Live in the Shed with Little Cricket: "Erratic"

One year ago tomorrow, an American by the name of George Floyd died in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis. He had already been successfully detained, he had not been charged with a crime, and he was not an immediate threat to himself or to anyone else around him at the time of his death. Nearly a year later, a jury would find Derek Chauvin, the police officer who kneeled on Floyd's neck for over 9 minutes, guilty of murder.

This incident, which divided Americans over legal, racial, and political lines, sparked protests and riots across the country that lasted for months, at the cost of multiple human lives and billions of dollars of property damage. Either side of the debate would have you believe that the cause of the incident, the facts regarding what transpired, and the solution to the problem are all simple, obvious, and accessible.

I'm here to tell you that it's much more nuanced than that, and I wrote a song to express a perspective that refuses to accept that the primary villain in this story is either George Floyd or Derek Chauvin. Rather, instead of examining the individuals whose names have become engrained in our collective psyche due to the coverage of the corporate press, I suggest that we take a giant step back from the details of what happened in Minneapolis that day and take a broader look at the institutions (and the people in charge of them) that facilitated the situation to begin with, a situation that would require Floyd and Chauvin to interact with one another, when, without these institutions, they would not. The song is called "Erratic," and it will be available tonight on my YouTube channel. My goal is for the music and lyrics to invite you, the listener, to think of the murder of George Floyd not in terms of cop verses criminal, black verses white, or left verses right, but in terms of the citizen verses the state, because it is this relationship that affects each and every one of us every day. It is this relationship that we can all truly unite against.