Defiant Imagination, Part 3: Other Songs of When They See Us

Having written a lengthy analysis of the song "Moon River" and its pivotal significance as part of the soundtrack of When They See Us, the remainder of my comments on the songs and soundtrack will take more of the form of vignettes, or glimpses into the artistic synergy of song and film in conveying a powerful story of injustice, defiance, and solidarity in the stories of Raymond Santana, 14; Kevin Richardson, 14; Antron McCray, 15; Yusef Salaam, 15; Korey Wise, 16; and their families.   It's not so much full of academic language and theory.  Much of this is an attempt to reflect on the story of the Central Park 5, the Exonerated 5, while becoming acquainted with music that has not been on my playlist.  The general sense of a prophetic or defiant imagination has been crucial to my own work, yet I have not taken much opportunity to hear the way such imagination permeates and interacts with popular culture.  What follows are some forays into that sort of reflection.

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Another song like "Moon River," displaying a similar kind of defiance as seen in the Louis Armstrong example, is "Hope," by Pete Josef.  Different from most songs that are part of the soundtrack, this is a verbatim musical setting of a beloved poem by Emily Dickenson.  One of the U.S.'s most popular poets, Dickenson wrote usually short poems of only a few lines.



Dickenson's brief "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers," is a poetic reflection on the power of hope in the image of a songbird.  It "perches in the soul," implying that it resides at great depth within a person's thoughts and feelings.  In any time and place there remains a steady voice, singing "without words" and not stopping.  Even strong storms cannot stop the bird's voice from coming through, giving strength to the soul, burning and warming like a fire.  No matter how cold, no matter how far and foreign a place, hope holds forth with a vigorous, yet undemanding presence.

This song plays over the scene when Yusuf returns home from prison, as viewers peer into his inner drive to make a life although still feeling out of place among his family and friends.  A steady voice of song within Yusuf is not silent, but defiantly rises up in him to achieve what none would expect of him.  The scene then turns to the family of Kevin visiting the prison.  Kevin is feeling lost there.  His sister proceeds to talk to him about identifying "something to look forward to." It is a strategy of hope that gains strength from his inner power, bolstered by the truth that no matter how far away they are from him, he is never alone.  What she sees deep in him "perches in the soul," and from that place will give him the strength to endure.  The song reveals the young men's tenacity in the face of forces working to crush them.  Though they are young and tender, like the delicate image of a songbird, they persist in their vision of a world that is not what others would claim it to be.

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In the earlier post, I also identified a kind of defiance in the story of Ruby Bridges--readiness to place one's body over against the oppressive forces that would seek to destroy a people.  It is a mode of living in an alternate narrative and reality, already before it is fully visible, that provides courage to take steps to change things.  Mos Def's song "Umi Says" passes on the wisdom of generations, received by son from mother, to "shine your light on the world." Life offers no promises or guarantees.  The song plays briefly in the film, as if from the car radio when Kevin is ridingwith his sister Angie.  He is struggling with all that he has missed in life and with the many barriers he still faces after release from prison.

She says, with the wisdom of "Umi," that he has what it takes to rise in his life.

You got time. A lot's changed, but you know what ain't changed.  You.  That was my biggest prayer for you--that you'd stay safe, and you'd stay your sweet self.  I know you've seen things, maybe had to do things, defend yourself, survive, whatever might have happened.  But in the end you have the same heart.  You gotta carry that with you outta here, okay?

With that strength of identity, she believes he can overcome.  His life can matter for something greater.  She can see in his eyes and hear in his voice that he longs to redeem the lost time, the damaged life, even the park where he was beaten and falsely accused.  Mos Def's lyrics speak of the struggle and emotion, the desire to give up, to shrink back.  Yet Umi keeps pressing him to know that his life has to count for more than just surviving with me and mine.  He needs to be in the fight for freedom.  He needs to be part of building a united front in the work of liberation.  There is a path to take, and only when we place our full selves, our emotions, our hopes, our dreams, and our bodies on the line will we begin to see the change that we are becoming.

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Another song that feeds into the Ruby Bridges kind of defiance is by Andreya Triana, "Song for a Friend."  This song plays over a series of scenes with parents and family talking on the phone to their children in prison.  Next the film shows how the families worked hard to be able to visit the young men while they were locked away.  The song lyrics bring attention to the aspect of Ruby's story of spending a year as the only pupil in her class, facing so much hatred and attack for taking a stand.  Yet she did not feel alone.  She knew that her parents and their larger circle of friends were with her in the struggle.  Her body was on the line each day, and yet their bodies were in line with her to embrace and uphold her.  The very body of Jesus stood with her as she prayed for the forgiveness of her persecutors, using his own words toward those who had condemned him.



