Turn It Up - Special Post-Election Edition

Songs to keep on pushing

We’re still working through the election results from last week, and what they might mean for the future. But we’re certain of two things. First, the next four years are going to require a long and sustained fight, built on solidarity and driven by compassion and justice. Second, the music can help prepare us for it. For our immediate response, we’ve decided to dig deep into the “gospel impulse” that we’ve written about before. David outlines the “gospel impulse” in his first entry, and we find it crucial to approaching both the music and the world that produces it. We hope you find these songs as helpful as we have.

The Staple Singers – “I’ll Take You There” (from Be Altitude: Respect Yourself, 1972)

At Memphis’ Stax Records, in a series of what they called pop-and-soul “message songs,” the Staple Singers preached that a better world awaits but that it will take something more powerful than just you or me to get there. In his A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America, scholar and critic Craig Werner terms this lesson the “gospel impulse,” the belief that a movement of people can accomplish together what individuals working alone never could. “For the classic gospel singers,” Werner writes, “the source is god; for soul singers, it’s love…Whatever its specific incarnation, gospel redemption breaks down the difference between personal salvation and communal liberation. No one makes it alone…[I]f we are going to…move on up, we’ve got to connect. The music shows us how.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right,” the group’s legendary lead singer, Mavis Staples, told me in 2004 when I profiled her for No Depression. “You know, [her late father] Pops [Staples] would say that sometimes. He’d say, ‘We don’t have to die to go to heaven; heaven could be right here.’ But he said we got to work together.” Backed and carried along by as irresistible a rhythm track as I’ve ever heard, Mavis insists she knows a place where there are no tears or worries. She can take us to this place, but only if we join her and offer assistance as needed. How exactly we’ll do that is strategy, not song, but Mavis knows the first step is to lock arms and have each other’s backs. “Help me,” she pleads. “Come on, somebody help me now… Let me take you there!” – DC

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – “Here Comes My Girl” (from Damn the Torpedoes, 1979) 

When many of us reflect upon working with others to alter our worlds, the most intense and immediate example we come up with will often be that collective we’ve created with the person on the other side of the bed. Perhaps that’s where you first turned this past week? Here, Tom Petty ticks off hardships and worry, bemoans work that never seems to pay and even indulges fantasies of good old days when the world seemed “just a little bit more in focus.” “Every time it seems like there ain't nothin' left no more,” he cries, “I find myself having to reach out and grab hold of something,” and that’s when his lover takes his hand. Guitarist and co-writer Mike Campbell join Tom in supportive harmony, and the rest of the Heartbreakers sympathize too as the music springs to the hopeful and grateful chorus—and as you and I sing along. And, just like that, Petty and his girl find they have a community. – DC

Willie Jones – “Country Soul” (from Right Now, 2021)

One of the ways music can show us how, per Werner, to connect is when its aesthetics model the world we want to create. This boot-scooting party starter from Willie Jones moves the crowd by shouting out R&B and rock and roll, country and soul, funk and rap, in the process modeling the pluralist, multiracial, democratic, for-working-folks country of my dreams. “Let the music move your soul!” – DC

Yola – “Diamond Studded Shoes” (from Stand for Myself, 2021)

Speaking of genre fluid artists… Yola takes in all sorts of rootsy pop-soul-and-country here, and the results are a low-key anthem for class struggle. She’s mostly singing the blues, about how politicians and rich folks swipe security and potential from the rest of us even as they purchase diamond-studded footwear and add to their yacht collections, pat us on the head and tell us not to worry because it’ll all turn out alright. No longer fooled, Yola shouts, “It ain’t gonna turn out all right!” That’s a bummer, but what makes this a gospel impulse favorite of mine is the way she uses that grim take on the status quo to launch us all to action: “That’s why we gots to fight!” – DC

Iris DeMent – “Workin’ on a World” (from Workin’ on a World, 2023)

When the shadows of our world start overtaking my spirit, I almost always find my way to the music of Iris DeMent. The title track of her latest album (which I wrote about for The New Yorker) was written back when Trump won the White House the first time. It begins with a lonely church piano but shifts suddenly into an energized and energizing roadhouse ramble—a musical approach that mimics her own shift in spirits years ago, and that rings as necessary today. DeMent, recalling earlier “warriors of love” who opened doors for her they were never able to use themselves, understands, frustratedly but hopefully, that here on out she’s working on creating a world that she may not be around to see—and as Iris and I are the same age, that hits particularly hard for me. “I don’t have all the answers to the troubles of the day,” she confesses in her church-bred twang. “But neither did all our ancestors. They persevered anyway.” Time to get to work. –DC

