his song “The Story of OJ,”

I coulda bought a place in Dumbo before it was Dumbo
For like 2 million
That same building today is worth 25 million
Guess how I’m feeling? Dumbo

It is still Jay-Z’s Brooklyn but transformed. In many way, David is a stand-in for a Jay-Z. King David’s penthouse is filled with work by famous Black artists such as Jean Basquiat and Kerry James Marshall. One of my favorite elements of the film was the use of the art and other cultural artifacts such as the Toni Morrison first editions of Sula shown at the end of the film that signify the class politics. The movie is dripping with the aesthetics of the Black bourgeoisie. They even mention that King David owns a home in Sag Harbor, clearly an effort by his character to enter into the historic Black bourgeois.

Paul was my favorite character, as he represents the remnant of the Black working class in New York City. Paul’s identity also feels intentionally different than King David and his family’s. We see a shot of Paul’s office or room in David’s house which has a photo of Malcolm X and a Five Percenter poster. Paul is an ex-con and a Muslim who is suspected of being implicated in the kidnapping. But then, as it turns out, his son Kyle has been kidnapped instead. Paul faces countless indignities in this film which serve to illustrate the poor condition faced by the black proletariat in a city of glass like New York City. From the first time we see him in the film, Paul asks his boss David if he can say goodbye to his son Kyle at basketball practice. He is promptly told no by David, despite the fact that David says goodbye to his own son Trey. The whole film in regards to Paul as a character is frankly hard to watch. When it’s revealed that Paul’s son Kyle is kidnapped instead of Trey, he begs David for a loan of 17.5 million to pay the ransom so his son is not killed. He says something like “I’ll pay you back,” or another pitiful phrase along those lines.

The tragedy of that moment reminded me of Stringer Bell stealing the badminton set in The Wire or when Ki-woo commits to making enough money to buy the house that his dad is trapped within in Parasite. We all know about the tragedies and impossible situations that poverty traps people in especially the Black working classes. Paul is no exception. In the film, Paul is constantly harassed and suspected by the NYPD in the midst of the investigation into the kidnapping before it’s revealed his son has been kidnapped. Paul is treated poorly by all of the cops despite the fact that many of the investigators are Black and Latino cops. Wright really acts his ass off. One of the most difficult moments to watch is where Paul asks the officers repeatedly if he is “being detained.” Paul is a man who has been clearly traumatized by the war on crime and mass incarceration that peaked in NY in the late 90s/early 2000s. You can see it in his face. Spike understands NYC. When he is finally reunited with his son, Paul pleads with the police to allow him to have a moment alone. He contrasts with his son’s treatment by the NYPD with Trey’s treatment. The fact that there is double standard with how the police treat Black boys dependent on their class is something that is often missed in the race writing that seems so popular these days.

Paul’s Islam and Black nationalism, while they are subtle signifiers, spoke particularly to me, as they are the remnants of the 20^th century’s Black radical politics that have remained in the Black working classes as culture. In contrast, David’s family home is adorned with Kamala Harris posters and the Black art that I mentioned earlier. In some ways, Paul’s faith plays in his contrast with a younger version of him that is represented in Rocky’s character Young Felon. Young Felon, in contrast to Paul, is a complete nihilist who begs King David to kill him on the subway in the final confrontation of the film. The reality is that the young Black proletarians have even less hope than Black men from Paul’s generation, they are completely lost in a desire for TikTok hype as opposed to the Black nationalism of the 20^th century. I was reminded of Idris Robinson’s text “On Black Leadership and Other White Myths”,

It is worthwhile to note that black people, ourselves, never refer to any mythical black leadership. This is because we know, full and well, that all of our leaders, since Martin and Malcolm, have been killed. Even our potential leaders, like Trayvon and Tamir, are gunned down before they can share with us their vision. What’s more, if they are not brutally murdered, then they are locked away forever with Sundiata, Mutulu, and Mumia. That is, we know that if you speak with truth and move against oppression, then the only way to avoid the pig’s bullet or penitentiary, the modern-day cracker’s whip or plantation, is to go on the run like Assata Olugbala Shakur!

