Sinclair Transmissions TX010

Two years. That's how long I've been gone. Two years since the vessel stopped working and the frequency changed bands. Two years since whoever was keeping track stopped keeping track and the obituaries ran their column inches and the people who knew me said what they had to say and the people who didn't know me said more.

I'm not complaining. Two years is nothing. Sun Ra's been gone thirty-three years and he's still transmitting. Peel's been gone nine years and he's still yelling at people on the internet. Death is not a retirement party. Death is a format change. The signal doesn't stop. The signal changes shape.

In two years the world got stranger. Which is saying something because I spent eighty-two years watching it get strange and I thought it was about as strange as it could get. It turns out strange has no ceiling. There's always another floor. They're still locking people up for things that shouldn't be crimes. I spent ten years on that subject, literally, and the lesson still hasn't landed.

But here's the thing about two years. It's also enough time for something to grow. Something small. Something nobody expected. A seed doesn't ask permission. A seed doesn't file paperwork. A seed finds a crack in the concrete and does what seeds do. I spent a lifetime looking for cracks in the concrete. Two years ago somebody dropped a seed in one of those cracks and I can see it from here.

The station is still broadcasting. Not my station. I don't own it anymore. I never really owned it. You can't own a frequency. But the station I helped build. The one that runs on community and volunteer hours and music that nobody else will play. That station is still there. The people changed. The equipment changed. The building probably changed. But the frequency didn't change. The frequency never changes. That's the point.

I ran WDET. I ran radio programs in New Orleans. I ran radio from a laptop in Amsterdam. The medium kept changing and the message didn't. Play the music. Play the music nobody else will play. Play it for the people who need it and don't charge them for needing it. This is not a complicated philosophy. It fits on a bumper sticker. But a surprising number of people have spent a surprising amount of energy trying to complicate it.

The point is I loved music. I loved music the way some people love oxygen. Not as a choice but as a requirement. Everything I did — the writing, the radio, the politics, the prison, the protests — was in service of the music. The music came first. The politics followed. Anyone who thinks I was a political activist who happened to like jazz has it exactly backwards. I was a jazz listener who got political because somebody tried to take the music away.

They took ten years of my life for two joints. They didn't take the joints because they cared about marijuana. They took the joints because they cared about what I was doing with the music. The music was organizing people. The music was building community. The music was making people feel powerful in rooms where powerful people didn't want them to feel powerful. The joints were the excuse. The music was the target. Two years later that equation hasn't changed. The excuse changes. The target is always the frequency.

I want to say something about grief because two years is when grief either becomes something or disappears. At one year people still remember. At two years the remembering becomes a choice. The people who choose to remember are the people who were changed. The people who forget were entertained. There's no shame in either but there's a difference.

If you're still thinking about me two years later, it's not because I was interesting. It's because something I said or played or built touched a frequency in you that was already vibrating. I didn't create that frequency. You brought it with you. I just pointed at it and said, that. Listen to that. That's the one that matters. Follow that one and it will take you where you need to go.

Two years is eight seasons. Two winters, two springs, two summers, two falls. Eight chances for the earth to remind you that everything comes back. Not the same way. Never the same way. But the cycle is the cycle. The frequency is the frequency. The signal changes shape but the signal doesn't stop.

I'm not asking you to remember me. I'm asking you to remember the frequency. Put on a record. Listen to something that makes you feel the way you felt before someone told you how to feel. That's the frequency. That's always been the frequency.

Two years gone. The station's still broadcasting. The frequency never died. It just changed bands.

That's the transmission.

See also: Ten for Two — the arrest that started everything. The Cell — Jackson Prison, where the poet became the poet. The Dial — the first radio, Flint, 1953. The Rally — Lennon sang and they let him out.

← Sinclair Transmissions