The Out There for today is the today that never ends, the today that stretches into eternity: Donald Trump.
It’s a week after his latest indictment as I write, one that–it’s embarrassing to formulate this thought, more so to give voice to it–does feel different than the indictments, impeachments, scandals, and meltdowns that have preceded it. He and his 18 co-conspirators have a couple of more days to turn themselves in. I’m not sure how that will look if it happens, or what comes next if it doesn’t. If it involves handcuffs and/or a mug shot, I’ll make sure to buy a newspaper the next day. If I can–not a sure thing anymore.*
We’re still too close to Trump (that’s a joke; we still live inside his every utterance and twitch) to have a good sense of what art–music and films and, to a lesser degree, television being my own fields of interest–will define his catastrophic stranglehold on the culture. Soon into his presidency, I started a thread on the ILX message board modeled after The Dream Life, J. Hoberman’s book about the evocative links between presidents, from JFK to Carter, and the films that appeared during their presidencies. It’s been a while since I read The Dream Life, but the basic premise, as I recall, was that each president gathered a body of films around him that was almost a subconscious map of how he was viewed by the nation: Bond films for Kennedy, paranoia thrillers for Nixon, etc. If you accept that idea, the definitive Trump film for me is Jordan Peele’s Us. Not Get Out, which came out in 2017 but had much more to do with Obama. Us, appearing a couple of years later, was pure Trump, most unforgettably in the shadow mother’s response when asked who exactly she and her family were: “We’re Americans.” There were others, although nothing that carried the deep Nixonian resonances of The Conversation or Joe.
Music during Trump has been–to my ears, at least; I don’t keep up like I used to–surprisingly scattershot. Pop music was all over Nixon, even–especially–on Top 40 radio: “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” “Ohio,” “Bad Luck,” “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” plus more oblique ruminations like “Slippin’ Into Darkness” and “What’s Going On.” Most of the best Nixon songs came from Black artists, although Neil Young chipped in with at least two more great ones besides “Ohio”: “Ambulance Blues” and “Campaigner.”
When I think of Trump songs, the first one that comes to mind is A Tribe Called Quest’s “We the People…” from We Got It from Here, released just as Trump came into office. The album and the song got lots of attention: it was their first in 18 years, it appeared a few months after the death of Phife Dawg (Malik Izaak Taylor–he had been working on the album at the time of his death), and, barring an unexpected relaunch, it was the group’s farewell. I really didn’t care for “We the People…”, putting me in a very tiny, almost non-existent minority. It’s a very literal song, and the melodicism that I love so much in “Bonita Applebum” and Q-Tip’s own “Wait Up” is completely absent. (Do you want melodicism in an indictment of Donald Trump? If there were something else in “We the People…” to take its place, probably not, but if there is, I don’t hear it.) In a 2019 piece for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield framed Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” as a sideways rebuke of Trump: “As the late great Hunter S. Thompson would say, it’s a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. It defines the yeehaw state of mind. At a moment of nationwide apocalypse, it’s a love letter to everything that used to be cool about this once-proud land, the final stand of the last great American jukebox hero.”
Getting back to Us (and “Slippin’ Into Darkness”), I sometimes think that obliquely is in fact the only way, or at least the best way, to approach Trump. His conduct is too monstrous, his stranglehold too exhausting. In the Trump-movie thread I mentioned, at a certain point I was getting chastised by another poster whenever I’d revive the thread with something I’d just seen. Why did I continue to do this? It was very upsetting to him. If you don’t want to read about Trump movies, I’d suggest, a good strategy would be to not open up the thread about Trump movies. It was a poster I otherwise like, so I tried to split the difference between patience and exasperation.