Idris Robinson captures the sad conditions faced by young Black people well in this quote. Young Felon embodies the understandable nihilism that seems present in much of the Black proletariat in the wake of the Black movement’s destruction in the 20^th century. Young Felon is also revealed to be a super fan of King David who envies his penthouse in the sky in Brooklyn. In some ways, this represented, at least to me, how Black celebrity has completely replaced the Black political leader. Instead of Malcolm X, there’s Kendrick Lamar. Instead of Kwame Ture, there’s Kai Cenat. It’s a horrific reality indeed. The Black Panthers, the Republic of New Afrika and any Black groups that could have offered young Black people hope are mostly gone. Instead, they are replaced by trend chasing Black activists, which Spike seemingly critiques a bit at the end of the film. My friend Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Black Arms to Hold You Up deals with this sad reality for Black social movements in the current moment we are in, as I’ve written about before.

To be clear, the film is by no means radical in it’s approach to the characters or the plot. The film celebrates the Black business acumen of King David, even if he faced with the encroaching horrors of AI. The ending seems to serve as a critique of modern hip hop that definitely shows Spike’s age. Finally, when Young Felon is brought into the courthouse, there are thousands of people outside of the courtroom yelling “Free him,” which seems to be a not so sly critique of the social justice movements of the past fifteen or so years. Spike seems to be saying that people are less interested in a real cause and more-so in chasing trends. While this is partially true, takes like these always rub me the wrong way as I feel they invalidate and collapses the past fifteen years of Black struggle into trend chasing, which diminishes the sacrifices of participants who faced death and prison for their participation in various uprising. I think a lot about the various Black men and allies who were killed in the wake of the Ferguson rebellion.

Despite this, Paul’s story ends tragically. While David does ultimately decided to pay the ransom so Kyle is not killed, it seems that it mostly happens cynically because Trey is getting roasted on Black Twitter. David’s financial sacrifice leads to success for his reputation and his record label. Eventually, Paul uses his street connections to find Young Felon after David’s money goes missing during a handoff in the best scene in the film. Paul and David return to their old hood. David manages to get the money back from Young Felon but Paul is injured in the attempt. As Paul sits in the hospital, he has been blinded by glass flying into his eye, and he tells David he is no longer going to work for him. David jokingly calls him “cyclops” earlier so the indignities only continue. Finally, Paul turns away with a tired look on his face as David tells him to “Stay Black.” This part only serves, at least to me, to highlight how different Black experience can be, as it calls back to Paul’s frustration with the police’s treatment of his son. The sad thing is that Paul constantly thanks David throughout the story for giving him the opportunities for work. He is so grateful for David, referring to him as “beloved.” Finding work as an ex-con is difficult so Paul through sacrificing his job with David is throwing himself into a world of uncertainty and perhaps immiseration.

I have been writing a lot about film these days. Literature will always be my main thing, but I’ve enjoyed writing about film, as it often is more able to explore some of the topics I am interested in. I don’t think Spike Lee or Alan Fox (who wrote the film) were looking to make something about the Black proletariat when they made Highest 2 Lowest. Despite this, Highest 2 Lowest is a film in way that has to do with class and Black people in 21^st century New York City. Happy accidents do occur. I think many of the conclusions in the film are conservative ultimately (essay for another time) but the film does show, at least in my view, a deep empathy for the Black proletariat in a city like New York. It is unsure and predictably corny in other ways, but I was surprised on how much I enjoyed it.

NOTE 2: For new subscribers, I also have a podcast called Rough Drafts where I do what I do on Substack but with my friend Maurice on an audio format. That is, we explore ideas. We interview artists, rappers, organizers, academics and many other types of people. We read books, debate ideas and crack jokes. It’s available to listen everywhere. We’ll be doing a cross country tour next year after getting a grant for a lot of money. Check us out and if you wanna be a guest, hit me DM. We going countrywide.

—

My girlfriend got me a book called Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar for my birthday. It was perfect gift as I am obsessed with reading and writing (seriously and unseriously) about bohemian life. I also saw a note from Omar F. Najjarine about how the obsession with distraction on social media and cell phones is actually about being content with deep well of mediocrity within one’s own life. These two things inspired me to write about the tragedy of the scroll and why bohemians (the people living the avant-garde life) of many stripes must push against it.

