COMMENT

Every week on Facebook I post a video and call it Jam Of The Week. This week it’s “Neighbors Know My Name” by Trey Songz. I want to make a couple notes about it, and another, related recent jam as well: R. Kelly’s “Echo.”

Both songs function as a vehicle for the singer to perform a panegyric to his own sexual prowess. In both cases, as well, this panegyric is founded upon objective evidence of said prowess, the noise made by the beloved during sex. But beyond this convergence of content, and very clear formal lineage and influence, there are two quite different worlds proposed by each of them.

Quickly, the lineage. If I’ve suggested on this blog that The-Dream’s work often functions as an explicit or implicit homage to the work of R. Kelly, Trey Songz surpasses homage. But whereas T. Nash expresses and even thematizes his debt, young Trey enters into relation with Kelly as an antagonist. That he does so by appropriation of the very techniques which Kelly mastered and brought to new heights is painfully evident.

Still, “Neighbors Know My Name” is a terrific jam. The gestures might be textbook R. Kelly, as I’m suggesting, but they don’t suffer for that. The conceit of the song is not obscure: Trey’s sexual prowess causes the beloved to scream his name at such volume that the other intervenes in order to recognize, ratify that prowess. The neglect of neighborly responsibility on the part of the lover emphasizes the abandonment to their own physical delights, true, but the emphasis is clearly on Trey’s name. That is, Trey’s glory, far from being in question, is secure on account of the disturbed social.

“Echo,” of course, clearly demonstrates an interest in the singer’s sexual acumen. But the scene is somewhat different. Instead of disturbing the social, Kelly wants his beloved to a) disturb the wage slavery state she persists in in favor of somatic pleasure and b) scream and moan, undoubtedly, but only peripherally for the iteration of Kelly’s glory. The focus is indeed the beloved’s pleasure, and the noises which serve as evidence of this pleasure are reserved in the text for her and Kelly alone. The shift, for me, is finally a tender, mature approach to the heteronormative sexual encounter so glorified by contemporary jams. No Patron, no “shorty,” etc.

But above and beyond this somewhat attenuated narcissism (as opposed to Trey’s more or less masturbatory text), “Echo” achieves something that “Neighbors” doesn’t. Both songs of course are extreme instances of the literal. But “Neighbors” only transcendent moment is the onomatopoetic “knocking” on the wall and the door that figures into the beat. “Echo” does something very weird, even for a weird writer like Kelly. “Echo” contains within it the fantasy that sex with R. Kelly will transform the beloved into a Swiss maiden yodeling at a high altitude. I mean, there is a very real Heidi citation at stake here (yikes. okay, would Swiss Miss be better? I don’t want to perpetuate the overdetermined and racist portrayal of Kelly as a sociopath). But, I mean, Kelly’s representation of the beloved’s screams of pleasure is literally a yodel. Moreover, once the sex is fully initiated, the lovers elevate, “I got you soundin’ like you’re screaming from a mountain peak.” Ricola, anybody?

But really, I think both of these are great efforts. For the most part, Trey’s recent work actually is more interesting than Kelly’s. But “Echo” shows that as a writer there is a complexity not really in Trigger’s wheelhouse yet.

COMMENT

I’m just now going to give up on reading Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. We had a good run. And actually I like it quite a lot. Tim Kreiner told me on Sunday the whole thing was fucking dictated? Please. My surrender is just another acclimation to the fact that my reading happens on BART, lunch breaks in various corporate cafes and occasional spaces carved into the financial district for business lunchers to lunch, in my bed after working all day, and when I’m rigorous on weekends in a variety of spots. The attention that Theodor warrants I can’t always give. I dunno. Maybe I’ll leave it by my bedside for a while and call it a lullaby.

Anyway, there is a lot of interesting and essentially relevant material in AT. I just want to mention one bit, from the chapter on “Art Beauty”. If I’m understanding this right, Adorno distinguishes natural beauty and art beauty. He writes, “Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is.” Art beauty is something like an artifactural version of this. Artworks don’t resemble nature, but natural beauty. And the content of this resemblance is the production of this “more”.

He goes on, “Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning.” In previous thoughts about prosody on this blog this term “residue” has occurred which is where I want to try and collaborate with the Adorno passage. I think that prosody is one instance of the “something more” which makes poetry irreducible to its signifiers. But I am also interested in this notion of the artwork producing “something more” in terms of translation.

I think I’ve forgotten to say over the last 5 years or so that when I’m talking about translation I’m talking about translation as making artwork. That’s been an assumption, but of course the difference is literally everything. The crises germane to a non-artwork act of interpretation might well be relevant to any practice of translation as an artwork, but the context of that relevance is totally altered. Right? Something like that?

COMMENT

did you all have a nice weekend?

mine was great, too, thanks for asking. There were a lot of literary and social highlights. Among the former, I had the privilege of acting in Cassandra Smith’s Interview, Robert Duncan’s Origin Of Old Son (directed by David Brazil), and moreover realized a lifetime dream of playing Charles Olson in a play written by myself and Sara Larsen. Sara and I’s play dramatizes the real life date between Olson and Janis Joplin. It’s tentatively either called The Date or Duncan Ex Machina, a super phrase of David’s. Poet’s Theater was fun. The bar after was fun. The party after the bar was fun. Saturday morning was rather less fun.

And last night Douglas Kearney and Jasper Bernes absolutely triumphed at The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Also had a delicious bottle of Chardonnay from the Arboir at Terroir, escargot puff lollipops and a potato gratin from Spencer On The Go, and the Saints are going to the Super Bowl. Hooray!

But after all that, the real highlight of my weekend is this. In the middle of a conversation outside of Sadie’s about the Swedish producer Max Martin, I noticed a Swedish dude named Erik walked out of the bar. I had met him earlier in the evening. Now I called him over to account the cultural magnitude and formal brilliance of Martin’s work. He expressed surprise and asked why I knew so much about Max Martin. I explained that I have a lot at stake with Martin’s art and want to someday do critical writing about it and him, to which, Erik, are you ready? dude tells me he’s a journalist in Stockholm and can totally arrange a hangout session with ME and MAX MARTIN. Holy shit, right? OMFG, right???? 2010 pwns it, ya’ll.

Hi friends, I'm publishing three of my own chapbooks in early 2010: TOOTH FAIRY, THE ORGY, and YOUR MOM'S A FALCONRESS AND OTHER POEMS. These chapbooks will be available in limited edition for $4.00 apiece of $10.00 for all three. Trades are also encouraged! If you'd like to buy books, hit the button on the right.




thanks! BB

JAM OF THE YEAR

Drake's "Best I Ever Had" is the Jam Of The Year

"Best I Ever Had" charades as a love song, a tribute by the lover to the beloved in song. It's a charade because, as the text of "Best" shows clearly, the operative word to hear in its title is "I"--insignia of the absent "You", which even proliferating attempts made in the chorus can't recuperate. I'm not actually proposing that the "You" in the song is an empty signifier--it's not. It's just that it's also not what most love songs are that deploy the "you," generalized anthems easily appropriated by any lover to express the ineffable feeling of suprasensual attachment. It's also partly an anthem to the commodity, and therefore exchange value. That's the crucial force of "Had" in the song, which does more than merely perform the ancient use in Indo-European languages of the verb for possession to signify the verb for copulation. But it is largely, in fact dominantly, an ode to Drake himself, a love song mouthed into a mirror, shown not by the "I" of the title (which, indeed, contributes to the charade of "Best" as a trditional love song) but by the overwhelming majority of the song's content.

In fact, the song's two verses reveal very, very little about this beloved. The little we know about this beloved is put into tension by the use of the superlative, sure, but also by the painstakingness of the spoken introduction, in which Drake insists that "Best" is directed towards one specific person. Okay, but to be systematic, here's what we know about her:

1. She's up on everything
2. She holds (Drake) down every time (Drake) hits her up
3. She makes (Drake) beg for it until she gives it up
4. She has a roommate
5. She may or may not have been accustomed to the fast life (Drake thought so, anyway)
6. Drake finds her prettiest in sweatpants, hair tired, chilling with no makeup on
7. She doesn't trip when friends say she can't bring Drake along
8. She has a big butt
9. At every one of Drake's shows, she's out there reppin' like a mascot

That might seem like a lot, but for a song that pretends that it might enumerate the qualities of the beloved which determine her "the best", the overwhelming majority of content is in fact about what Drake is doing, can do, might do, or intends to do. And the Andy Griffith theme song is implicated, yes. Also, note that the only qualities listed above that are independent of Drake to some extent are that she's up on everything, she has a roommate, and a large ass.

