There's a Riot Going on

Los Angeles, 9th June 2025: for a third day, people come together to fight immigration deportations, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, to fight ICE with fire, flames and bodies on the street, Mexican flags. The movement of the people everywhere is beautiful, necessary. And though it's what comes after that matters, how it plays out, it's what comes before, too the whole thing. Setting self-driving cars on fire inserts the human, the worker, the saboteur back into the abdication of agency to the hands of tech-bro-billionaires. The protestors put up make-shift barricades, purple tables and benches block the streets, preventing the destruction of community in the name of the greater national body, and its policing of which bodies can or cannot make up a part of that body. 

The President seems to want to declare civil war on the state of California. The state calls in the LAPD and tries to suppress the riots while also resisting the entry of the National Guard and other federal bodies. The protestors say fuck the police, all of them. This is perhaps best understood, not so much as an 'insurrection'--the language the government uses--but as a war of defense, an ongoing rearguard action that gets portrayed as a 'riot'. Or, it actualizes what is already a civil war, as mayors are arrested when inspecting ICE detention centres, as judges try to block presidential orders invoking emergency powers only meant to be used for times of open conflict: a civil war declared by the government on its own people, in their name, or in the name of some of them. 

Later on in the day, the state of California takes the President to court, the President threatens to arrest the governor. What happens next, if someone is killed, how this plays out, the balance of forces, who sits on what fence, is anyone's guess. But when the state turns authoritarian--turns more authoritarian--to fight. And we've seen this before. First there's the democratic election of the fascist, and then the fascist street gangs, or first it's the fascist street gangs and then the democratic election of the fascist, or the two are two heads of a hydra, and the street gangs are not only the street gangs, but the police, and the fascist vigilantes, and they are ICE, and the army. To fight, to fight fire with fire, judging the situation, burning the self-driving car.

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There's a riot going on.

Sly Stone died today. As his career spiralled, collapsed, he would re-record the parts, the mixes, record entirely different versions of albums that had already been released, accumulated hours, potentially hundreds of unreleased tracks, multi-tracks, turning the self into an orchestra, drum machines, overdubs, as if to take everything up into himself, the inflated grandeur of addiction, its hubris, perhaps, but also the splitting and impossibility of the collective the band as the Family envisaged in its heyday. His cover of 'Que Sera, Sera' on Fresh: a song which he apparently performed in private sitting at the piano with Doris Day. What does that mean. The unexpected, gentle beauty of its fatalism. Lament at the heart of celebration, but perhaps, too, celebration at the heart of lament: giddy, out of control, manic, the kind of grim celebration of holding on and of not giving a fuck, teetering on but never quite entering the state of nihilism, redeemed--redeemed?--by its gospel background, by the collective life in music it emerged from in the church, by the upright stance of 'Stand', or the woozily beatific romance of 'You caught me smiling', for all its pain, its fear of going insane, or the literally childlike chants of 'Everyday People' and its idealized collective beyond hatred and discrimination.

 
And Sly and the Family Stone were always missing the gig, never showing up--but the possibility that he might, that they might, and that the show might be great, transformative, catharsis, release: an image of what we (who?) might be. Making stars into emblems of our hopes, holding them over us, despising them when they fail us, elevating them: this is the practice of celebrity, the altar on which, willingly or unwillingly, Sly Stone sacrificed himself, was sacrificed. The singer channels the collective only at the wealth-excessive cost of becoming a king, a king who then falls, living in a campervan, fed by a local retired couple: that drama of rise and fall, so that what could have been collective aspiration--the Black Panthers' reported demand that he politicize his music, politicize those nascently political hopes--falls by the waysides of addiction and excessive wealth, gold paint sprayed over the walls of the mansion, marble floors scuffed beyond recognition. And what more is there to say. A singer for whom--as for all singers, perhaps--words fail.