I’ve thought a lot about the scroll in relation to my own life. I am a recovering addict to the rectangle. So one of the most bohemian things that I do is my resistance to allow popular digital technology to fully inhabit my life. The main way I do this is by not using a smart-phone outside of the house. I’ve written about how I do it exactly elsewhere on Substack.

Instead of the scroll, I have opted to dwell in silence on the trolleys, buses, and trains. Further than that, it means much of the “modern conveniences” that are supposed to be a part of modern life are absent from my life. I get tickets in real life.

There’s pros and cons here, I think. I started writing this piece on Amtrak headed back to Chicago. I was quite bored in a lot of ways. I had failed to pack enough good books as I was sorta hurrying out the door. While Oreo by Fran Ross is a good one, I can only read it in doses. By nature of that, I have spent a lot of time on this Amtrak train from Philadelphia to Chicago contemplating the endless scroll as it exists. Boredom is valuable for this reason. We are meant to spend time in silence. We are not meant to quiet our minds always with the endless scroll.

I think the reality is that across the political and cultural and intellectual spectrum, people are addicted to the scroll. It’s easy to be addicted to it. These companies that build the platforms have invested billions if not trillions into getting us addicted. In Alan Moore’s novel The Great When, his protagonist Dennis Knuckleyard ruminates on the future of television in post-War Britain. An avid Orwell reader, Dennis imagines televisions that are strapped to the backs of their watchers, weighing them down. Metaphorically, these devices do weigh us down. They break our wrists, strain our necks and eyes. Dennis’ prediction came true. They created a perfectly curated machine to make it possible for us to avoid life in all of it’s imperfections. I think a lot about the relevance of the scroll to dating as well. The idea of “ghosting” in modern Zoomer relationships is dictated by the scroll. One can ghost because people are just content. Instead of love letters and yearning, digital subject can always find another person on Hinge or whatever. Romance is largely uninteresting these days as it has just become another algorithmic trap. While back in the day, dating apps were a new interesting way to meet people, they have become sterile and flaccid as they are just another example of the endless scroll. But that’s a whole other convo, though.

The reality is that the avant-garde is mostly dead. The endless scroll killed it. The prospect for new and exciting forms of art is strangled by the endless scroll for meaningless engagement and views that hopefully result in social and eventually real currency. Mediocrity over anything interesting.

The avant-garde can only return once we re-neg on the endless scroll and embrace the quietness of our lives once again. While I don’t think we will ever “go back” to what existed before, there has to be a new synthesis that exists beyond the current excesses of our era.

I have thought a lot about the role of the scroll and how it boring it has made everyone. Even people who would considered amongst the avant-garde are actually all very boring as their tastes and perspectives are curated through TikTok influencers rather than their own intellectual exploration. I think this is the problem with “free thinkers” and their Black counterpart “The Hotep” becoming memes. Our mass culture lambasts people who are interested in ideas beyond the scope of what is deemed acceptable by our gods in Silicon Valley and their influencer demi-god henchmen. Thus, the bohemian/avant-garde is killed by the scroll. Everyone is supposedly alternative now. The reality is no one is alternative because we are all dictated by the logics of the scroll and the rectangle.

My two biggest reasons for attempting to abandon the endless scroll have largely to do with my involvement in social movements and my commitment to my artistic work. Both things I would consider fairly standard bohemian commitments. I think the reality is that many people have little ambition when it comes to either of these things. The Left has largely abandoned real commitments to organization, while those who would have been artists a decade ago commit themselves to AI-generated slop.

It’s not to exceptional myself in any real way but the truth remains is that the avant-garde and bohemians must always outside of the reaches of what is acceptable. The most acceptable thing in our society in this moment by far is subjecting ourselves to the endless scroll. Well, work is also pretty important culturally, the Marxists have has a lot to say on that. But much of how people these days work now is through the endless scroll and the phone.

