MUSIC

ordered Johnson be placed on electronic monitoring. The court’s pretrial public safety assessment of Johnson had recommended he be released with no conditions, according to paperwork filed with the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. A 2017 Injustice Watch report on rules changes at the county’s felony bond court notes that during a month of observation by the group’s reporters, Lyke instituted electronic monitoring in roughly onethird of his cases—and in about two-thirds of those, the court’s pretrial services department had not recommended it. (The other three judges observed used electronic monitoring about one-fifth of the time.)

Lyke added the condition that Johnson not skateboard or have a skateboard in his possession, and set his bond at $20,000. The Chicago Community Bond Fund paid Johnson’s 10 percent bail deposit later that day.

It would be three more days till Johnson was released from Cook County Jail. Doan heard from him the morning of Thursday, August 20. “I got a call at eight or nine in the morning,” Doan says. “I was in tears to hear my friend’s voice, and to hear from him that he was OK, and was tested for COVID and didn’t have it. He seemed pretty hopeful that he would be released very shortly. The call cut o about a minute and a half in.”

Ford felt similar relief when she was finally able to talk to her son. She’d spent the days leading up to Johnson’s release calling anyone in her network who could provide insight on her son’s legal situation—including, fruitlessly, a cousin who’d formerly served as a Cook County police o cer. “This was the first time I’ve had to deal with the criminal justice system,” Ford says. “And it has been a rude awakening.”

On October 6, the night before Johnson’s 26th birthday, his friends helped him throw a fundraising telethon with live music and comedy. “A Fire Type Telethon” ri s on the name of the album he’d released at the beginning of the month, which he’d been working on for a year and dreamed of for longer. “I’ve had the idea for a long time, ’cause I’m a nerdy dude—I like nerdy stu . But

I didn’t think I had the skill yet,” Johnson says. “So I waited about a year and a half into my music career before I started rapping about Pokémon.”

In November, Johnson began streaming sessions of Pokémon Sword and other Pokémon video games on Twitch. He uses his streams to present more than just gameplay—he addresses politics there, just as he does in his music and comedy, talking about topics such as patriarchy and toxic masculinity. “I try to use my Twitch to have conversations about how to unpack that stu ,” he says. “Like, where body standards and beauty standards come from, our definitions of gender and where we got the binary from, and how those things are antiquated. How not to be harmful—stu like that, ’cause I feel like I’m in a particular position where I can just reach a lot of people. I want to be able to do good while I can.”

Johnson can’t participate in further protests, of course—not while he’s still on house arrest. And his case proves that not everybody sees protesting as “doing good” anyway, no matter how worthy its aims. The city and CPD consistently frame protest as malicious and deserving of a harsh response—no amount of pious o cial rhetoric can erase their violence toward protesters or their attempt to publicly condemn Johnson long before his trial. “This is happening everywhere,” he says. “People are being put away for years, are being charged with felonies and being threatened with their livelihoods, or being put on probation for long periods of time, to serve as examples to other protesters to deter them.”

But Johnson knows that protests won’t stop until the injustices that provoke them finally disappear. The stakes are simply too high. “The people are hurting, and it seems like the people in charge of doing right by them are the ones who have dedicated themselves to harming them the most on behalf of capitalism, on behalf of racism, and on behalf of the status quo,” he says. “The city is not stu , the city is people, and we are hurting our people right now on purpose to keep them quiet. There won’t be a city left if we continue.”

Recommended and notable releases and critics’ insights for the week of April 1