Welcome to Post-America: Sole, DJ Pain 1 make music for the morning after

On Feb. 25, Sole released “Post American Studies” with frequent collaborator DJ Pain 1. It is, according to what’s available on most streaming services, his 27th full-length work. 

On Feb. 24, with Russia’s violent military invasion of Ukraine, the world got a stark reminder of what makes his work must-listen each and every time he releases something new. 

Sole’s work is so vital in his third decade of making pointed, crisp, aggressive rap albums because of its humanity. He’s become hyper-focused on the local and intimate, the way that policy and rhetoric play out in human lives and on a human scale, and he forces us to examine the narratives we traffic in that allow us to ignore human suffering.

Further, in his unrelenting discourse of forced self-examination, he tasks us with exploring how our beliefs are created and the intellectual emptiness of forcing people to pick arbitrary sides. 

It is possible to believe that the United States has committed unspeakable imperial atrocities and that it is wrong for the Russian military to launch missiles that hit residential apartment buildings and force neonatal intensive care units and pediatric cancer wards to makeshift bomb shelters. We can be sad and angry for the Iraq War and the obliteration of Aleppo and still grieve for the human lives lost senselessly due to a contemporary demonstration of inhumanity. 

We don’t have to ask, “What about?” We can be angry and sad about many things at once. And, Sole makes clear, we can be joyful and defiant and loving, even as we are angry and sad. We don’t just have to pick one. 

“I don’t need no Nazi to tell me,” he raps with an almost weary clarity on “Welcome to the Future,” “The halls of the Capitol are empty/ Politicians hiding under their desks.” 

It’s the kind of sentiment that leads even anti-war activists to express admiration for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he stands on the streets of Kyiv and tells the U.S. he needs ammunition, not a ride to safety. Who is this world leader who seems to put the people he serves before himself? It almost doesn’t seem possible in our heyday of disingenuous discourse designed only to tally points on some imaginary political scoreboard (or, worse, to raise money). 

But Sole also makes clear that he “don’t need no heroes” and on the catchy and listenable “Lightbringer” he intersperses savage verses of calls for radical transparency and new alternatives – “Democrats in office/ We’re still fucked, just get real/ It’s 2021/ How that boot on your neck feel?” – with Unwoman’s languid chorus: “Bring the light/ Burn the sky/ Torch our lives/ Break it all into parts.” 

Question everything. 

At his core, Sole offers a call to action. He makes clear that he has dropped out of the rat race as far as he can go and encourages us to do the same: “Staring into my screen, like what we gonna do?/ Y’all I promise this will be my last Zoom call … It’s either hell or utopia/ It’s either new forms of life or new forms of controlling you.”

Which are you going to choose?

It can sound bleak, yes. On “The Collapsing 20s,” though, and in lots of intimate moments, like one of his young children mic-checking with a sense of wonder at the open of “Surrounded” as an ’80s guitar line plays in the background, Sole makes clear he’s not a nihilist. By deploying Ursula Le Guin’s famous speech to the National Book Awards in 2014 – “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of Kings.” – he calls on, as she says, “some real grounds for hope.” After all, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

And, hey, he offers, “It ain’t every day you get to watch an empire fall.”

Of course, no one will accuse Sole of being an optimist, either. Even as he collaborates with the likes of Decomposure to create eminently singable refrains, they still contain lyrics like, “Losing my breath to a burning sky/ Wound in my chest for the left behind.” The climate crisis, he predicts, won’t be addressed in a meaningful enough fashion to avoid large-scale suffering. Capitalism won’t go quietly. COVID-19 is just a taste of what’s to come. 

He is adamant, in “Plague Days,” that “it’s a fucking fact that this thing you call America is dead already.”

Maybe that’s provocative. But maybe it’s what people need to accept if society is to create a more perfect future. The past ain’t coming back. 

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at [email protected].