Illustration by Samantha Duran. Courtesy of artworxla.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

Here, our contributors consider the rich building blocks of the public square: personal connections. In our segmented, often lonely world, they are shaking off the blues on the dance floor, telling tall tales over breakfast, and forming friendships through a seven-and-a-half-year-long book club.

They help us answer: How do we find connection in the public square?

The post How Do We Find Connection in the Public Square? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bruce Springsteen was the first artist I saw in concert—in 1976, when I was 15. He had recently graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and journalist Jon Landau, who would later become his manager, had dubbed him “the future of rock ‘n’ roll.” His early Dylan-esque reveries of streetwise characters on the margins, songs like “Sandy” and “Spirit in the Night,” felt lived-in and alive, and evoked charm and scruff. By the time he came out with 1975’s Born to Run, his music’s ever-bigger sound propelled working-class frustration and disillusionment into a high-octane overdrive of expansive dreams and open-road odysseys.

My frustrations were different: I was a lonely, awkward, self-absorbed, diffident suburban teenager, aching for a way out of myself. For me, Springsteen’s songs unlocked a liminal sweet spot between joy and fury that quickened my teenage rebellion fantasies and affirmed my angst-ridden realities.

The second time I saw Springsteen was at Madison Square Garden, in that transitory summer between high school graduation and freshman orientation. By then he was graduating too, from intimate concert spaces to cavernous ones, from Next Big Thing to bona fide rock star.

He brought a new vulnerability to his first-person confessions and laments. When he performed “Adam Raised a Cain”—a lightning-bolt-at-first-listen for me—you could picture him on his knees, pounding the floor, letting out a Brando-esque wail. He wasn’t just telling you about his fraught relationship with his father; this was primal-scream therapy. He was willing, in a room full of tens of thousands of strangers, to offer a sonic squall from the soul. This forced me to sit and listen. A catharsis of that visceral magnitude can power-drive you into silent submission. His concerts were epic transformations, doing what good art does.

As I grew—physically, emotionally, intellectually—I expanded my heart and mind to other music, other sounds, other affirmations. I hosted four different shows as a DJ at my college radio station: punk/new wave, jazz, classical, and the graveyard shift, the most freeform playground of all. I seldom, if ever, played Bruce. My musical palette broadened and deepened. His hadn’t. And while I would forever be in his debt for taking me to new places, I had moved on.

Like old friends from previous chapters in your narrative, some artists are of a certain time and place. The joyful fury and furious joy that fueled Bruce’s music lost its immediate relevance for me. But several decades later, Bruce returned—and I took notice.

In 2016, exactly 40 years after I stood in his audience at my very first concert, Springsteen published his memoir, Born to Run. The following year, as a sort of companion piece, he created and performed his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway, which would later stream on Netflix. These works revealed to me an artist who had foraged through the attics, crawl spaces, and basements of his mind and reconstituted a life. They reminded me of the best aspects of a reunion—as a barometer of personal trajectory and an opportunity for rediscovery and recontextualization, where old friends reimagine friendships. Such became my reconnection with Bruce in my late-middle age—from a mutual place of wisdom and grace.

Media coverage around Born to Run homed in on Bruce’s description of his long battle with depression. Critics found it ironic that one who put everything he had into a four-hour offering of roof-raising exaltation would suffer from an illness that can lock you in a deep, dark world, where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” But as someone who lives with depression, I understood. Depression is a monster; sometimes that monster is Shrek and sometimes it’s Godzilla. You pray for the Shrek days, but you prepare for the Godzilla days, deploying every weapon in your arsenal to keep Godzilla off your trail. And if that means, for Bruce, a scorching guitar solo, a larynx-ripping roar, a band that amplifies your pain, and if it takes four hours, night after night, city after city, then you do it.

With Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce mined his music for a deeper exploration into his process and evolution as an artist, not so much performing the songs we’ve all known for so long but reimagining them to suit the sensibilities of a then-sexegenarian who has seen and felt and lived.

It’s just him, on guitar and piano, with occasional accompaniment from his wife, Patti Scialfa, in a 960-seat Broadway theater. This was a next frontier for Springsteen, where he could center his prowess as a storyteller, scribe, and poet, and reimagine his oeuvre as an evening-length narrative.

Full disclosure: I watched Springsteen on Broadway 3,000 miles from Broadway, in the comfort of my living room in Los Angeles, on Netflix. Just as reading a book is a solo act and a deeply personal interchange between author and reader, watching Springsteen on Broadway let me engage in Bruce’s psychological/emotional/artistic journey. No need for dancing in the dark. Just processing on my own.

This manifestation of vulnerability, of personal excavation, inspired a new appreciation, a different connection—to an artist in service of and in full allegiance to his art, who is still searching, still seeking, but through different means, and who is willing to interrogate the mysteries and wonders of his long odyssey, and all that he created and shared along the way.

We all have chapters in our ongoing narratives that we would rather leave closed and unexamined. Perhaps we’d even want to excise them altogether. But Bruce, in this late-period exhumation, was more than willing to go there. While my teenage fandom was cause for escape, exultation, and empowerment, my late-middle-aged appreciation has inspired me to reexamine my own back pages for deeper truths about where I’ve been, and where I’m going.

The rock icon who once had me in his thrall is today a greater inspiration as a human, endowed with foibles and grace, darkness and light, demons and angels, in equal measure.

The post What Bruce Springsteen Taught Me Then—And Teaches Me Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman made history last year when she became the first Black artist to receive the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year Award, after Luke Combs remade a song she wrote—the 1988 hit “Fast Car”—and it soared to No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart.

If only the late, great Black singer-songwriter Ted Jarrett had been alive to witness Chapman’s achievement. Like Chapman, Jarrett sticks out as a kind of oddity—the rare Black musician who wrote a country No. 1 and became renowned for it. That there are not more examples of hit country songs written by Black songwriters speaks to America’s racial divide, which, for many decades, dictated how music was marketed. The fact is, Chapman’s and Jarrett’s songs, and the country stars who perform them, have a great deal in common. They express in uncomplicated and memorable ways the everyday experiences of everyday Americans. Looking at it that way, Chapman’s CMA honor was not an anomaly; it was inevitable, if long overdue.

