Bad Moves — Music for a Movement
By Ezra Kaprov
District 1199 New England Healthcare Workers Union is a fighting organization which represents the mostly Black and Brown women comprising the majority of the region’s frontline healthcare workers. The day-to-day of these workers contains all the pain and promise of pandemic life. At for-profit nursing homes, bosses walk the floor in hazmat suits, while low-wage nurses aides work overtime and understaffed with the only PPE they have—trash bags, duct tape, and folded bandanas. Organizers and support staff log on every Monday for a weekly union meeting, updating one another on victories and fights from across our chapters. As organizers, our job is forming connections which inspire action for change. Making change compels our search for knowledge, which can reach our soul at depths of wisdom known to music and prayer. Elevated by the exemplary courage of the workers’ love, each Monday meeting begins with a song.
Last meeting we began with Working for Free by Bad Moves, in which we heard agitation, the process by which an organizer creates space in a conversation for a worker to express the emotional state of living with injustice. In this piece, a combative inquiry is directed against an absent boss. One goal of an organizer here is bringing the worker from seething frustration to outward defiance: “you feel entitled to determine my pay, huh?”
Underlying Bad Moves’ sound is integrity, the foundation of action, giving workers the strength needed for taking strategic risk in confrontations with capital. Honesty breathes trust into the band’s message, forming a relationship with the listener, and echoing what makes an organizer worthy of a worker. The song’s vulnerability mirrors an organizer’s courage to name the stakes of the fight, for the workers we’re organizing, but also for ourselves.
Crafted by the line “to keep your mind quiet, scream out”, from the song Party with the Kids who Wanna Party with You, is a vision of the future. It reminds me that clarity is focused in truth, and true freedom is freedom from fear. It instills in me the feeling that the future I see worth fighting for each morning is imminent. But if we are to continue beyond a vision, organizers must empty ourselves daily into the work of its actualization. Organizers must connect with our vision for change in active dedication to service under the guidance of our values.
As Cool Generator begins, the momentum slows, but right before the first verse, a one-second-long bass slide moves the story forward. Brilliantly simple and humbly on-beat, like effective organizing, it maintains the momentum of communication. Timing is crucial in an organizer’s ability to form a connection with workers.
From my lower chest, “no one here needs you to be anybody” rises like internal redemption from the song Toward Crescent Park. To me, it sounds like freedom born from confidence, balanced with gratitude and grounded in community. On all that we can ever hope to be, our humility shines—in search of means by which to make our contribution and the imagination to use them. Well-rounded awareness holds complexity; for instance, this line could indicate a writer’s realization at either end of some redemptive ascension.
In Hebrew, this realization is called Da’at—the spark at which the ten Sefirot all connect, the elements of existence according to Kabbalah. It’s the intellect (Hokhmah) applied to the emotional center in a moment of understanding (Binah), like a well-placed nod to a shop-floor leader during a shift change. It’s the difference in an organizing conversation between knowing some issues facing a worker, and knowing the issue for which that worker is willing to fight.
Raw victory (Netsah) advances from reflective battle cries over war drums in Change Your Mind. Affirming the spiritual tenor of Night Terrors, mournful determination harmonizes love (Hesed) and rigor (Gevurah). These two Sefirot find their equilibrium in a third: beauty (Tif’eret). Cascading blues fall from the chorus of Cape Henlopen and land with steady impact. A fearless image of an attainable future guides the melody.
Melody can spark the essence of a song, like eyes can shed depth upon a worker’s kitchen table. Here is Da’at, where the connection lives. Without it, we’d have no agitation, and consequently, no action. Eyes and melody express who we are to anyone paying attention. Connective rhythm allows an organizer to reach true depth in conversation, timed with care to emphasize key inflections. Rhythm and tone convey not just our emotions, but the guts underneath. One could call this our values, the moral of our respective stories.
Bad Moves paint a picture of the world with moral clarity. Staring back is a call to action. In organizing, this comes in the form of a question framed around two choices—the world if we don’t fight and the world if we do. The culmination of an organizing conversation poses these choices before us: Defeat or struggle? Hopelessness or possibility? Which world will you choose? If punk is for being pissed off, then Bad Moves is for doing something about it.