Glen Billesbach reviews Take This Hammer

Paul Rekret. Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2024. 200 pp.

19 July 2024

Music is an unstable vessel of power. It can reflect existing social relations and gesture to alternatives beyond them. Likewise, the form of a song— its melody, rhythm, lyrics, arrangement—is indivisible from the social and historical conditions in which it is created. But it is not inextricably bound.

W. E. B. Du Bois elucidates these dynamics in the closing chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The Sorrow Songs, Du Bois describes, are haunting echoes of dark times. Born of slavery in the Americas, they are the articulate message of human suffering and disappointment. Yet they are also a gift to humanity, equal in stature to those bestowed by Sophocles, William Shakespeare, and Friedrich Schiller. They are a beautiful expression of a grim human existence, and they breathe hope that “sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.”[1] Amid white terrorism and economic and political crises converging during Reconstruction, sorrow songs were often caricatured, appropriated, or misunderstood. Many erroneously used them as evidence that the black slave was careless or that they expressed sorrow known only in a bygone era. Properly understood, however, they were communal, rhythmic, plaintive, stirring, melodious contestations that continued to refuse racialized domination and a narrow vision of work.

It is Du Bois’s tradition of aesthetics, which takes seriously the unstable vessel of music in the context of racial capitalism, that Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer corresponds to. Both works reject the idea that a particular vision of progress is inevitable, and instead embrace contingent emancipatory politics. Fighting for an idealized vision of dignified work or an equal share of capital is not enough. The sorrow song and the work song can anticipate a cancellation of hierarchy and the wage relation. They can anticipate freedom. Drawing most of all from theorists in the Black Radical Tradition and the Frankfurt School, Rekret examines changing experiences of time and space after the Great Recession.

Episodically, he focuses on the form of popular work songs as they intersect with the transforming relations of work and leisure since 2008: “chill” playlists and streaming platforms (Chapter 2), trap music and the interminable work of drug dealers (Chapter 3), World Music and globalization (Chapter 4), and environmental field recordings and climate change (Chapter 5). Each chapter develops a critical and historical account of popular music in relation to crisis. The separation of leisure and labor, where people are working for the weekend, has eroded and was never universal in the first place. Today, precarious on-call, zero-hour, and fixed-term contracts are common. This development engenders a monotonous experience of time, exemplified in song, where one is rarely off the clock. In these cases, Rekret argues, dissecting their logics is paramount to counteract the stifling affects they induce in listeners.

One strength of the book is Rekret’s attention to what these songs sound like. Take his argument that music is an intensified experience of time and that today what sells in streaming is sound that neither takes its audience too high nor too low. Boundaries of work and leisure blur as music from “chill” playlists seamlessly integrates into different experiences, such as working, studying, or relaxing at home, becoming part of an ambient backdrop. He contends that the sound of music in this context is typically “premised upon the evacuation of any cutting notes and the layering of arrangements so that anything potentially jarring—a too assertive saxophone or a jangly guitar, for instance—is carefully modulated or removed altogether” (p. 52).

Rich descriptions of varieties of rap and the rise of Atlanta trap in Gucci Mane’s Trap House and Young Jeezy’s Let’s Get It also show Rekret’s attunement to aesthetics. To take just a few examples focused on vocals, B.I.G.’s voice is said to be velvet-smooth, and his vocal flow is breathy (see p. 83). Jeezy’s voice is “raspy, pressing, insistent, it recalls a low level screaming or dying wish at times” (p. 87). And Gucci’s vocals are “placed relatively low in the mix, often doubled and effected, so they can be difficult to discern; his Southern drawl is especially viscous, his voice is nasal and mumbled, and he changes pitch only infrequently” (p. 88). In the cases of chill and trap music as work songs, the financial and housing crises are centered, but Rekret insists that taking music on its own terms and with an orientation to how songs in these contexts can push beyond their limits is crucial. To idealize or moralize music as a critic is misguided and ultimately harmful to emancipatory politics.

Rekret’s analysis will be engrossing for those concerned with aesthetics, the power of music, political economy, or the substantive subjects of his case studies. His work is also important for those studying the politics of technology, like students of critical algorithm studies. By elaborating on the dynamics of music and technology in each of his cases, he avoids generalizations. Streaming platform corporations and algorithms or the US military and field recording technology—to name just two examples—are illuminated with fine-grained contextual analysis. By unraveling the complexities of contemporary popular music, Rekret sheds light on the broader sociopolitical ramifications of technological advancements that should not be overlooked. As an entry point for those navigating the terrain of critical algorithm studies or science and technology studies broadly, readers will have to look elsewhere. For those interested in how economic and technological infrastructures shape but do not bind cultural production, this book is revelatory.

While the relationship between music and social relations has long been the subject of critical reflection, few authors have dealt so forcefully and minutely with contemporary analysis of work, song, and crisis. Take This Hammer is a brilliant intervention and a generative force for hope. Yet Rekret does not mince words about extant crises and the difficulties people face in their wake. We might ask, as Du Bois did in his own work on sorrow songs, whether such hope is justified. Will work songs of refusal sing true?

[1] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1994), p. 162.