Country music and Black folk music are rooted in centuries of symbiotic relationships between southern Black and white singers, songwriters, musicians, and audiences. As early as the 18th century, African American traditional fiddlers were familiar sights on slave plantations in the South. They were “the center of social activities during the evenings for relaxation as well as during holiday festivities, providing music not only for blacks but for the white slave owners on holidays and for their private parties,” wrote musical polymath Terry Jenoure in 1981, in the journal Contributions in Black Studies.

The banjo, an instrument with African origins, became the signature sound of string band and bluegrass music beloved especially by southern white migrants toiling in northern factories and stockyards. Jazz genius Louis Armstrong and his wife Lil Hardin Armstrong accompanied Jimmie Rodgers, one of country music’s first modern superstars, on Rodgers’ 1930 recording of “Blue Yodel #9.” African American harmonica player DeFord Bailey was one of the first artists heard on WSM’s “Grand Ole Opry” radio broadcast. Black country crooner Charley Pride garnered CMAs and Grammys. Ray Charles’s two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums became bestsellers in 1962.

Jarrett’s life and work reflect this give and take.

Theodore Roosevelt “Ted” Jarrett Jr. was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 17, 1925, just more than a month before Nashville station WSM launched the “Grand Ole Opry,” the radio broadcast that turned Nashville into the country music capital. Jarrett’s upbringing was a riches-to-rags story. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Jarrett Sr., earned enough money working for a bootlegging enterprise to enable his family to employ a housekeeper, a cook, and a nurse. But after Ted Sr. was shot and killed, Jarrett’s mother, unable to maintain the family’s standard of living, sent 7-year-old Ted Jr. and his sister, Dorothy, to live with their grandmother and step-grandfather on their Antioch, Tennessee farm. When they were old enough, Ted and Dorothy joined their grandparents in picking cotton and doing other farm work.

Ted always had an imaginative mind, and from knee pants, he spent what little free time he had writing poems. In his pre-teen years, Jarrett was intrigued by newspaper ads that shouted about the “thousands of dollars” to be made by submitting song poems, or lyrics, for publication. Ignoring his step-grandfather’s dismissive retort that “Black boys don’t write songs,” and with surreptitious support from his grandmother, Ted eagerly sent samples of his song-poems to the advertisers. To his dismay, the so-called publishers turned out to be nothing more than “song sharks” who preyed on the hopes of amateur lyricists, only to defraud them in the end.

Disappointed but not daunted, Jarrett made music throughout high school, and enrolled in the music program at Fisk University after graduation. He had to delay his studies when he was drafted during World War II, and again later, when his GI Bill money ran out. To pay the bills, he dove full-time into Nashville’s postwar music scene, fitting in a class or two at Fisk whenever he had extra money.

Jarrett wrote songs and pitched them to Music City publishers. He also worked as a disc jockey on pioneering African American radio station WSOK, as a pianist in the city’s then-booming R&B club circuit, as a talent scout for the R&B and country label Tennessee Records and, briefly, as tour manager for Nashville’s Radio Four gospel quartet. In 1955, his song “It’s Love Baby (24 Hours a Day)” became an R&B hit for local unit Louis Brooks and His Hi-Toppers, and for bigger stars like Ruth Brown, and the vocal group the Midnighters.

Jarrett wrote his first No. 1 Country hit, “Love, Love, Love,” that same year. The song, an exuberant pledge of eternal affection, caught the attention of Webb Pierce, a white singer, guitarist, songwriter, and Opry star known for wearing elaborately decorated “Nudie Suits.” Pierce’s version of “Love, Love, Love,” which gave Jarrett’s song a pedal-steel-drenched reading that sounded like a long-lost Hank Williams piece, spent 32 weeks on the U.S. country chart, eight at number No. 1. In November 1955, Billboard presented the song with a Triple Crown Award for being the most played country record on radio and jukeboxes, and the best-selling country record in stores. The December 10, 1955 issue of the trade magazine the Cash Box featured a smiling Jarrett holding 78 rpm singles of three versions of the song: one by Pierce, one by pop crooner Johnny Ray on Columbia, and his own recording for Nashville imprint Excello.

From there, Jarrett grabbed the music industry with both hands. Music, regardless of genre or marketing category, was his passion. He championed Black artists who crossed over from R&B to pop, managed acts, and founded record labels such as Calvert, Champion, Ref-O-Ree, and T-Jaye. In total, Jarrett wrote approximately 300 songs, several of them portending the rise of southern soul music. The Rolling Stones covered “You Can Make It If You Try,” arguably Jarrett’s best known composition, on their eponymous 1964 debut album. All the while, Jarrett never gave up on his dream of a college degree, receiving a bachelor’s in music from Fisk University in 1974, when he was in his late 40s.

But all of Jarrett’s success didn’t shield him from the racism embedded in the music industry. Take an incident in 1956, when the Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), an organization that represents songwriters and music composers and publishers, saluted Jarrett and “Love, Love, Love” at Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel. Arriving in black tie at the hotel where his mother once worked, Jarrett was stopped at the door by a white police officer who thought he was trying to crash the party. The mishap was quickly rectified, but Jarrett reflected in his 2005 memoir that initially “all the people inside [the event] stared at me, wondering what a black man was doing at the country awards.”

Jarrett only had one big country hit. But he maintained a relationship with the country music community by helping the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum curate “Night Train to Nashville,” a 2004-2005 exhibit that chronicled Nashville’s significant but often overlooked contributions to R&B. A two-album compilation inspired by the exhibit earned a Grammy in 2005 for Best Historical Recording. (Today, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, you can view the “Night Train to Nashville” exhibit online.)

By his death at age 83 in March 2009, Jarrett had showed his step-grandfather, and the world, that “Black boys” could write songs, even hit country songs for white artists. More importantly, Jarrett—and now Chapman—demonstrated that a good song is a good song, no matter who sings it, when, where, or in what genre.

The post The Black Songwriter Who Took Nashville by Storm appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s Zócalo’s 20th birthday, and we hit the two decade milestone running—we hosted 21 events in 2023 to fulfill our mission of connecting people to ideas and to each other.

