The complications of multinational pop: This song first emerges as a Swedish-language solo recording by Frida. In this trax, she gives comfort to an old man whose sweetheart has passed away. Once it became clear the trax was going to be a big hit, the song fans out into both Spanish and English versions. The Spanish version, with lyrics by RCA-Argentina employee Mary McCluskey, is the weaker of the two: here, ABBA sings to a man who has seen war and has survived because of the “protection” of the stars. The English version, with lyrics by Björn, is far more intriguing and risky: now Fernando and the singer are veterans of a fight for “liberty” across the “Rio Grande” river. Björn eventually will claim that the song is about Zapata during the Mexican Revolution, but this makes no sense: Zapata’s forces never entered U.S. territory. On the other hand, Pancho Villa crossed the border several times, as did General Mariano Arista at the start of the War of North American Invasion (known to the north as the Mexican-American War). It’s finally possible to hear the track as a fantasy Reconquista, through immigration or at the point of gun barrel, with the stars aligned for the future downfall of the white interlopers. Thus, the Spanish version appears to be a sop to Latin American political and market forces. But this still fails to explain how the English language version turn into a Samuel P. Huntington fantasy.
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On the one hand: human beings have elevated themselves to a position outside of nature: “Their gods have made them special and above nature’s law.” On the other: DiFranco herself, in response, goes even higher to hang out with the “hawk”: “you just grow wings and rise above it all” to a “borderless” place of “mercy.” Staking out the higher moral ground is a commonplace tactic, but perhaps inappropriate for rethinking the anthropocene. For that, we’re going to have to get down in the dirt.
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Adjacent to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s appeal before the grand jury announcement in the Michael Brown case, President Obama ventriloquizes in a white paternalist voice: protestors must respect the lives and property of others. The right to free speech, also mentioned by both men, animates this whole discussion and serves as the third prong of the appeal. (See Dan Quayle’s, George Bush’s, and Charlton Heston’s censorious statements/actions after this trax’s initial release.) What they don’t see is how lives and properties—this life’s properties as life’s only current guaranteed property—are imbricated. What, at first blush, serves as a revenge fantasy for Ice-T and Body Count (“tonight we get even!”) reveals a confusion of time central to the oppressed’s resistance. With the murderous fantasy in plain view, the singer sympathizes, “I know your family’s/momma’s grieving.” About to happen/already happened: the text of premeditation is both immediate and longstanding, with a repetitious fantasy fulfillment animating the writing and performance. Yet if one has a (local) monopoly on the use of force, premeditation should be considered planning; fantasy is prelude to systemization. And this might help explain a particular sleight of hand constituting white supremacy in which black lives must be (ab)used and eventually neglected in the name of civil protest. (Keep in mind that in his Autobiography, Malcolm X describes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategy of non-violent protest as a way to “dramatize the brutality and evil of the white man against defenseless blacks.”) With odds like that, it’s difficult not to agree with Michael Brown’s step-father in spirit and “Burn this motherfucker down!”
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“Do You Know the Way to San José” (Dionne Warwick)
Downscaling in the belief that Los Angeles and San José are fundamentally opposed, with the former a place of broken dreams, failure, and loneliness, and the latter the home that brings comfort and “peace of mind.” As if there are two kinds of U.S. cities. As if there are two kinds of U.S. economies. As if the free way is just down the freeway.
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“Change the World” (Eric Clapton)
Sweetly, whiningly, learingly, tunefully, tastefully, he remarks: to change the world, you gotta be the king, not the fool. And he wishes that it were so (and his girlfriend would then be queen). “Clapton is god” reaches its nadir. Revolting, of course, and fully revolt-worthy. “Fools” of the world, unite . . . You have nothing to lose but your blind faith.
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The self is a vertigo-inducing creation, inducing shame by instituting regimes of decency. This is “obscene,” even though this is a trax dedicated to finding and communicating the self. The initial problem of interpretation here is how to make sense of a confession that one embodies obscenity. The narrativization of such depravity activates the corruption with each and every telling. Not much help. But listen to the instruments, the other items of divination. At various moments, they are marginalized (panned right and left), only to be put in solitary confinement in the center. Or, as with the sustained guitar bends in the solo, they rely on the listener to make the connection between the partitions. (Don’t miss the dizziness as well, especially in the wobbly, chorus- and reverb-laden guitar figured in the verses.) The “beast . . . inside” doesn’t need to listen to this nonsense, but sociability demands un-beastly behavior. Backtrack and follow the bass: relentlessly descending, divorced from this self-introspection. We’re already low, setting the groove; no need to aspire to (the heavenly) heights.
