Milwaukee has giant four-faced clock towers standing all over Downtown and up the East Side, and back down into the 5th Ward, where the big faces on the Rockwell tower are there to remind you where you are. "Better know the time in this town, boy, keep your excuses in your pockets or you're finished here." It's one of the oh-so-German and intimidating things about the city, a throwback to the era of old industry, when being on time mattered in the automation of producing all manner of machinery and parts for the U.S. Department of Defense (War).

Those days are long gone, the industries too, and the time gone with them. No two clocks in downtown Milwaukee tell the same time, and they haven't for as long as I've lived here.

The lines "in the City of Clocks, no one is telling good time" started playing in my head 5 or 6 years ago, the meaning taking on all sorts of connotations but always coming back to one: No metro area in the country incarcerates African-American men at a higher rate (per capita) than Milwaukee does, and no state at a higher rate than Wisconsin. Source: bit.ly/2UtlAQJ

Roughly half the African-American men aged 30-45 living in Milwaukee County have served time in prison, according to one UW-Milwaukee study. Half -- an unthinkable outrage that has gone on and on unchecked through the 2000s to today, a nightmare of racism that persists in Wisconsin largely due to the lack of political will to upset the status quo and find meaningful reforms to an inherently racist system of police, prosecutors, courts and prisons.

Your friends who happen to be black live in this nightmare, and so do you, as a human being, as a friend, lover, acquaintance. No person of any political stripe in America should pretend for an instant that he or she doesn't understand to the bone why a police station in Minnesota burned, or why the police were so quick to fire tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters every single day and night of the actions in Milwaukee. All of this has to change.

When?
Now.
Let's get moving.

-- JdM

"City of Clocks" is not a song about change; it's a story about the way things are, about two friends -- one white (the narrator), one black -- on a typical night, doing what friends do. They meet up and head out into the night, the "downtown" of the mind, looking to get into something good, someplace better than where they're at. Instead they find violence. In the City of Clocks, they're going to jail if the police don't shoot. In the City of Clocks, one of the friends will be imprisoned, and the overwhelming odds are that it won't be the white guy.

OUR PLEDGE: "City of Clocks" is not for sale. As much as we would appreciate your $ support for our music, we instead encourage that you donate to groups working now to end mass incarceration and systemic racism in policing, prosecution and sentencing.

These key groups need our focus, attention and support now:

AFRICAN-AMERICAN ROUNDTABLE of Wisconsin Voices, organizing and empowering our community. wisconsinvoices.org/aart/

SUPPORT THE ROC - Ending Mass Incarceration:
www.rocwisconsin.org/our-work/keeping-people-out-of-prison/

WISDOM and ROC partners: www.rocwisconsin.org/partners/

BLACK LIVES MATTER in Milwaukee is a decentralized, grassroots movement not affiliated with the national BLM org, but you can help @BLMMKE set up shop and grow by donating to the Black Lives Matter MKE capacity fund - bit.ly/2UcA2MG
For more info, hit up Black Lives Matter on Facebook: @BLMMKE

peace & love & dissonance,

Primitive Broadcast Service