Skip Tracer
Jive Poetic, Liveright, £15.45

JIVE POETIC is a poet, musician, activist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches  poetry and hip hop workshops to at-risk youth in New York City and the surrounding area. Here, he is a poet and textual DJ, getting our feet working.

Jive has a new book out, titled Skip Tracer. It’s part poetry, part memoir, stories and hip-hop quips, and dangerous information about the blues. Assembled in chapters that are like a DJs reference guide: 8-Track Cassette, Multi-track Cassette, Single, Reels, Crossfader, Turntables, Records, Maxi Singles, Instrumentals, and Live stream. Now imagine this collection as places of memory and rhythm and lyricism; imagine everyone’s a DJ, and here’s Jive’s whizzy whisk.

Skip tracer. Owing. Some Chasing. Often debt you couldn’t help but accrue in a culture that encourages debt slavery.

The skips he refers to are skips in the vinyl records he grew up listening to. Skips were to be avoided. Like he says: “My mother and uncles were worried about me dropping the needle improperly and damaging the grooves.” They would become rare and valuable records.

He’s also referring to his grandfather, whose nickname was Skip. He is a groove channel of memory back to an early childhood in Jamaica.

Jive found his groove with early dance numbers by Michael Jackson. “Bright. Glowing. Black suit. White Socks. Michael Jackson. Off the wall.” And many others, coding his memories, his times — Big Daddy Kane (“Ain’t Half Steppin’”), Bookie Down Productions, EPMD, Public Enemy. And Heatwave’s Too Hot To Handle. 

There are many excellent sections of the volume. It’s great as a whole; it’s great in its parts. 

Growing up Black, in a classroom, the self-consciousness stark: “Before they're old enough to want to know/ if we think OJ did it/ or why we voted for Obama/ or why they can’t say the n word/ we learn they want us to answer/ for everybody who looks like us/ in fourth grade.” Stone cold kill.  

And existential moments the white man can’t easily relate to: “...they will find loopholes / after they kill you; she says, they will hide behind badges/ and blame everything except their uniforms:/ ... blame death in custody on you/ as if your will to live was an act of being your own rope/ to the lynching.” Defund authoritarianism.

There are the moments of crackling identity crisis, and seething resentment, as when he goes to meet his father, estranged from his mother, for visitations at the Salvation Army recreation centre and deals with folks judging his mother (“irresponsible” and “lack of education”) when, in fact, he writes: “My mother was a multiple-college-degree-holding research scientist. Her focus was neuropsychology.” 

His father often didn't show up. Then, “My mother and I used to see my father on the subway, and he would straight up look past us. We were nothing more than city clutter to him. I imagine how that would have made my mother feel.” Stone cold world.

The volume bristles with fringe experiences — missing girls, murdered rastas, guns, perverted forms of power, hyper-tension, rice-and-peas, gunfights between fathers and stepfathers, Bob Marley, and dancing.

Jive Poetic reads like the needle dropped in a haystack of sound — lost and found at the same time. Highly influential skips. Buy in. Dance.

For more information see: jivepoetic.net