In the same way, Ray's father and abuela put their bodies through the regular phone calls, the work to support him, the travel, the security searches, and in every way possible demonstrated their presence to him.  He did not have to doubt that his bodily struggle found solidarity in them, and their embrace in the visiting room gave flesh and blood to the defiance of solidarity.  Abuela reaches to touch Ray's arm under the voice of Antron's mother saying to her own son, "I'm walking through this with you."

Antron expresses regret that his mother has to work so hard to come see him, but she says she would come every day if allowed.  "You're not too much trouble," she says.  Digging deeper, she gets him to tell about what's troubling him.  It's a dream that feels like a nightmare.  It is so real he isn't sure whether he is awake or sleeping.  He hears the sound of steps drawing closer.  Each night, it seems they get even nearer.  His mother soaks in that story, then flips the script on him.  She tells him to keep on listening, because those steps are her feet getting closer every day to picking him up and taking him home. 

Antron says, "I feel like everybody in the world hate me, Ma."  But she replies that she loves him "enough to make up for everybody.  All I do all day is love you."  She goes through a litany of ways in which she will always be with him, describing the interconnection between his body and hers in the struggle of fear, pain, and joy as his life progresses.

The song's lyrics repeatedly focus on the love expressed through bodily presence:  resting one's head on a shoulder, being held close, being brought into the arms of love, and having someone by one's side.  These are given as evidence of never being alone, of support when it seems hard to breathe or to move, and of having a faithful friend to the very end.  The family support of these young men is not merely an abstraction, but a defiance demonstrated through bodily presence.

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The first post in this series on the defiant imagination brought together my experience of viewing When They See Us with scholarly work of Robert M. Franklin on the life and thought of Malcolm X.  Malcolm's defiance, his refusal to be who the world had tried to make him to be, becomes a vocal type of defiance, a public challenge in word and agenda.  Malcolm brought critical insight into the structures and systems of white supremacy and the cultural accommodation to racism.  He demanded that things change, and if not by transformation of the whole society, then at least by construction of alternate patterns and structures that would insure justice for those who have suffered long under oppression.

The opening songs of the first episode demonstrate a kind of confidence and brash self-acknowledgement that could represent the mindset of these young men.  In the post-Civil Rights Movement era, recognition that many things had changed for the better, normalization of some levels of integration in housing, employment, education, and public facilities might provide a level of encouragement about the future of race relations.  Yet the genius of white supremacy as an ideology is that it continues to remake itself in new forms.  The end of the 1980s marks a dramatic shift toward a new encoding of racism which centers around rewriting the criminal codes to increase lengths of sentences, multiply criminal charges, and expand incarceration of minorities exponentially.  The 1989 case of these five young men takes on an iconic role in shaping the demonization of young black men as "superpredators" who must be locked away from the rest of society.

Opening scenes include the songs "I Got It Made," by Special Ed, and "Microphone Fiend," by Erik B. and Rakim.  Both celebrate the giftedness and freedom of young men expressing their power and striving for success in the world.  A kind of defiant attitude is built into the tone of these pieces, and it gains intensity when the young men join the large crowd that goes into the park on the night that the violent rape occurred.  "Fight the Power," by Rage Against the Machine, redirects the gifts and freedom of black youth toward continuing the struggle for structural change.  The point of rhyming should be to strengthen a sharp mind and embolden a brave heart.  Intellectual and emotional growth feed into analytical capacity to understand social structures and systems and remake them for justice, not merely letting the powerful recreate their domination systems while young people enjoy life without cares.  This tone of defiance is interrupted by the scenes of criminal violence that lead to massive police action in rounding up anyone "fitting the description," including the young men who were initially charged and browbeaten to be witnesses against one another for crimes none of them saw, much less participated in.



The overwhelming power of the domination system becomes apparent when its technologies of repression get applied to the young men who have not skills or understanding to defend themselves against police rush to judgment, imagery of monstrous black youth, forced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, and fearmongering public media.  The defiance of the song remains relevant, but the persistent power of oppression is no small opponent to defeat.

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"Love and Hate," by Michael Kiwanuka plays in the second episode as the trial is beginning.  It begins playing over interviews with community leaders who are challenging law enforcement, the court system, and the media for failing to listen to the truth, failing to investigate and uncover the flaws in the case, and failing to see the young men as human beings.  It continues and builds as the young men, their families, and their lawyers make their way into the courtroom.