 
The title track to There's a Riot Going On is famously silent. And on 'Just like a Baby', on 'Poet', the vocal is present, but receding, just another textural element amidst the instrumental wooze, the bass and drums seeming to become the lead instrument, wah wah whooshes, whether from guitars lifting and dropping pedals or from a chorus opening and closing their mouths, music as a kind of amniotic fluid, or lighter fluid perhaps, ready to be lit: the same oceanic drift, vast energy at a standstill, found in Miles Davis' (instrumental) music of the 70s so influenced by Sly, the rumour that he made his band listen to Sly's 'In Time' on repeat. (But was the song Davis played 'In Time' from Fresh--a song of delay, with its ironic play on Sly's reputation for lateness on stage and lateness in delivering albums--or 'Time' from There's a Riot, with its philosophical speculation on the nature of the universe? And how do those two relate? The time of the commercial cycle, the chart, time as money, and time as a flow that the music accesses along some sort of deeper, mythic substratum: or both times are equally mythic, myths the music is trapped between even as it seeks to reinvent time in a kind of oceanic splendour. Time, the times, temps, durée: marching, dancing, rioting.)

Sly Stone's music was modern, for sure: the insistent use of multi-tracking to build up virtual collectives that supplant or support or challenge real ones, the pop of slap bass, of a drum machine. But archaic, too, in some way: a keyboard that channels a harpsichord, an organ that--as with Davis--moves on past the church and the strains of the horror movie into a kind of synthesized future, or an idea of the future, a construction, improvised in real time. And children's songs, yodels, everyday songs, everyday kitsch. To find a collective there. Fusing them into a kind of indistinguishable stream, of approaching and receding lights--"in time"--where time seems to have lost its meaning, to have retreated--to extend the piece, the jam, beyond the limits of the pop single, to repeat and vary, not so much to ecstasy, increasing heights of energy, but into a kind of chugging gasp, a running on the spot--but beautiful.

 
Drifting past words, Sly Stone's music expresses and oozes that which goes beyond words, yet in doing so it loses words' capacity: the inability to put the riot into words, to formulate the demand. In Sly Stone's music, whether brief achieved bliss or the hazy, narcotized beauty of nightmare, music exists as dreams. Whenever an edge appears it disappears again. Roles are constantly changing. You can live there, get lost there. But when the time comes, you have to come out the other side again. "The universe needs to be a little stronger / Time they say is the answer, huh / But I don't believe it". And time is what we make of it, when dreams and the reality that endlessly in fantasy refigure as utopia or as nightmare, as working-through, crash up against each other and in the present strike a fire, blown by the winds both in and out of our control.

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And clarity, crisp hard: the other side of the coin. The rhythm sounded by Horace Tapscott in 'The Dark Tree', the version from The Giant is Awakened: Dodot-dot-dash, dotdot-dot-dash. Morse code from another uprising, another time. 

I listen to 'The Dark Tree' and then I listen to There's a Riot Going On and then I listen to them both again. Perhaps the best way to get the truth of the situation would be to play both those albums not back to back, but both once. But to listen to both at once would be cacophony, indescribable, unlistenable. As morse code turns language into abbreviated sonic signals that can then be decoded and turned back into language: a carrier, emergency transmission, made music. Tapscott would tap out that rhythm on the horn of his car or tap on the windows and doors of houses to announce his arrival at friends' houses in the late night rambles he would take towards the end of his life. And perhaps if you decode that rhythm some linguistic clarity, but which would in turn betray its conversion into music, two torn halves, a split. Dotdot-dot-dash, time is the answer, riot, silence. The imperative that we formulate an answer.

