SKIP TRACER

A Brooklyn-based writer and DJ intermingles hip-hop-inflected sensibilities with different media forms to create a “printed mixtape” of his life.

Jive Poetic grew up in a home where vinyl records and music were family touchstones that also connected him to Black culture. As his tastes grew more sophisticated, the author became especially intrigued by the way Black artists sampled from each other to create works that recalled “African American quilting traditions.” His fascination with “cutting and spinning old tracks into new ones” eventually led him to become a DJ. In a work that combines prose, poetry, and family photographs that serve as “cover art,” the author offers impressions of an urban life and family history framed as tracks from cassettes, reels, and records; as sonic works produced on DJ turntables; or even as musical broadcasts like livestreams. In the section titled “8-Track Cassette,” for example, the author examines childhood. In the subsection (track) “Go Home,” he muses on being a Black boy in a city where the “sirens, screams, cries, [and tears]” that accompanied the police cars and emergency vehicles meant—and too often brought—trouble into Black communities. Later, in a section called “Cassette Single" and a track called "Clearing Clutter," the author delves into the painful relationship he had with his mostly absent father, a man who ignored him. Other absences have haunted him as well—e.g., that of his grandfather, who represented a silent link to an inaccessible Jamaican past. As a man with a “West Indian identity…hyphenated by first-world advantages,” the author laments that he could only simulate that past through “scratched snippets that get looped and replayed” like memory. The author’s genre-bending fearlessness and the compelling way he expresses his quest for identity and wholeness through words, images, and music make for a one-of-a-kind read.

An emotionally rich and complex work.