frequencies

by josh kun

Siren song

THE KID IS running. The cops are chasing. Someone's been shot. That's all we know. We don't know if it's murder; we don't even know if the kid pulled the trigger or if he's just a suspect. But the cops are chasing him, all day, all week, down railway tracks, without end. "What have I done?" the kid asks. "Will you help me?" The kid begs for help, but we don't know from whom. All he wants is more speed. All he wants is to keep running.

Eddy Grant had been living in London for seven years before he wrote "Police on My Back," in 1967. The teenage Guyanese immigrant, who would soon don a blond Afro while singing "Black-Skinned Blue-Eyed Boys" with his mixed-race band, the Equals, may be remembered in the States for putting the reggae synth pop of "Electric Avenue" into Casey Kasem's '80s hit parade, but it's his first-person flight from the London cops that's still his best legacy, even decades after he packed it up for Barbados. More nervous than NWA's LAPD middle-finger and less confessional than Bob Marley's sheriff fess-up, "Police on My Back" is one of pop music's great cop-baiting songs precisely because it is not boiling with rage or wrapped in adolescent boast but is full of vulnerability, ambivalence, and dread. There's the law, and there's the kid, and the kid is scared.

In T-Bone Walker's blues classic "Stormy Monday," each day of the week is worse than the one before it, but at least there was church on Sunday. In "Police on My Back," the calendar never stops unfolding, and the kid runs for all seven days as if he knows there's no Sabbath for the accused. When the Clash covered it on 1980's Sandinista! (Epic), a punky reggae slam of US imperialism and an ode to Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels, they emphasized Grant's catalog of the days that wouldn't stop with snare rolls, cymbal snaps, and guitars that sounded like patrol car sirens.

While the Clash's version left room for the black immigrant kid to be reimagined as white and working-class, a more recent version from London's Asian Dub Foundation and Toulouse's Franco-Arab collective Zebda makes the kid not only a south Asian in the UK, but a French-Arab living on the margins of national citizenship (Zebda is French slang for Arab). The update makes a timely appearance on Another World Is Possible (Uncivilized World), a new "antiglobalization" compilation spearheaded by activist group ATTAC (Association of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens).

The album was released just weeks before the Parisian police were on the backs of three suburban immigrant kids (one from Mali, one from Tunisia, one a Kurd from Turkey) who ran right from their game of street football into a power station, where they were electrocuted before their IDs could be checked. The end of their running led to 20 nights of unrest in Arab and African neighborhoods. Much has been made, in an echo of LA in 1992, of how French hip-hop predicted the riots, but it was Grant's song that saw it coming. Not the details of it all, but the coming zeitgeist of resistance and refusal, the point at which the kid would have to stop running and either fight back, be caught, or die. In that way the song went beyond its cops-and-robbers content and became a song about power, a citizen's plea in a moment of crisis.

That the song was written by a South American immigrant in London a year after Guyana gained independence from the British crown was also a harbinger of the globalized era of unprecedented inequity and international migration that was waiting just around the corner. As Noam Chomsky writes in one of the essays that accompanies Another World Is Possible, it is an era that lives by a cardinal rule – "capital has priority, people are incidental." Whether you understand them as political or mindless, the French riots were a demand for recognition by people who want, for once, to understand what it means to be prioritized.

Besides tracks from Salif Keita and the Skatalites, the new "Police on My Back" is joined by a track from Manu Chao, probably the artist most associated with giving the antiglobalization movement a musical voice. Chao even showed up to do a set in the middle of this fall's other hotbed of global unrest, Mar de Plata, Argentina – home to a globalization showdown between Bush's Summit of the Americas and Chavez's People's Summit of the Americas.

Yet to the dismay of many activists, Chao refused to play in the alternative summit's stadium headquarters while Chavez dug a grave for free trade and put Bush's name on the tombstone. Chao was clear with the press: He was anti-Bush but not pro-Chavez. So as Arabs and Africans burned their way through the Paris suburbs, Chao stood in the Argentine rain and sang his songs where he said they belonged: in a local plaza in a working-class neighborhood, with no politician as his opening act.

E-mail Josh Kun at jksfbg@aol.com.