In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Rasheedah Phillips’s Dismantling the Master’s Clock brilliantly explores the history of time through the lens of racial justice.
Fred Moten wrote of the book:
“The straightening and whitening of time are as viciously colonial, as brutally geocidal and genocidal, as the settling and owning of space. Rasheedah Phillips brilliantly and rigorously alerts us to this condition while also showing us how we walk with and wait on one another in rhythm. Dismantling the Master’s Clock is a queer, black, reconstructive tour de force.”
In their own words, here is Rasheedah Phillips’s Book Notes music playlist for their book Dismantling the Master’s Clock:
Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (DtSM) is a collection of essays that examine time from a number of different angles, written, researched, and experienced over a lifetime that is still being lived. Text can sometimes lock things into time and music has the ability to extend beyond the page, continue forward in time while reaching back simultaneously.. Since music is such an extraordinary way to encode memory, my favorite playlist was a sot of cheat code for unlocking those little particle size memory cells that threaded together and latched onto each other to help me write the book.
- Keep on Movin; – Caron Wheeler, Soul II Soul
“Keep on moving
Don’t stop like the hands of time
Click clock, find your own way to stay
The time will come one day
Why do people choose to live their lives this way?”
“It’s our time, time today
The right time is here to stay
Stay in my life, my life always
Yellow is the color of sun rays”
This song was in constant rotation when I was young, whether on the radio, at a family reunion or barbecue, playing on a Sunday as my mom cleaned the house. But it wasn’t until much more recently that I actually listened to the lyrics and realized that this song is very explicitly about time. It embodies so much Black temporal philosophy in the lyrics, lessons about flow and right timing, the time of the present, the now moments.
I reflect a lot on waiting time and wading time and the “right” time for liberation in DtMC. Reading about the history of this song, it was about resistance in the face of brutality – Jazzie B, one of the founders of Soul II Soul and the songwriter, penned the lyrics following the threatened shutdown of his club by police. As Paul Gilroy wrote in The Black Atlantic: Modenity and Double Consciousness, it is a track that “enacted the ties of affiliation and affect which articulated the discontinuous histories of black settlers in the new world.” The song speaks to what many in our communities are, reckoning with – the layers of the past, the intertwining with the now, and collectively creating sustainable and equitable futures of our own making, those strategies for how we keep on movin’.
- ‘93 Til Infinity – Souls of Mischief
A song that is a portal to the here, the now and the infinite, a Black spacetime that evokes zamani time (infinite and eternal timelines) and sasa time (the immediate, the present). From its opening lines, the song locates you in space and place (Oakland) and then an immediate introduction into how they spend their time, or how they “just chill.” The chill is infinite and timeless – stretching from the year 1993 until infinity! The beat, the lyrics, the adlibs—they all work together to span spacetimes, reminding us that hip-hop isn’t bound by linearity. In my book I talk about the concept of weighting time, and how curfews have historically sought to confine Black mobility and agency – restricting our ability to “just chill” on our own terms. From the Jim Crow era’s sundown towns, where curfews upheld racial terror, to their use in modern protests following police killings—from Ferguson in 2014 to Philadelphia in 2020—curfews remain a tool of racialized control, targeting Black and Brown youth under the guise of public safety. These curfews do more than restrict physical movement; they constrain access to public space, socialization, and opportunity, reinforcing inequalities and wielding time itself as a weapon. Yet, hip-hop, as Souls of Mischief remind us, disrupts these temporal boundaries, holding memory, present struggle, and futurity in the same breath—a timeless refusal to be bound.
- Sha-Clack-Clack by Saul Williams (Slam Soundtrack – Ray)
“I am before before”
“Time makes dreams deferred”
“Light only penetrates the darkness thats already there…and Im already there”
I revisited this poetic performance as I was writing DtMC and realized that the whole poem represents the core themes of the entire book. In the lyrics I quoted above, Saul Williams is speaking very specifically about the temporality of Blackness, darkness, and light. The refrain, “I am before before,” situates blackness as ever-present, unbound by linear or colonial constructions of time. In the context of special relativity, blackness—interpreted as the absence of light—moves outside the Western paradigm of light-speed limitation. “Light only penetrates the darkness that’s already there” reflects this essence: darkness is not a signal bound by causality or velocity but an inherent state, already waiting.
- Time: The Donut of the Heart by J Dilla
There comes a time
Day and night
I can’t get you off my mind
I listened to this album on vinyl probably every weekend while writing the book. The entire Donuts album is in itself a sonic palindrome, a quantum time capsule, a temporal pincer move (to borrow the concept from the film Tenet). The opening track is the outro, and the last track is the welcome. It works backwards and forwards and in any track order, inviting remix and reinterpretation. The Time track is time folded in upon itself, a layered, impossible to disentangle-nowness-futurity-history.
- Head Over Heels / Broken – Tears for Fears
“Funny how time flies…”
I first heard this song while watching Donnie Darko during this amazing sequence in the beginning that shows all the main characters involved in the timescape of the movie. The music is seamlessly synched in the sequence, and it felt like time stopped while watching. This was probably the intended effect, as the film’s writer and director intended to pair it with the song when creating the scene and almost didn’t get the rights cleared. This feels like a situation where a closed-loop universe righted itself to ensure self-consistency.
- Time is on My Side – Irma Thomas
Irma Thomas’ Time Is On My Side is such a poignant example of how time operates as both erasure and reclamation. The Rolling Stones’ version of the song is probably the best known. However when Irma Thomas recorded her version in 1964 months before theirs, she gave it a deep sense of blues, while flipping a standard narrative. “Time is on my side” casts the future as her ally and as her ex lover’s burden.
Just months after her recording, The Rolling Stones’ cover, borrowing heavily from her interpretation, and it became their first American Top Ten hit. Their version was stripped of its roots and reimagined as a rock ballad, becoming part of the “British Invasion” —a movement that often capitalized on Black American music without due credit or compensation.
As a result of her erasure, Irma Thomas refused to perform the song. But time is never linear, and it has stayed on her side, as she proclaimed. In 1992, Thomas reclaimed the song and began performing it again, and then in In 2024, 60 years after laying down the track, she performed it with Mick Jagger at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The past remains alive, and recognition, though delayed, can still arrive and shift the ways we engage with the past. Time can obscure, but it can also reveal, redeem, and restore.
- Optimistic – Sounds of Blackness
The blackness
Keep, keep on
Never say die
Optimistic
When in the midst of sorrow
You can’t see up when looking down
A brighter day tomorrow will bring, oh
You hear the voice of reason
Telling you this can’t never be done
No matter how hard reality seems
Just hold on to your dreams, yeah
An unapologetic affirmation of deep Blackness, a temporality of hope and eternity that embodies liberation and boundless possibilities. It activates Afrodiasporan temporal ontologies through the lyrics of “never say die,” embodying an optimism that transcends and resists the boundaries of time. They speak of “being in the midst of sorrow” – casting it as ephemeral yet enduring, both fleeting and ancestral, an intricate weaving of traumas that flow through the roots of our family trees. These traumas may shape the twists, turns, and bends of those roots, yet they do not define them. Through it all, be optimistic, for things can and will change. It invokes Mmere Dane, an Adinkra Symbol that means “Time Changes” or “Times Change” in the Akan language, signifying the dynamic nature of change and the temporary nature of any state of events.
I am from Philadelphia (Lenapehoeking land) but currently live with my family in Los Angeles (Gabrielino/Tongva land). As I write this, Los Angeles is grappling with catastrophic wildfires that have displaced tens of thousands of people and destroyed entire communities. Among them is Altadena, a historically Black community where beloved speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler grew up and where she is buried. Notably, a 1-acre property in Altadena was recently returned to the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, the first time in nearly 200 years that the Tongva had land in Los Angeles County. However, the Black, Indigenous, and Brown residents of that neighborhood and the tribal nation who are the original stewards of those lands have received significantly less national attention than other neighborhoods dominating the narrative and news cycle on the tragedies.
Despite this erasure, the community has already begun to rebuild with each other, coming together in collective care and mutual aid. They have activated what time scholar Kevin Birth calls “temporalities of hope.” By recognizing and uplifting these communal temporalities, by moving in solidarity with them, we open up spacetimes for radical hope and transformative action, ones where the full humanity and potential of Black people and our communities are protected and valued. This collective work must be grounded in optimism, the hope that things can be different, that time will change.
- Harvest Time – Pharoah Sanders
Another vinyl that was in constant rotation while writing the book. I have to shout out my partner, Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) for putting me onto this song who knows how long ago and procuring the precious vinyl. After hearing it for the first time, though, it already felt familiar, as if it had reached back into time in my memory stream and I had known it forever. The song speaks to a way of measuring time that is not dependent on the clock but on the seasons. In DtMC, I spend a chapter focused on Black, African, and Afrodiasporan temporalities and cultural means of time reckoning. Several cultures and societies across the diaspora place more emphasis on the seasons than they do on a monthly calendar, 24-hour clock, or linear progression of years. The song invokes and journeys through those traditions, circling around a particular loop that subtly expands and collapses and continues and expands and collapses. I asked Camae what the song meant to her and after thinking for a moment she said “Its a meditation and a freeness. It’s built around love, intention, and rhythm. Its an unfurling of time while embodying it.”
- Home (The Wiz Soundtrack) – Stephanie Mills or Diana Ross
And just maybe I can convince time to slow up
Givin me enough time, ooh, in my life to grow up
Time be my friend
And let me start again
In DtSM I explore this concept of nostalgia and its relationship tied to home, memory, and people actively displaced from whatever they consider to be home. The etymology of nostalgia derives from Ancient Greek, capturing the essence of nostos (signifying “return home” or a “homeward journey”) and algos (“pain” or “ache”). Its roots are deeply entwined with the wrenching loss of a place where memories and emotions once thrived, tied to a specific locality and time.
When I think of home, I think of a place
Wheres theres love overflowing
I wish I was home, I wish I was back there
With the things Ive been knowing
Wind that makes the tall grass bend into leaning
Suddenly the raindrops that fall they have a meaning
This song evokes a lot of nostalgia for me—something a bit bittersweet tethered to childhood memories of watching The Wiz and The Wizard of Oz in the late ’80s/early ’90s – feelings of home, safety, and innocence – all the things Dorothy left behind when she was swept up in the tornado, but then learned along her journey that home was inside of her all along, quantumly entangled with her being.
Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, writer, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux.