If you’ve only ever listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s recorded output, you’ve probably never heard “Hope Drone.” The song has no fixed form; instead, it is an evolving being, seemingly fated to live solely in the domain of live performance. You can find ample evidence of the track’s changing character online; fan-recorded bootlegs trace its many manifestations as the band’s opening number since 2010, when the Montreal-based collective reunited after a seven-year hiatus. Through those 15 years, with five recorded albums and countless live performances, “Hope Drone” has been, at once, the most consistent and ever-changing facet of the collective’s repertoire.
The word HOPE faded into view as a low bass hum emerged over the loudspeaker, announcing the imminent arrival of the band on stage at Chicago’s Salt Shed on the night of Nov. 8. Over the next dozen minutes, that one word flickered in and out on a piece of looping celluloid as the band began to shape the droning sound into something specific, imbuing the open concept with meaning. If hope is a discipline, as longtime abolitionist Mariame Kaba has taught us, then “Hope Drone” is a persistent exercise in renewing faith in a better world—the Sisyphean act of inching the boulder upward, only to watch it fall into an abyss of violence that seems to expand each day.
The band’s eighth album, No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, asks us not to look away. While the band has never been subtle about their left-wing politics (see: “Transphobes eat shit and die alone,” taped to an onstage amp), the lack of overt messages on the songs themselves can sometimes push these conversations from view. If it feels like political actions taken elsewhere have done nothing to slow the horrors unfolding within Gaza, Godspeed reminds us that our attention still cannot waver. Just four months into the genocide, the band would mark the nearly 30,000 dead, a number that keeps growing. Even in these abstracted terms, whole lives and worlds reduced to one number, the slaughter is unfathomable.
What, then, do we make with this one word, HOPE, coming in and out of view behind a growing swell of wordless, ever-expanding noise? It’s not hard to think back to the afterglow of Barack Obama’s first election. Deployed by a candidate who saw the obvious yearning for a fundamental shift in global politics, the word soured as Obama’s eight years in office wore on and was ultimately negated by Donald Trump’s first election. Yet in the years since, GY!BE has clung tenaciously to this idea, scratching and clawing it into the uncertainty of our troubled world. It seems right that the band has never put the song to record. What passed for hope just a few days before the show no longer felt relevant, as the decisive return of Trump to the White House changed our political future overnight.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, those in Palestine asked to take stock of our election saw little difference between the candidates. "We must rely on ourselves and our resistance, not the U.S. elections,” Omar Assaf, a Palestinian political activist, told Turkish news outlet Anadolu Agency. “They will continue to support the Israeli aggression and will not hesitate to provide political cover for it.” Hope, in the context of those in the direct line of fire, must mean something more painfully urgent than most on the outside can comprehend.
Those of us assembled to witness the band, still reckoning a second Trump term and its impact on our day-to-day lives, experienced the real privilege of being able to gather and collectively mourn, away from this direct violence for the time being. In that space, GY!BE reminded us of the multifaceted task at hand: to let this grief and terror become real, without deadening the hope of another world still waiting to be born.
Live and on stage, Godspeed You! Black Emperor make a passive listening experience impossible. In ways I’ve never experienced across hundreds of other concerts, the sounds conjured by the collective—one that has steadfastly refused interviews or individual adulation across their decades-long history—leave no room for idle thoughts. From “Hope Drone” on, we were asked as an audience to engage with our whole hearts—just three days after the election.
Both my partner and I had moved through the previous two days in a state of dissociative, hard-to-name heaviness—aware intellectually of all that would soon transform, still numb in our grief. A brief argument at the end of the long and wearying work week nearly unraveled our night, but the frustration cut through the haze we’d been stumbling through, a reminder that anger can help us name what we’ve been too afraid to say.
That energy is palpable on No Title, from which much of the band’s set that night was drawn. After gradually introducing trilling, elegiac violins and a rising swell of clattering drums and seesawing guitars to “Hope Drone,” the band plunged directly into “Sun Is a Hole Sun Is Vapors,” the first, relatively tranquil song from their new album. Then, on “Babys In A Thundercloud,” the keening wail of a guitar wrapped around a building assemblage of drums that heralded a coming change (one you may or may not be ready to face). Next, the opening two minutes of “Raindrops Cast in Lead,” which takes its name from a 2008-2009 assault on Gaza that left 100,000 Palestinians homeless, sounded like squeaking, mechanical birds, coming up for air and to look for survivors after another shelling. Poet Michele Fiedler Fuentes reads a short text in Spanish on the track. Translated into English, the closing lines read, “Innocents and children and the tiny bodies / That laughed and will remain asleep forever / And never saw the beauty of the dawn.” For a band that typically shows its political leanings outside the content of the music itself, these few spare words are a reminder of the terms of engagement, grounding the record’s sense of purpose in our disturbing time.
Across the two-hour set, I felt the enormity of what needed to be processed pass through my body in wracking sobs. In live performance, the band’s use of overlapping, looped film reels add a depth to each performance, an indirect beauty that invites the audience to find their own meanings. Throughout the night, some of the images included a flame enveloping a flower, a jellyfish moving through water, and a man crying into his hands. These small gifts of wonder contrasted with the brutal weight of all that must change, reminded me that there is only right now for us to name and touch and let slip through our fingers. With too much to comprehend, only the present is spacious enough to hold it all.
Even before the band adopted “Hope Drone” as their opening refrain, the collective had imagined a “Hope Hammer,” which appeared in the artwork for their 2002 album Yanqui U.X.O. In a rare moment that broke the silence between band and audience, guitarist Efrim Menuck told a Brooklyn crowd in 2003: “We all must go to the hardware store and buy a hammer. All of us. All...all...all of us. And we walk or drive or fly to Washington, the Capitol, and we go to the Pentagon or the White House or both and we bring both those buildings down brick by fucking brick by fucking brick...” The hammer is the band’s essence: chipping away, but also doing the work of building something different. As my friend and fellow music writer Sasha Geffen, who flew to Chicago to attend the show, said about the new record, “Only when you’ve beheld what’s real in all its horror can you lurch into what’s possible.”
In their statement accompanying the new record, the collective observed: “every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.” However much the American public has been spared the direct horrors of the crimes we’ve inflicted upon others around the globe, the many promises of violence put forth by a second Trump administration are a reminder that cruelty anywhere begets cruelty everywhere.
Yet across No Title, Godspeed You! Black Emperor reminds us that hope can bloom in the simple gift of getting to fight another day. As the group finished their pre-album statement:
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE
Setting grief and joy apart weakens both; learning to live with each together is the best path for surviving the adversities that grow daily. Now that the dust from the election has settled, we must pick up the pieces and start again, whatever arises next.