At our homebase at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles, we discussed some of the biggest issues of the day—from artificial intelligence to surveillance. We enjoyed a special homecoming, hosting our first-ever event steps away from our namesake: Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución, otherwise known as the Zócalo, one of the largest public squares in the world. We traversed California, from Sacramento to Riverside, to discuss the needs of workers in low-wage sectors of the state’s economy. We traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, and to Memphis, Tennessee, to consider how sins of the past shape the present, and what might move us forward. We even threw a dance party—shout out to all 700 of you who boogied with us at the Port of L.A. on a Sunday afternoon!

Picking our favorite public programs each year is never easy, but these seven events reflect the variety of our work—and most importantly, kept us talking long after the discussions wrapped. Whether you came in person or watched virtually, you’re what makes our public square so robust. Thanks for being part of Zócalo, and we look forward to continuing the conversation next year.

Do We Need More Food Fights?

This emotional conversation and cooking demonstration brought together photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini, who compiled a cookbook that collects recipes from the families of desaparecidos—the tens of thousands of people who have gone missing in Mexico—and Maite Gomez-Rejón, a culinary historian and co-host of the “Hungry for History” podcast. Livestreamed and in person from LA Cocina de Gloria Molina’s demonstration kitchen in downtown L.A., the women prepared special guest Blanca Soto’s pozole from the cookbook and spoke about the power of a meal. Cooking does not just satisfy our hunger, they noted, but can also unite us, and in this case reunite us, with those who are no longer here. The special event, presented in partnership with LA Cocina de Gloria Molina and California Humanities, was part of our birthday series “What Connects Us?”

The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize: How Does a Community Save Itself? With Michelle Wilde Anderson

For 13 years, Zócalo has honored the author of the best nonfiction book that explores community and social connection, inviting them to visit us to collect their prize—$10,000 and a nifty Zócalo Rubik’s Cube—and deliver a lecture. In June, this year’s honoree Michelle Wilde Anderson arrived at a packed house at the ASU California Center and shared stories of hope from The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, her book looking at the communities of Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Detroit, Michigan; and Lawrence, Massachusetts. “We have to invest in people where they live,” she told the evening’s moderator, Alberto Retana, president and CEO of South L.A.’s Community Coalition. The program also featured poet Paige Buffington, who joined us virtually to read her 2023 Zócalo Poetry Prize-winning submission, “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque.” And, because this kicked off Zócalo’s 20th birthday celebration, the night ended with cake.

What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?

The gloves were off at the ring (okay, the ASU California Center) as panelists—professional boxer and actress Kali “KO” Mequinonoag Reis, former middleweight champ Sergio “the Latin Snake” Mora, California State Athletic Commission executive director Andy Foster, and sport and ethnic studies scholar Rudy Mondragón—shared candid perspectives on the state of their sport. The discussion, presented in partnership with UCLA College, Division of Social Sciences and ASU Global Sport Institute, called for more protections for athletes and left the audience with a major question: What will be left of professional boxing if it does not do more to protect its athletes’ physical and financial well-being?

What Is a Good Job Now? For Fairness in the Workplace

What better way to get the attention of California politicians than by convening a conversation right on the Capitol steps in Sacramento? As part of the Zócalo Public Square series supported by The James Irvine Foundation, “What Is a Good Job Now?,” we brought together California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, founding member of Inland Empire Amazon Workers United Sara Fee, and California Labor Commissioner assistant chief Daniel Yu for a memorable conversation on wage theft, unpaid overtime, dangerous working conditions, discrimination, and rising employer retaliation, moderated by our own Joe Mathews.

What Is the Value of Art?

Nobody called the fire department on us, but so many people showed up for this powerhouse night of arts and culture that we had to open a separate screening room. In anticipation of the international art fair Frieze Los Angeles, we curated a conversation on the state of the art world, inviting LAXART director Hamza Walker, artist and activist Andrea Bowers, writer and curator Helen Molesworth, and artist, cultural organizer, and co-founder of Meztli Projects Joel Garcia to break down some of artists’ greatest aesthetic, moral, and financial challenges, as well as their biggest opportunities for social change and community building.

How Does a Community Move With Music? A Diaspora Dance Party

We came. We shared our songs and stories of L.A. And we danced. We danced a lot. Zócalo’s first-ever dance party (another birthday series event), held at the Wilmington Waterfront Park at the Port of Los Angeles, was a smashing success. Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, the inaugural contributor to our ongoing “Diaspora Jukebox” playlist series, emceed. KCRW DJ Raul Campos and local Wilmington DJ Mario “Dred” Lopez kept the music flowing. Curation from Levitt Pavilion and performances by Pacifico Dance Company and Korean Classical Music and Dance Company wowed the crowd. If you needed a break from the dancing, we had food vendors, an art activation by LA Commons, and a pop-up Wilmington Art Walk at the ready. And glow sticks. So many glow sticks.

How Do We Hear America? A Special Evening of Music by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Raven Chacon

We thought our final program of 2023 was pretty special, and you did, too: Zócalo’s audience voted “How Do We Hear America?” as the fan favorite event of the year. This night of music, co-presented with L.A.-based music collective wasteLAnd, ASU Gammage, and GRoW Annenberg, brought us together at the ASU California Center to watch and listen as the ensemble brought a selection of composer and musician Raven Chacon’s works to life. With our senses activated by the music and our bellies warm with tamales from Mama’s Tamales, and Tacos, Too, we think we ended the year on a high note.

The post Our Favorite Public Programs of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“American Ledger no. 1” sounds different each time.

That’s by design, MacArthur fellow Raven Chacon told Zócalo before a performance of his ambitious sound and visual retelling of the nation was staged at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles. The event concluded Zócalo’s 2023 public programs season.

Aside from the abstract shapes that appear on the score and the notes Chacon provides to the conductor and musicians, the musical expression is left up to interpretation. Some sounds and actions occur regularly: throwing coins when a bunch of dots show up. Lighting a match when you see an eighth note with a flame. But other elements vary widely, from the instruments used to other ways sound is conveyed. (For example, because the ASU California Center does not allow axes, the performers last night had to get creative when the score suggested chopping wood.)

“I’m very open to what somebody might bring to this, as long as they are trying to tell the very serious and violent history of the United States,” Chacon said.