Urban Guerrilla Planning in the United States: As Above, So Below (1973)

Larry Clark's second feature, Passing Through, is one of the most acclaimed of the films to emerge from the 'LA Rebellion' moment connected to the UCLA Film Programme in the 1970s, though, like many of these films, it's still extremely hard to track down. Currently available on YouTube, however, is his first film, As Above, So Below. Produced by pioneering arts administrator Vantile Whitfield's Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PASLA), an organisation founded in 1964 to help train inner city-youth in the arts, the film is a product of local organisations, interdisciplinary in their reach and collaborative in their ethos. Jazz will be utterly central to Passing Through, and in some ways, the forms of improvised cooperation within the sphere of improvisational music serve as one model here, and the film is saturated with the often improvised music of Horace Tapscott's group (recall, after all, that Larry Clark was nephew of jazz pianist Sonny Clark, and that, the previous year, he'd served as Director of Photographer on Mel Stewart's outstanding Wattstax). Around an hour in length, the film's credit sequences depicts a lone gunman on what look like military manouevres in a snow-covered forest. The film goes on to depict the recruitment of this gunman, Jita-Hadi (Nathaniel Taylor, who also stars in Passing Through) an ex-Marine, who's participated in US imperial meddling in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, by an urban guerrilla group: a network of militants who operate in small groups yet who now constitute a linked, nationwide uprising. It's never quite clear in what precisely their activities consist: the activities of the militants are rendered as a series of training exercises rather than in detail (an encounter with murderous armed police at the end of the film might be read as its 'climax', though the film's narrative logic refuses anything like a three-act structure). But detailed plot isn't the point--it's the idea of armed resistance, and the dedication, quiet determination and efficiency necessary to accompany this that are at stake. The depiction of militancy echoes Ivan Dixon/Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, which had been quietly buried by its Hollywood distributors earlier that decade (the two films were screened together at UCLA), and Jules Dassin's Uptight, but the film is, in general, looser, rougher and less linear in its texture, as befits Clark's role in the LA Rebellion and the influence of Third Cinema. While most of the film depicts recognisable locations and interactions in a broadly realist fashion, surrealism is a factor, as in the sudden appearance of Jazz Age dancers outside a contemporary cafe in an incongruous fantasy sequence that insistently reminds us of its nature as mediated fantasy, or a lengthy shot, early in the film, of a blank grey sky accompanied by the sounds of machine gun fire and police sirens.

















Sound is also key: much of the film is set to the ubiquitous sounds of the Horace Tapscott group, driving scenes with rhythmic propulsion or offsetting them with bursts of free improvisation (with the great Arthur Blythe's alto very much in the mix). And much of the information, texture and atmosphere of the film comes from the equally ubiquitous radio transmissions that play as both diegetic and non-diegetic texture. The soundtrack is not as wildly multi-layered as fellow LA Rebellion director Haile Gerima's soundtrack to Bush Mama (Gerima appears in a cameo here), in whose opening sequences a barrage of sound, from jazz to the sounds of police helicopters to non-synchronous conversation to an audio collage of the questions of invasive welfare office workers, is poised between the psychological and the 'realist', suggesting a traumatic breakdown between inner and outer that aims at sensory overload, not to overwhelm through spectacle, but as a dialectical quality of form that encourages active spectatorship and aids thought. Clark's use of radios in As Above instead imparts a kind of documentary quality, an argument or thesis absorbed as part of the sonic texture of everyday life--in itself a political argument about the respective stakes of mass media and revolutionary counter-transmissions, perhaps inspired by radio in Vietnam (Radio Hanoi and 'Hanoi Hannah') or Cuba (where the exiled militant Robert F. Williams broadcast Radio Free Dixie). Sound makes historical connections without having to put clunky speeches in the mouths of characters: thus, out first glimpse of the film's hero is as a young boy in 1945, as the radio announces the release of Japanese Americans from detention camps, a still too little-known aspect of US history and one that's echoed later in the film as the radio announces similar measures for African Americans, along with curfews and psychiatric torture/'therapy', reminiscent of the racialised brutality of the mental health apparatus made infamous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). (The radio reports draw on HUAC reports on Black militancy from the late 1960s--ironically enough, Clark recalls that one of his professors at UCLA wanted to report him to HUAC on the basis of this film, never mind that HUAC had by then disbanded.)




