Kaeley Pruitt-Hamm (KPH) is a young community organizer/social justice advocate who has spent the last several years mostly bedridden (read her story here). I bring this up not to garner sympathy for KPH’s plight—although much of her recent work has been a twin effort of creative expression and self-sustainment due to her circumstances, she is not an artist defined by her condition—but rather to give context to the stomping declaration that is “Dam Dam.”
Over steady bass, a descending funk guitar riff, a nice organ drone, ghostly backing voices playing hide-and-seek with the panning knobs, thigh-slapping (seriously, she told me herself!), kinetic high-hat, and a kick drum that sets up the chorus (and primary groove) of the song from the start, KPH infuses every lyric—from alternately frustrated and ruminative verses to a joyous metaphor-packed chorus—with real-life experience. You can’t hear “Dam Dam” and not know intuitively that it comes from a place of pain, near-resignation, and breakthrough.
Finally—and I may be stretching interpretation, but I almost fell out of my chair when this occurred to me—in a feat of tonal mastery, KPH & The Canary Collective keep the whole thing moving along on an A minor chord as extant within the confines of the key of E minor. And what’s so special about that? A minor is the subdominant in this key. Sub = below or under, dominant = powerful, influential. It never moves to the dominant and never resolves to the tonic—that’s how important the chord is to this song. “Dam Dam”’s very harmonic structure can be seen as a sequential metacommentary on the experience it relates.