My two favourite Trump songs aren’t Trump songs at all, not even remotely: the Julie Ruin’s “Lookout” and Zebra Katz and Njena Reddd Foxxx’s “Ima Read,” both of which date to 2013, when the notion of President Donald Trump belonged to a throwaway line in a long-gone Simpsons episode (“As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump” announces his successor Lisa Simpson, the country’s first “straight female” ever to hold the office). He’d made a couple of fanciful, half-hearted presidential runs at that point–you might even call them fake–mostly just to keep his name out there because it was good for ratings and a balm to his outsized narcissism. He was not on the horizon for 2016 in any serious way. But from the vantage point of 2023, the Julie Ruin seemed to sound the alarm, while Zebra Katz and Njena Redd Foxxx…well, I’m not sure what they did; I’ll try to figure that out when I get to them. And, a must, both songs came with accompanying videos that only enriched their elliptical complexities.
There’s a storm out
There’s a storm out
Look up ahead now
There’s a storm out
There’s a storm out
There’s a storm out
It’s got a rhythm that
Nobody can write out
So begins the Julie Ruin’s “Lookout.” I think of that one line all the time when watching cable people fumble around trying to analyze, give context to, find historical precedent for, or simply come to terms with Trump’s latest outrage: it’s got a rhythm nobody can write out. If you do hear Trump in “Lookout,” you might also hear a glimmer of optimism: “You’ll be fooled, but you’ll be alright.” Seven years along, yes to the first, a resounding no to the second.
At first glance, the “Lookout” video seems to be the kind of fan-uploaded thing that you often find on YouTube: a clever idea, the content already sitting there waiting for anyone so inclined, and well within the technical capability of someone with decent editing software. But it’s not–it’s part of the Julie Ruin’s YouTube channel, along with another dozen videos posted by the band. On second glance, the necessary copyright clearance is probably in and of itself a good indication that it’s an officially-sanctioned creation.
The video consists of footage from the 1963 Stanley Donen film Charade, which Pauline Kael called “probably the best American film of last year” (subscribing, at the same time, to the general view of it as “no more than a charming confectionery trifle,” a Hitchcock knock-off that voraciously steals from North by Northwest). Its stature has grown some in the intervening years: for starters, although not exactly the benchmark that it used to be, the film got the Criterion treatment a few years ago. Central to the intersection between Charade and North by Northwest is, of course, Cary Grant in the twilight, you-are-so-fucking-suave phase of his career; whether romancing Audrey Hepburn in Charade, or Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, Kael wrote that Grant “knows how much his presence does for him and how little he needs to do.” The Julie Ruin, who came out of foundational riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, aren’t much interested in Cary Grant, though, or in the supporting cast of knaves and con men who are after a dead man’s fortune in Charade. The “Lookout” video is instead wholly focussed on Audrey Hepburn: on the run, opening closets, ducking into phone booths, eyes wide, peering through keyholes, donning shades, smoking cigarettes, eyes wider, dashing through the underground, lounging in bed, eating lunch, eyes wider still. Extras are visible here and there, but none of the cast’s principal males–it’s all Hepburn. She’s one of the two or three enduring movie crushes of my life, so I’d be happy with another hour of just her.
Putting aside my subjective connection of both song and video to Trump, “Lookout” is unmistakably a feminist statement, a calling card of leader Kathleen Hanna going back to her days in Bikini Kill. Hepburn is dodging four men who are out to kill her in Charade (with the one man who wants to save her, in real life, played by an actor who may or may not have been gay); absent Grant, she’s able to stay one step ahead of them in “Lookout” through some combination of fierceness, ingenuity, and inexhaustible energy. The images, text (the song’s lyrics are superimposed throughout in big block letters), and rhythms of the song are beautifully in sync. The video ends (“LOOKOUTLOOKOUTLOOKOUT…”) with a gun, in dramatic close-up, poking out from behind cover and pointed directly at Hepburn. A moment of unbearable tension that ends in slapstick farce. Which would be one way of looking at Trump’s political career, although I doubt many people would. For one thing, it’d have to end.
“Ima Read” might also be a feminist statement–and it’s half-rapped by a man who is definitely gay–but I don’t know; Njena Reddd Foxxx’s admonition that “I’ma chop that bitch/I’ma slice that bitch/I’ma dice that bitch/I’ma ice that bitch/I don’t like that bitch” doesn’t necessarily bring to mind Gloria Steinem. (It might bring to mind Valerie Solanas.) I posted the video on Facebook a couple of days before Trump’s inauguration, saying that it somehow captured the mood of the moment in ways I didn’t totally understand. It still speaks to me about Trump, about the campaign that year, and about all that has happened since.