My involvement with social movements has lead me to abandon the scroll as I’ve seen how movements are tainted by online discourse in real life. Instead of building real mechanisms such as collective study and decision-making structures, the endless scroll dictates that the social movement meant to liberate ourselves. Instead of politics that lead us to more just future, leftist politics are just another thing to be consumed. Joshua Citarella for all of his corniness, does an amazing podcast where he highlights and adequately describes these dynamics. Politics have become another consumable. This isn’t even to mention how these technologies alienate us from one another, surveil us and generally make our lives worse.

My other desire in life is to write novels and essays. Ideally, I would like those things to be read and be able to support myself making them. I am kinda half doing that, now. The problem with the endless scroll is that it distracts us from this purpose in ways that are universally unhelpful. Instead of reading a novel or watching a film, I was engaging in the endless scroll. I have NEVER watched a TikTok that made me want to go write or create something. All I did was make me want to watch another TikTok. This is different than listening to music, reading a short story or watching a mini-series. All of those things have made me desire to create something. I have friends who have creative ambitions but I often feel they are stymied by their own preoccupation with the endless scroll. Imagine if those hours we poured into perfecting Meta’s algorithmic maw, we spent instead by nourishing our minds and pursuing art. In some ways, the true tragedy of our moment is the fact that we have access to all of the information and art in the world but people would rather settle for AI generated reality television. It’s pure mediocrity. We could be watching Russian socialist films from the 1920s, reading esoteric short stories from Black surrealists or bumping obscure free jazz albums. Whatever other strange thing our hearts desire could be ours in this world of endless information (albeit the paywalls have made things more difficult).

My favorite times on the Internet was where I found strange things. An odd forum about the television show Firefly, demo recordings of a Midwest emo band I loved in high school school, or a Third-world communist reading group hosted on Facebook. But the reality is that the endless scroll has rendered much of the Internet no longer strange. Instead, the endless scroll has rendered it all boring and similar, there’s just different varieties. Freedom means we get every brand of annoying influencer in every identity, aesthetic and political tenor we could possibly desire. I do think text-based platforms have more of an ability to elude these sorts of traps though they are imperfect and evil like everything else coming out of Silicon Valley.

I’ve expressed this before but I think the main way to break free from the endless scroll is finding ways to spend as little time on our cell-phones as possible. There’s a multitude of ways to do this. Obviously, some people rely on these devices in their work (like ya boy, I am not free from sin), but we should all endeavor to collectively leave these devices behind. Across the country, Luddite clubs are cropping up. As I’ve mentioned earlier, a big reason that I stopped using my cell-phone outside of the house was due to the fact that friends of mine were already doing the same thing. Perhaps the answer is for all of us to get our close friends to stop using their phones as well. But what of the people who don’t have friends?

Well, the reality is that we should be treating our disgusting connections to the little rectangles as an addiction in the same way that we treat alcoholism or drug addictions. There should be support groups for people who spend eight hours on TikTok. This shouldn’t be something that is celebrated. I grow tired of people who claim a fascination with the Internet as a liberatory project when in reality, the endless scroll is just another prison that has distorted human life and connection. The only way we can break out of these oppressive connections is through collectively choosing something alternative to the machine. There’s many ways to do this. We could throw our Smart-phones into the river. We could get flip-phones. We could plan no-phone hangouts with our friends. We could do AA type groups for the scroll. Perhaps, we need to ban children from using these machines as some politicians are proposing and some countries are doing. There’s no one way to do it. I think it’ll need a combination of personal choices, collective action and maybe government intervention. I don’t mean to be prescriptive on this Substack. But I hate this current reality which seems quite dictated by the smartphones and the scroll.

In a strange fashion, neo-romantics, Christians, socialists, surrealists, anarcho-primitivists and many others all have found themselves coming to similar conclusions that the scroll is bad. We have all watched friends of ours lose themselves in the scroll. We’ve watched the light fade in their eyes while the blue light illuminates their faces. We all know their lives are more empty for it. I don’t my friends to waste their lives on the scroll. Lord knows, I’ve wasted enough of my life on it. As the late anarchist ethnographer, David Graeber describes in his book The Dawn of Everything, all of human history is a series of collective choices. We can choose to do something different than relying upon to these evil rectangles and the endless scrroll. I am generally a cynic but a friend of mine was using an iPod nano yesterday, so maybe we’re headed for a better world. Only time will tell.