"March in formation / March for our nation / Now I don't care what I've been told / This police state is much too cold..."
So sings Moses Sumney in “Rank & File,” the closing track of his 2018 extended play and finale of hisNPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concertin August. Though Sumney wrote the song in 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown, the song carries just as much weight today as it did then. In the wake of election night, I felt drawn to try and capture the political and emotional turbulence that has been intensifying these past few months, and especially this past week.
“Rank & File” paints a powerful portrait of what it sounds and feels like to protest, crystallizing feelings of desperate urgency as well as unbridled anger. In the version of the song performed in the livestream, Sumney strikes the top of the microphone to recreate the sound of a drum. He proceeds to layer shouts, claps and snaps that mimic the sound of feet hitting pavement. Unlike most of his music, which is an icy, delicate kind of experimental soul, this piece thrums with a raw and fiery intensity. Within the first few seconds, I’m taken back to a protest I attended in late May soon after George Floyd’s killing; I can almost feel the heat rising from other protesters' bodies as I march past a group of people smashing in the windows of a parked police car outside of the Trump Tower on Wabash Avenue.
"Now I don’t care what I’ve been told / To kill so quick is animal / Now I don't care what they might say / It's gon' come back around one day..."
In the second chorus, Sumney leaps entire octaves to sing the ends of his phrases in a way that is so beautifully piercing, it almost sounds like he’s screaming. Throughout the song, he returns to the mantra: "They fall right into rank and file."A clear allusion to the ongoing militarization of the United States' police forces, the chant-likerefrain is repeated in the verses, choruses and outro,perhaps as a sonic metaphor for the relentless brutalization of Black and brown communities.
I think this whole week has been a jarring reminder of how difficult it is to be living through a period of such intense political polarization and simultaneous physical isolation. Uncertainty has certainly become the norm, and while it’s frustrating we can't gather as a community in the same ways that we used to, it's songs like “Rank & File” that remind me how crucially important music is in making sense of the world, putting words to the incomprehensible and espousing a sense of solidarity that is able to transcend physical boundaries.
