Driving in the Snow
Saw a post from some guy complaining that no one writes protest songs anymore. I don’t enjoy online bickering so I refrained from calling him a narrow minded fool. I'm classy like that.
Generalizations are generally a sign of a lazy mind. I don’t know where that guy gets his music but there’s no shortage of revolutionary sentiment being expressed in virtually every genre and medium and moreover I question the credentials of a self-styled cultural critic who’s apparently never heard of rap.
If that guy was one of my students from back when I had students I would press him to define his terms, then to challenge his assumptions, and finally to let his findings inform his thesis rather than writing to support his prejudice. I know that way of doing things is out of fashion. All the more reason.
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In January 2017 I drove facefirst into a blizzard that covered the northwest quadrant of the U.S. I saw the weather reports and didn’t care. That I was in a subcompact (Fiat 500) ill equipped for anything beyond jamming it into tight city parking spots and getting some sweet pickup on a straightaway in Sport mode was not also not among my concerns. My mission was to get to Oregon, like Lewis and/or Clark, or one of those doomed bastards in that old computer game from the '80s. My second goal was to avoid dysentery.
I had a lot on my mind and I was determined to drive as far away from it as I could. My mind came with me, which complicated my efforts, but the open road and constant fear of disappearing into a whiteout proved adequate distractions.
After a disappointing stint in Texas, followed by a Christmas trip to Las Vegas with a woman I'd hoped to revive a relationship with, in which we slept in separate rooms and had an overall bad time together, then having acquired a nasty flu on my drive to Northern Michigan for New Year's, and learning somewhere on the road in Nebraska that my comedy writing partner for the past six years had died unexpectedly and without any real explanation, I was in listless crisis mode and really didn't care what happened next.
A few months prior, in Norman, Oklahoma my good friend Brian, an artist (I use his work here regularly), scientist, and hip hop fanatic, had introduced me to Run the Jewels. They hit me right where I needed it. For the next couple months I blared them out the windows at 90 mph on the toll roads in Central Texas, and all the way back up North after the election when hanging around in the South just didn't seem like a great idea if you could avoid it.
RTJ was with me through blinding squalls, when my tiny semi-visible car was the only non-eighteen-wheeler on a horseshoe curve near Medicine Bow, as I limped from town to town (Cheyenne, Rawlins, Rock Springs), making it about a hundred miles a day before cashing it in for another motel, knuckles sore from bracing against the steering wheel. And when I finally broke out of the blizzard and gunned it through Utah on my way to Boise to stay with a friend and a fog like steel wool descended over the river valley and forced me to a crawl the rest of the way past other vehicles in the ditches with their hazards on.
And they were with me when I limped back across the country on much the same route a few years years later having been through some serious bullshit and with my sanity in doubt.
Through the entire first Trump administration, and when they dropped 'Walking in the Snow' and then RTJ4 in the summer of 2020 when everything felt wrong all the time, they jolted me into remembering that we weren’t all just future corpses on lockdown.
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Of all the I concerts I can remember attending the best, or most important, was RTJ at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco in August 2017. That show was all righteous anger and love and pure catharsis from the first beat to the encore. They're even bigger now than they were then. Their music has always been political as well as hilarious and the dynamic between the two of them - Killer Mike (Michael Render) a black man from Atlanta and El-P (Jaime Melin), a white dude from the Bronx - provides all the inspiration one needs to look to the arts for answers.
This last Sunday I saw them open for Wu-Tang Clan. There was no flagging energy, no resignation to the moment, all those guys got up there and threw their whole bodies into every line, every beat, and this crowd in a Montreal suburb was right there with them for all of it. Hip hop is a universal art form. Folk music without (usually) banjos.
Mike has rubbed some of his fans the wrong way in the last couple years, mainly, from what I understand, for a weird buddy-buddy conversation with RFK Jr. in a barbershop. I don't know what that's about and I hope and choose to believe he’s still an ally. As far as I know El-P has done nothing objectionable and is still the hardcore nerd and amazing rapper and producer he’s always been. The two of them together are living examples of how art can subsume and transcend bullshit.
And Wu-Tang? We don't have time to get into Wu-Tang. Wu-Tang is for the children, man. Even in the deeply conservative (light blue, we'll say, being generous) community I left after last year's election there were lawn signs that said 'Presidents Are Temporary; Wu-Tang is Forever'.