The special evening of music, co-presented with L.A.-based music collective wasteLAnd, ASU Gammage, and GRoW Annenberg, began in the historic lobby of the Herald Examiner building, with another Chacon creation, the call-and-response duet “Echo Contest.” As the audience followed the music into the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Event Center, performers embedded in the audience to create a blanketing—yet assertive—effect.

A voiceover from Chacon explained what each line of the score for “American Ledger no. 1,” rendered in the shape of the American flag and supersized on the screen so the audience could follow along, represented.

First, there is a blank space: a time before humans, and maybe animals, “where we don’t remember what existed here on this land.” Topography—stars, mountains, landscape—follows. A continuation of this “uninterrupted lineage of this worldview” is only offset by ships being built from the other side of the world, coming closer and closer. The following lines continue the story: Colonies are built, humans are labeled not five-fifths but three-fifths of a person, the economy grows, and commerce expands; all the while, a steady beat of inequality drums on. By the sixth line, things are either speeding up or slowing down—maybe there’s revolt or protest or assassination, Chacon suggests.

The final line is open-ended: “We don’t know what happens,” he says.

After the show concluded, the audience enjoyed refreshments and tamales from Mama’s Tamales, and Tacos, Too.

“The coins—line four, line five—that was actually the best sounds for me,” an audience member, Andrew Choate, said while chatting with one of the ensemble members, William Roper (who played the helicon, a brass instrument in the tuba family), after the performance.

But Choate said that he had to plug his ears during the police whistles: “That was too harsh.”

“It was harsh,” Roper agreed, “but we live in a harsh land.”

The post Hearing America in Matchsticks, Police Whistles, and Clanking Coins appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hailed as a truth-teller and a champion of Black empowerment, disparaged as a hoodlum with a hot temper whose lyrics glorify violent behavior, the late rapper and actor Tupac Shakur continues to be remembered in contested ways, more than 25 years after his murder in a drive-by shooting. In 2023 alone, FX aired a five-part docuseries on him, at least three different writers authored books about him, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce awarded him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a long-overdue arrest and indictment has finally been made in his murder investigation.

I’ve thought a lot about Shakur, beginning in the 1990s when I was a teenage fan of his music and more recently during the four years I’ve spent researching, writing, and promoting my book, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. During this time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the public continues to overlook Shakur’s greatest legacy: that of a messenger steeped in the Black prophetic tradition, blending spirituality and liberation theology with social justice advocacy—conveying principled messages meant to deliver Black people in this life and thereafter.

To be sure, Tupac Shakur was an imperfect messenger. He was brash, profane, and often vulgar. He faced repeated arrest and incarceration for alleged assault and other offenses. He drank liquor, smoked blunts, and celebrated promiscuity. But Shakur at the same time was a harsh critic of police brutality, he advocated for women’s reproductive rights, and condemned wealth inequality in America. More than anything, he was deeply committed to his core demographic: young Black men. To Shakur, young Black men were lost sheep in the wilderness of North America—banished and besieged, feared and misunderstood—and he longed to be their redeemer, even if it meant offering his own life as a cautionary tale.

If Shakur could be said to have a creed or doctrine, it would be the doctrine of Thug Life. Many people assumed he was promoting hooliganism, but, Shakur explained, Thug Life was an acronym for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”—meaning the injustices children face at a young age have repercussions on society at large. Thug Life, to Shakur, was his way of reaching his folks where they were at, without judgment or reproach.

“Young Black males out there identify with Thug Life because I’m not trying to clean them up,” he said. “I am, but I’m not saying come to me clean. I’m saying come as you are.”

In 1962, over a decade before Shakur was born, the writer James Baldwin reflected on his brief stint as a child preacher at a Pentecostal church in Harlem. In his essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” first published by the New Yorker and later reprinted in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin describes what he’d perceived as the hypocrisy, arrogance, and gospel of submissiveness endorsed by the Black Church, and the feeling that the church had abandoned the urgent needs of the people, encouraging them “to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life.” He wondered why they couldn’t organize around something tangible, like “a rent strike,” and he asked: “Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?”

Thirty years later, Shakur’s 1993 song, “I Wonda if Heaven’s Got a Ghetto,” has clear parallels to Baldwin’s essay. The song, a B-side to his anthemic single “Keep Ya Head Up,” contrasts the pie-in-the-sky promises of the church to the real-life ills facing his community: police brutality, poverty, drug addiction, and other ills. Unlike Baldwin, though, Shakur seems to be asking not if heaven will replicate the same segregated and deplorable conditions as America’s inner cities, but whether heaven will welcome with open arms all the subjugated people who suffered, struggled, and rebelled against their conditions.

Early on in his career, Shakur realized that when the church fails to reach the people most in need, it’s the militants, hustlers, or entertainers who will fill that need, and he would embrace all three roles interchangeably. At the same time, Shakur didn’t shy away from rebuking the church for not doing enough to address his community’s needs. In a 1996 VIBE interview, he acts as an interrogator of the church and its function in society: “If the churches took half the money that they was making and gave it back to the community, we’d be a’ight,” Shakur says. “Have you seen one of these goddamn churches lately? It’s ones that take up the whole block in New York. It’s homeless people out here. Why ain’t God lettin’ them stay there? Why these n****s got gold ceilings and shit? Why God need gold ceilings to talk to me?”

Consciously or not, Shakur’s demands for the church and society at large to pay attention to the unmet needs of Black Americans links him directly to the Black prophetic tradition, exemplified not only by Baldwin, but also Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ida B. Wells, and many others. The Black prophetic tradition, with roots that date back to the arrival of enslaved Africans to the American colonies, is a rhetorical tradition, rooted in (but not confined by) the Black Church, bearing witness to injustice, speaking truth to power, and boldly condemning White supremacy. The role of the prophet—from the days of Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and Daniel, to today—is not to mollify but to rebuke a nation that has deviated from principles of justice and righteousness. Black prophetic fire is a forewarning of grim and dire consequences, both for America and the world, if Black and other marginalized people continue to be persecuted. As the theologian James H. Cone writes in his 1970 book, A Black Theology of Liberation, “The black prophet is a rebel with a cause, the cause of over twenty-five million black Americans and all oppressed persons everywhere.”

