Not long after Renee Nicole Good was shot by ICE, and Trump outright lied about her killer being the actual victim (the killer was, in this alternate reality posted on âTruthâ Social, run over, in the hospital, and in very bad shape), I played D'Angelo's âDevilâs Pie.â Produced by DJ Premier and released in 1998, the dusty, bass-dragged, soul-simmering track concerns desperate people who are reduced to crime or selling their bodies for a few bucksâa slice, and a very slimy one, of the âdevil's pie.â But the track is deeply sympathetic. D'Angelo is not condemning but describing the raw realities of hood capitalism. These people might be fallen, but they are not irredeemable. They might be living in hell, but they havenât sold their souls.
Now let's turn to the matter of a devil's bargain. We could get all fancy and talk about Goethe's Faust, which presents the devilâs bargain in a Cartesian and Laplacian universe of intellectual masteryâno, that won't do. Letâs instead keep it real simple and locate its meaning in a 1987 film that mixed horror and noir, Alan Parker's Angel Heart. What happens in this movie: A private detective, Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourkeâan â80s actor who is going through something right now), is hired by a rich man, Louis Cyphre (played by the only Hollywood actor to inspire an â80s pop hit, Bananaramaâs âRobert De Niroâs Waitingâ), to investigate a mystery that needs, for contractual purposes, to be cleared.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Harry doesnât know he is actually possessed by a swing-era crooner, Johnny Favorite, who sold his soul to the devil to become famous and, when the time came to pay off his stardom, tried to get out of the deal by raw-eating the heart of a fresh World War II soldier, Harry Angel. Along the way, Johnny Favorite murders people in a desperate effort to break the bargain. In the end, Louis Cyphreâyes, as in Lucifer, aka Satan, aka the Dark Princeâreclaims what he owns, what was sold in the bargain, Favoriteâs soul.
Now, this movie is about a man who cannot be redeemed. Even God can't help Harry. Those who went for a slice of the devil's pie, however, are not totally lost. God is still there for them: on the street, in the jacked car, in the prison cell. DâAngelo knows you still got soul; knows that God will not throw stones but instead wash your feet. Even the tax collector is not in the abyss, not like Johnny Favorite, someone who, by their own choice, is forever out of the reach of God's love and forgiveness.
If Minneapolis shows us one thing, it is the irretrievability of those who support a president who is bombing people on boats, who is kidnapping people from city streets, and who is now killing people for practicing their rights as American citizens. ICE agents are bats right out of hell. Their contribution to society as a whole is next to zero. They are even attacking and traumatizing children.
And it doesnât get better: The suppressed materials of the Epstein Files make it clear that MAGA has sold its soul to the horrors upon horrors they describe. You are in there now and forever. You will never escape this bargain.