Okay. It sounds like I'm bagging on "Best I Ever Had" and I kind of am. But before I go further, let me mention the obvious, which is that every JOTY, and, shit, every contender who aspires, clearly digs deep into the je n'sais quois that is melody (the original thing to make you go hmmm.) And "Best I Ever Had" does that, and does that serious. Which also shows something about the JOTY in general: JOTY isn't just based on anybody's experience of their own IPOD, there's an empirical quality to it. And when I think of jams in 2009, "Best I Ever Had" is the jam that everyone loved, that lived on car stereos like Jay-Z lives on Billboard. It lived there, too.
The charming and slightly horrifying thing about that very fact is what "Best I Ever Had" is suggesting to us about our very culture. It's unrepentant narcissism is matched only by an uncanny symptom of its pervasiveness: Drake himself became synonymous with exchange value.

It's been speculated widely that 2009 was the year of Drake. But simultaneously, Drake entered hip hop vocabulary as a signifier meaning "hit single." That this only manifests in one or two instances, one of them by the man most fit for profiting off said metamorphosis (Wayne), is irrelevant. That's all it takes--and the fact that it's immediately understood reinforces that. Anybody participating in this lexical community can now equally bestow the term "Drake" to anybody doing almost anything. "Kasey Mohammed was the Drake of 2010," "Lil Wayne" was the Drake of 2007," etc. But what this means for Drake's actual singles, and "Best I Ever Had" supreme among them (so to speak), is that they perform a residual tautology in the culture. There's something not just narcissitic but nihilistic about the jam, and that our culture rallies behind that is extremely interesting.

"Best" has a spoken outro too, a bookend of meaning to complement the intro. Here Drake says, "Uh. Ah yeah. See this is the type of joint you gotta dedicate to somebody. Just make sure they that special somebody (pause). Young Money. (pause). Yeah. You know who you are! I got you." How do we read that "Young Money"? On one hand, I would be willing to accept it's your standard brand-drop for the label that's producing and releasing the song. On the other hand, I want to read it as the answer to the indirect question. The song, that is, ends up being itself dedicated to its own producers, its own writers, its own artists. The "you" is finally a matter of complete nuance: it's not just a beloved, it's not just Drake himself, and it's not just this concomitant symbolizing of Drake as synonymous with an-object-which-generates-capital: it's all those things, and more.

JAM OF THE YEAR

"Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart," Alicia Keys; "Knock You Down," Keri Hilson ft. Ne-Yo and Kanye West

In my lifetime, pop music has occasionally been absorbed into the spectacle of sovereign politics, as a source of misrecognition, political appropriation and manipulation, and what is no different, rhetorical citation. Nobody watching will forget, in the opening moments of Barack Obama's acceptance speech in November 2008, his reference to Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come". This reference, in the context of the election's close and the supposed initiation of a new era in American history, draws attention to the transitional moment itself. The past ("It's been a long time coming") and its troubles are brought into relation with futurity ("change is gonna come") and its invisibilities in the certainty of the presence of the speaker ("I know").

A couple of weeks after the election ended and that speech was made, my friend J. (to whom all JOTY discussions are indebted) made the observation that Ne-Yo's "Mad" should be strongly considered as Jam Of The Year. His reasoning, in paraphrase and according to my faulty memory, was that "Mad" nicely portrayed the situation of American "hope" in politics after the reductive divisiveness of the election. "Mad," I would add, also proposes a moment in time, going to sleep, as a critical moment for coming-to-terms with unresolved fissures and confrontation which depend on certainty of the present in order to proceed with good prospects.

While I think all of this is true, and that "Mad" is an outstanding jam, it's relatively late release and slightly tardy introduction into the mainstream cultural purview excluded it from this blog's comments. This actually reveals a systemic crisis inherent in this blog's procedural tactic of coming up with this shit in late December of the very year in which JOTY is supposed to emerge. And all of the above, actually, is an appropriate preamble to a short discussion of "Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart" by Alicia Keys.

Like "Mad", "Heart" figures temporally in the soporific. And like both "Mad" and "Change," "Heart" insists on that moment as a kairos, as a critical time bridging the past and future in which the speaker in the present longs for resolve. And it expresses eloquently resiliency and duration in the face of, well, the disappointment of the very certainty with which perhaps the speaker had maintained. Of all the many reasons why Keys, and all of us, have to try sleeping with a broken heart, I want to refer to only a couple: the "rude awakening" experienced by the American left in the first year of the Obama presidency, and the death of Michael Jackson.

Not much more needs to be said here about the prevailing sense of disappointment in the "change" that was so sincerely believed imminent by millions one year ago. That this disappointment totally derives from the actions and decisions of President Obama is of course not the charge of this blog nor Keys' text. But both respond to the spectacular jettison of idealistic speech that once issued out feverishly from that specific political machine. The platittudes of hope and change have been morphed into, thanks Hova, politics as us-u-al. That you or I might not be surprised by this transformation isn't really the point. On a vast cultural level, there is a sense that the sovereign in whom such emotion was invested has let us down, if not knocked us down, from our pedestal of hope.

