I was thinking about our discussion of intellectuals and their role in creating/maintaining/overturning a given hegemony and then came across this piece from the NYT Sunday Magazine, which was focused on music this week.

The piece examines SAULT’s “Hard Life,” a gorgeous song that remixes themes and grooves from the “soul” era in music that grew alongside the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s and 70s. Gramsci examines that “organic” intellectuals, in order to serve a “directive” function, must not only have a message that can function as the “cement” or “glue” to attach disparate social groups together in unity; they must express this message with the right “accent” and imagery that “fits” with the preexisting cultural matrix of those groups, what the neo-Gramscian Raymond Williams famously called a “structure of feeling.”

Here, SAULT is a mostly anonymous collective of mostly Black British artists who have released a tremendous amount of staggeringly great music in conjunction with the rising profile of the Black Live Matter movement. You can certainly say this song (and a lot of their music) issues from the “structure of feeling” of this movement: youthful, melancholy and joyful and hopeful by turns, keenly aware of their place in a broader historical narrative of fighting for justice. And this “structure of feeling” is engaged in an effort to expand the frontier between “us” and “them,” converting souls and expanding the size and power and intensity of the movement.