On my own scattershot hip-hop timeline–I’m far from a scholar–“Ima Read” looks back to Rammellzee and K-Rob’s “Beat Bop” (1983) and Schoolly D’s “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” (1985): spare, desultory dreamscapes, hip-hop crossed with PiL’s Second Edition or Generic Flipper. It’s not epic like they are–“P.S.K.” runs six-and-half minutes, “Beat Bop” over 10–but if anything it’s weirder than either. And really, really nasty. I don’t know if it’s nastier than “P.S.K.,” where Schoolly “put a pistol up against his head” before thinking better of it, but I can definitely hear the Trump of “grab ‘em by the pussy”/“I’d like to punch him in the face”/“when the looting starts, the shooting starts” all over “Ima Read.” There’s a recurring couplet that especially looks ahead to 2016 and the debates: “I’ma take that bitch to college/I’ma give that bitch some knowledge.” It’s not just the profanity I’m responding to here, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s the fixed, hateful, dead-to-the-world glare, same one Rihanna flashes in “Cheers,” but less focussed on one specific person, and more of an all-consuming revenge fantasy directed at everyone ever who has crossed Donald J. Trump.
The video ups the weirdness still. If you were to take “Ima Read”’s video and hang some Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails song on it, chances are I wouldn’t give it a second thought–I’d probably even dismiss it as being just as corny as the few Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails songs I know. Horror-film imagery abounds: the Diane Arbus twins from The Shining most obviously, but also The Blair Witch Project (Njena Reddd Foxxx sitting in the corner the first time she appears, back to us and legs splayed on either side–you half-expect her head to do an Exorcist-style 180), Friday the 13th (masks–not hockey, more like unadorned kabuki masks), Twin Peaks (the camera tracking through an empty school hallway), and lots of J-Horror imagery I’m guessing. Context is everything: with minimalist hip-hop as the backdrop, instead of abrasive metal-industrial (a style I’ve little interest in), I find the net effect extremely unsettling. The Arbus twins are everywhere: break-dancing interpretively, jumping rope with Njena, hiding out in the stacks. At 1:27, one of them creeps up on her partner and starts to slowly reach out as if to strangle her. There was a heavily memed still from the one Trump-Clinton debate that drew a striking visual parallel to Michael Myers lurking behind Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween; it’s like the “Ima Read” video takes that a step further by getting right into Trump’s head.
Soon after the 2016 election, Scott Woods and I published a book called Unshackled: the Dustbin of Donald Trump. It was a sometimes elementary, sometimes more intuitive compendium of all the omens and prophecies of Trump we were seeing in the years and decades leading up to his improbable rise–films, books, and TV shows mostly, but also other politicians, media celebrities, and cultural ephemera of all sorts.** And we were seeing Trump everywhere. We had intended to finish the book before the election, and we wrote under the assumption he’d lose; it was conceived as a post-mortem of sorts. We meandered, he won, and by the time the book was ready for release, no one we knew wanted to hear, much less read, anything more about Trump.
Seven years later, I’m still reflexively seeing Trump everywhere. (“Proofread that bitch”–that has to be about Trump, right, thinking back to his incoherent 3:00 a.m. tweets?). And the fatigue factor has gotten a million times worse.
(Postscript: It’s impossible to remember exactly what my frame of mind was when I wrote this entry 15 months ago, but I was probably working from the unspoken assumption that “the today that never ends, the today that stretches into eternity” was in fact going to come to a close with the next election, especially with all the indictments and mugshots and general mayhem happening at the time. On November 10, 2024, I can confirm that the never-ending has still not ended, and that an eternity of this is looking more and more possible.)
*No, yes, and done.
**I didn’t catch up with “Lookout” until after Unshackled. I would have gotten it in there for sure otherwise; “Ima Read,” which I did know, never occurred to me at the time.
we don't want to know 