contact(n.)

1620s, “action, state, or condition of touching,” from Latin contactus “a touching” (especially “a touching of something unclean, contamination”), from past participle of contingere “to touch, seize,” from assimilated form of com “with, together” (see con-) + tangere “to touch,” from PIE root *tag- “to touch, handle.”

The figurative sense of “a connection, communication” is attested from 1818. The meaning “a person who can be called upon for assistance” is attested by 1931.

From etymonline (2025)

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„Word chains enact with rhythm, make my music hit like the intangible power of systems“

From Bright Moments

The power of chained words amplifies its impact when it lands (communicates) on/with other human beings. For the charge of words to fulfill its strength, others must perceive, listen, and truly hear. Without interest and empathy, the meaning of communication is lost, and words become a jumble of signs (ignorance)—or, we could say:

„In my unhumble opinion, motherfuckers walk the museum too briskly“ From Bright Moments

As Aristotle famously wrote in Politics, “a human being is by nature a political animal” What sets humans apart from all other animals is the capacity for speech and a sense of moral values:

„The combats in my life are strictly moral The task to think large, though we all infinitesimal“ From Bright Moments

As Desmond Fisher writes in the article Communications and Community (1986): „As a political animal, man is a social, communicating being. For his full development, he needs to exchange meanings with his fellow-men in a community, a society sharing the same broad sense of moral values. Community is the end product; communication is  what builds community; communications are the means by which communication and, therefore, community are achieved.“ As he further emphasizes in the text, even though we live in an age of unlimited communication possibilities, reality falls short of the ideal. On the contrary, communication by itself does not yet create community.“Communication increasingly serves not to build, but rather to disrupt and prevent the formation of community.” – Desmond Fisher (1986).

From Interference (Out the Loop)

The very words of the artists that introduce the new album already provide a certain key to its interpretation. If we were to start from the phrase with which we ourselves unlock the album — [contacting á communication á community] — and apply it to the text „A late-stage internet memento. Postmodernity’s woes coded, decoded, and imploded / Mankind’s unkindnesses kindled in a new hardwiring (From album description by Sunmundi & Sasco),“ we would feel fading memories of a time of loving contact and sincere relationships, of words that carried weight. We sense an omnipresent fear of vanishing humanity in a society where hatred grows, where people disappear and turn into batteries powering a vast technocratic colossus.

As Ursula Huws writes in the book The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (2003): „Historically, the processes of transforming virtually anything into a privatized (and often fictitious) commodity that can be exchanged on the market have been of critical importance for both the rise and the ongoing reproduction of capitalism. It is only through the production of commodities for exchange that capitalists are able to extract surplus value from labour.“ Building on this, Jernej A. Prodnik poses urgent questions at the conclusion of the article 3C: Commodifying Communication in Capitalism from the book Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (2015): „But can we really claim a right to communicate exists for everybody if the whole communication process is turning into a big, interrelated and world-wide commodity chain. Is there any freedom when “cre-ative,  intellectual work turns into mass production, while individual ideas undergo ideological scrutiny to fit the demands of the market, where pre-dictability  and repetition are  the key to  commercial success.“

From Interference (Out the Loop)

Or, in the context of many current global conflicts and genocides, including the one in Gaza, Defcee paints an even more apocalyptic portrait of commodified modernity with his words in the track Dawn of Time (feat. Defcee):

The entire album, in a thought-provoking, sophisticated, and unprecedentedly complex way within rap music, comments on and depicts inhumanity, hatred, and new forms of oppression in the postmodern digital internet era (Mankind’s unkindnesses kindled in a new hardwiring). Paranoia, constant surveillance (as emphasized by the Czechoslovak rap duo Edúv Syn & Dominik Holý – Camera knows), the indelible digital footprint, and the manipulation of public opinion through censorship of news related to Palestine [“Palestine will be thriving or we’ll all just be humans recognizing survival” From Algorhythm / Power Lines (feat. Jouquin Fox)], are motifs that (in)directly flourish in every track on the album. This authoritarian control of the internet space could be called digital fascism. As Mustafa Demir writes in the article From Ideology to Algorithms, The New Face of Fascism: Digital Fascism (2025): „Broadly sustained by social media, coupled with the usage of Big Data and artificial intelligence, digital  fascism  enables  the  continuous  monitoring of  individuals’  online  identities,  along  with  the prediction and control of user behaviors. These capacities indicate that digital fascism has become an essential tool for reinforcing authoritarian regimes.“

The culture losing (surrendering) in the battle against digital fascism (The Surrender of Culture to Technology) enables the rise of the Technopoly — or, as Neil Postman defined this term in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology: “A society where technology becomes the ultimate authority, dictating culture and thought, effectively surrendering to its sovereignty. Technopol is a state where technology isn’t just a tool but a worldview, shaping our values, beliefs, and understanding of the world.“

Sunmundi aps in the track Dawn of Time (feat. Defcee):

shemar expands on his skeptically bleak vision in the track Clout Spells (feat. shemar):

So that Jouquin Fox, with his words on the track Algorhythm / Power Lines (feat. Jouquin Fox), casts us into a digital racist and fascist hell:

Contact and communication are poisoned (commodified), controlled, and full of hatred, yet the very awareness and shared reflection through rap (poetry) ignite the flame for revolution (communities). The origin of the power that Sunmundi and Sasco find despite obstacles can be traced back to the very birth of hip-hop, to the essence and core of the genres, as DJs and rappers created some of the most effective and revolutionary interventions in the field of communication while deliberately opening it up to a wider audience. Tricia Rose perceives these communication innovations as the ability of hip-hop artists to construct from deconstruction, and in her book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), she writes: „the arrangement and selection of sounds rap musicians have invented via samples, turntables, tape machines, and sound systems are at once destructive (in that they actually take apart recorded musical compositions) and recuperative (because they recontextualize these elements to creating new meanings for cultural sounds that have been relegated to commercial waste bins). Rap music revises black cultural priorities via new and sophisticated technological means. “Noise” on the one hand and communal countermemory on the other.“

Similarly fragmented, elusive, chaotic, and revolutionary are Sasco’s beats, without whose talent and vision the final album wouldn’t have nearly the same power. Sunmundi in these soundscapes never sounds pure or straightforward; rather, he speaks like our conscience, like a voice awakening as the world cracks. But back to igniting the revolution (communities) through hip-hop. The counterattack (empathetic communication, human contact, hip-hop) against the exploitative system was described not only by Tricia Rose but also by Victor Del Hierro in the article DJs, Playlists, and Community: Imagining Communication Design through Hip Hop (2019), with the words: „By communicating through a variety of practices and leveraging a “communal countermemory,” Hip Hop has learned to engage across communities through the recognition of similar nodes of meaning making interpreted through local expressions known as translocal styles. These styles range from the recognition of black linguistic expressions like “yo” and “dope” across globalized linguistic communities  to the various styles of music production like sampling or record scratching. Hip Hop’s inclusiveness and accessibility is based in the development of rhetorical tools for meaning making understood as style that allows for the revision that Rose describes across all forms of communication and mediums.“

Sunmundi and Sasco find faith and strength in the postmodern digital zeitgeist:

From Idling Nowhere

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I’M CONTACTING YOU

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[contacting á communication á community]. On the album, Sunmundi captures the contemporary world with all its flaws, yet through its apocalyptic vision flows faith and love for people, humanity, and the planet. Controlling, commodifying, exploiting, and using people [“Be free of suckers in the land of vampires and bluffers” from The Whole World (SOS)] is only possible when they are dehumanized. This dehumanization, in the context of the album, doesn’t have to be achieved in the literal sense; it is enough when interpersonal CONTACT is absent. To create and nurture it, communities must be maintained. As M. P. Follett already wrote in 1919 in the article Community is a Process: „COMMUNITY is a process. The importance of this as the fundamental principle of sociology it is impossible to over estimate. If we study community as a process, we reach these new definitions. For community is a creative process. It is creative because it is a process of integrating.“ He then asked: „What then is the law of community? From biology, from psychology, from our observation of social groups, we see that community is that intermingling which evokes creative power. What is created? Personality, purpose, will, loyalty.“

The dystopia presented on the album is built on the idea that people, things, music, interactions, communities, contact, and touch lose their beautiful meaning and lack love or joy—they become merely transactional and practical objects.

From Clout Spells (feat. shemar)

To break free from the grip of the burning, hollow dystopia, we must not turn away (to the universe), but rather turn inward (to the Earth). We need to raise the alarm (SOS) so that the whole world becomes one community (The Whole World).

From The Whole World (SOS)

Donata Francescato writes in her article WHY WE NEED TO BUILD A PLANETARY SENSE OF COMMUNITY (2020) that „planetary sense of community, will enable us to confront the systemic problems of climate change, racism, sexism, socio-economic and power disparities.“ The concept of planetary meaning for the community further defines it as „the concept of planetary sense of community which I put forward in this paper, has three main components: feeling an affective sense of belonging to the planet earth, considering oneself primarily a citizen of the world and having a spiritual or ethical responsibility to protect the planet earth and all its living creatures.“

From The Whole World (SOS)

It’s no surprise that Sunmundi, in the conclusion of the album, on its final track, turns to the most intimate feelings and the closest circle of people—his family. Despite the album’s complex lyrics, which we could (and should) study much longer and deeper than this brief article allows, the simple message conveyed is one of empathy, care, and love (for oneself, for others, for all, for the Planet). As Sunmundi and many others will surely confirm, the path to this awareness is infinitely complex, and everyone must walk it alone. But don’t look for an end—it’s a lifelong journey.

„My whole life I’ve been contacting you.“

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REFERENCES

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Cover photo by Suchi Mane

Aristotle. (1996). Politics (E. Barker, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 350 B.C.E.)

Demir, M. (2025). From ideology to algorithms, the new face of fascism: Digital fascism. Anemon Muş Alparslan Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 13(1), 232–272. https://doi.org/10.18506/anemon.1619446

Fisher, D. (1986). Communications and community. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 75(297), 74–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30090708

Follett, M. P. (1919). Community is a process. The Sociological Review, 11(3), 366–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1919.tb02602.x

Francescato, D. (2020). Why we need to build a planetary sense of community. Community Psychology in Global Perspective, 6(2), 140–164. https://doi.org/10.1285/i24212113v6i2p140

Harper, D. (n.d.). Contact. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved July 12, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/contact

Hill, E. (2019). DJs, playlists, and community: Imagining communication design through hip hop. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 7(2), 28–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358936

Huws, U. (2003). The making of a cybertariat: Virtual work in a real world. Monthly Review Press.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books.

Prodnik, J. A. (2015). 3C: Commodifying communication in capitalism. In C. Fuchs & V. Mosco (Eds.), Marx in the age of digital capitalism (pp. 233–321). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004291393_010

Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press.