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October 29, 2020
Christina Hammonds Reed's Playlist for Her Novel "The Black Kids"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Christina Hammonds Reed’s The Black Kids is an exemplary debut, a young adult novel that is as timely as it is relatable.
BookPage wrote of the book:
"Christina Hammonds Reed’s debut novel, The Black Kids, is set in 1992 but has a timeliness that often feels uncanny…Reed addresses experiences common to Black teens in both 1992 and 2020 with grace and nuance. Her sentences are searingly beautiful…This is a striking debut that fearlessly contributes to ongoing discussions of race, justice and power."
In heer own words, here is Christina Hammonds Reed's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Black Kids:
Songs in The Black Kids
My grandfather had a t-shirt that said “I Am Music” that my mother bought for him from a vendor on the streets of Manhattan. It couldn’t have been more apt. He had one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard, the kind of voice that should’ve made him famous. He loved all kinds of music and he and my grandmother had a massive record collection. One summer, when I was home from college, I helped catalogue all of them. As I typed up the names of all of the records, I liked to picture my grandparents at various points in their lives listening, dancing, cleaning, and singing along to the songs that got them through all that is most difficult and wonderful about being Black people in this country.
That idea of music as the soundtrack to a life and specifically the ways in which music is often a form of joy and catharsis, rage and refuge for Black lives definitely factored into the way in which I thought about the music in The Black Kids. In my mind, the music wasn’t just there to create a sense of time and place, it was an extension of Ashley’s journey, and in many ways a commentary on race, language, and place itself. I’ve chosen a few of my favorites to tell you a little bit more about.
“Good Vibrations” by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch
One of the first musical references in The Black Kids is “Good Vibrations”. It’s a fun song setting the tone for the time Ashley and her friends are having at the pool. And it immediately transports us back to the era. But it’s also a song that doesn’t exist as a super hit without the Black woman singing the hook. Loleatta Holloway’s voice is foregrounded, and the most memorable part of the song, but the rapping of the white dudes from Boston is supposed to be the main draw. It’s such a complicated snapshot of hip-hop music: white artists chasing new trends and cultural appropriation, especially given Mark Wahlberg’s history of race-related violence against Black children including yelling, “Kill the nigger” and throwing rocks at them. This song comes out not even a full ten years after that incident, and his career skyrockets on the back of a Black woman’s talent. But Ashley and her friends aren’t aware of any of this. Heather’s just air-humping to the beat. The boys think the song is lame. And Ashley is just getting started on her journey of racial awakening.
“How I Could Just Kill A Man” by Cypress Hill and “F—Tha Police” by NWA
These two songs are such a great snapshot of the tensions boiling over in this cultural moment. They capture the anger of LA-based Black and Brown youth struggling to survive and to thrive in the face of oppressive forces, but they’re also jubilant in their in-your-face defiance. The frustrations expounded upon in NWA’s 1988 release foreshadowed the response to the Rodney King beating police acquittals. And Ice Cube’s solo work, including the song “Black Korea”, released in 1991, while highly problematic and offensively simplistic, spoke to the rising tensions between Korean store owners and the community in South LA, especially after the death of Latasha Harlins at the hands of Soon Ja Du. West Coast hip-hop was becoming increasingly more mainstream in 1992 and it’s not surprising that Trevor and Michael, two privileged white dudes ditching class to hang out at a pool in a mansion, would relish the defiant posturing and swagger of both songs, while also being completely disconnected from the experiences of their Black and Brown creators.
“Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
If ever there were a ubiquitous love poem to Los Angeles, it’s this song. Anthony Kiedis sings about copping drugs under a bridge in Downtown LA and how he’s taking solace in the city herself. He personifies Los Angeles throughout so that she’s like a lover or friend holding him through his darkest spaces, even as those darkest spaces are literally in her shadows. Lucia isn’t singing the correct lyrics this scene, they’re more like nonsense and Ashley knows the words are off. But there’s something about the loneliness that is speaking to them both across language itself. Something also deeply rooted in a sense of place. I love that a Guatemalan 30-something and a wealthy Black teenager are connecting through the words of a recovering white addict in this moment. To me it feels very much emblematic of Los Angeles itself - people finding themselves connected even though many of them come from all over and have vastly different life experiences. As well as the ways in which the city is capable of destroying and embracing you all at the same time, which in some ways foreshadows Ashley’s experience of self-realization as a result of the riots.
“The Air that I Breathe” by The Hollies
I love that in this moment Jo is singing this beautiful love song to the point of gasping for breath and Ashley is so deeply frustrated with her sister to the point of “hate”. I personally came to this song because of how Radiohead uses it in “Creep”, which was one of my favorite songs as a kid. “Creep” is itself a song all about feeling like you’re not good enough, or like you don’t belong. Given that so many deaths of Black people at the hands of police have centered around the phrase “I can’t breathe” and watching the literal loss of breath of Black bodies, it felt like a very subtle way to explore breath, alienation and disconnect between these two sisters that comes about because of how much they actually love each other and can’t properly express themselves within the context of their individual Black experiences, Jo’s mental health struggles, and the intergenerational trauma they’re both reckoning with, unbeknownst to them.
“Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys
This one is a purposeful echo of the Marky Mark and Funky Bunch “Good Vibrations” in the opener. Many of The Beach Boys biggest hits evoke the quintessential and implicitly white tanned girls lounging in the sun, much in the way we open the book with Ashley’s friends sunning poolside. It’s a version of what it means to be a California girl that excludes people who look like Ashley and the other POC who live in California from the narrative. The Beach Boys are themselves from Hawthorne, a near-beach suburb that boomed because of the innovation of the aerospace industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It was also, historically, meant to be a whites-only settlement, a “sundown town”, which meant that Black people were not meant to be there after dark. The Beach Boys have these incredibly complex beautiful harmonies, harmonies that are incredible because of the number of voices layered on top of each other to create the sound. To me that’s in some ways like Los Angeles itself, voices layered on top of each other that make this city beautiful. Hawthorne itself has gone through several demographic shifts since due to the rise and fall and rise again in industry. That said its perhaps a bit ironic that the birthplace of said sound is rooted in exclusion. And that doesn’t go unrecognized by Ashley’s sister, Jo, and increasingly Ashley as she starts to think more deeply about everything she’s hearing and seeing as the riots progress.
“Home” - The Wiz Soundtrack
This song so full of longing. It’s when Dorothy, as imagined in this all-Black retelling of The Wizard of Oz is singing her version of the “there’s no place like home” line made famous by Judy Garland in the original movie. The fact that Ashley mentions it as one of her favorites, a musical that is all about a Black girl trying to find her way to home is entirely fitting for Ashley as she struggles to understand who her people are, who her real friends are, what her city is, and who her parents and sister are. Dorothy in The Wiz is starting to see home clearly. Lana starts the song in the car as she and Pham drive Ashley home. The words out of her mouth are melancholic as the idea of home “where there’s a place where there’s love overflowing” is not quite something she’s experienced because of her mother’s abuse. Then, Pham joins in, and I wanted to use the song as a way of exploring what home means to an immigrant, as a political or economic refugee to this country. Eventually it’s the three of them singing together - through which I wanted to interrogate what does it mean to have to flee one’s home in search of another safer haven, and also how does the Black experience of The Great Migration, the one that landed Ashley’s family in Los Angeles, parallel those journeys?
“O.P.P.” by Naughty by Nature
Ashley is only kinda down with O.P.P. By which I meant that she only kind of knows the lyrics, but also O.P.P. is Other People’s Property. And Michael is Kimberly’s. It’s a tongue in cheek reference and Ashley’s being down with O.P.P. is about to have disastrous consequences for her later in the scene. I entertained myself while writing it in. I also love the sample from The Jackson Five’s “ABC” and the innocence of that song with the cheekiness of the Naughty by Nature song.
“Gee Officer Krupke!” - West Side Story Soundtrack
I fell love with West Side Story as a baby movie buff and theater nerd (and before I realized that in the film half the Sharks are played by white actors in brownface ) This particular song is a delightfully humorous musing on juvenile delinquency and what makes a “bad kid” bad. How does the system continue to pass off the responsibility on kids who are failing and flailing? How do our institutions fail us? Why do we make the choices we make and is there redemption for even the worst of us to be found somewhere? Given that Ashley has just had to confront her actions and how they not only hurt LaShawn and his family, and could have impacted LaShawn’s future, the song felt like an appropriate way to muse on what it means to be “bad” and what it means to be “good”? It’s also something that Los Angeles is reckoning with as she confronts the socioeconomic and cultural reasons behind unequal policing and the Black community and the decades of Black disenfranchisement that give rise to the frustrations that then boil over at this moment in history. It’s also a moment when people outside of the Black community actually start to really question the narratives of cops as “the good guys” when the video of Rodney King’s beating clearly shows otherwise.
“Beautiful Brother of Mine” by Curtis Mayfield
I love Curtis Mayfield - so many of his lyrics are meaningful and challenging while also being funky as hell. “Beautiful Brother of Mine” is a celebration of Black love, both familial and as part of a metaphorical Black family. The fact that Ronnie and Craig bust out into this particular song is emblematic of the momentary healing of their family bonds, the beauty in their shared history overrides the pain. It’s also representative of Ashley’s raised consciousness of herself as a Black person and her increased embrace of her place within the Black community. It’s such a loving celebratory note to end on between the two of them after the melancholy of the revealed family connection with the Tulsa riots and their mother’s suicide and the rift it created.
“Sweet Life” by Frank Ocean
I could do a whole different playlist on the songs I listened to while writing this book. But if there were any particular more recent song that felt like it captured Ashley’s journey it’s this one. It’s all about privilege and being oblivious and then slowly starting to awakening to what’s going on around you. I spent many a day laying on the sand at the beach, listening to it along with “Super Rich Kids” from the same album, and just closing my eyes and picturing Ashley’s trajectory.
Christina Hammonds Reed holds an MFA from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. A native of the Los Angeles area, her work has previously appeared in the Santa Monica Review and One Teen Story. The Black Kids is her first novel.
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