The Jackson thing. Admittedly, this may not be the most relevant or gracious thing to say about his death, but it is true I think that for many of us Jackson’s death signified a death that-could-not-be. In the privileged bourgeois life of middle-class America, and for a pretty broad range of ages, Jackson’s music and fame had been coterminous with our entire lives. And really, that fame. The life of that fame was so much larger than the person of Michael Jackson that it generated a penumbral quality of immortality many of us absorbed as inherent to his person. Thus his bodily death, incompatible as his body was with that penumbral, inconceivable glory, jarred many of us into an awareness about the threshold between the artist and the illusory perpetuity of that glory ("all this time you were telling me lies / yeah"). Also, Jackson’s fame was truly unprecedented—and the lack of any adequate theorization about that level of fetishization and identification (since Jackson as unprecedented icon requires an analysis at the level of the particular, not the universal) left us as a culture ill-prepared for receiving his death. If abstraction is the cipher of everything modern, as Adorno suggests, then the empirical nature of his disappearance and surrounding circumstances are literally indecipherable. Except perhaps, after the wash of variously hollow and rich elegies, something of the repressed trauma has leaked into the genres into which MJ has irrevocably intervened and determined.

Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down" is another testimony to the murky poles of certainty / uncertainty and the critical opportunities in which one usurps the other. If anything, given what most of this comment has touched upon, "Knock You Down" presages the possibility of hope's loss and the need for determined resiliency in the face of that possibility. The song depends on binary poles ("what we gon' have / dessert or disaster") and ambiguity (the two ways in which love "knocks one down," visualized in terms of diametrical opposition), although, and this is interesting, Hilson et al's text is especially interested in what lies beyond the categories of certainty and uncertainty, the zones of the non-thought and the non-answered: "I never thought I'd / fall in love like this;" "I never thought I'd / hear myself say;" "You should leave your boyfriend now / I'ma ask him".

"Knock You Down," also, stages a rich contribution to the contemporary structure of "ft." (side note: the proliferation of the "ft." is almost total at this point. You heard Lil Wayne a lot on the radio this year but you did not buy a Lil Wayne LP because there wasn't one, etc. On this whole list of JOTY contenders, only three ["Plenty Money", "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart," and the yet-to-be-revealed JOTY itself] do not have guest vocalists). There is an insinuated narrative in the three vocals: Hilson has been stunned by an experience of love she didn't think possible, Ne-Yo is stunned by a similar experience, specifically coded as an innovation with regards to his own performnce of masculinity, while Kanye is "knocked down" in an entire other sense, that of being abandoned by the lover. That this departed lover is "played" by Hilson, with Ne-Yo as her new beloved, is made explicit in the video.

But the point to be made about the triangle is not just a narrative one: the featured vocalists produce texts that, indeed, fit more or less into the storyline; but they're also so emblematic of the individual performers themselves that they function more as insignia or brands than they do mere baton-carriers of a romantic drama. Ne-Yo's art is consistently dedicated to showing at great detail how phenomenal a partner he is, and indeed often at the "expense" of masculinity's mainstays (in fact, much of this inversion is the central content of his recent work, so that the desire is now for the beloved to be "the boss," not the submissive wife, etc.) West, at least at the time "Knock You Down" was produced, had just finished "808's and Heartbreaks," an excellent instance of the classic divorce record. But moreover, the specifics of his contribution to "Knock You Down" are too close to the narrative elaborated on "808's" to dismiss: the high school sweetheart who leaves the successful artist, etc. But as if this referential branding wasn't apparent enough to the fan, Ne-Yo even hums a line from one of his own songs, "Miss Independent," in the middle of his verse.

Both songs' insistence on resiliency are evoked by marching drums, minimal in "Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart" and inciteful, nervous in "Knock You Down," and, appropriately, the former's stated ambition is to sleep, to rest, to lie down; the latter's is "to keep rockin," "to get back up". I like both of them enormously, and if finally I find Keys to perform a more sophisticated paean to keeping on, that's not at the denigration of Hilson et al's terrific effort. Despite the similarity of their attentions and determinations, their ambitions aren't identical. (What Keys song accomplishes, for me, moreover, is a nuanced appreciation of Prince's work as a songwriter, a translation of auratic elements of his finest recorded work that doesn't sound like parodic homage.)

They're both bangers, just in different bedrooms.