Stay Calm. What You're Hearing is the Sound of the Record Being Scratched
Love him or hate him, in 2016 Donald Trump became a key note in the song of disruption. Trump’s presence alters the anthem we've been entranced by for so long — the song of submission.
Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elvis Presley, Tupac, and now former U.S. President Donald Trump. All these men have mugshots.
The term “mug shot” dates back to 18th century Britain, where mug was slang for face. In our cultural paradigm, a famous mugshot has less to do with the face of a person and everything to do with the face of the movement they represent.
When Jimi Hendrix received backlash in 1969 for playing his version of the national anthem, the hard rule was that you cannot change the anthem without some legal procession. Rules within a system of order are always attached to a prerequisite of legal order within that same system. Yet, as we all know through the words of civil rights activist Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
The national song — or the expression of collective identity that we’re tuned to now — is a far more contested landscape than in the last century. It is a landscape of many revolutions. Literally, revolution means a turning from one thing to another, a rotation enriched by passion and momentum. The idea that if you want things to change, you must follow the rules is ironic for a country that was founded on the sacred act of rule-breaking, of breaking the holding pattern or the rhythm of a distorted power system.
Since 2016 — and especially since 2020 — the American people have been experiencing a growing number of revolutions across a number of sectors and issues including health, education, election integrity, immigration, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech among others. Despite what many say about a second coming American Revolution…the revolution is already here. It’s been here. We are thick in the song of revolution, a new national anthem edited by all of us.
Love him or hate him, in 2016, Donald Trump became a key note in the song of disruption. Trump’s presence alters the national song that we’ve been entranced by for so long — the song of order, obedience, and submission to authority. That is the only real reason Donald Trump is being legally attacked. Everything else is window dressing.
Donald Trump’s mugshot means one thing and one thing only: he is a trance breaker. A trance is a hypnotic state. When induced upon a population, a trance has only one goal: control.
“That sound where the DJ scratches the record in mid-play, moving the record back and forth really fast… That is what we’re experiencing as a collective. As a country, we more or less were spinning around in one song with all these various notes in interplay. Donald Trump enters the stage and that song gets jostled, back in time and forward in time really fast. It’s disorienting. It sounds awful. But it does force us to pay attention.”
— Shireen Qudosi
Repeat, synchronized messaging (especially) across screens is a form of trance. Whether it’s a century of consumer culture, classrooms, political ideology, or the myth of a monolithic national identity, a trance induces the illusion of uniformity. It makes a large group of people, like citizens of a country, believe they all belong to the same song when nothing could be further from the truth. Between school boards to states’ rights to individual bodily autonomy, the revolution is here and it is localized.
The disc jockey that is the powers that be cannot tolerate having the song changed. If the song changes, the trance is broken. If the trance is broken, the extremist arm of authority that believes there is only one way to be and belong in the world (and that by hook or by crook it’s completely justified to force people to adhere to a unified worldview) …that authority loses all power. For America to survive, the song of revolution must continue. January 6th was one day but that day continues in the hearts of Americans as a symbolic rising tide, a chorus of voices that breaks the monotone chant of submission as bent knees drum the floor in hypnotic ‘thuds’.
Whether through controversy, provocation, or as the symbolic martyr to a corrupt legal system, Trump’s mugshot expression is the face of the second American revolution: anger and focus.
Despite globalized attempts to demean or belittle the former president as bloated or self-engrossed, ultimately the textbooks will only refer to that photo. Trump’s mugshot is an iconic and accurate portrait of the American spirit at the turn of the 21st century, a terror to authority and beholden only to the song of the heart that inspired the first American Revolution.
Irrespective of how you personally feel about Donald Trump, for many Americans Trump’s mugshot is like looking in the mirror after years of forced lockdowns, social isolation, school fallout, forced vaccinations, households devastated inflation, and the attack on personal dignity of every middle-class man, woman, and child who has endured the hardship of the last three years, made to eat dirt and told its equity, climate consciousness, or some other circus trick to keep the old record spinning.
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln said, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
We have grown weary, friends.
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About Shireen Qudosi
Storytelling on seismic cultural issues through the lens of the sacred, Shireen Qudosi looks at the space between things or within the Dark to map a new understanding of the human experience. Through that journey, she found a lost Islam. Shireen Qudosi is the author of The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam, which speaks to the theologically-sound parallel reality of the world’s third-largest religion.
“The world we live in is growing more complex with newer challenges. These times are an invitation for us to step into our gifts. To do that, we need to remember the song of our hearts and the stories that are our own.
My gift is in alchemizing chaos and confusion into song. I inspire others to believe it is possible to go within and below the surface layer of their identity to find the mystery, a wonderful complex constellation that is beautiful and uniquely their own.”
— Shireen Qudosi
Shireen is devoted to mapping figurative landscapes and inviting others to go into unknown places not as a tourist, but as a child exploring the world for the first time filled with wonder and curiosity. As a daughter of refugees across three continents, as a mother to a son with Autism, and as an explorer in the wilderness of the heart, she believes that the mystery of being is often nested within the composite of our entire life experience, that we can find the sacred in the mundane nestled like a jewel in the rock.
Read The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam