“I’d make Coretta Scott King mayor of all the cities”
Tzuchien quotes a great piece of utopianism from The Coup:
And if we win in the ages to come
We’ll have a chapter where the history pages are from
They won’t never know our name or face
But feel our soul in free food they taste
…
Retail clerk - “love ballads� is where you place this song
Let’s make heaven right here
Just in case they wrong
Another great utopian track, of course, is ‘If I Ruled the World’. Listening to it recently, it made me wonder about cockaignes, those impossible countries of luxury and idleness. They’re usually understood in terms of a simple version of Bakhtin’s carnival, where the central trope is inversion: the master becomes the slave, and the peasant a king. But I wonder if there isn’t something more subtle going on in the incoherence of the cockaigne. Perhaps the point isn’t so much inversion as an impossible, mad, insatiable juxtaposition of different elements. Hence Nas combines that the faintly foolish and personal with the eminently serious and political, as if there were no distinction between the two:
I know it sounds foul but every girl I meet’d go downtown
I’d open every cell in Attica send ‘em to Africa.
I wonder if part of this incoherence is an attempt to illustrate what Foucault called “the stark impossibility of thinking that,” an enactment of the way in which revolution would have to not only reorder the empirical distribution of things, but overflows the basic conceptual grid that makes this empirical order possible.
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