“Rocket” (Smashing Pumpkins)

Limitlessness denied. Similar to ideas from both Nikolas Rose and Jean-Luc Nancy, freedom, which comes with the free disposal of rights, is presupposed by both a State and psy- discipline; the result for singer: he “couldn’t stay free.” The human body becomes a projectile, hurling into celestial emptiness (instead of into another) to be rid of “those voices in my head.” Ingesting love and consuming hate becomes the necessary fuel to attain escape velocity. The catch: “no more lies” assumes that once future being emerges, the true, sovereign subject will materialize. The irony not fully realized—here or there.

“Do It Clean” (Echo and the Bunnymen)

In the verse/chorus tension/release, an inkling of how to defuse or short-circuit pragmatic calls. “Where?” for example, is answered: “here,” “there,” “everywhere,” “nowhere.” Deictic dislocation, and absolute dissemination without position. And what did you “do with it” (whether a “handful” or a “barrel”-full)? “I did it clean.” In other words, he did it all, every drop, to the bottom and the limit, with no instrumentalist attachments.

“Continuum” (Jaco Pastorius)

Via Cantor’s logic, a finite set is never equivalent to its own subset(s), while all infinite sets are. Equality, then, only appears amid infinite particularities without exhaustion. Given this, a continuum properly thought must have no limit point, no possible incarnation or subjectivity to mark either terminus. Repetition of root braces the four-note ascending figure in multiple registers (whose only differences are in timbre and vibrato). Improv section approaches relation via timing (phrases eventually beginning in the last quarter of the bar, for example). Track ends with root and harmonic ringing out simultaneously, with the latter endless—proving that the note, physically, is a node which initiates relation by remaining still (and in the middle). Presence, presently, registers positionality and not (proximal) possibility.