Author: Lynk Bella Hues

1. mad, i decide to take a walk in the rain on this scorching hot august day. with headphones on and smart phone in hand, i set off from worker’s hill in newark’s central ward, the anti-puritan, anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and anti-capitalist liberatory space of my all too imprisoned imagination. i listen to beethoven’s “emperor”, my recent musical obsession, while walking toward the old lenape pathway to the river called passaic. this road, after expropriation, got named market street by the capitalistic dispossessors of land, and i still (un)consciously wonder if there’s an anti-emperor, an anti-empire logic, which beethoven wove into their song’s fabric somewhere. [it has to be in there. how couldn’t there be an anti-imperial logic to the song? all cultural workers across color, shape, and ability lines know their oppressors take the fruits of their labor, the surplus labor creates, alienating them from the goods and profits they make, all for Their Owners and Bosses own privileged delights. beethoven couldn’t be disabled from seeing the ruthlessness of the emperor over them, could they? and, anyway, a song as joyous as the “emperor”, if that’s joy in the notes of the first part i hear, such a tune must know inside itself the joy of guillotining the emperor’s head from their body when and where the fruitful means of production become ripe for the picking.] i listen more...