On Repeat: Pig Feet Is A Real Time Monument To History
Tristan Young @talltristan
From the beginning of the last decade it took five years to get to Alright by Kendrick Lamar. Years after America had pulled through the recession and Obama was closing in on two full terms of an administration that had successfully navigated all of the clumsy nativist attempts to derail him, a spark of hope seemed warranted. It was an anthem for black power, pride, and resilience. That was then. We only had to get half way through 2020 to get an anthem that tragically has come to define the modern age in similarly salient ways. Pig Feet by Terrace Martin, Denzel Curry, Brittany Thomas, Daylyt, and Kamasi Washington doesn’t feel like a light at the end of the tunnel. It feels claustrophobic, pressurized, wounded, and militarized. It feels like the times. It’s title even, harshly blunt with jarring vividness, forgoes subtext for explicit defamation. This song cultivates an atmosphere that has no fear of retribution largely because it expects it already. It doesn’t matter how conciliatory Black Americans can and have been, the shooting will start. As Trump once so callously put it, what have they got to lose? His idea of America, one of carnage and trauma would eventually take the black community to the edge of believing it to be true. That the overwhelming numbers of protesters and their supporters have elected tostill use their words and their art shows an almost unfathomable level of restraint. The only option left is for those words to be bitterly scathing.
Denzel Curry handles the first half of the lyrics, after the blood-curdling intro to the beat. Curry has been consistently one of the most nimble rappers out there, especially unique in that his blistering lyrical delivery is not one of finesse, but cacophony and blunt force in the form of a jackhammer. Even with the adrenaline-induced fury of reliving years of police racism and brutality, it’s not just rage. As he sings “Disease, the grades, increase grenades/ disease, the aids, I seize today”, you can sense a flutter in his voice, the kind of occurrence when your heart is in your throat or you have to choke back the tears. That he can still be so fiercely articulate seems indicative of just how often he’s had to experience this, and keep going. His tempo races at a terminal velocity and it registers as overwhelming, as he observes a past and present of life under the boot, “ten years plus four, little kids die at war”. The mood is more than shell-shocked, it spreads beyond the personal into a larger sense, beyond his emotions, into his bones and tissue. It’s system shock.
Kamasi Washington provides an assist with his savant like brand of vivid brass. It’s especially sickened here. At first his verse seems comprised of marooned notes, distant and secretive amid a torrent of snare heavy percussion and thunderous piano. The curves grow malignant and serpentine, wrapping around your heart and squeezing, seizing your breath from you as it mimics an overworked pulse growing more panicked and irregular. Washington always dramatizes his work with something along the lines of grandeur or whimsy, but it seems more sullen and proactive here. It also comes off in a metaphorical sense somewhat tactical. The notes circle around when they are not stitched into a makeshift boundary. It’s defensive and full of misdirection, sentiments that are more vital than should need to be.
LA emcee Daylyt takes over the second verse. His reputation as a formidable battle rapper serves him well here. His voice registers a bit deeper and calm, barely. He’s slightly more cognizant to the state of affairs, more inclined to serve up just a small sampling of grievances, to remind everyone what’s happening and where it’s going. He’s defiantly confrontational, “We attack you, don’t act to street/ We gon ask you is this a cop out?/ bring the cops out, bring the pigs, you see the pigment”, signalling his near certitude that he will be targeted for being black, so he may as well be ready. Daylyt effectively explores the enormity and scope of these injustices targeting the larger pillars of democracy for its negligence, and also the futility of seeking reform through their terms, “we don’t go for the house of reps, they done trapped us in alphabet”.
In a recent speech, Killer Mike lamented that he didn’t want to be here. Yet there he was, doing what must be done. Pig Feet invokes similar feelings. It’s hard to absorb in one go, in no small part because Martin’s production is something akin to the torturous therapy of Clockwork Orange. It’s ultra polished fidelity and sharply cut sound engineering makes it register as terrifyingly unavoidable. Once it’s on there’s no turning it off, even after it’s finished. The delirious sax burrows into your head with no plans to surrender that space. It is designed to be undeniable, immune to countering, a rival source of authority. If the current authorities don’t finally understand why music like this is necessary, calls to defund and abolish them will only grow louder. It’s getting hard to imagine just how much louder they can get.