Gathering in November 1889 for the second annual meeting of the 1888 legislative biennium, South Carolina House Speaker James Simons greeted his colleagues by celebrating that “not a single vacancy has been occasioned by death.” While American legislators still die in office today, the apparent ubiquity of death in the post-Reconstruction South Carolina House hints at broader differences between the state legislatures of that period and the more contemporary congressional and state legislative arenas in which modern political science has honed its theories and measurement strategies.

Weber overlooked Citizens, but this essay concludes that, in truth, this role in any society is not an independent factor but a “dependent variable.” It depends on “common sense,” which means understandings which are shared by members of the same community but differ from one community to another – such as between what is demanded of good Americans and good Indonesians. Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” helps us to frame the subject, though, by urging us to measure every candidate’s “cause” against its potential consequences and then instructing citizens to support only good cause candidates. Trump has no cause, though, because he does not offer intelligible policies (he issues no position papers) but exploits his “charisma” to engage in politics as a program of exciting “show business” where the goal is achieve headlines every day and get the show renewed. In this sense, Trump is a modern “Pied Piper,” using the arts of advertising, public relations, and propaganda to “entertain” rather than to “educate,” to “amuse” rather than to promote a coherent national “vision.” What scholars must investigate now is why 77,000,0000 million American citizens, in the words of Neil Postman, found Trump “amusing” and voted for him. Can democracy survive if citizens are tempted to vote for fun and, say, ignore a politician’s disdain for global warming, international alliances, science, and top-notch higher education?

In 1984, Winston Smith said that freedom is the right to step back from lies and say that 2 and 2 make 4. But today, even though we are free in Smith’s sense, someone else will say, loudly and repeatedly, that 2 and 2 make 5. And who will separate for us the wheat from the chaff? Therefore free speech is no longer always helpful, as thinkers like Mill and Holmes thought, in which case we must consider how to repair the marketplace for ideas so that we can advance in solid knowledge rather than drown in mere opinions. John Thompson suggested a “Trump Test,” whereby “public language… must distinguish between… grown up political discourse and outright nonsense.” This can be done in two ways. We can wait until our speakers and influencers fix their discourse, which may take many years, or we can fix the information system that conveys to us too many incorrect propositions. If we chose the second option, what needs to be done is clear. We must regulate the use of smart phones so as not to permit them to maintain a conversation that fractures modern society and muddles modern thinking. Of course, to overcome such a pleasant national addiction will require commitment to moderate political activism, and each of us must look for inspiration to that end. Thomas Paine told us that we have the power to remake the world. He did, and so can we.

This chapter listens closely to songs released by Saweetie (‘My Type’ and ‘Tap In’), Latto (‘Muwop’), Erica Banks (‘Buss It’), and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion (‘W.A.P.’) in 2019 and 2020. Each of these tracks employs sonic elements of trap music while sampling classic hip-hop and club anthems. Beyond just flipping samples, these rappers flip hip-hop sexuality itself on its head, transforming cuts that position Black women as objects into songs that center Black women’s desire and agency. We listen to these tracks not only in relation to one another (and to the sources of their samples) but also in the context of Sylvia Wynter’s influential analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Riffing on Katherine McKittrick’s engagement with Wynter, we theorize the work of these rappers as “demonic sound,” as they make themselves present in music that had previously absented them.

What Stradivarius and Steinway are to classical music, and Fender and Gibson are to rock and roll, the E-mu SP 1200 and AKAI MPC samplers are to hip-hop. As beat makers in the mid 1980s experimented with newly available digital samplers, E-mu Systems and AKAI introduced their all-in-one sampler. During the so-called Golden Era, the SP 1200 and MPC developed a reciprocal relationship with hip-hop music that saw the specifications of the machines in conversation with the aesthetics of the music. Through analyses of ‘South Bronx,’ ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell,’ and ‘Unbelievable,’ the chapter addresses how these two machines became primary instruments of beat making. In addition, these examples reveal how each machine developed mythic legacies within hip-hop culture that have long survived their commonplace usage, and how these machines shape an aesthetic consideration of the “sound” of hip-hop beats to the present day.

This chapter examines hip-hop’s rhyme history. With attention to examples from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Big Daddy Kane, and Busta Rhymes, it identifies three main modes of rhyme: “normal,” “extraordinary,” and “impossible.” Popular during hip-hop’s early development, normal rhymes clearly and predictably mark line endings. Sometimes dismissed as unsophisticated, they invite the listener to experience the depicted experience as communal. Extraordinary rhymes concentrate normal rhymes’ infrequent technical flourishes into a defining characteristic. They play intonation against line breaks and feature denser, more complicated multisyllabic rhymes such as mosaic and forced rhymes. They aim for a conspicuous virtuosity. Impossible rhymes are often performed at a formidable speed, without any clear sense of where lines start or end. Riddling passages also cannot be conclusively understood. While normal and extraordinary rhymes encourage their listeners to remember and perform them, impossible rhymes aim for irreproducibility.

This Introduction notes that 77,000,000 American citizens voted for Donald Trump even though he was a convicted felon and autocratic narcissist. They therefore abandoned the “self-evident truth” principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. That is, they failed to exercise citizenship as a vocation dedicated to good public behavior which supports voting in favor of candidates who will protect and maintain democratic values and institutions. Anticipating further analysis in later chapters, the Introduction ascribes this failure of responsible citizenship to, among other causes, the marketplace for ideas today which is overloaded with information and disinformation, leading to muddled thinking, a scarcity of common sense, and what Neil Postman called a media imperative of “amusing ourselves to death,” or entertainment rather than education.

The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.

Moving from Illmatic to Young Stoner Life, this chapter listens closely to rap flow – the complex metrical pulse that runs through its verses. Drawing on lyrical examples from rappers like MC Lyte and Missy Elliott, it lays out a series of core technical effects (such as pauses, overflows, and triplets) before turning to the question of how MCs have grappled with the challenge of recording their flows on the page. Discussing the obstacles that face any attempt to apply traditional print poetic scansion to hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the innovative ways that rappers like Rakim and Young Thug have approached their notepads – making use of 16x4 grids, unorthodox punctuation, and abstract shapes. It closes with a discussion of so-called mumble rap and the ethics of close listening, pointing to the controversial use of rap lyrics in the recent YSL court case.

Black disfranchisement in the American South constitutes the most severe instance of democratic backsliding in American history. But Black disfranchisement was not a single instance of anything – rather, each of the ex-Confederate states took its own unique path to disfranchisement. In much of the Border South, as I discuss in the previous chapter, disfranchisement occurred in the midst of relatively competitive two-party systems and reflected an effort to secure Democratic Party control of these states. In some Deep South states, especially Alabama and Louisiana, which I explore in Chapter 6, disfranchisement was inseparable from the “Populist Moment” in the South. In this chapter, I focus on two Deep South states – Mississippi and South Carolina – in which disfranchisement occurred in the midst of nearly pure one-party politics.