This, to me, defines Tupac Shakur. In the many hours I’ve spent reexamining his music and listening closely to his words, I’ve come to appreciate him beyond his reputation as a brash and hotheaded young nihilist. The recent influx of products, programs, and conversations related to Shakur proves I’m not alone in this reconsideration and recognition. Shakur was a bearer of difficult truths, a fiery and zealous critic of injustice, and a fierce advocate for the liberation and deliverance of the downtrodden. These are the responsibilities of the prophet. The prophet’s role is not to power over the people but to empower people to better themselves and envision a better world. “I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world,” Shakur said, “but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.”

‘Nearly three decades after his death, Shakur’s millions of listeners across the world—young fans and oldheads like myself—continue to parse Shakur’s words, as though conducting biblical exegesis, seeking meaning and inspiration in his lyrics and interviews. As Black American men are killed by police officers at a staggering rate, as the gulf between rich and poor grows wider, and as drug addiction and overdose deaths continue to disproportionately affect communities of color, Shakur’s words remain as relevant and important—indeed as prophetic—as ever before.

The post Tupac Was an Imperfect Prophet appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, Chacon’s music is having a moment. In 2022, his composition for church organ and ensemble “Voiceless Mass”—a piece that “considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power”—won a Pulitzer Prize. And in August 2023, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Chacon its prestigious “Genius” grant, lauding his “practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music” to activate “spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

On December 14, Zócalo and partners wasteLAnd, GRoW Annenberg, and ASU Gammage present “How Do We Hear America?,” an evening showcasing performances of two Chacon works: “American Ledger No. 1,” an ensemble piece performed beneath a giant, flag-inspired score that tells the creation story of the U.S.; and “Echo Contest,” a call-and-response duet that plays with notions of distance. The program will take place at the historic ASU California Center, in downtown Los Angeles. (Tickets are free. Sign up here.)

Zócalo’s editorial director Eryn Brown caught up with Chacon over Zoom to talk about the saxophone sitting on his couch, how Los Angeles influences his work, and what it means to be American.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Raven Chacon Makes Noise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

They drove from Van Nuys, Boyle Heights, and Long Beach. They biked from Santa Monica. And they made the short walk from just down the street for “How Does a Community Move With Music? A Diaspora Dance Party” at Wilmington Waterfront Park at the Port of Los Angeles on Sunday.

In total, more than 700 people (kids, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, community leaders, and neighbors) stopped by to take part in a celebration of culture and connection put on by Zócalo and several community partners—the Port of L.A., Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles, The Music Center, Wilmington Chamber of Commerce, Wilmington Art Walk, LA Commons, KCRW, and the Los Angeles Times—with generous support from Atom Tickets.

L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano was emcee

The party began in the afternoon and went on well past sunset. Guests enjoyed sets from KCRW DJ Raul Campos and local Wilmington DJ Mario “Dred” Lopez, performances by Pacifico Dance Company and Korean Classical Music and Dance Company, food vendors, art activities by LA Commons, and a pop-up Wilmington Art Walk. Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, the first contributor to the “Diaspora Jukebox” playlist series, emceed.

That series, part of Zócalo’s 20th birthday editorial and events offering, “What Connects Us,” celebrates songs beloved by Angelenos, the ones that get us up and moving at a wedding, help us through heartbreak, and play again and again, remixed across generations. Whether it’s Sublime or Selena or Celine, bolero or bebop or bhangra, these songs form a community’s playlists. And strung together, these playlists form Los Angeles’ jukebox, reflecting its kaleidoscopic culture.

The series inspired the dance party, and the DJs infused their sets with songs from these playlists, from “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” by the GAP Band to “Cha Cha Slide” by DJ Casper. 

Before the dance floor opened, Arellano introduced L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn, L.A. City Councilmember Tim McOsker, and former L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who all spoke of the power of music and community before shaking their hips with the crowd.

L.A. City Councilmember Tim McOsker

Former mayor of L.A. Antonio Villaraigosa

L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn (left) with Zócalo editor Talib Jabbar (right)

Dred Lopez, who grew up in Wilmington, was the first to hit the decks. “I’ve always wanted to be a DJ since I was a teenager,” he told Zócalo. “I used to DJ at my parents’ family parties. And little by little they were like, ‘You’re good.’”

Eclectic selections from both Dred and KCRW’s Campos held significance for people in the audience. “I grew up in L.A. in the ’90s, so anything ’90s hip-hop related, I’m all in,” said Julian Martinez, who came with a group from Mid-City. When “Como la Flor” played from the speakers, Pacifico Dance Company member Alina Hernández, who had just taken the stage to perform the company’s signature mix of modern and traditional styles of Mexican dance, told Zócalo that Selena was “a huge inspiration” for her. “I’m always trying to embody that stage presence she had,” she said.

Between the flurry of breakdancing, two-stepping, and a Korean-stylized fan dance, and amid a sea of glow sticks and a warm Pacific breeze, patrons enjoyed pizza from a mobile oven, treated themselves to chocolate-dipped paletas, and perused art from local vendors.

DJ Mario "Dred" Lopez

DJ Raul Campos

Pacifico Dance Company performing Mexican folklórico dances

Korean Classical Music & Dance Company performing a fan dance

In addition to cutting the cement rug, audience members added songs to a new Spotify playlist meant to complement Zócalo’s Jukebox—to share the music that means something to them and their communities.

Long Beach resident Joseph Cabral said that she added “Amor Eternal” by Juan Gabriel. “It’s always played at funerals and moments where you’re trying to remember people. It’s a song that is grieving the loss of a source of love in your life. The Juan Gabriel version makes me think of my grandma and her connection to Juarez, and the music scene there.”

Campos closed the night with “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire—a call for us all to keep our hearts ringin’ and our souls singin’. The spirit of the Diaspora Dance Party and “What Connects Us” was apparent—connecting the multiple places we call home together on one dance floor, at one moment, with each other.

The post A Song and Dance for Los Angeles’ Cultures and Communities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The songs I’ve selected for this collective “Diaspora Jukebox” come from those parts of me that are activated by moments when I was moved, both literally and figuratively. This includes the many times I was moved from one place to another, which happened a lot with my musician parents—from the Philippines, to Hawai’i, back to the Philippines, and eventually to Southern California, which I’ve been lucky to call home since 1983—when I was 10 years old—with only a few excursions north and east.

These songs are also the irresistible hooks and beats that moved me: Songs that made me acutely aware of love, even if I wasn’t on the receiving end of it. Songs that made me anxious with lust, or that offered the first stirrings of queerness before I ever gave myself the permission to be who I was destined to become. This music forced me to overcome my butch awkwardness and lack of aptitude for choreography to get on the floor and move with the people who would eventually become my community, my world.

Love songs do a lot of work, but now, squarely in middle age, I recognize the cycles of longing that evolve inside and around us. When I was young, I’d hear these songs and say, “I hope to feel that way someday.” When I became a full-fledged adult, I said, “I know now what it means to feel that way.” As someone older, wiser, happily settled into who I am, where I am, and who I’m with, now I hear the life-and-death ardency in this music and say, “Oh, to have once felt that way.” While I’m grateful that my limbic system is no longer flooded with that level of anxious uncertainty, re-inhabiting these songs sends me through and across time and space, tumbling through that cycle of unknowing, knowing, and back again. I invite you to hear it too.

“Mr. DJ,” Sharon Cuneta (1978)

This voice belongs to one of the Philippines’ grande dames of cinematic love teams and saccharine song-stylings: Sharon Cuneta. “Mr. DJ” was her breakout hit back in 1978, the year my mom and I first left the Philippines to move to Hawai’i. I was 5, and Sharon was 12.

Sharon Cuneta was my first unrequited crush. Her crooning on “Mr. DJ” sounds mature for its age, yet it’s still a little coltish. She asks Mr. DJ (quite politely, peppering her refrain with lots of thank yous and apologies) to play her favorite love song, just in case her dear-heart will hear it and remember their time together. Sadly, her beloved is with someone else now, and the song itself has grown old.

“Mr. DJ” was the score for my many movements back and forth across the Pacific before I finally made it to the mainland in 1983. Even though it is in Tagalog, something about it always anticipated “America” for me. Maybe it’s the lilting, waltzing heartbreak that could very well be out of a Doris Day song. Cuneta’s scooping, mellifluous voice is on the verge of falling completely into rubato, like the old timey voices on the radio she sings about. That resemblance makes it a song accented by empire—by that ’50s All-American girl next door, as well as by her more wan, cinematic echo in 1978: Olivia Newton John as Sandy in Grease. But there’s also something undeniably and persistently Pinay about it. Maybe, the lilt is not simply a waltz, but the doubled upbeats of a folk dance from the Visayas.

“The Ghost in You,” Psychedelic Furs (1984)

When I was 11 years old, only a year into living in a tract home in Riverside, my parents saved up to buy me a banana yellow 10-speed from Sears with a brown pleather seat and handlebars. I deeply appreciated the fact that my dad insisted I get the boys’ version of the bike with the bar that ran straight across, instead of the girls’ with the scooped frame, which I always found weirdly patronizing—one’s femininity shouldn’t be threatened by throwing one’s leg over a bicycle bar. But then again, I was never the type to wear a dress or skirt while riding a bike.

Once—I don’t remember why—we were somewhere in the woods, and my parents let me ride freely across the flat trails with my Walkman on. I’d recorded this song off the radio and listened to it over and over and over again as I rode, flush with my first sense of freedom while simultaneously lulled into contentment by Richard Butler’s accented British voice telling me that “ayngels foll lyke rayn…”

“A Ray of Sunshine,” Wham! (1983)

I’ve never quite sorted out whether my love of Wham!, and of George Michael specifically, marked the dawn of my homosexuality or the peak of my heterosexuality. At the very least, my adolescent lust for George was an elaborate pantomime of what I thought straight behavior was: thirsting over a naturally hirsute man who was meticulously manscaped to show off his tanned, toned leg muscles.

A child of the ’80s, I didn’t know much about disco, and knew nothing at all of the leather gay aesthetic of Tom of Finland, so, I didn’t register that the “boys like you … so bad through and through,” white-rapping like they were Blondie on tracks like “Bad Boys,” were actually disco-dancing leather daddies in capri jeans who “woke up every morning with … a bass line, a ray of sunshine.”

Now, I joke that George Michael was my first gay love. This song taught me so much about myself and my desires, and it continues to do so.

“Lover to Fall,” Scritti Politti (1985)

Green Gartside’s voice—legibly post-pubescent, yet indeterminately gendered—became my proto-queer siren song in the mid-1980s, as I was transitioning out of my pubescent attachment to the tortured, whiny virility of New Ro’ tenors like Simon Le Bon and, of course, George Michael.

When music writers gush about Cupid & Psyche ‘85, the album “Lover to Fall” appeared on, it’s for its airtight samples and soulful-but-robotic pop sound that would become ubiquitous by 1988. But relatively little is said about the strange power of Green’s voice, an oddly thin and flaccid one for a white male singer to brandish in the pop landscape of the mid-1980s, which was ruled by the turgid Miller-Lite rockism of Huey Lewis and his Sports-bros.

Green gushes in “Lover to Fall” (which bears a spiritual resemblance to Madonna’s 1989 song “Cherish”): “I found a new hermeneutic; I found a new paradigm; I found a plan just to make you mine.” This song made seduction as a wordy enterprise part of my proto-queer toolkit, showing me how to transpose gender trouble into beautifully gnarled, stupefying phrases (like this one). It’s a tool I still use today as a queer scholar and writer.

“Good Beat,” Deee-Lite (1991)

I became a bona fide queer when Deee-Lite came into my life. Though “Groove is in the Heart” was the track that became an unofficial anthem for my 1991 high school graduating class—alongside Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up,” and C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” which was performed at my grad night at Disneyland—“Good Beat” wins a spot on this list because it created the occasion for my gayness to fully blossom.

My friend David Diaz introduced me to Deee-Lite. I’d known him for as long as I’d gone to school in SoCal. When we were in sixth grade together, people tried to pair us up, assuming that his effeminacy and my tomboyishness would make for an appealing and respectable straight couple. But neither of us would surrender to the social pressures of bearding. By the time we started community college together, and just before I transferred to UCLA, we were having house parties all night, transforming ’80s-era Spanish-style tract homes in the Inland Empire into mini rave dens, where we flaunted our thrift store finds and consumed Boone’s Farm by the gallon.