The song's lyrics are not uniformly defiant.  They also contain cries for help:  "I need something; give me something wonderful."  At moments they express doubt and anticipate setbacks: "Now I feel some days of trouble."  The defiance of this message recognizes that it is not a simple fight.  It is a long fight, and there will still be casualties along the way.  Yet there is no concession, no giving in.  There is resolve to continue the struggle and achieve without surrender.

How much more are we supposed to tolerate?
Can't you see there's more to me than my mistakes?
Sometimes I get this feeling makes me hesitate...

I believe
She won't take me somewhere I'm not supposed to be.
You can't steal the things that god has given me!
No more pain and no more shame and misery--

You can't take me down!
You can't break me down!
You can't take me down!

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The lyrics of "U Don't Know," by Jay-Z, describe the conflicting narratives of black youth caught up in gangs, drug trade, and crime, versus the creative capacity of those young people to make another kind of life through intelligence, art, business, and hard work.  The defiant narrative acknowledges that at times the less desirable path of high risk and potential showdowns with police may seem like the only option a young black person may have.  Whatever elements of character that went into the ability to succeed in music and entrepreneurial life also contributed to survival and advancement outside the law.  Jay-Z celebrates his emergence as a powerful economic force having done the work necessary to go above and beyond all expectations.  In contrast, this song plays near the end of the third episode, over the visual depiction of Ray's turning to selling drugs as his only solution to being out on the streets without opportunities for more legitimate employment.



"Who We Be" by DMX again reflects this contrast of life possibilities, emphasizing the inability of the normative gaze to look upon the lives of young black men with any clear sense of their humanity.  Describing the harsh conditions, the stereotypes, the compromised choices that affect poor urban young people, the lyrics intermix the human struggles, the aspirations, and the possibilities of faith.  With detailed references to the experience of arrest, the courts, remote imprisonment, solitary confinement, and mental fragility, this song plays over the story of Korey as he strives to keep himself together, hundreds of miles away from his family, targeted by other inmates so that his only refuge is in solitary confinement.  Having been taken under wing by a sympathetic prison guard, he begins to hope for something better, but faces a parole board intent on forcing another false confession out of him in order to consider releasing him from jail.  Korey continues to languish in prison, holding himself together with visions of his family and friends, of his past experiences and choices, thought of as someone other than who he really is both inside and outside the prison.



After the movie, after "Moon River" and the images of the actual five men, the credits begin as still shots from scenes from the four-part movie flash in the background.  "Picture Me Rollin'," by Nipsey Hussle plays with its promise to "make it home."  Acknowledging the ever-present threat of racial profiling, false accusation, unwarranted arrest, and further consequences of a broken criminal justice system, the song still urges the listener to believe that rather than stopped, beaten, and arrested, the protagonist is still in the car and rolling forward to get home.  It may still seem that life is offering odds like "a dice game," but the singer's hope in God's care and drive to press forward, betting against those odds.



In all these songs, the defiance to stand up against an unjust world appears, at the same time as they recognize the struggle will be long and hard.  Just as we viewers of this film and listeners to the music must recognize, the path to overcome white supremacy continues as an uphill battle.  Frustration is rampant, and patience wears thin.  Many will not tolerate such a wait.  Others remain in denial that there is even a battle to fight.  And those in the midst of the struggle must with the late Nipsey, be

Tryna to stay focused, kinda like Moses,
Like somebody chose us.  This weight on my shoulders--
I feel these emotions, but still I keep going.

Defiant Imagination, Part 2: Frank Ocean's "Moon River" and Seeing Possible Worlds

As the final episode of When They See Us was coming to a close a song began to play that grabbed my attention.  It was a new arrangement and performance of an old standard.  It had been foreshadowed earlier in the episode by a recurring appearance of an unknown prison inmate ("Singing Inmate") who took every opportunity to sing "Moon River" as loudly as he could.  In those scenes, he was singing it with the powerful intonations of a golden-throated crooner.

