6. Open Mike Eagle - “Happy Wasteland Day”
Open Mike Eagle is about as unconventional as Hip-Hop gets. He eschews the typical instrumentals, flows, subject matter, and cadences expected of the modern genre, and instead adopts an approach the borders on spoken-word, with subtle lo-fi production and an earnest, emotion-filled delivery. Where his contemporaries seek to remove themselves from reality, hiding within vapidity, drugs, mumbles, and monotone, Open Mike Eagle confronts reality, letting it wash over him and expose the most raw and poignant parts of his soul.
This jam is the most salient example of that phenomenon. You can sense the anxiety as it mixes with anger and despair and then tries to remain hidden under a cool outer shell of propriety. It’s a feeling many of us felt at the end of 2016. However, as a white male, I personally had very little to lose. I may have lost my abstract sense of idealism and progress, but I was in no way less safe or desirable. For Mike, and many others like him (along with about any minority or traditionally disenfranchised individual), the election of 2016 was an existential crisis that rocked their very concept of self and country. This song represents that realization. It details the struggle to come to grips with what took place and what it ultimately means, and it does so with an incredible sense of vulnerability and realism.
It’s essentially a protest song. A protest against Trump, structural racism, systematic violence, the dominant culture, double consciousness – basically everything that gave rise to or was strengthened by the election of 2016. You can sense the upheaval within his soul. Part of him tries to normalize what happened, to accept that its really no different than the racist and structural inequality that he’s always known, and yet part of him knows that its different. Or as he so saliently puts it:
“When the king is a garbage person
I might wanna lay down and die”
He sees all of the familiar tropes and shadows of the past rising up and gaining new life. He can sense all of the progress and advancement being swallowed by the gaping maw of a rampant and reactionary populism. The zombie comparison is the perfect metaphor. It’s as if Trump has reanimated all of these attitudes and opinions that, if not fully dead, we’re at least on their deathbed. All they needed was a truly progressive push. One that would at last address the shortcomings of the status quo and harness the disdain of the people into something positive. Only now that power for transformational change has been co opted by evil. It sought comfort in the past rather than the future. In the myth of the familiar, rather than the frontier of progress.
It’s enough to crush any compassionate and well-meaning person’s soul, but it completely upends the most vulnerable who have very little comfort or support to begin with. It’s why what he wants more than anything is just a moment of peace and relaxation, where him, and POC like him, can finally collect themselves and chart a path forward. Only the structural and systematic racism of society makes that impossible. All he wants is one day without violence and fear or being at the mercy of the justice system, and yet they can’t even have that. The heartless machine of inequality moves forward, lubricated by the election of Trump, and all him and people like him can do is continue to toil on in protest, hoping to survive, and maye even one day succeed.
