Peel back any of Benjamin Booker’s songs from his three albums, and in its center, there is always a looming question, unasked but pleading: How do we keep going in an awful world? Booker’s songs speak of a yearning to find a way through the mess in his self-titled first record, filled with energetic guitars and fueled by anxiety pressing his music forward.
In “Violent Shiver”, for example, the music is faster than his words, enveloping them as he mysteriously talks about crossing “mighty rivers” before finding a way to “go down”. Whether “down” is a pathway to hell or out of it is ambiguous, but it is clear that “here” is a place that needs to be escaped. Something is out there that’s different, and his song’s characters—flawed, hurt, and often self-defeating—have never stopped looking elsewhere. They are not heroes but survivors.
On Benjamin Booker’s second album, Witness, the singer’s restless movement seems to lead the listener to church. With Mavis Staples singing the refrain of the song the record is titled after, she wonders, “Am I going to be a witness” to the racist murders happening in the streets with police claiming phantom guns as excuses for killing Brown people. Staples’s voice is soaring, and witnessing is not a passive act but a political action of standing with and for the abused.
Importantly, though, Staples is asking a question, not making a statement, and Booker’s voice is ragged and angry as he spits out truths about life in the streets, never able to answer her question in the affirmative. We may be in church, but placing these two albums sonically and lyrically together, there seems to be no God coming to save anyone. It’s on us, but we’ve messed up and, as Booker’s voice masterfully articulates, so very, very weary.
Booker’s lyrics are primarily obtuse, where narratives are partially given, and clarity is never the goal. You get a feeling from his songs that generally direct you on how to listen but never to judge. His world-building is made of the muck of life, and there are no directions on how to survive or even if survival is possible.
Yet, Booker’s characters still strive forward, blindly groping for their next step, which is at least one more than the last. In a world that is so dark, it is these solitary steps that bring some hope of light. Booker’s albums remind me of Tille Olsen’s Great Depression novel, Yonnondio, where the beaten down, abused, and abusive parents who never have a chance for a life refuse to give up. “But you can’t take it lying down—like a dog. You can’t, Anna,” Jim says to his wife. But he has no answers on how to make a better life, only to keep going in this one because that’s all they can do.
In Benjamin Booker’s newest album, LOWER, these blind steps searching for elsewhere seemingly lead downward, as the title directs. The opening song, “Black Ops”, sets the tone for most of the LP. The title is a dark play on words, referring to extralegal police operations in the killing of Black people. The song is bleak, with heavy guitars pressing downward on the listener. There is an oppressive heaviness, even overcoming Booker’s voice, which seems suppressed by the song’s noise.
There is no escaping, with the protagonist “Dying fighting / For a life I ain’t had yet.” Tragically, death seems inevitable; the unfulfilled life is a given in a racist world. It’s telling that Booker has the murder happen in a house, a space that is supposed to be safe, an inside whose walls protect the inhabitants from intruders from the outside. However, to be non-white in the US is to be precarious and constantly in danger.
Being an outsider unable to find a safe space to rest is a thread throughout many of the songs, especially in the record’s first half. In “LWA in the Trailer Park”, with cascading guitars fighting for dominance throughout the first half of the song, Benjamin Booker’s voice desperately stakes an anxious claim for “a good life” before stating that “No one will ever love me.” “
“Pompeii Statues”, with its jangling guitar picking, depicts a depressing world of people strung out on drugs who are only heading “deeper” into madness. The inevitability of failure in these songs and others drags the listener lower, achingly feeling for a bottom sinking deeper and deeper.
Booker, though, is no nihilist, and hope sneaks into his songs despite the overwhelming odds. While the police find their murderous ways into houses, in “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar”, Booker’s protagonist finds himself within this safe space, searching for someone like him, dreaming of starting a “modern family.” The hope of “being seen” not through the eyes of a white supremacist heteronormative society but by “another me” allows him to dreamily state, “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me / What this life can be.”
It is a fascinating lyric where beauty is brought into consciousness by staring at one’s true self, a vulnerability built within a space designed to be apart from a bigoted and dangerous world. The beauty is a mirror image of himself with the possibility of a life tantalizingly close. However, These lines are repeated slowly, with the word “life” slipping in its repetition, creating an aura of fantasy around the idea of a beautiful life. The gay bar may be a safe space to desire and dream, but outside the doors, the world is still hell.
Yet, in “Heavy on My Mind”, Benjamin Booker, strumming a guitar, sings, “If there’s hell, then there’s heaven.” It’s a statement, a belief in the opposite of the reality that he is living, and what is more, he is reaching out to someone to convince them of this fact. He is not alone. Together, the pair create a “feeling,” and while the ever-lurking and dangerous “they” may try to stop them, Booker sings clearly, “I refuse.”
In “Witness”, Benjamin Booker’s protagonist could not answer Staples’ question if he would become one; in this song, he is standing up and testifying, refusing the nihilism that he could so easily slip into because “I want more than a dream.” While a fantasy of a beautiful life seems to end at the door of the gay bar in the previous song, here, Booker is willing to take a step outside, refusing to stay within the confines of a (deferred) dream.
The culminating song on Lower perfectly captures the overall feeling of this LP (and I would suggest all three albums). “Hope for the Night” is narratively the most straightforward song on the record, telling the tale of an alcoholic who passes out at a bar and gets thrown out. Miraculously, though, an unnamed “they” pick him up, take him home, undress him, and bring him to bed. The song offers “hope for the weary,” and the effect is that the alcoholic wakes up early, throws out his booze and drinking shoes, and begins his new life.
The song is beautiful, with the first verse showcasing the interaction with the nameless others, giving the drunk man faith that he can get sober. He can’t, and he finds himself that night in the same bar, getting thrown out again at closing time. This second verse seemingly deflates a narrative that is told almost as a pseudo-religious experience with angels picking him up and laying him in bed.
However, there is no hope for God’s mercy in the song, as God is nowhere to be found. Instead, the hope is to be found within the literal hours of the day, as Benjamin sings of not drinking until 6:00, with the additional line, “We’re talking PM now.” The hope manifests in the drunk’s ability to lay off the booze for 12 hours and to walk the streets find his way. That way may lead eventually to the bar, but it is not a direct path, taking him away from the world he finds himself trapped within for a little while. Benjamin Booker seems to say that is good enough for now, or at least all we have to keep blindly walking forward in this world.
After finishing touring with Jack White and Courtney Barnett to support his first album, Benjamin Booker found himself on a plane to Mexico City, reading Don DeLillo’s postmodern classic White Noise. As he describes in an article for The Guardian, he was drawn to the line, “What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.” It’s a revealing line, and Booker’s songs on this album not only touch but live within darkness, with its characters always reaching for a way beyond.
On repeated listens to all three albums, but especially on Lower, another scene at the very end of the novel comes to mind that helps me understand his music more clearly. In the book, Jack, bleeding from a gunshot wound, is being taken care of by a nun. When he asks her about heaven, she scoffs and tells him that she doesn’t believe in heaven because there is no God. When he presses her on why she pretends, the nun says, “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the whole human race would die.”
When listening to Benjamin Booker’s Lower, I imagine these characters, despite living in our age of necropolitics where those in power dictate how some may live and others must die, still grope along, putting on their “walking shoes” and taking steps in a world that cares nothing about them. These faltering steps, though, urge the rest of us to believe that we can also take some steps into the darkness.