Damon Locks : List of Demands
I’ve been following Damon Locks for a minute. When he described his music and his work as exploring “The Black Nod,” “an unspoken acknowledgment that often happens out in the world. An ‘I see you’ moment exchanged between Black people”? Amen. I signed up for the Revolution turned Evolution treatise. Immediately. This and these words are not to be confused with Black Twitter. What Locks is speaking of is the little sayings that keep people, Black folks, motivated. Filled up with the good word. Marching toward progress for decades—that’d be longer than Twitter’s existence.
Locks draws from numerous vinyl sources, physical media treasure troves, grinding up those forever-giving scrolls—vintage Black Movement music: Gospel, soul, reggae and movie dialogue through life-from-the-dispatches moments. Projecting resistance through lettered and vivified Black voices. Speaking out against while being in alignment with those plinky piano chords, churchly stringed Isaac Hayes swagged-out charts; The Bomb Squad-esque voice on voices. Those black, brown, and beiges interspersed with the verbal incarnation of denim and Afro-Blue. Locks is stacking the box for compressed sound featuring aural literature cross-stitched with the damn dirty blues in all its historical incarnations, from Muddy Waters to Terminator X.
List of Demands, Damon Locks’ maiden attempt at creating a project from spoken and text-based work, finds this Chicago-based musician and educator not just putting forth what all those “black Nods” had been saying in code, hiding while at work in white spaces for hundreds of years. The tones, the way the funk moves about these orchestrated moments of social attack, especially on “Distance,” where we hear the whole enunciation of “distance” from Locks and ponder what new word he has designed. But the assortment of these snippets of blackness caught live and direct on little black records, for the most part, have always rang true.
From the jokey out-of-control Ferris wheel rotation on “Everything’s Under Control” when it’s not, to the slow-burning trumpet loop, setting the patina as “it’s all bad” as Locks connects it to nature, architecture, and personal observations that sense it’s about to go down—all projected through some type of bullhorn and making references to “life in collaged storms fight for the foreground/Like extras once did in the DMX video of days gone by.” Yes Lawd! Ooowee.
List of Demands, in its 12 songs and 32 minutes of chaos, is being delivered by process—it doesn’t need to be chopped and screwed. The message is the method. Locks is the PA system, teleprompter, and Mister Señor Love Daddy for these proceedings.
Label: International Anthem
Year: 2025
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Damon Locks : List of Demands
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