this song is gorgeous. Carly’s voice is perfect for this echoing post-punk groove; it vaporizes into the song’s technical jangle, allowing the feeling to seep in around the edges of a bouncy beat. where the rising chord changes in the chorus bespeak tension, drowning, and discord, the vocal offers peace within the chaos.
as one of the youtube comments indicates, this song also heavily samples, uncredited, this one:
this is “pfumvu pa ruzevha” by Thomas mapfumo, a Zimbabwean guitarist and activist. the title translates to “trouble in the preserves” - a lament about the difficult living conditions in Zimbabwe’s rural areas. the song was written in 1977, under the colonial regime in the country; its lyrics narrate how city centers, flush with cash from colonial economic structures, flourish while residents of the countryside suffer in poverty and watch their families die.
pop music is amazing, a sort of broad-scale hymn for a society with no gods. like hymns, pop unites people of different experiences and origins; like hymns, it can act as an opiate as much as a balm. through ignorance or malice, pop can hurt people, can be indefensible. “trouble in the streets” steals from “pfumvu pa ruzevha”; it’s not the first nor is it probably the last time that a group of white artists will take the work of a black artist and bleed it of its meaning. without the central, circular riff, bc unidos’ track loses all of its power and forward motion; that central riff is not theirs to claim. they know this. it’s why it wasn’t mentioned anywhere that this riff is mapfumo’s (the closest information on the internet is an obscure interview with Ariel pink around its release, in which he describes the riff as “a short loop/sample of a highlife recording” that he then built the chord progression off of). it’s why the sample remains uncredited, why mapfumo is not listed among the song’s writers. his piece is the most essential; it provides the engine of the track. but “trouble in the streets” dishonors its parent song by making its central conflict about lovers on the outs. its existence implies that the suffering in one place can be converted, no questions asked, to the pleasure of another.
