By the end of this week, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio will have turned to the crowd at the Knockdown Center, in a post-industrial section of Queens, New York, and he will have sung, “I’m no madman/But that’s insanity.” By this point in the evening, the Brooklyn band will have played the first two songs from their essential 2008 record, Dear Science, the album they will perform that evening in its entirety for its tenth anniversary. It’s this lyric in the first verse of the third track, “Dancing Choose,” about being sane in an insane world, that will have shaped the evening.
This future perfect tense—what will have happened—is a bit unwieldy, but it’s one way to consider how TV on the Radio captured the beauty and terror of American life in that album. A decade later, some of the band’s criticisms of American politics and life remain true in ways that make Dear Science seem like a cruel predictor of our current times. In other ways, since the 2016 election, the political engagement Dear Science asked of its listeners has reemerged in fresh and energizing fashion, drawing frightening parallels while also suggesting a more positive future is possible. Times have and haven’t changed; as the legacy band returns to play their best-selling and most topical album, anxieties about state surveillance and violence, American imperialism, and racism feel as fresh as ever. What happened after 2008? The same thing that will have happened a few years from now, quite possibly.
Compared with 2018, there was no less urgency for political art in 2008. The world was on fire then, too: It was the beginning of a crippling financial crisis and another grinding year of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, of drone strikes on civilians. The American empire was drunk-driving itself across the globe and into a morass. And for Dear Science, released in the fall of 2008, there is hardly any talking of the album without talking about its popularity. The album went to No. 12 on the Billboard charts, eventually selling more than 250,000 copies, and remains the band’s best-selling and highest-charting record. Punching horns, tumbling polyrhythms, and throaty funk vocals, at turns menacing and hopeful, made Dear Science an artifact of its moment that also saw its way to a better time.
“It was the end of the Bush era, and there was a lot of frustration around the wars and American foreign policy in general,” TVOTR guitarist and singer Kyp Malone tells Pitchfork now. “It’s hard to remember a time before the Patriot Act, the ramping up of the surveillance state…It wasn’t in full swing yet, but the groundwork was being laid.”
These themes emerged on Dear Science, in explicit terms. “Red Dress” opens with Malone yelling, “Hey jackboot, fuck your war!” On “Crying,” the band sings, “And Mary and David smoke dung in the trenches/While Zion’s behavior never gets mentioned/The writing’s on your wall/And the blood on the cradle,” a reference to American support of the Israeli bombings of Palestinians. The funk, jazz, and rock instrumentation on the album reflected its political anxieties, whether in the elegy of “Crying,” the simmering rage of “DLZ,” or the buzzing cacophony of “Dancing Choose.”
The political messaging embedded in the album ranged widely. On the phone with Pitchfork, Adebimpe starts reading out loud from a commemorative book he’s producing for the Knockdown Center shows. It’s a list of inspirations for Dear Science; among them, “how religion and racism have shit on past, present, and the future, causing war and death of the innocent and the hoodwinked; hope in the face of bungled love and mortality; manifesting joy through revolutionary/radical love; a divided America where avowed racists and white supremacists were becoming outnumbered.”
That last one didn’t quite hold up, Adebimpe jokes bleakly. “It was about trying to keep your head up in a hopeless situation.” He refers to a lyric on “Red Dress,” a jittery funk track where personal malaise intermingles with the politics of American racism and war, to illuminate how far we haven’t come. “There’s a line ‘those days of white robes have come and gone,’ but that’s not true. There’s Nazis and Klan all over the fucking place. Still, it’s a hopeful song. Maybe not in my lifetime, but that shit is going to die, die, die.”
Dear Science tackled intersections of American personal and political life with unflinching vision. There’s the beauty and historical weight of an interracial love affair on “Family Tree,” and the dangers of American imperialism and racism on “Red Dress” and “Crying.” Add to that the portrait of a despicable and technology-addled bourgeoisie on “Dancing Choose,” and the profound, utopian hope of “Golden Age.” Adebimpe opens “DLZ” with “Congratulations on the mess you made of things,” suggesting the wide-ranging indictment embedded in the record.
The band’s label didn’t necessarily grasp the politics. Malone recalls executives from Universal and Interscope initially discussing “Crying” as a single, even suggesting a big-budget video to accompany it. “If the message of what I was talking about was getting through, Interscope wasn’t going to put the stamp on that,” he says. “It’s hard to not to feel like more material success one experiences brings deeper and deeper complicity in the system, one of exploitation and oppression.” Dear Science brought the band to the confusing nexus of radical politics and commercial success. Politically, the Obama administration provided a slight respite as the band toured Dear Science in 2009. “The triumph [of Obama’s election] people were feeling made them feel safe, like there was nothing to worry about or work on anymore, which very clearly was not the case,” Malone says. “I even saw myself getting sleepy inside of that; people weren’t holding power’s nose to the shit.”
Neither Malone nor Adebimpe could have pictured how trenchant their work might still sound in the retrograde era of Trump. These days, they feel torn between articulating radical optimism and confronting the horrors they witness all around them. The band has begun work on new material for a forthcoming record, their first since 2014’s Seeds; for it, Adebimpe says, “There’s a song I’m writing now about eradicating Nazis.” Malone worries about writing a new record containing only “lamentations” and cites the Dear Science track “Golden Age” as the more optimistic approach he’d still like to take. It’s a balance. “It’s easy to get bogged down in how much we fucking suck, but we’re magic beings,” he says. “We’re supposed to present the world that we want, not just cry about the world that is.” But he worries about falling prey to escapism, too. “If the whole thing is on fire, not addressing the fire feels disrespectful to the people who are burning.”
Some of the enduring appeal of Dear Science lies in its ability to both confront the fire and express cautious optimism. Ten years later, Adebimpe calls the writing and recording of Dear Science “a calling out to life to show me a reason to continue to be a part of it, a letter to anyone who might need some solace in a world that isn’t for them.” It took him years to listen to Dear Science without hearing only his suffering; in the lead-up to tracking Dear Science, Adebimpe says, he did an enormous amount of acid in the hopes of erasing his personality, of escaping his agony. “I needed to do that, if only to learn that was not the best idea,” he says. “So, this whole catastrophe and all of the shit, if you can share it with your friends, it’ll give you some kind of strength or joy.”
He brings up Picasso’s famous anti-fascist painting Guernica and wonders what the “war painting” for 2018 would look like: something that would powerfully evoke politics, with or without context and theory. It might be Donald Glover’s “This Is America,” he says. For his part, Malone talks about seeing Neil Young play his more recent, explicitly political songs live. “Maybe it’s important to stop trying to be clever,” he says.
The community that will have joined at the Knockdown Center later this week will have come to see survival, to rejoice in the surviving, to simply have survived. Survival is no small thing in 2008—or 2018, for that matter. But, more than mere endurance, the crowd will see a band exuberantly retracing its greatest success and finding comfort in its complications. “Pushing joy is as important and as political as laying bare the lies of power,” Malone says. “None of it really means a thing if you can’t dance to it.”
