Shaun Carlo’s Careful Questions About Time

Eli Day
4 min readDec 8, 2020

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I cannot say if we lose anything by acknowledging the relentless march of time — if life’s precious minutes are spoiled by wondering why they race by so quickly.

But I do know that there are those who rightly throw themselves against the clock, hoping that with enough cunning, force, and determination the hours might not overwhelm them before they’ve done all they can with their living. And by this, I mean that there are those who examine each day’s hours with extraordinary care, hoping that it gives them an edge in the fight to make it out alive.

It is fitting then that Coils, the fifth official installation from Detroit’s Shaun Carlo, clocks in at just 17 minutes. In that time, Coils retraces an entire journey. Listen closely and you can hear Carlo falling deeper in love with the stark beauty, and peril, of being Black in America, even as he notices the path growing more narrow and jagged the longer one travels it. Importantly, Coils manages to cover this vast landscape without shortchanging an inch of it. And this is the magic trick: believing that the minutes we have are indeed precious, Carlo carefully stretches each one to its breaking point, filling 60 seconds with as much raw self-examination as it can bear.

Coils opens with a thunder. It is the voice of Kathleen Cleaver in 1968, pointing a finger in the face of American hierarchy and declaring that Black is beautiful and Black people need no revision. Cleaver is followed by a clip of recently-slain activist Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, reminding us of the sometimes horrific costs to this: “I cannot take my fucking skin color off. Wherever the fuck I go, I’m profiled.” In the first minute, we are asked what it means to love the very features your country would devour you for celebrating. Features that make potential martyrs of anyone on the unlucky side of America’s ferocious machinery.

“Sage” finds Carlo contemplating the view from that side, looking back at an adolescence filled with landmines. They come rapidly, and with the gifts of time and distance, Carlo now rhymes with the shellshock of someone who can finally see how absurd it all was. There is the terror of mamas being beaten. The stunning speed with which guns appeared in the hands of homies. The brawls that always seemed to be on the brink of unleashing greater chaos. And, importantly, there is his own inferno: “Prolly had a dozen fistfights before 9th grade, so suppressive that I ain’t even peep my rage, until I came of age…let’s turn the page.” Which is where we find Carlo now: combing through an album of memories that could have left him in ruins, or worse, made him an early ghost. No one wishes for this kind of wisdom, the kind that comes from knowing that so many have barely escaped time’s indifferent judgement, and that so many others have not.

Tucked in the middle are “Keep Shit Raw” and “True Hate,” songs that drop you into a landscape that is still uncertain and prone to chaos. But Carlo has nearly found his balance, and with the help of comrades, commits to finding a path out. Between a strong contribution from Eli Myles and a typically breathtaking appearance from collaborator and partner-in-crime Tish, these tracks are the EP’s beating heart. Each one is a kind of battle cry, insisting that not only can we survive this world, but that a better one awaits if only we would love each other as fiercely as this nation’s terrible machinery does the opposite.

We emerge on the other side to “Jalen Hands” and “Coils” (the title track and closer). “Jalen Hands” reflects on time’s eraser-like quality, as if Carlo has looked up after a grueling climb to survey what, and who, has vanished along the way. “If I ain’t never told you that I love you, know it’s love,” he harmonizes on the chorus of “Jalen Hands.”

This is what we all wish for: that those we love most will never have to wonder how precious they are to us. You can hear Carlo’s fear that this too often does not come true: “Hand slaps to all my niggas, pour it out and put it in the sky for all the people who done died” before leveling with himself that “I still can’t wrap my head around none of this shit, but I gotta be Jalen Hands when it come to this shit. Keep my head up high, something I’m struggling with.” There is no satisfactory explanation for this — a chain of disappearing friends and loved ones, each of their empty shadows an impossible loss to us or someone we know. But this is not a call to despair. It is a call to give whatever we can to whatever time is left, to wrap our arms around those we love before time beats us to it.

And this is what it boils down to: time and memory force reckonings on all of us. As Coils draws to a close, Carlo has yet to find his way to a world better than this one. But he hasn’t promised us one either. The promise of Coils is that such a world is possible. The promise of Coils is that we have all seen too much to believe that things inevitably work out in the end, and that our best shot, the only one we have, is to link arms anyway and push against the headwinds. Somewhere in the distance there are faint but glimmering possibilities, if only we could carve a path there, together or not at all.

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Eli Day

Eli Day is a Detroi­ter, where he writes about racial and eco­nom­ic justice. His work has appeared in Vox, Current Affairs, Mother Jones, and In These Times.