Kill Rock Stars has a brand new single by Bay Area “radical, militant queer collaborative music collective” COMMANDO. Titled “EMET (Izdis Hymn)”, the song has a lot of layers and depth to it but, you know what? Why should I regurgitate when the band explains it clear enough:
“EMET (Izdis Hymn?)” is a magical realism-oriented ode to Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago, lIllinois who was tortured and killed while visiting family in Money, Mississippi for an alleged sexual offense toward a local white woman.
Till’s killers were tried but never convicted.The photograph of his mutilated corpse was viewable at his funeral and appeared in dozens of publications internationally, deeply influencing the then burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.
The song’s title contextualizes the song’s gradual reveal through an overlay of Till’s name with the Hebrew word EMET (“Truth”) and an African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) phonetic refrain (Is This Him?/Is This Hymn?/Izdis Hymn?) pointing toward ceremonial prayer, grief, generational trauma ancestral blood memory.
The lyric and samples further ground references to Black popular cultural media characters murdered/martyred in sexualized violence by Racism/White Supremacy: Daniel Robitaille/“Candyman” (from the eponymous 1992 film) and the wrongly convicted John Coffey from the 1998 film “The Green Mile”.
The story of Emmet Till is some tough shit to sift through at any time, but COMMANDO pull no punches and knock this one out of the park.Take a listen below, and visit COMMANDO on their Bandcamp page for more.
the white drew carey (aka – Jeff Sorley) is the founder and head editor of TGEFM. He’s lived (outside of) Chicago, Madison WI, (ugh) Penn State, Lyon FR, Oxford UK, central New Jersey, and now within earshot of SFO in the Bay Area. When not scouring the web for more great bands and labels to post about, he also spends time drawing (mostly) silly sci-fi and anime stuff under the name Asplenia Studios.
