Video Script: Songs that make me cry (Patreon)

Here's a thing. I've spend a week writing and revising this, and wanted to let yall know that I AM planning on more videos. I still need to add a paragraph about sentencing and the aftermath. This one should be done before October. (content warning: violence against a minor, LA riots)

I dunno how to start this. The fact that you weren’t chased away by the title of this video “songs that make me cry” at least lets me know that YOU have an ideas as to what you’re getting into, but still. I don’t get too emotional at movies. I mean I’m not made of WOOD and if you put a sad scene with a cute animal? I’m probably getting misty eyed. Same with visual art. I can connect with some pieces on an emotional level but it’s rare. Books? When I was younger. Video games? Only a couple of them but songs. Music hits me in a way that no other creative medium does, and that makes sense since music is the world I fell so deeply in love with as to make it my career but why? Why do certain songs hit me in such a way that my body’s reaction is to start making tears. This happens with anything from a great classical work from someone like Vaughan Williams play clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFRqCK0cLcY , to a jangly cut from Iron and Wine (shout out to my current favorite band) Whether the music is supposed to be “sad” or not, the ingenuity, creativity, lyrical brilliance, cleverness, melodic turns, anything, might set me off into tears if I think no one’s looking, or if the flight being accompanied by my headphones is late and dark enough.

Heheh wow, even my browser knows I’m procrastinating in getting to today’s song. (screen 3) There it is right underneath Joe Rogan saying something weird and highlights for increasingly copyright protected things I shouldn’t talk about with big brother youtube listening. Let’s get to it. This section is called “The Setup”

The Setup

Gabriel Kahane (Screens 4-7) is a good composer and you know this because his hair is always messy on purpose. (Play clip of Interview 1, 0:35 - 1:03) To oversimplify, Songwriting is a bit less involved. You write lyrics, a melody, and some chords to go with it. Very open to improvisation. The song may change and morph each time it’s performed. When composing you need to account for every thing that every performer is doing every second of the piece. Composed pieces are usually longer and more tightly controlled than what we think of as “songs”. This puts Gabriel’s music in a weird middle area we could call “Pop-Orchestra” or “Mind-Pop” or “Popchestral song-positions”.

Gabriel has done everything from Jazz piano and rock shows to a stint at Carnegie Hall. The recording that I’m going to talk about today kind of goes in the… “none of the above” category. (Adam Neely video 0:04 - 0:10) This is “apartment sessions” where they do recording sessions in a New York City apartment. (play clip of “cramming an entire orchestra” vid showing setup) This video series isn’t getting a mention just because of the gimmick (play clip of them removing doors to fit more people) but for the arrangement done by this guy (Show screen cap of Luke McGinnis labeled with his name). This is the man who took Gabriel Kahane’s song “Empire Liquor Mart (9127 S. Figueroa St.) and made it into a “Songs that Make Me Cry(tm)”. Wait. We gotta work on that.

(Cut to the line “Only Days after the trial”) The first time listening through this song is like the first time listening through a symphony. I don’t know about you but I only get the vague shape on first listen to new music. Much is left to uncover. The instruments they chose, the different voices, the choral harmonies, WOAH is that a french horn? The camera lady has wine, OH WOAH They have to physically cycle out musicians and instruments due to space constraints aaaaH! They have to watch each other conduct so the musicians can receive cue around all the little walls that fail to contain this SOUND. Where even is the SOUND person? Wait… (cut to screen explaining death of Latasha Harlins) what… is this song about?

Replay the (only days after the trial, fading into news and riot footage. Cut to judge “I know a criminal” bit) This song is the story of Latasha Harlins.

I’m gonna call this section boringly “Musical and lyrical analysis” but it’s important to keep in mind that THAT is what I’ll be talking about today. Music and lyrics. I’m not a historian, or a law-enforcement specialist so if you want to argue over legal details, go ahead down to the comments of someone else’s video and go crazy. I am discussing lyrics, not police reports, so if there’s a detail in there that you feel you need to correct the author on about “ACTUALLY she was LEFT handed” THAT’S NOT THE POINT it’s poetry and while it’s biographical in this song, lyrics aren’t court documents and shouldn’t be treated as such. So with that said, let’s just jump into it.

