Chicago photographer Ray Contreras captured my favorite moment of Friday night’s downtown inauguration protest. He tweeted a video clip of a young black DJ in a reflective safety-yellow vest rolling a jury-rigged mobile sound system through the crowd, pumping a raunchy ghetto-house track. Its lyrics don’t exactly scream civil disobedience (“Aw shit / Here I come / Hit it from the back / Make me cum”), but the protesters didn’t care—they chanted “Fuck Trump!” along with the beat. Those bluntly, unapologetically sexual lyrics are their own kind of antidote to the new administration’s extreme right-wing policies—and the fact that they’re delivered by a woman can be seen as a rebuke of Trump’s chauvinism, misogyny, and admitted history of sexual assault. Protest songs don’t need to specify a target to be effective—spreading the voices of the marginalized and oppressed can do the job just as well.
Chip’s original “Aw Shit” is difficult to track down online, but below are a couple other versions—and Contreras’s clip.
This is the most Chicago thing I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/EG4rzqhXSA
— Ray Contreras (@SkateandListen) January 21, 2017
