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October 21, 2021
Quincy Scott Jones's Playlist for His Poetry Collection "How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children"
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.
Quincy Scott Jones's poetry collection How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children is powerful and important.
Yolanda Wisher wrote of the book:
"These poems are dying to stay tender in the plumage of rage. These poems are cry-laughing to keep from killing somebody. These poems are the knife's edge of nightmare scoring the fertile threshold of song. They unflinchingly ask and answer: What use is a poem on this American killing floor and its cooling board of rhetoric?"
In his own words, here is Quincy Scott Jones's Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children:
How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children – the soundtrack
How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children is a meditation on racial violence and raising children in a world that seems to cater to this violence. While writing this book, too often the soundtrack was news reports and the sound of grieving parents. But there’s always music: music to cry to, music to heal, music to live.
I mean, I think there is.
Honestly, when I was offered to make a playlist for this book, I became as scared as I was excited. I’m the comic book nerd, the sci-fi nerd, the cinema nerd; not the music nerd. My wife is the one that can pull the deep cuts and offer an on-the-spot thesis both informative and entertaining – music nerds are the coolest nerds of the nerd tribe. But music is a great influence of mine, and while my mixtape will be mostly radio edits, I combed through the book and rediscovered fifteen songs either mentioned directly or made their presence known even while playing in the background of the poem. So, I would like to offer the How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children soundtrack, if it’s cool with you.
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
I have no proof, but I can imagine on stage no matter how high Lady Day was, she snapped out of it when it came time to sing this song of American lynching. No drug is strong enough to spare her from this reality, so in turn she does not spare us.
In the 1995 TV film The Affair, the white Englishwoman played by Kerry Fox and the Black American GI play by Courtney B Vance listen to a recording of “Strange Fruit” in the kitchen during World War II.
“What poetry!” says the Englishwoman.
“Poetry? This is happening!” says the G.I.
Shortly after, they have sex.
I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but the film ends with death and detached sympathy. Feel free to guess which character experiences which.
Simon and Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence
When I was young I was haunted by two men calmly singing about reality randomly tearing apart revealing a window into a dimension where a mass amount of people worshiped a shapeshifting deity that resembled the signs hanging in the windows of dinners and Blockbuster Videos. This was my introduction to extended metaphor.
As I grew older I came to understand this was not a song about alternative realities but about social realities, the inequities of society and our refusal to speak about them. At this point, I was no longer haunted by the images, but by calm itself: the men sing their protest in a whisper, barely louder than the silence they fear.
Nina Simone – See-Line Woman
Who better to chase away the constant storm of silence than the protest of Nina Simone? “Four Women.” “Mississippi God Damn”. “Ne me quitte pas.”
Then there’s “See-Line Woman”, a song I’m honestly not one hundred percent sure what it’s about. I know it has to do with prostitutes lining up on the shore waiting for sailors, but it could also be a play on Sea Lion Woman, which makes me think of mermaids and sirens and other women white mythology taught us to fear because they were too powerful.
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she'll fly away
Sometimes protest is retelling the story.
Jea Millz - “No No No No”
In the early '00s, several hip-hop artists tried to sample Dawn Penn’s classic “No No No,” but the then 20-year-old Jea Millz takes the crown, creating a swagger sprinkled with politics and patois that’s punctuated with the soulfulness of Penn’s voice. But all that swagger’s more than tough talk, it’s a voice of authority, a warning of love, one coming from an adult who was once a child who was all too used to being told “no.”
Dawn Penn – “No No No No”
Of course, nothing beats the original. Penn’s voice haunts me as much today as it did when I first heard the song. The rhythm, the plea, the sound of the tears in the reverb. Is this the seduction of loss? Is this a beauty that only comes when one has felt the absence of an embrace?
2PAC - Words of Wisdom
Is it hip hop? jazz? A poem? a speech? Is this from the same guy singing background vocals on the “Humpty Dance”? Quick fact: September 13, 2021 marked twenty-five years since Tupac Shakur, music icon and the nephew of Assata Shakur, was killed. If he was alive today, he would only be fifty. By September 13, 2022, he will be absent from this world for more time then he was with us.
Vaughan Mason & Crew- Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll
It was incredible to learn Jordan Davis loved to skate. I, like many kid, grew up not too far from a roller rink. In junior high I would watch my my father zoom around the like he was born with wheels on his feet. In high school I caught my younger brother making out with some girl when I went to pick him up. And at all ages, I would strap my skates on, jump out into the rink come crashing down on my butt within the first ten seconds. Skating was never really my thing. And yet, the few times I went, sore tail bone aside, the rink was a place a joy, Black joy.