It was on one of those nights, riding the high of “Good Beat” in my sequined “wizard dress,” that I first kissed a girl and liked it very much.

“First of the Gang to Die,” Morrissey (2004)

No matter how you cut it, Morrissey was going to end up on this list. And if my California-inspired Anglophilia wasn’t problematic enough (read all about it in the Inland Empire chapter of my first book, Relocations), I’ve picked a song on the cusp of the “Bad Morrissey” era, when he began to speak all too freely about his disdain for immigrants and pop artists of color. Writers like Melissa Mora Hidalgo and others have gone deep into why his music and his popularity endure amongst the communities he insults most, so I needn’t go into that here.

Suffice it to say, this song made it to my playlist because it captures the moment I returned to Los Angeles after seven years of graduate school in the Bay Area, where I lost touch with the queer-of-color worlds that had nurtured me in my Southern California adolescence. Animated by new friendships, especially with writers and performers like Raquel Gutiérrez, Claudia Rodríguez, and Mari Garcia (who collaborated on a performance project called Butchlalis de Panochtitlan), I spent those first few years back in Los Angeles reveling with them in the lights that never went out, watching “the stars reflect in the reservoirs …”

“Maroon,” Taylor Swift (2022)

Like any basic butch, for the better part of the last 17 years I benignly appreciated Taylor and enjoyed most of her hit songs. But it wasn’t until March of 2023, when my sister-in-law invited me to my 5-year-old nephew’s first concert—the opening night of the Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona—that I fully blossomed into a “Swiftie at Fifty.” Not only was I properly stunned by the breadth and depth of Taylor’s oeuvre, I was impressed by her capacity to entertain us for over three hours, with a set of 44 songs that barely scratched the surface of her catalogue.

Shortly after that, I spent some time in Australia as a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney—including several nights out on the town during World Pride, dancing at the Stonewall Hotel to remixes of Taylor, Miley, and, of course, Kylie. Building on my transcendental experience at the Eras tour, these excursions morphed me into one of those most twisted and passionate over-readers of the Swiftian universe known as “Gaylors.” While it’s unlikely I—or anyone—will ever truly verify Taylor Swift’s “gayness,” the veracity of such claims is far from the point. Listening to Taylor Swift’s music feels gay to me because it keeps bringing me back to myself: to the longings, hopes, disappointments, and painful outcomes irrevocably bound up with some of our happiest moments.

In this sense, Taylor Swift is a consummate writer of torch songs. More than a century ago, Oscar Wilde committed many clever and intricate sentences to describing how romance and realism are interwoven. “Maroon” does this splendidly, elevating “your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top rosé” into an accidental totem of intimacy that reaches its peak just before it spirals toward a shattering end. “That’s a real fucking legacy to leave.”

“Getting to Know You,” Julie Andrews (1992)

In her final hours, barely able to open her eyes, my grandmother Linda Katindig waved one of her hands in the air in time with the music on a playlist I had made of her favorite songs. A smile crept over her face as she gently slipped away into the embrace of a familiar melody. Or at least that’s what I told myself then, to soothe my unbearable grief.

Call me morbid, as Morrissey used to say (before we knew what he really thinks about to eschew the earworms he wrote), but I’ve been thinking a lot about what songs might welcome me when I am eventually “called home.” I don’t necessarily mean when I die, though I don’t NOT mean that either. I’m talking about the music lodged in our unconscious. The tunes that live “rent free in our heads,” as the youth (or at least people younger than me) like to say—in the inner landscapes of ourselves. These unconscious terrains of attachment, longing and love are also, at least for me, the pathways to material environs: the real places and hardscapes that shape our lifetimes.

The post Karen Tongson’s Diaspora Jukebox Playlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I sat down to write my memoir FIRST GEN, I was struck by the music that regularly played in my head as I sifted through decades worth of memories: ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s, ’10s.

The songs that came rushing back were specific, eclectic, and almost contradictory. In many ways, they mirrored the twisty, nonlinear journey of being a “First and Only,” the term I use in my book to describe those who are the first in their family to cross a societal threshold.

It’s why I wrote FIRST GEN in the first place—to challenge our inclination to smooth over the emotional cost of social mobility for those who are First and Onlys, as well as to normalize an experience that can feel deeply isolating, despite being widespread.

I eventually came to understand that these songs symbolized and encapsulated too much to serve only as inspiration. They were meant to be chapter titles, laying out the musical soundtrack of my book.

In honor of National First-Generation College week, I invite you to journey with me through these songs that, in many ways, are sense memories—evoking sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings related to particular moments in time that I revisit in FIRST GEN.

“Fast Car” (Tracy Chapman)/Chapter 1

When I was a child, my grandmother Abi (short for abuelita) and I would sweep the leaves off of the sidewalk outside of our apartment building, as fast cars whizzed by on Lincoln Boulevard. I remember watching the cars and wondering about the people inside of them—who they were and where they were going. At the time, there were seven of us crammed into a three-bedroom, and financial insecurity engulfed our daily lives. While we swept, I’d imagine I was Cinderella—poor, yet only temporarily. Unknown, yet soon to be discovered. I was convinced that one day, I’d be a part of something that truly mattered in the world. It’s the same feeling of blind faith and hope amid struggle (and despite the odds) that is evoked when I hear the melancholy guitar and lyrics of “Fast Car”—“I had a feeling that I belonged. I had a feeling I could be someone.”

“Born on the Bayou” (Creedence Clearwater Revival)/Chapter 2

My mom loves telling stories about her time as a teenager in Tecate, Mexico. Back then, she would often ride her bike to the U.S.-Mexico border and raise her cheap transistor radio over her head in the air until it picked up the signal from American stations. The fact that she didn’t speak English at the time made no difference. She loved listening to Janis Joplin and the Beatles, and would sing along despite not understanding the words she was saying. One of her favorite songs was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou.” You can’t help but feel a sense of anticipation, defiance, and adventure when you hear the first few notes of the song. For those of us who are First and Onlys, ancestral inheritance—the place where we are born (and to whom)—can feel especially complex. “Born on the Bayou” captures the spirit and audacity of the women who came before me and the constellation of legacies—both difficult and inspiring—that were set into motion decades before I was born.