Sweet Honey in The Rock – “I Remember, I Believe” (from Sacred Ground, 1995)

I’ve written before about this remarkable song from the late Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose entire body of work offers a necessary set of lessons in this moment. (I hope you’ll read my earlier post about the song and the artist.) As I wrote then, the song turns to the past as a source of strength to face the present, using memories – of one’s own life, and of a community in past and present – as a source of sustenance. Invoking the specific burdens of slavery and its continuing legacies, and how Black people resisted them and survived, Reagon finds a resolute inspiration to continue forward (or perhaps to keep pushing), ending with the firm declaration that “I’ll raise my voice for justice, I believe.” A beautiful song, one that I imagine will be even more central to my mix now than before. – CH

The Impressions – “Keep on Pushing” (from Keep on Pushing, 1964)

Central to the gospel impulse is a commitment to persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. This great anthem from the Civil Rights era is one of the most effective articulations of that vision. Over a circling pulse of horn-driven rhythm, lead singer and songwriter Curtis Mayfield bears witness over a sweeping melody as the other Impressions support in call and response. One of the most effective translators of Black church traditions to both freedom-song-derived message music and R&B more broadly, Mayfield makes one specific, significant switch in the lyric. He changes it from the faith-affirming “God gave me strength” to the self-affirming (or at least self-reassuring) reminder that “I’ve got my strength.” Delivered as its own kind of prayer, the new line reinforces Mayfield’s conclusion that it really “don’t make sense” not to carry on for as long as you, and I, and we can. So, let’s keep on pushing. – CH

(For more on “Keep on Pushing” and Curtis Mayfield, be sure to check out Craig Werner’s Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul)

Shamir – “Abomination” (from Heterosexuality, 2022)

There is so much redemptive power in the celebratory defiance of this banger from Shamir, one of our moment’s most compelling young artists. Over a cyclone-on-the-dance-floor arrangement, they take a seeming source of shame or demonization and reclaim it as an anthem of self-expression and shared purpose. It is creative refusal, but also a remaking of the world around the fluidities and freakeries that Trumpism seems determined to silence or expunge. I’d much rather live in Shamir’s world, and I’ve taken my sadness and anger about the viciousness of current right-wing politics and exploded it through “Abomination” in my headphones, turned up louder than even the most outrageous MAGA rhetoric. A joyful noise, if ever there was one. – CH

The Linda Lindas – “Racist, Sexist Boy” (from Growing Up, 2022)

This song isn’t here for the obvious reason made plain in the chorus. (Although that’s sure as hell a message that sticks, for obvious reasons.) I included it because of a lyric that’s always jumped out at me from the Linda Lindas’ crunching 2021 breakthrough anthem. In the second chorus, singer and bassist Eloise Wong assures the title character that “we rebuild what you destroy” even after he’s done wreaking havoc. The gospel-impulse side of rock ‘n’ roll has always centered this idea of re-creation out of ruin, and I don’t know that I’ve heard it expressed more powerfully. It certainly doesn’t minimize the damage done by racist, sexist boys, whether in middle school or the White House. But the Linda Lindas insist that it’s not the end, even if the rebuilding requires the radical hope and hard work that social change always does. Let’s get started, and let’s rock. – CH

Fantastic Negrito – “This Little Light of Mine” (from Son of a Broken Man, 2024)

Released just before Election Day, Fantastic Negrito offers a brand-new take on one of the most enduring of the freedom songs. The soul-rock iconoclast pairs the song’s message of commitment with a bubbling funk arrangement that favorably recalls Sly & The Family Stone. (And don’t ignore his urgent call for a ceasefire.) It’s a song built for mass movements and community meetings, and it’s a specific reminder to each person within that collective. As Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon told Bill Moyers, the song’s first-person singular “I” affirms each individual’s role in the struggle and also makes them promise that they’ll be there to contribute. As we face down a long four years, we all need to let our lights shine everywhere we go, as keep on pushing towards justice and rebuild whatever these odious political forces have their minds set to destroy. I’ll be there. Will you? – CH

Recommended reading:

-Tressie McMillan Cottom on the election, for New York Times

-Natalie Weiner with a post-election playlist for fighting back, for Don’t Rock The Inbox

-Jewly Hight on Nashville hip-hop artist Chuck Indigo, for WPLN

-Jewly Hight talks to Fancy Hagood, for Variety

-A.D. Carson on hip-hop aging and identity crises, for The Conversation

-Harmony Holiday on the late rapper Ka, for 4 Columns

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