Summer Song Challenge, Day 17: Pat

Prompt: "A song that makes you think of your favorite book"

Selected by Pat

"It Takes Two"

Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock

It Takes Two, 1988

I've read David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets twice. It is a phenomenal work of non-fiction; easily readable and absolutely gripping in its account of violence in a modern American city. It certainly helped steer me toward a decade-long career in the justice system. But 30 years since its publication, it cannot be ignored how much misconduct the book leaves unexamined. Consider the interview of Ransom Watkins, a inmate who at the time was serving life for a murder committed when he was sixteen. Watkins asks the detectives how they sleep at night knowing they put an innocent man in jail; the book frames this as the taunts of a remorseless monster. In fact, Watkins was exonerated in 2019, after serving 35 years in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with.

Though my feelings on Homicide have changed over the years, there is one sequence that will stay with me forever. Midway through the story, as the weather grows hotter and the murders more frequent, the detectives are unable to escape 1988's song of the summer: "It Takes Two." At every crime scene, the hook rings out. At every witness canvas, officers see young people dancing. Soon the song is so ubiquitous that Simon begins separating paragraphs describing brutal death with the chorus. The result works on two levels: as commentary—a homicide literally takes two—and juxtaposition—that even in a world as violent as Baltimore in the summer of '88, people spent their days dancing.