I should include a comment on the type of writing I am doing.  I do not intend in offering my interpretation of a song's lyrics and music to be telling you what I think is in the mind of the composer.  I am not even claiming to know why the song was included as part of the movie soundtrack.  I am writing about possible meanings of the lyrics and musical structure, intertwined with the scenes of the film, and filtered through the interpretive context of my own viewing.  I'm not saying that it is arbitrarily subjective, but I am saying that interpretation of texts and films is multivalent.  The song's performer and the soundtrack composer may have different perspectives.  Yet I am analyzing musical lines, harmonic relationships, and actual words and sentences which do guide the interpretation.  So, don't take me as saying that I am offering the authoritative meaning of this song or soundtrack.  I am offering a reasonable and reasoned set of insights into a powerful creative composition of music, lyric, and film.  Now back to the song discussion.

Lena Horne, Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Pat Boone, and especially Andy Williams had made this song part of their performance repertoire.  Some artists like Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, and Eric Clapton with Beck, gave it their own twists.  "Moon River" is one of those songs that was pervasive in popular entertainment throughout my childhood, but I did not really learn the song or know much about it.  Vague memories of watching the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's suggest that I must have once known that Aubrey Hepburn sang it in the movie.  I mainly remembered the song as a standard sung by Andy Williams who was on television all the time in those days.  Beyond the opening line, I couldn't have told you the lyrics.

I think I listened carefully to the song for the first time after hearing the Frank Ocean version during the epilogue of the final episode of When They See Us.  This new cover of "Moon River" played as images of the actors faded into the actual exonerated men, with text overlays describing the current life situation of each of them.  Looking upon the bodies and faces of these boys who became men while wrongly imprisoned presses the viewer's consciousness into recounting specific events and relationships portrayed in the four-episode film, linking the visual narrative to flesh and blood.  In the context of these men's experiences of interrupted youth, injustice, and eventual exoneration to face a life so different from their plans, the song's lyrics opened up a wide space for imagination.



The song's lyrical images portray looking across a river toward what may be on the other side.  Getting across a mile-wide river is a daunting challenge, at the end of which one cannot be sure what she or he will find.  Then, the image shifts to traveling on the river, representing moving toward dreams of one's future.  The dreams are accompanied by heartbreak and the narrator's uncertainty about what's around the next bend.  As poetic imagery often does, the song starts mixing metaphors: the words speak of chasing the end of the rainbow as equivalent to flowing with the river's direction around bend after bend.  The narrator is pursuing what he or she longs for, not fully knowing what that is.

Thus the river is portrayed first as a barrier between the protagonist and the future.  Is it even possible to get across to the other side?  What will the other side bring?  Second, the river is a path upon which to journey.  The journey finds a sojourner facing an uncertain future, hoping, longing for what could be, but without assurance of what actually may appear.  And finally, the river is also the companion.  The narrator describes "two drifters off to see the world" who are "chasing after the same...rainbow's end."  The caring companions, the fellow-travelers, equally facing the unknown, sharing and bearing their hope and burden together--this may be the deepest message of the song.  If I step out into this river, it will bear me along toward its destination.  We will travel the same direction and meet the same obstacles and vistas, whatever they may be.

Ocean adapted the lyrics to his own version of the song.  It's a "crazy world" that they will see, not just "such a lot of" world.  Things won't always make sense how they turn out, but even the nonsensical is something we may find and see and experience.  With reference to the end of the rainbow, Ocean adds the phrase "chasing after" to give an even stronger sense of desire and longing.  Believing that there is something good to find, the protagonist passionately chases a dream yet not clearly formed.

He doesn't use the word "huckleberry," but says simply "my friend."  He omits there a reference in part to Mark Twain's famous character, for any number of reasons that could include the often racist language of that story from another era.

A final major lyrical change is the addition of more concrete lyrical descriptions of the formation process of one's life.  "What I see, who I become" echoes behind the lines about traveling on the river journey.  Ocean is making explicit that by joining this river journey, his life is taking a particular form through the experiences and growth specific to the river's path.  He says "Life's just around the bend."  It's not only the figment of imagination, the rainbow's end, that is around the bend.  With or without the rainbow's end, the protagonist's life will emerge from the contingent circumstances, the unanticipated relationships, and the mystery of the world encountered on the journey.  This practical language presses the viewer's mind toward the unexpected world unfolding for the exonerated men, filled with challenges and also possibilities.

The performance itself brings intellectual and emotional challenges to the listener.  The surprising opening stanza sung by a child's voice drills into the emotion of how the tragedy of this story explodes into the lives of children who went to the park one afternoon.  It's not an untrained voice, but neither is it a smoothly polished voice.  Quickly, another voice joins with harmony for a phrase--but the harmony turns out to be another melodic line in a different key, a beautiful dissonance of open harmonics.  Soon a kind of improvisational polyphony emerges as the mode in which the song progresses.  Going from solo line, to rich harmonies, to echoed motifs and improvised riffs, the performance partly deconstructs the traditional crooning ballad.

