Brian Hinshaw -- Townblog

North American Anthology
of Pop Music Literature

One:  Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" #12 & 35

Jack Dove dj'd under a name that would later embarrass him, having chosen a tag that was cutting edge at its invention but dulled and gummy by the middle of the next year.  He might have done better by "dj jack dove," in e.e. cummings uncaps, which through its obviousness and utility would have stayed sharper in the knifeblock than the name he'd stretched for.  It was under this name, the one he'd wince to hear when he'd run into patrons of the dance club in later years -- always at the grocery store or the mall, wherever the lights were too bright, and always when his kids were misbehaving, the auld acquaintance being the absolute worst kind -- under this name he'd posted to the internet a mash-up of Bob Dylan's thing about "everybody must get stoned" and Sly Stone's thing about "I-high love everyday people."

It had come to him in his sleep, or from the verge of wakefulness anyway -- connecting those two songs, and he'd worked on a title before he'd manipulated the music into any form of actuality.  Downloading, cutting up, recalling a short story from his high school literature textbook, all of it coming together without really thinking about it, almost in the way he read those stories in high schools, watching the words without recognizing that he wasn't actually reading, seeing without comprehending, turning back to see where he'd stopped paying attention.  What is there to know about zen that one cannot better intuit about zen?  

Dylan's song is, on the level most often appreciated, about getting high.  It's also about a certain kind of inevitability, of outside forces working upon the individual:  they will stone you when you are walking home, but you needn't feel so all alone -- they do this shit to e'erbody.  Stone's song, meanwhile, is about acceptance and diversity, different strokes that move the world, but it's also kind of a resignation to our separateness, to man's inability to figure out what bag you're in.  It's also about getting high.  Only in that every Sly Stone song is about getting high.

None of these levels factored into Jack Dove's work with the two songs in ProTools -- to the extent that he sought meaning at all, he meant only to recreate the idea that had come to him in sleep, the creation of a sound he'd heard in a dream, a sound that did not exist and wasn't even a sound.  But its interesting to consider that Jack Dove took two songs that are celebratory on their topmost layer ("What do call what's above the subtext?") then merged them into something about the inevitability of division, persecution, and violence.   The addition of the Shirley Jackson story, in the form of the composition's title and that doubled meaning of "to stone," underscores all of this in a way that, again, the mash-up artist -- the author, or collagist -- was entirely unaware but for which he must still be held responsible.

The song he'd created -- or merged, or stole: these are someone else's argument to make with you -- this song made from other songs about stoning and people and everybody, this song has long since disappeared from digital space, from peer-to-peer file sharing sites, or wherever such things once had their loci. The source file must have lived on some long-wiped hard drive, the weblink broken and 404'ing to nowhere and nothing.  Before winking out, and according to server analytics themselves now overwritten with now-now-now, the file was downloaded two hundred and thirty seven times.  Its possible, one supposes, that copies may still exist, floating out on the ethers and iClouds, ready for recharge on a Gen2 mp3 player in the lowermost desk drawer in an ex-girlfriend's guest room, just as it is possible that it is gone entirely.  Like the sound of an airplane too far away to see, its jet trail only ones and zeroes.

Stranger still: when Jack Dove merged the Stone horns of Cynthia and Jerry with the Dylan horns of Doc Butler and Charlie McCoy, he also merged -- in ways too elaborate to detail -- distant branches of his family tree, as one of the horn players of the Family Stone was a shirt-tail relation of his maternal uncle and one of Dylan's players had once been married to a second cousin-once-removed, but mapping this out is oblique and hard to follow.  And, frankly, as Jack Dove was no more aware of this than any other layer of meaning beneath what can be felt in one's funk and heard through one's earbuds, to make anything more of this particular coincidence would be to strain credulity.

Some time later, Jack Dove was recognized by his long-lapsed dj tag in a southside Super Target by a man only slightly younger than he, but a younger man all the same, one who'd so far resisted any urge to change his clothes or hairstyle or metaphysics from how'd they'd been situated way back in his dancehall days.  "Yo: dope, that was dope," this younger man said, in relation to the digital construction or the dj or that period in which they once shared common space.  Then a handshake too intricate to recall and a question:  "You holding?"  Jack Dove looked to his small children in the cart as if he were afraid they might be hip to the lingo, as if they'd knew the soundtrack, as if they too might be hiding pebbles in their balled-up fists.