“Uh Huh” is a protest song, during a protest year, during a baffling era.
The lead instrumentation—John Paul Carillo’s bass
and guitar; Chris Olsen’s drums and percussion—alternates between harrowing restraint
and thumping outcry. Anna Meadors plays the song’s dirge on her alto saxophone;
the song, then, absorbs the universal lamentations of people who’ve been deprived
of other people. When all four of us participate at once, including the howling
vocals, there is a variety of madness that we could call liberation, or
honesty. Listeners will be rewarded again and again by the virtuosity of the
musicians. The outro, in particular, estimates the emotional quandary of
marching forward, despite a societal environment that cannot remediate its own
destructiveness.
“Uh Huh” refers to brothers in the universal
sense: close and distant family, comrades, colleagues. We are protesting an
inexcusable societal blight like gun crimes, on the one hand, but many protests
can be echo-located in “Uh Huh.” (What’s your
protest?) In the lyrics, a gun is pointed at an unarmed person. This
fundamental inequality can transfer from one situation to another. You’re powerless
at a crucial moment, you fear for your life, you lack a basic resource. You
struggle to envision a future, uh huh.
The artists who created the video—Gabriela
Bulisova and Mark Isaac—have stamped their narrative on the song. By turns
eerie, disturbing, and deeply righteous, the video commences with the thermal
imagery of headless bodies trudging toward a blank destination, at an orderly
pace, their backs to the viewer. Without being told, we know that many of them
are doomed. There is a gun-scope encircling a partial portrait, and an
incongruous flag unfurling, and a litter of human shapes strewn upon a stained ecosystem
that’s struggling, itself, to persevere.
“De voi
depinde,” said the poet Paul Celan: “It’s up to you.” What he meant was: the
individual really matters. By design,
the band does not appear. Our faces don’t outweigh the importance of the protest.
What will our brothers be singing? What will our, what will our brothers be
singing? If we deaden ourselves to loss, we’ll never challenge the status
quo.
Play this song loud. Expect punk-jazz. Topple
the establishment.
Joy on Fire is
John Paul Carillo (bass, guitar)
Anna Meadors (baritone and alto saxophones,
vocals)
Chris Olsen (drums, percussion)
Dan Gutstein (lyrics, vocals)
“Uh Huh” composed by Carillo / Gutstein / Joy
on Fire (2020)
Video and band photograph by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac
(2020).
“Uh Huh” is an official selection, PRISMA Rome Independent Film Awards (2020), London Rocks Film Festival (2020), and L.A. Rocks Film Festival (2021).
