Howdy folks!

Work, vacation, and life have all conspired to delay this month’s issue. Thank you for your patience!

It’s been a long, hard winter. Here in Chicago, they said it was a winter to make transplant regret moving to the city, after several years of very mild winters.

Beyond the weather, the US government’s war on its own people has been tiring and tragic. Linked below, you’ll find pieces covering what its like to go to a concert while ICE terrorizes your community, an analysis of the symbolism of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, and questioning why more musicians aren’t being more explicit in their criticisms. All of that plus some thoughts on the book of the month, Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil In America.

Eric Church Ignores The Moment

After ICE’s rain of terror in Chicago this past summer (they set off tear gas just blocks from my house to abuse my neighbors trying to help innocent construction workers), I’ve been harrowed by what they’ve done to Minnesota.

So when I saw the title of Keith Harris’s Eric Church concert review for Racket — “I Watched Eric Church Perform in St. Paul While ICE Thugs Were Kidnapping My Neighbors” — I knew it was a piece that was likely to affect me.

Harris’s review hits on all the emotions of this new reality - the hope you feel realizing the people around you also care deeply, the dissonance of wanting an artist to recognize your reality and know that it doesn’t mean much, the anger you feel anyway - and also still manages to be a dang good concert review on top of all that

Was it unfair of us to expect Church to acknowledge that our state was under attack? Were we fools to even suspect he was on “our side”? It would be unthinkable for a performer to show up in a town and not mention a natural disaster, or a school shooting, or some other local catastrophe that had dominated the news, after all. What was different here?

Bad Bunny Brought The Easter Eggs

I’m white as hell so, try as I might, there was plenty of Bad Bunny’s powerful Super Bowl Half Time show that went over my head. What I wanted as soon as it ended was to read about it from some capable of absorbing the full joy of that moment.

Of course Julianne Escobedo Shepherd delivered at Hearing Things with “Benito Bowl Wasn’t About Them—It Was About Us.” It both contextualizes the performance in the current moment and helps to explain all the references, all in around 1000 words. This newsletter is an appreciation of great writing and I sit here astounded at the economy of Shepherd’s language (“Omit needless words” indeed) and ability to write no more and no less than necessary.

He entertained while delivering his message: That he is a colonized subject performing on the colonizers’ biggest stage, showing how his music and culture are, to paraphrase the massive billboard behind him, bigger than hate. Enis’s interview captures an artist who isn’t taking anything for granted. They cover her experience getting into meditation and how she’s taking the time to master her craft. There’s no mythology here about troubled times creating great art. Instead, it’s recognition of how space, time, and resources mean the world to an artist.

Book of the Month: A Little Devil In America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

This book came out in March 2021 and it’s been sitting on my shelf since about then. I don’t know why I didn’t get to it that first year, but after my mother (who taught me to love reading) died in 2022, the reading part of my brain was broken for years. This got lost in the shuffle.

I’ve since gotten my reading motor back and didn’t have a newer book to read for this issue so it felt like a good chance to make up for lost time.

If you’ve read this newsletter for any amount of time, it’s no secret that Abdurraqib is not only a favorite music writer of mine, but maybe my favorite writer in any genre. This book has only solidified that in my mind.

The book is a collection of essays all centered on Black performers. Most of those performers are musicians - Aretha Franklin, Josephine Baker, Sun Ra, Don Shirley, Beyoncé, and more - but he also covers dancers, actors, and the performance that happens in our daily lives.

The crown jewel of this collection is “I Would Like to Give Merry Clayton Her Roses”, which I will argue is possibly the single greatest essay on a musician I’ve ever read. Clayton is most famous for her vocal performance on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” - which is central to this piece - but she is also a talented solo musician who never quite made it on her own (The documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, about backup singers, features Clayton heavily as well).

There are so many lines in this essay I wish to quote (“Merry Clayton could sing her ass off and so it might not be a surprise to know that she was born with a man of God as her father'“). Abdurraqib, clearly inspired and filled with love, captures the power clearly and without exaggeration:

There were people who thought Clayton’s great flaw was that she could never pull away from her instincts to take people to church, no matter what a song’s content was asking of her. Imagine that, your greatest flaw being that you sing every word as if it were delivered to you by God.

Bonus Links

• Ann Powers asks “Where Are All The Protest Songs?” at NPR Music.

• Craig Jenkins goes even harder at Vulture: “The 2026 Grammys Needed More Naming and Shaming.”

• Niko Stratis moves beyond dad rock to talk about youthful crushes in “The Lessons Learned in Goo Goo Dolls Songs” at Paste.

Thank you for reading!

Justin Anderson-Weber