Musical and Lyrical Analysis

Gabriel chooses to tell this story out of order and I like this decision. It’s not easy to get people to listen through a 10 minute song but this opening is startling enough lyrically and musically that it just might convince you to keep listening. We start out with solo voice and it lingers there for a full stanza until we’re finally joined by high strings. The melody of this section is SO deceptive of what is to follow. It sounds like some folk song you’ve never heard, which is partially accomplished by the use of mode in the vocals. It’s almost entirely pentatonic except for a few notes. (Pentatonic meaning 5 notes. *hum up and down the minor pentatonic scale used here, on camera so we have some visuals*. You’re now subconsciously set up for something familiar sounding.

The opening section is describing events from the point of view of a person that has just been killed. It gets across a sense of slowly piecing together what’s happening and it does that with lyrics AND arrangement. The strings slowly build, the chords become clearer as the stage is set. A surveillance camera is mentioned and at the same time your mind is putting things together the strings swell and…

Only days after the trial. You can feel the tension rise. We hit into this RnB-esque section with vocals, beatboxing, marimba, and I THINK electric bass. WOW is this ever an example of allowing lyrics to stand on their own. These words are powerful enough that they only need the lightest of dressings. Get it? It’s like a salad with good stuff in it. You don’t need to SLATHER THE RANCH ON. From here we get some more percussion in there including a typewriter, which at FIRST I thought was a gimmick, but I wanna give Luke McGinnis enough credit to say that it symbolizes the news coverage at the time. Actually… oh wait he’s hitting “L H” over and over. Latasha Harlins. Nice.

See, this is also a song about the LA riots, but not about Rodney King. Rodney King was brutally beaten on camera by LAPD officers, and while the tape of this incident is widely credited with starting the LA riots of 1992, distrust between the citizens of LA and the criminal justice system had been growing for a long, long time. Rodney King was just the example that made national news. Latasha Harlins’ death is a nearly forgotten example of how unjust that system can be depending on who you are, and undoubtedly contributed to the intensity of the LA riots.

The song cuts back to the style of the opening lines, a brief flash of innocence.

The music gets complex. Note the time signature. We’re in 11. Nobody uses 11 in pop/rock music.  We’re in the city. We’re in the gray areas. Things are complicated by design. The chords start coming faster and WOW does Gabriel do a great job here with picking chords that aren’t expected, yet flow into each other in a way that sounds natural. The instrumentation comes alive at this point and it makes sense. We’re going from talking about one to talking about many and the instrumentation reflects that.

The two kinds of light mentioned; from blubs and from burning buildings and cars. Now we get some conventional percussion added, snare and bass, not a drum set, but imitating one. The machine is set fully in motion and the lyrics turn to the media. How is this story being presented to people outside of this neighborhood. I grew up thinking that the police, judges, lawyers, politicians, etc. were all working towards things like justice, fairness, equality, and in general wanted to help all people. That’s what you’re taught in school, and to people in 1992 watching the LA riots spring up seemingly out of nowhere, as if Rodney King was the first person of color to be victimized by the criminal justice system, as if the police who beat him were the first or last to commit terrible acts in public view, and suffer no consequences. To someone living next to Latasha Harlins, these events were not new.

This is not the first time the community has felt this loss. This is not the second time, nor the third or fourth. This is a common occurrence, finding their children dead in the streets, justice again absent. This is not a reaction to a single incident. This is the culmination of decades. A riot is the voice of the voiceless, to poorly paraphrase Martin Luther King’s son.

The news reporters seem ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the manifold reasons people took to the streets in 1992. They seem far more concerned with the store being looted than the girl that was shot there on March 16th, 1991. Yeah, a full year earlier. The riots didn’t start the day after the incident. It went to trial, and then the appeals court before ANYone started burning cars in LA. The verses get almost sarcastic in their nihilism, suggesting that fires, floods, and earthquakes are just there to keep god from getting bored.

The strings go off for a bit, setting up a flashback. In a song. That makes sense and is good and I love it LET ME TELL YOU THE REASONS. And it’s not just cuz they deployed tactical banjos for this segment.

