"I yield my time. Fuck you."
Hello friends.
Everything is uniquely bad right now. I’m not even sure you want to receive frivolous emails about music-adjacent things at the moment. I’m not sure I want to be writing them. So if you feel like sending this email to the trash, that’s a big ol’ “I get it” from ya boy Dan. But maybe you are looking for something that’s not your daily dose of 8,000 horrific viral videos. If that’s the case, I’d like to tell you about one of the rare showings of optimism I’ve seen in recent days.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Police Commission held a virtual town hall meeting via Zoom. Like all Zoom calls, I didn’t recognize most of the faces I was looking at, but the guest of dishonor was LAPD Chief Michel Moore. Moore’s name had been in the news the day prior for saying that the death of George Floyd is as much on the hands of the looters as it was the officers who killed him. Ah don’t you hate when that happens—when you steal batteries from Target and it’s the reason a racist cop on the other side of the country murdered someone several days prior? Moore later apologized for the remarks but that’s not really one of those things you can walk back.
Zoom’s max participant limit is 500 people and I unfortunately didn’t make it in, but I watched all day and took notes, which is more than I can say for the LAPD representatives who practically yawned at points. One by one, people called in and gave the LAPD a piece of their minds. At first, callers were given two minutes each, then one minute, and then, in an effort to cram everyone in, just 30 seconds. But still, people dutifully waited. All day. People who joined the meeting at 9:30 a.m. were still waiting after 5 p.m. You can watch all 8 hours and 35 minutes of it. Very soothing in case you don’t own a white noise machine.
There were a few rare shithead callers, some bootlickers who called to thank Daddy Moore for keeping their town’s cell phone accessory kiosks safe. But on the whole—and I’m talking about the overwhelming majority—every citizen was more resolute, informed, and eloquent than anything I’ve heard from a government official or politician on CNN. I started keeping a thread of the callers. One woman told Moore he needed to be “run out of town like the Old West,” another asked why tear gas is banned in warfare but acceptable to use on citizens, and many wondered why cosmetology school requires more hours of training than the police force. A cop called in and after explaining that he proudly bled blue, he called Moore a disgrace to the badge. All were outraged. Some were crying. One guy had the most economical use of 30 seconds I’ve ever seen, which ended with a line that should go down in internet history: “Suck my dick and choke on it. I yield my time. Fuck you!”
And, indeed, it has:
Mostly, these LAPD shills just sat there expressionless and took it. The only time they seemed perturbed was when someone said fuck or shit. Maybe they weren’t even listening. Maybe they had CSI reruns or some dumb cop movie playing on another window just off to the side. Maybe it was that dreadful movie where Sgt. Will Smith is partnered with an officer who’s like an orc or something. Remember that movie? How did it not do more to end prejudice in America?
I watched all these outraged (but focused) callers for hours and it actually made me feel more hopeful than I’d felt watching the news all day. After I thought about it for a while, I realized why: Normal, everyday citizens of all ethnicities, ages, and genders—nurses and teachers and college students—were all using the language of music that was considered extreme years ago. Sentiments typically relegated to hip-hop, punk, and hardcore songs of the 80s and 90s have finally become mainstream positions.
People talked about demilitarizing the police, they came prepared with statistics about police murders and brutality, they had constructive feedback on how we could reallocate tax dollars to better serve citizens (hint: literally anything). And most importantly, they expressed outrage over how much violence we do not know about. If all of these atrocities are being captured on camera in broad daylight, what, then, are the police doing behind closed doors? How much raping, murdering, and harassing are they doing that we’ll never even know about? How can we end their impunity to kill? People are finally asking these questions.
Previously, these were problems that citizens could ignore or be completely blind to if they were in a position privileged enough to do so. If you were a white person living in the suburbs and didn’t actively seek out music by Dead Prez or Dead Kennedys, it was pretty easy to ignore the violence happening on the other side of town. This was by design. It’s why Tipper Gore founded the PMRC in the 1980s—to suppress these voices by forcing Parental Advisory stickers on albums and working with police unions to bully artists and silence them.
I had assumed the story of Ice T and his Body Count song “Cop Killer” was a well known cautionary tale of artistic censorship, but in talking to friends recently, I am realizing that I am An Old and it has been largely lost to time. Maybe one day I will write a long history of it, but essentially, during the 1992 LA riots, Body Count wrote a song called “Cop Killer” and Tipper Gore’s army of angry white moms caused so much trouble for the group that they decided to pull the song from their record. By keeping these songs away from suburban white kids, Gore thought she was sheltering them from violent language, but what she was actually doing was sheltering them from violence itself. Even today, the song still does not appear on the album on streaming services. It was a form of generational oppression—the burning of documentation of American culture deemed undesirable by the protected class.
Similarly, and I hate to even sound vaguely self-promotional right now, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, a few years ago, I spent a bunch of time over a summer profiling Scott Sturgeon a.k.a Stza Crack. I know, I know, he is divisive and a lot of people have problems with him but, for better or worse, he has taken some provocative positions in regards to the police in his music. He has written multiple songs about killing cops, sold shirts that said KILL COPS, and has the words tattooed on his fingers. We talked a lot about the use of language like “kill cops” in songs and what he believed the function of it was. Here’s him:
"I'm not so militant that I think every cop should be killed, but I think that in order to affect change, you have to have extremist art and extremist positions in art, like people talking about killing cops."
"I'm not a hate monger. I'm not a violence purveyor. I'm an artist and an activist, and if I need to sing about killing cops to get people to pay attention to reforming the police, then I'll write another dozen songs about it."
And then when I asked if he would write a song like “One Dead Cop” today, he said:
"No, I wouldn't. Because when I'm writing political songs, I'm always searching for the thing that's not being said or the thing that's not being paid attention to."
"To some extent, I've purposefully toned down the message, because the most important part is being heeded. So instead of being the crazy person telling everybody to kill cops, I try to just be a part of the discussion."
I have lost the thread a bit here but my point (if I have one) is that time often exposes the truth in extreme positions. It was deemed unpatriotic and conspiratorial in the months following 9/11 to imply that the US government was maybe just a weeee bit responsible for that. Now, thanks to facts mined out by oversight commissions and investigative journalism, we know it to be true. Despite decades of censorship by people like Gore and the religious Right, racial injustice and police brutality are finally infiltrating mainstream thought due largely to social media. Today’s smartphones are doing the work yesterday’s artists were striving for in the face of backlash. It’s easy to squash out a few violent songs about injustice, but these videos of cops committing unprovoked attacks in broad daylight are so numerous and omnipresent that you would have to be willfully burying your head in the sand to block them out. (Here is a thread of 270+ of them.)
This is all a longwinded way of saying the very obvious: Protect freedom of expression in art at all costs. Listen to artists when they are speaking about worlds that differ from your own. Today’s music listeners are tomorrow’s Zoom callers. I yield my time. Fuck you.