In an attempt to defend a discriminatory “anti-riot” law, a lawyer for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis - the governor of the same state that initially acquitted Michael Dunn for the murder of Jordan Davis – pointed to a Juneteeth celebration as evidence the law stilled allowed Black people the right to protest. Mark Walker, the U.S. District Judge in the case, noted “a public gathering of Black people celebrating ‘Black joy’ and release from bondage does not automatically equate to a protest.”
“‘Black joy’…does not… equate to a protest.” And yet, somehow it does.
The Rolling Stones (feat Merry Clayton) – Gimme Shelter
There are places in this world where one can find this manuscript in its earliest form under the then name “shot away”:, a title that ultimately leads the question “Did you see the documentary 25 Feet From Stardom.”
Short answer: “Why, yes” (see also Kate Rushin’s The Black Back-ups.)
Long answer: I often heard, but saw for the first time Merry Clayton, a Black woman in '60s clothing, and hence in the clothing of America, belting out “rape and murder” as if she was belting out all of history. And yet, in this song, it is the white man who is asking for shelter.
Prince - “Partyman”
Maybe it’s the way the horns keep the rhythm or how the synthesizer plays in the staccato of the lyrics, but in my youth Prince’s “Partyman” always felt like a bridge between classic big band swing and this new thing at the time called “hip-hop.”
This is his follow-up to “Batdance.” This is the video where Prince jumps ten feet in the air, does a split, and comes down like it’s nothing. This is the soundtrack to Jack Nicholson’s rampage through the art museum - my first lesson in how to deal with a Western canon that refuses to let BIPOC artist in:
Smash. Smash. Smash. Sma – “I kinda like this one, Bob.”
Jr. Walker & The All Stars – Shotgun
In my youth, when the old heads claimed young people’s music was too violent, I would counter with the 1965 lyrics ‘Shotgun / Shoot ‘em ‘fore they run now.” I don’t much else about the song except:
1) In 1965 the performance of this song marked the first television appearance of a certain backup guitarist by the name of Jimi Hendrix.
2) Despite my obvious superior rhetorical abilities, I have yet to win an argument with any old heads.
The Notorious B.I.G. - One More Chance
I was half sleep on a couch in my first-year college dorm when I learned of the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. from a ten-year-old blonde-haired kid standing next to his family presumably visiting his older sibling. I wanted to pop and yell “what?” but I was worried I would frighten the kid and his whole family would scream.
Teaching high school years later, I would mark the day by writing a quote on the board by poet Christopher Wallace. Only once did a fellow faculty member stop, approach me, and say “Is that Biggie?”
The Beatles - Twist and Shout
I probably would gain more cred if I included the original Top Notes version of this song, or the Isley Brothers cover, or even the Salt-N-Peppa deep cut, but I have to shout-out the Beatles, mainly because of their performance of this song at the 1963 Royalty Variety Show, and mainly because I may have “borrowed” Lennon’s joke about class inequities and clapping from the cheap seat.
I mean, the Queen was there. That’s gangsta.
James Brown - “please please please please”
When I teach first-year writing, I tell my students the truth: writing conclusions is hard. I don’t tell the absolute truth: as long as they live, they will never write a conclusion better than the James Brown turning a 2-minute song into a six-minute religious experience on the 1964 T.A.M.I. show.
James Brown sweating like a preacher. The drummer keeping time with the proverbial amens. The fans cheering in tongues. And then, in the last few seconds, the camera turns around to the audience, and there’s one woman in black who doesn’t seem to get it. There’s always one.
Nina Simone - Sinnerman
Can anyone follow James Brown? Well, yes, a jazz-inspired, classically trained, spiritual an encore from the one and only Nina Simone.
If there’s one song they play at my funeral, let it be “Sinnerman.” I want a story. I want anaphora. I want a soul clap and piano solo. I want rolling snare and a base guitar. And I want it all to end in a wail so deep it has to be a prayer or a history or a lover’s plea. And like a prayer or a history or a lover’s plea it must be most definitely felt, though most likely it will go unheard.
Quincy Scott Jones is the author of The T-Bone Series (Whirlwind Press). His work has appeared in the African American Review, the North American Review, the Bellingham Review, and Love Jawns: A Mixtape. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a VONA Alum. With Nina Sharma he co-curates Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC artist. He teaches in the NYC area and is working on his first graphic narrative.
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