So the next stop on the Police State Tour will be Chicago, maybe. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

At any rate, while we are waiting for the police state to roll out and while we are waiting for the Democrats to be wrong about Joe Biden for the 666th time, we'll need some music. So here is my playlist for this week:

Siouxsie and the Banshees -- Hyaena

This is an album from 1984 of a really tight post-punk group from the UK. Siouxsie's voice is really effective as an instrument. Everyone doubtless remembers this album as containing a cover of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence." All the other songs are good too though, which makes it puzzling why it's not more popular than it is.

The Clash -- London Calling

This is of course the album which made The Clash really famous. Clash before this tried to be punk in an orthodox way; Clash after this played around with a variety of styles. The Clash offer a bit of stylistic confusion -- punk, but not really serious, left-wing lyrically, but with a sort of bravado (evident in Joe Strummer's voice) that neo-Confederate youth tried to claim for their own when the Clash embarked upon a tour of the southeast US. Anyway, we should be listening to songs with the themes the Clash chose when this came out in 1979.

Talking Heads -- Fear of Music

This was the last of the Talking Heads, put out in 1979, when the Talking Heads were an art concept in their own right, before David Byrne the lead vocalist decided he was into anything exotic and foreign, and definitely before the Talking Heads broke up in 1991 and became something far less as a multiple production than what they were when they were together as a team. I'm just not all that into any of David Byrne's or Jerry Harrison's solo albums or for that matter the Tom Tom Club past the first album. I'm especially not into David Byrne, who has become much ado about nothing. At this point in their scene Byrne had a nervousness that was still far more "cool" than his subsequent "cool," and the rest of the band was in fact necessary toward the Talking Heads aesthetic. This album also has the willingness to tackle some really basic human themes which was sidelined in the Talking Heads opus beginning with Speaking in Tongues (1983). David Byrne lyrics are all of course nonsense, but the fact that they were was still unimportant at this point. This album and Remain in Light (1980) are the best of the bunch.

Gary Numan -- Living Ornaments '80

Back in the Seventies Gary Numan was really this awkward kid named Gary Webb who had Asperger's syndrome and who decided to become a rockstar while living with his parents. The pancake makeup of his early years was part of his deeply and profoundly dystopian act, the doom and gloom of which is still pretty essential to today's listening. The makeup was also something he did to hide his acne. There's super-heavy Seventies synthesizers in this music, but there's also tight guitar, bass, drums. The concerts which were recorded in the Living Ornaments albums had stage props which were so expensive that the tour lost money. If you want to hear what his act sounds like now, there's the Australian concert-tour album "Big Noise Transmission."

John Coltrane -- Transition, Kulu Se Mama

This was a jazz album, kind of Bop and kind of New Thing, released in 1965, which transitioned into some entirely experimental work toward the end of Coltrane's life, and some entirely experimental life prior to sudden death from liver cancer in 1967. Its thematic heaviness is appropriate to our time and place. "Transition" is essential listening for its emotional intensity. In my car-stereo disc of this album I've added the song "Kulu Se Mama," more or less in the same period and spirit as Transition, but with a tune written by Juno Lewis, a thematic bongo-drum in the background, and with performances which let you know, unmistakably, why it had to be John Coltrane on sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, and nobody else, otherwise it wouldn't have been all this. If you want to know of the history of the blazing-hot aura around John Coltrane, start with the Ben Ratliff biography. But don't stop there.

Laurie Anderson -- Big Science

Laurie Anderson was and is a performance artist who might be best in multimedia, but you can't do multimedia in your car stereo while driving. So we have this, with frames of science and of everyday life strewn over music. It's not confusing; you'll recognize what you hear.

Linton Kwesi Johnson -- Live in Paris 2004

Linton Kwesi Johnson is a dub poet whose lyrics are voiced in a heavy Jamaican patois (even though he's lived in the UK since 1963) and whose themes are of the sort of politics we're encountering even today in America. This album is heavy on songs of struggle and does not visit very much of Tings an' Times (1991), an album of political exhaustion and stock-taking which I was into when I was in graduate school. The backup band is professional as hell and the sh*t is profound.