Mid-way through the film, dialogue and narrative scenes are intercut with a lengthy sequence in a church prayer meeting; reminiscent of a similar sermon that occurs at the end of Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess and of the more dream-like church sequence intercut in Gerima's Bush Mama. Most obviously, the sequence reinforces the film's critique of the Black Church as mental opioid: one of the most eager participants is Kim (Gail Peters), the owner of the cafe whose endorsements of her Saviour, combined with the rambling secular odes of the customer who praises 'the white man', form a chorus of reaction, seen as two sides of the same coin; and there's a satirical dig as a church elder asks for donations, from one to one hundred dollars--no entry to the church without a wallet. At the same time, the visceral power of the sequence and its non-alignment with the main narrative renders it with a 'documentary' energy that leaps beyond the bounds of plot. In that sense, one might be reminded of Glauber Rocha's first feature, Barravento, in which the depiction of cadomble practices, religious ritual and social rituals of song and dance achieves an audiovisual immediacy existing in unresolvable tension with the didactic, anti-mystical speeches that condemn such practices as tools of backwardness and fatalism. (See Robert Stam's nuanced reading of Rocha's film here.) The placement of these sequences in Clark's film is somewhere between didactic formal argument and an aesthetic quality that doesn't so much contradict the film's unflinching advocacy of militancy as place them in dialectical tension. Here, as throughout, the film crackles with a desire to expose, highlight and further social contradiction as part of a process of revolutionary change.
 

And this dialectical quality is present, too, in the apparently incongruous occultist/Hermetic reference in the film's title (later appropriated for a truly diabolical horror film set in the Paris catacombs). This is a film of doubles--many of the characters we initially encounter turn out to be secret members of the armed cell, an Ellisonian disguise by which a perpetually-coughing junkie is actually a militant leader, something that reads as actuality in the film's plot, but that the film also suggests is a potentiality outside the film's universe. This is most apparent as a key scene replays in a kind of coda after--but really serving as--the 'completion' of the film's principal narrative strand. Early in the film, Jita-Hadi enters the cafe where he will meet Bee (Lyvonne Walder) who, unbeknownst to him, is one of the leaders of the guerrilla cell: their subsequent intimate encounter is one of the final stages, or tests, in his recruitment into the group. When they meet, she describes their encounter in terms of deja-vu, the uncanny feeling that what's happening in the moment is the replaying of a previous encounter. At the time, it's just a chat-up line, complete with talk about dreams coming true (or, in terms that sound closer to psychoanalysis, travelling to the farthest recesses of one's dreams). But sure enough, Jita-Hadi's entry into the cafe is repeated at the end of the film. At the film's climax, the customer in the cafe earlier seen praising 'the white man' seeks to inform on the armed cell, for which he's shot by cops, who in turn are shot by Kim (Gail Peters), the proselytising Christian owner of the cafe who turns out to be another  of the militants. As we cut from Tapscott's eerie inside-piano work to the entry of the full band in affirmative unison melody, the film cuts back to an earlier shot of Jit-Hadi driving a car and to his entry into the cafe. Passing the resurrected neighbour on his way in, over the soundtrack, we hear Bee's words of the initial encounter replayed over the soundtrack: "Hey brother, do you believe in foreknowledge? You know, deja-vu--it's like a birth to a new life, and you go on and on to other, still higher planes of life..." Thence the film cuts to the scene with which it began, the lone militant on manouevres in a snow-covered forest; except this time, we see him joined in conversation with a comrade, before the fade to black. What initially were a set of social encounters characterised by alienation or isolation--the lone militant, the reactionary conversations in the cafe, the wary glances of strangers--are now revealed to be potential nodes of solidarity. There are a number of ways we can red this: the revolutionary potentiality by which dreams coming true--travelling the furthest recesses of the dream--does not mean the dreams of the Church service, of the attainment of luxury goods, of the goodness of the 'white man', or what Henry Threadgill sardonically calls 'refined poverty', but the dream of a transformed society. The film does not, then, reveal a mystical secret, though there may be parallels between the underground guerrilla cell and the mystical or religious cult, a revealed knowledge into which one must be initiated for purposes of evading religious authority or state power, but the possibility of self-emancipation by any means necessary.