One of my favorite projects to incorporate into classes is the mixtape assignment. I don’t do this every semester, but I assign it probably once every two years. The purpose of this assignment is to help students think about connections between the themes they encounter in the literature and connect it with other parts of their lives, highlighting the role of literature and art in discovering ourselves and the world around us. I’m not planning to have students do a mixtape this semester for the banned books course; however, as I was constructing the syllabus, I started thinking about various songs that would relate to the texts for the course. I’m planning to create a mixtape for this course, and during the semester, I plan to add songs to it. Today, I want to talk about a few of the songs I’ve been thinking about and how they relate to texts and themes in the class.

Soul Glo “24”

Before last week, I had never heard of Soul Glo. Listening to music on Apple Music, I looked at the related artists, as I usually do, and saw Soul Glo pop up. Working through their albums, I came across “24” off of The N**** in Me is Me, and the music and lyrics immediately made me think about Justyce in Nic Stone’s Dear Martin along with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Initially, Pierce Jordan’s vocals at the end of the song caught my attention because he paints a picture which describes the legacy of racist violence and internalized racism over the course of about six lines:

They swing in my mind
Singing out across time
Sounding off like wind chimes
Our bloodlines hung from pines
Burning brighter than the fires
Behind the bluest eye

Through these lines, Jordan constructs the legacy of lynching and racial violence in the United States, and the final line, which could be read as the eyes of the white onlookers staring at their victims, can also be seen as an allusion to Morrison’s novel, leading to internalized feelings of inferiority. I say this because we can connect it with the title of the album as well.

Along with this section, the rest of the song makes me think about Justyce and Manny under police surveillance in Stone’s novel and the actions of the police against the two young men and others. Jordan’s opening line, “I’m beyond bars, or at least outside, under the eye of the overseer” points directly to this. Jordan’s lyrics paint the picture of a speaker doing whatever he can do to survive in a police state, and also thinking about how things could have been different if his ancestors had the resources and funds he did. These themes and issues connect with Justyce in a myriad of ways from the police state to the psychological feelings of inferiority he imbibes from the racist treatment of his white peers at school.

Radiohead “Exit Music (For a Film)”

Truthfully, this song didn’t even initially cross my mind when thinking about a mixtape. However, I watched The American Gladiators Documentary this weekend, and the song appears in it. It’s a familiar song for me, and as I listened to it in the documentary, I started to think about Louise and Marcus in Ernest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust. Radiohead wrote the song for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and the lyrics move from Romeo and Juliet’s wedding night to their suicides at the end of the play.

This thread, specifically the tone and some of the lines that Thom Yorke sings at the end of the song, made me think about Gaines’ novel. The speaker tells the Capulets and Montagues, “We hope your rules and wisdom choke you/Now we are one in everlasting peace.” Louise and Marcus encounter the rules of the community that say a white woman and a Black man cannot be together, and they decide to run away together with the hopes of making a life for themselves away from the rules. However, Bonbon murders Marcus and then he sends Louise to an asylum. Marcus and Louise’s actions are an affront to the rules, and like the speaker in teh song, they hope that those in control choke on their rules and “wisdom.”

“Exit Music (For a Film)” is a moody song that moves from mellow to crashing over the course of four and a half minutes. It begins with Yorke and an acoustic guitar, reminding me in many ways of the initimate moments that Louise and Marcus share, after their tumultuous beginning, in Of Love and Dust; however, these moments don’t last when Bonbon and others find out about their relationship. The song moves forward, gaining instruments and noise which create a chaotic foreboding feeling before crescendoing at the end, just as Marcus and Louise do at the end of the novel.

P.O.S. “Out of Category”

Since I’m teaching Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Stone’s Dear Martin, and James Spooner’s The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere. I thought about P.O.S.’s music, specifically songs like “Out of Category” and “Purexed” because they deal with identity, and especially, as in Spooner’s text, with linking and being part of a community and subculture that polices itself, sometimes on the basis of race. In “Out of Category,” P.O.S. raps about being a Black kid into punk rock and skateboarding and participating in “white suburban” subcultures. He chases girls, and when his mom gets onto him, he grabs his skateboard or bike and runs out the door.

P.O.S. raps about coming into his own and forming his own identity, and identity that makes him out of category with others. He raps,

Cause even when he matched as far as skin with kids, it seemed they didn’t mix
There seemed to be disdain from the kids that clashed colors with him
Rebel yelling girls tryn’a make they daddy pissed

There’s a lot going on in these three lines from P.O.S. feeling out of place from Black kids and white kids to white rebel grrrls using him to rebel against their parents. Even with all of this, though, punk rock saved his life. Punk rock opened a door for him to find people who working to “rewrite skin” and build bridges. P.O.S. comes into his own and “nobody,” as he raps, “will ever be like him.”

There are a lot of other songs I’m adding to this playlist, and as I do that, I will do more posts. What songs would you add for these texts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.