“Amor Eterno” (Juan Gabriel)/Chapter 2

It’s hard for me to hear this song and not tear up. Same goes for my mom. “Amor Eterno” and Juan Gabriel are so closely associated with our memories of my grandmother Abi. In my childhood apartment, we had a record player with a little stack of beloved and well-worn records. Al Green, Billie Holiday, and the most threadbare of them all: Juan Gabriel. Abi played this record when she cleaned, when she cooked, when she did pretty much anything. Often, we’d find her cleaning with tears in her eyes because the song “Amor Eterno,” in particular, brought back a tidal wave of memories of her mother. Little did she know that one day, my mom and I would play “Amor Eterno” and our eyes would swell remembering her.

“Keep Their Heads Ringin’” (Dr. Dre)/Chapter 4

I remember exactly where I was sitting the first time I heard this song. I was a sophomore at Saint Monica High School at the time and my boyfriend Spider and I were watching music videos on MTV in my living room. All of a sudden, “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” came on, with its unmistakable G-funk sound and bass line. As Spider and I sat on the couch bobbing our heads, he started throwing up gang signs to the beat. I thought he was the coolest guy I’d ever met. Falling for Spider is one of the central stories of my teenage years, a time when I struggled to balance bicultural identities that felt contradictory at times. G-funk remains on heavy rotation in my car and home to this day, yet few songs bring back memories as vivid “Keep Their Heads Ringin.’”

“Crash Into Me” (Dave Matthews Band)/Chapter 5

Several artists stand out from my undergrad years at USC—Jimmy Buffet, Sublime, AC/DC—but no one seemed more ubiquitous in those days than Dave Matthews Band. I had never heard of them before I set foot on campus in the fall of ’97, and it wasn’t the kind of music I normally listened to. Soon I had no choice. It echoed out of open fraternity house windows on sunny California days, set the mood late at night for many a hook-up, and would come on as the “last dance” song at themed house parties. I heard “Crash Into Me” a lot during those college years, so much so that its smooth guitar riffs instantly take me back to the precariousness of that time. It was a time when I crashed into a new social class and foreign environment on every level, including the music.

“On the Bound” (Fiona Apple)/Chapter 6

Fiona Apple put into words many of the twisty and confusing emotions that were coming up for me in my post-college years. I thought graduating from college meant I’d be set with a great job, financial security, and a sense of direction. Instead, I found myself taking a string of random jobs, sleeping on a futon in my friend’s living room, and waiting tables as I tried to figure out how to stay afloat. It was an approach that fell apart when my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Imagining she’d die soon after her diagnosis (like Abi had) and leave me with an 11-year-old sister to raise as a single mother in my early twenties, I saw the time to pursue my dreams as having run out. I’d drive around L.A. in my Jeep Wrangler blasting Fiona Apple’s album When the Pawn..., and the song “On the Bound,” in particular, and feel a hybrid cocktail of demoralized, desperate, and disappointed in myself. The pounding drums and Fiona’s wailing cries gave voice to the pain I was swallowing. “Maybe some faith would do me good” she says at the end. And I had to agree.

“How to Save a Life” (The Fray)/Chapter 7

I associate “How to Save a Life” with going to the laundromat in the snow. It’s perhaps not the most romantic of scenes but to a born-and-bred Angeleno in awe of the changing seasons while attending graduate school at Harvard, I felt like I was living in the most beautiful of snow globes. When our hampers overflowed with sweaters and sweatshirts, my roommates and I would pile into a car and head to the laundromat, doing weeks’ worth of laundry at a time. I remember “How to Save a Life” playing while we drove home at night, as snow flurries floated in the air around us like magic. I had a feeling that everything was about the change yet again, but I wasn’t sure how yet. This was a time when I took number of calculated risks rooted in intuition—Harvard, the ’08 Obama campaign, dropping out of business school. It’s reflective of that ambiguous in-between time when First and Onlys often find ourselves in the magic dark.

“Everlong” (Foo Fighters)/Chapter 8

There were many pinch-me moments during my time in the Obama White House. Some were serious, like the night we toasted the passage of the Affordable Care Act on the Truman balcony. And some were just plain fun, like the night Foo Fighters played on the White House South Lawn for the Fourth of July. White House staff, various elected officials, and other guests were invited to celebrate the holiday, and I don’t know if I’ll ever have a more symbolic Fourth. As the unmistakable opening guitar riff of “Everlong” blasted out of speakers just feet from the White House, fireworks exploded across the sky over the Washington Monument and the First Family looked on from a balcony. “And I wonder … if anything could ever be this good again,” Dave Grohl cried out. All I could think of was “nope.”

“La Trenza” (Mon Laferte)/Chapter 9

My mom introduced me to this song. I was already a fan of Mon Laferte but I’d never heard “La Trenza” before. “You have to listen to it. It reminds me of us and always makes me cry,” she said. When I listened to it, I understood why. It’s about braiding a child’s hair and imagining that when she grows up, she will live a free and beautiful life; unlike the one of the braider, whose own options and dreams were clawed away by misguided love. Yet the song is also meaningful to me for a parallel reason: my journey has been intertwined, even integrated, into my mom and grandmother’s lives and lessons. Like the pigtail braids my mom weaved into my hair as a child. Inextricably linked and generationally experienced through time. A braid. La Trenza.

“It’s Only Love That Gets You Through” (Sade)/Author’s Note

In “It’s Only Love That Gets You Through,” Sade’s voice echoes softly over the sound of church-like organs. It’s a raw and unadorned song that feels powerfully intimate, as if she’s speaking directly to you. “Girl you are rich, even with nothing. You know tenderness comes from pain.” I first discovered this song during my years at the White House and it’s been a musical “hug” to the soul during difficult times ever since. Listening to this song soothes and centers me. I shared the fireplace Abi built me out of cardboard and foil when I was a child. It was significant in its symbolism at the time and it was also one of the ways Abi showed me what unconditional love truly felt like. She may not have realized it at the time, but she steadied the ground under my feet by demonstrating that this kind of love existed, and that I was worthy of it. It was one the many gifts she left me with.

The post Alejandra Campoverdi’s Diaspora Jukebox Playlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.