What it means to keep “it true”: colorblindness mixed with righteous white liberalist tendencies. A remarkable move to remove the “folk” enmeshed in narrative of rap (cf. Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and the thousand other things written to monumentalize them) in the name of an entrepreneurial historiography. So, just what do black people have to sell? “Authenticity,” which “you literally can’t learn.” “Effortless” and cutting: at home with conditional justice (and a profit-sharing plan). (For an extended theorization of this, see “Thrift Shop.”)
Oft-covered vocal track reworked into standard jazz guitar arrangement, silence, and then urgent, driving percussion solo on right. Eight-string guitar runs the gamut from Montgomery-like octave runs to faux pedal steel bends to Pass-ian bass accompaniment. Eventual fade-out of melody rids track of original’s purpose: emotive motivation for the oppressed. There’s no more concern about “self-respect” or “hang[ing] on to the world.” Clearing the ground of its subjects to provide shifting, pressing beats inclined to the future.
You must “pay the price” of “love” (as the Everly Brothers also insisted). But here we can also read this doctrine in a political register: the figure of the “stranger” disappears as soon as you “think of the danger.” Corey Robin reminds us that “fear” lies at the origin of liberal polity (Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Arendt), though with “only” two lives to give for one’s country (which you can hear in the double-tracked vocal of the 45 version), you’d hope that one might be offered in tending to the disappearance of the other.
The silent majority, without doubt, is terrifying, bent on “creating souls of immunity” out of the war-torn remains of “Arlington Cemetery.” Yet the “vocal minority” doesn’t assert their ascendancy or demand race war; it’s really a fundamental difference in beat: they live on the two and four (while the majority lives on the one and three). Second in line and last in everything, this spatial, sonic, and stress(ed out) positioning grants the right to claim true democracy, with this caveat: 4/4 is still a steady pulse and throbbing commitment to shared “humanity”–another “hanging tree.” Perhaps, though, this is the limit of our shared “national emergency,” grooved out and locked in.
The earliest playable sound recording is this phonautogram of 9 April 1860–played back for the first time in 2008 through the miracle of the First Sounds collective. This trax consists of the first ten words of an eighteenth-century folk song (and sometime lullaby) intoned very slowly and as carefully as possible: “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête moi—” (“By the light of the moon, my friend Pierrot, lend me…”). If M. Scott had not run out of recording space, the commedia dell’arte trickster figure Harlequin would have gone on to tell his “friend” that he’s searching for a pen and a light, so that he might make a record of his thoughts. Pierrot rebuffs him and sends him to his neighbor. In the final verse, the search for implements transmutes into a discovery of the shaft (la plume indeed) and eros (le feu) with the aid of the girl next door, and the trickster beds down Pierrot’s beloved. Much as in the long version of Kenneth Anger’s film, Rabbit’s Moon (1972), Harlequin teaches Pierrot braided lessons on desire, deceit (double entendres), and inscription/reproduction (the apparatus). The song operates, then, as a metacritique regarding the mimetic and psychological limits to Scott’s labors. Relatedly, the trax ends with an open-ended “lend me,” implying, at minimum, some form of outside supplement to reproduction. An ear, perhaps?
The controversy involving the conflict between the achievement of a culturally-specific dance and the white supremacist practice of “adapting” material really comes down to this: if people of color could really name themselves, when would this ever be a possible conflict? The irony, perhaps, is that the original Filthy Frank video has no leader but an alternation between an extremely excited Bernie/Berne dance and the Butthead hump; the meme: all iterations require a leader or, more directly, motivation to break from alienated movement. Purportedly a riffing off of Dutch House/Dirty Dutch (among other genres/techniques) with a repeated bipartite structure alternating rooted and mobile (within the measures) bass patterns. Baauer himself claims ownership of the song, which ironically backs into with the imperative sample’s source critique: an attempted indictment of black rappers who sign endorsement deals. How about a way below this? If we are foreach other, then even a citation is unfaithful to the original.
As album’s inside cartoon implies, the revelation that inspires marching toward must escape the orbit of anarchy’s desire—in Sex Pistols’ reference—to resituate the state. The tension in this process of extrication accompanies harmolodic theory’s structured freedom, demanding support as much as it does innovation. Ascending/Descending, downward-sliding, shared pair of doublestops on guitar and bass at beginning lay claim to this commitment, initiating the destabilization of strict rules of instrumentation; for example, bass primarily maintains walking technique while honing in on and, alternately, initiating key changes. Coleman’s reverbed performance stresses revolution’s commitment to the past through its distant (re)incarnation, if only to reinforce the work of transforming so that, like track’s end, dominion emerges through consideration.
Wordless soundscape for a Samuel Beckett libretto to Morton Feldman’s Neither: a long track of extreme silences (with intermittent white noise, pops, clickings, and whirrings) punctuated after eighteen minutes by a sounds of a door unbarred, opened, shut, and refortified (three times). The idea of home for the self, or spatial origin and presence (spatial belonging), is a tempting phantasm, but unattainable. Home’s door closes upon approach. No one home, ever, but something (still) stirs: infrasonic refugees.
While others develop, seek out, or endure for a future salvation, what posture should be assumed? The other kinds of engagement build living “nightmares,” ranging from colonization to self-monitoring to sexual quietism. In these “times of terror and pain,” this trax advocates giving in to “temptations” as long (as they last) and stepping on the necks of the “meek.” With so much focus on experience(s), it’s not too much of a stretch to think this will all end badly—with a libertarian bent and superior sneer. There are no border police here, though, and you can “send in” anyone you want to protect hegemony. Being with “fools” and “whores” an antidote to the “torture and fame” of sinning, fueling a life on provisional but indefinitely renewable “dreams.”
Just like it’s impossible for a trax to encompass a single life (“I’ve actually erased a lot that I’ve been through”), the same goes for a human fetus with the poles reversed. Susan Sherwin contends that a set of feminist ethics shouldn’t be pro-choice in the common sense; rather, it should advocate for women being able to make “truly voluntary choices,” which includes determining the value and meaning of a fetus. As for the first, this would involve an intensive structural critique addressing situations like having to “fuck . . . for rent” or being resigned to “Medicaid fix[ing]” you. (It would entail, in the short term, a rights-based advocacy with a longer view toward the full enfranchisement of women, understood as a category of potentiality.) But what’s a fetus’ potential if it never existed as such? Can it provide enough material for a trax in itself? For Jean Grae’s narrator, a fetus is “divinity” while “mother” is an unmarked and experientially remote status. The fetus represents “another life that almost got close.” That’s a closed narrative already, an anti-utopia premised on disciplining and patterning the murderous self. A choice, then, is only a choice if one’s options include both the manageable and the impossible, or when the voluntary choice is able to entertain unboundedness as one of its orientations.