At times staggered entrances to melodic lines, fractions of beats apart, give a sense of fragmentation, a center that cannot hold, a whole that is invisible and out of reach.  These stuttering entrances and rhythms especially appear in relation to the lyrics about the uncertainty of the river's direction and destination, through heartbreak and uncertainty.  This performance itself touches a deep consciousness of the injustice and unreasonable path the young men's lives have taken.  

Yet the repeated motifs, the sense of a hopeful if uncertain destiny, are powerful themes and echoes throughout.  The polyphonic structures feed toward longer homophonic phrases of multiple layered harmonies.  Ultimately the richest, most intense harmonies and elaborate ornamentational riffs occur on the lyrics about chasing what is around the bend.  These unproven hopes, the deeply held conviction that even in a world that has been snatched away, where hopes are crushed, there is yet something worth finding up ahead.  It is a liberative theme, a recognition that the world as it is is not the world as it should be.  That better world, even if only partial and fragmented, still calls us forward.

This particular song drew me into recognizing how much a role the soundtrack had played for interpreting the film.  So I went back to review the soundtrack, making note of other songs that had projected an interpretation of the story.  In the process, I realized the way that the defiant imagination was at work in the music and the story.  "Moon River," like "What a Wonderful World," challenges the realities of a world dictated by white supremacy and white vision.  The river, always a potentially dangerous realm of currents, darkness, and hidden dangers, also represents the flow of life, the structures of how land and sea flow one into the other, the constancy of change and possibility of the new.  Ocean's interpretation recognizes both meanings, yet casts its lot with the someday, the dream, the chasing after what may and must be there for us.   Rivers have been a fruitful image to narrate the experiences of African Americans resisting oppression in the U.S.

Mavis Staples sang about lynched black bodies floating in the Mississippi River, that harsh and hateful world in which no black person is safe.  The song of lament was itself an act of defiance for putting into words and music the truth about life and death under a system of racist oppression.  Dissonant tones emphasized the incomprehensibility of such hate.  The lament ends with a call to action to "stop them from going in the river."

Other traditional songs such as "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "Deep River" recognized the danger of a great river's treacherous current and deep waters.  Yet they also saw also great promise in the power of a river that can carry one from harsh circumstances to beauty and joy, even overwhelm an army of enemies.  They sang of a river deep and wide that marked the passageway toward relief from suffering and fulfillment in a land of peace, a true home, a welcome table, a banquet at which they were honored guests.  As we know, all such songs point not only to an afterlife, but also to a promise of goodness toward which the defiant person can strive in this lifetime.  Not only eschatological Jordan, but the Ohio River or the Detroit River as markers of emancipatory power, are part of such songs.

One of my favorite songs and another river song, Kate Campbell's "Lanterns on the Levee" has much in common with this version of "Moon River."  The coming together of two people, by Kate described as the falling rain which enters the river's flow, is again a central message.  Hardships, falls, failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, can be isolating.  They can feel as if one's very life is dissipating, dissolving.  But joined with the strength of the river's strength, that life takes on new possibilities.

You can fall like the rain
And I will be a river, winding forever,
Strong and true.
I'll carry you away to the peaceful waters...

Perhaps Campbell's lyrics possess a different degree of optimism about what may be around the bend, that it will be peaceful.  Yet the offer of shelter recognizes more storms will come, even from beyond the horizon.  The path is winding, and goes on and on toward new horizons.  What it will bring is unknown, but whatever comes will be better through solidarity among those on the journey.

"Moon River" reflects a kind of defiance which looks beyond the so-called realism of the world and sees a truth much deeper.  In a recent conversation with local artist and community leader Pierce Freelon, we discussed something he had said about "creating black spaces without asking permission."  This is part of the defiance I see in this work of art.  Recognizing that the young men who were falsely accused and wrongly incarcerated found themselves at the mercy of a world which saw them as evil, the film and song also help open one's consciousness of building possible worlds that differ from the world that powerful people seek to impose on the rest of us.

A world made for everyone cannot ultimately be hoarded and controlled by a few.  In the midst of the horrors of a world with its designs on breaking, throwing away, and killing young black men, there is yet a remainder of truth, beauty, and goodness which one can glimpse and place one's hope on, just around the bend.  Look around at all those on the journey with you.  Chase the dream with all you've got.