Things shift into 4/4 as we shift to a “simpler” time. We shift into the comfort of the country. The comfort of childhood. This is the first time so far in the song that things seem “stable”. It’s a beat you can follow, a melody you can predict, and we’ve gone from orchestral flourishes to choral ones. Gabriel gives us more information. We get context around Latasha’s life and find out how she ended up in the liquor store that morning.

Latasha was 6 when she moved to California with her mom, following her mother, Latasha’s gramma. Gabriel suggests that the reason for the move was to escape “a sharecropper’s debt”. Sharecropping was a post civilwar way to keep black people working the farmland for former slave owners. The idea was that the black farmer worked the land, grew the crops, etc, but did not OWN the land, so at the end of each harvest, the landowner would extort most of the money made from the crops because… what were they gonna do about it? They owned the land their house was on. This would create an endless cycle of debt essentially binding former slaves to the land they worked. You know. Like serfs in the 1100s.

Now we get the first mention of Job. This essentially becomes the chorus of this monster of a song, as it’s one of the only lines that gets repeated. Remember how I was talking about how the LA riots didn’t spring up out of nowhere? The lyrics tell us that not only was Latasha gunned down, but so were her uncle and mother. It is not surprising that people lose faith in the system that is supposed to protect them when it fails them at every turn. This is just one family out of millions. It adds up fast.

*play chorus breakdown once*

Job is a biblical character who was tortured to prove a point to the devil. Job isn’t selected because of any great evil he’s committed, but the opposite. Job is chosen because of his faith and devotion to god. In the story god does not care how much Job suffers. God did not stop the death of Job’s family as God did not stop the death of Latasha’s family. God only stepped in when someone dared to question God. How dare they want justice.

“Nobody reads from the book of Job at the church where me and my Gramma go.” Why would they. The message you’re supposed to get from the story of Job is that bad things happen to good people, and we shouldn’t question it. Latasha wasn’t a bad person. She was a 15 year old girl. She had committed no great evil. She didn’t look for trouble, it found her. Just like people had told her her whole life. It’ll find you. This is the predestination of black youth in America. It doesn’t matter if you do everything right or everything wrong. Pay or steal, the trouble will find you. The system has assured that.

HOO Baby we’re gettin’ real in here aren’t we. Sorry I just needed to draw your attention to this break 1 or 100 more times because girls and boys you can keep your despacitos and your top 40 hits I will take this hit combined with the guitarist who looks like he’s about to cry ANY day. That guitarist? That’s me when listening to this song. This song doesn’t JUST have an incredible arrangement, meaningful lyrics, and an important message, it also SLAPS. Also, THIS lady. OOH! *show “it’ll find me” lady*

The orchestra pulls another time warp and we’re back into where the song started, but this time we aren’t talking in riddles, just dropping facts. Salient ones. *play what I mean is, that these tragedies, are a kind of family tradition* Gabriel goes through the timeline of events very matter of factly. Latasha got a bottle of orange juice, put it in her backpack with the juice sticking out for everyone to see, and walked towards the counter with enough money in her hand to pay for the juice. No matter how many times I listen through the song and go over the timeline in my head I just don’t understand how anyone ended up dead that day. I have walked into stores, put things in my bag, paid for them and left HUNDREDS of times, and I’ve never been shot. This isn’t some weird mistaken identity situation, or perfect storm of bad luck, this is a completely mundane interaction that ended up with a bullet in the head of a 15 year old and I don’t GET it.

The orchestra gives us a minute to process before Gabriel rips your heart out with *That right there was a lifetime, clip* To top it off the cadence, the final two chords, aren’t the usual five - one, or four - one, but flat six - one. This wasn’t the way her life was meant to end, and the music reflects that.

End bit

I love America. I love every broken corner of it. I love the warm togetherness of the south. I love the frigid stalwart north. I love the crackle of the desert and I love the monuments of the pacific rain forest. I want every single person who lives here to be able to share in that love. We are not there yet. We could be. All we lack is political will. Racism is not just the despicable acts you can see, but the system behind them that makes someone confident that they could shoot a teenager in front of multiple cameras, and not be held accountable for doing so.

Why haven’t you heard Latasha Harlins’ name before? Why hadn’t I?

Black Lives Matter.