The American Left Needs a Kirk Franklin

You unserious niggas need a Revolution.

Put down Twitter. Put down the shitty Substack essays. Leave the book clubs alone.

Pick up the Book of Revelation, Chapter 7, Verses 16 and 17.

The American Left needs a little short flamboyant dancing-ass nigga who makes New Jack Swing.

It’s the only thing that’ll grab you all, it seems. I know you all say you read, but based on your essays and the general state of the nation, it’s clear that you’re just like the rest of us. You like shiny, flashy things with a nice aesthetic. A nice form, but the content doesn’t matter much.

Well, then, it sounds like you’d love a Kirk Franklin.

Similar to how the music video for “Revolution” awakened a once dormant faith in the hearts of lazy, apathetic teenagers across America, into a fiery and burning passion that can, at any time, both light up a dance-floor and a pulpit, the Left must adapt to the needs of a changing landscape.

Franklin knew the days of old were over. He was brave enough to adapt. When simply knocking on the Bible failed to produce results, he knocked on ProTools.

When we constantly knock on the Communist Manifesto, and Walter Rodney, and Malcolm X, and Saidiya Hartman, or anything that looks like it might be literature or remotely help your life, you all turn away.

You turn away and turn to TikTok. You turn to Spotify. You turn to Substack. Well, we’ve gotta do what Kirk Franklin did, and meet y’all in the places you turn to in order to turn away from us. Can I get a Minor 7th chord?

We have to think bigger. It can’t just be in the music anymore. This isn’t the 90s. We need a short dancing nigga everywhere.

I want lil niggas in suits on Instagram Reels doing footwork to old John Henrik Clarke lectures. I want them to be so little that they’re wearing regular-sized-suits, but they look like zoot suits.

This adds to the charm.

I want niggas explaining dialectical materialism while wearing the fit you wear when your White friends invite you to go skiing for the first time. Or like you just got cast as the lead in a Disney Channel Original Movie from 1996 about the music industry.

The American Left, and leftist literature, need seemingly unrelated debauchery. The reason no one watches shit like Cornel West’s lectures on The Souls of Black Folk is the same reason no one wanted to read the Bible before Kirk Franklin conceived of Jesus Christ and Terry Lewis. It’s boring as shit. Where are the fish-eye lenses??

The Kendrick-Drake beef got 90 percent of the country to passionately believe in and argue about the most meaningless matters in recent history. Maoists and Marxist-Leninists need to get off Reddit, and get in the fucking booth.

There’s a working class to unite. And they want to dance.