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“Egypt is the place to be”: “pyramids are oh so shiny,” and “the women here are oh so cute.” But there’s a heavier message, if you’re listening for it: key afrocentric/afrofuturist theorist George M. James tells us that the Greek conception of “atom” referred to “that which cannot be cut,” while only Egypt’s “Memphis Theology” provided modern science with the know-how to “successfully split the atom” (Stolen Legacy 149-50). And West Coast hip hop pioneer Greg Broussard, coming on like the top dog among ancient Egyptian priests, shifts this knowledge to the turntables and beat science, boasting that, “I mix so fast, I scratch so sweet, there’s not another D.J. on earth who can compete.” But before concluding that the Egyptian Lover is just a mac daddy manipulating Black nationalist themes to accumulate a harem, one needs to hear the two key musical quotations: first, from Kraftwerk, including the heavy breathing from “Tour de France” and a pastiche of the synth line in “Trans-Europe Express” (via Afrika Bambaataa, of course); and, second, “The Snake Charmer” theme, which accompanied Little Egypt’s bellydancing at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The place called “Egypt,” therefore, bears all the historical marks of the globe: Berlin, New York, and Chicago-style Orientalism, for starters. The doubled title betrays this difficulty: the proper name, lacking a clear and determinant referent, becomes ever more emphatic, but thus all the more open to a cut.
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Since separation is togetherness’ necessary partner—otherwise, why argue?—and togetherness through separation is unacceptable, where are we headed? This boycott-oriented trax in response to Arizona’s SB-1070 is aligned with The Sound Strike collective of artists who encouraged the active marginalization of Arizona from the music marketplace. Come May 2012—a month before the Supreme Court approved of the de facto “driving while Mexican” provision of the law—the boycott transitioned to an embrace of contact, engagement, and a more laissez faire attitude. (Now, it’s pretty much the same as Artist for Action’s stance, without the active pedagogy or artist adulation.) Problem solved? Not quite. Singers invoke the Declaration of Independence, ask rhetorical questions, define “nation” as that which “join[s] heart and hand,” and generally follow MLK’s “constructive, nonviolent tension.” This is a growth narrative. Yet a combative posture is assumed, and a symbolic violence is simultaneously the heart of seeming platitudes, especially when one must “dare” to “stand for justice.” These moments—all moments, really—demand this unity in antagonism, infinitely.
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Katy Perry’s “version” isn’t one in a technical or a narrative sense. The latter deals with what Sobule sarcastically deems the “title-thieving” nature of Perry’s. And legally, a title isn’t “original enough” to be protected by copyright law (in most cases). This tension between protecting property and (implicitly) participating in a public project is imbricated in the Sobule/Perry dyad. Quickly: Perry’s fairly uninteresting conceit concerns temporarily transgressive border crossing monitored mentally by the figure of the “boyfriend.” Sobule: instead of the “diamond”-like pressures (and suffocation) of straight marriage, women can create “pearls” together (or share the ones they have); this option should be left open for the present and foreseeable future. Pearls, as product of an irritation after the intrusion of a foreign body, are precious unless they’re not, really, with variation/deviance managed for the market. If the sharing allows for de-formation and joint holdings writ large, then Sobule’s is the only one that allows for the commitment to and suspension of a choice.
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In memory of Lou Reed, written on 27 October 2013
The eulogies are pouring in today, and everyone is name checking Metal Machine Music (1975) and the Metallica collaboration, Lulu (2011), as evidence of Lou Reed’s enduringly perverse and antagonistic relationship with his audience. But it’s important to remember Take No Prisoners (1978), too, where his hostility is forcefully redirected at his own work, and, in particular, at his most beloved trax, “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972). Its very success is the target here, and no fan’s nostalgia will escape this act of self-trashing. The problem with the original trax is obvious. Noirish, smoky, and luded out, its call to the other is romantic and touristic through and through, as Reed strolls past the Factory’s collection of transvestites, straight and gay hustlers, drug fiends, and Norman Mailer’s “White Negroes.” (It’s a kind of companion to “Perfect Day”: let’s take an evening constitution where we will “feed animals in the zoo, and then later a movie, too.”) So, on this night at the Bottom Line in New York, Reed tells us that Nelson Algren’s original novel, Walk on the Wild Side (1956), is about a bunch of ludicrous “cripples” in the “ghetto” and written by a know-nothing Chicagoan. He claims the song was written at the prodding of some awful, off-Broadway theater producers, who later dumped him in order to produce Mahogany. “Better to be a garage mechanic,” he says, than write tripe for the Man. As for the famed quartet of wild side denizens, Reed claims he didn’t know Candy Darling very well, but she was nevertheless a dumbfuck because she got “leukemia from a silicone tit”: “And I’m supposed to feel sorry? I don’t have enough heart for 14,000 assholes.” Joe Dallesandro, another loser, has “an IQ of twelve”: “he can barely tie his shoelaces and dress.” And the less said about Joe Campbell’s pathetic love life the better. In the end, according to Reed, Andy Warhol withdrew from the Factory scene because of all these jerks and lowlifes. Who needs all this fake radicalism and posturing, this cheap imitation of the “wild”? But beyond all of this, remember: all coked up or not, “I am not trustworthy.” I am composed of “several selves,” and “Lou No. 1” is just getting around to meeting “Lou No. 5.” One Lou writes the song the whole world sings, and another smashes its pretensions. If there’s a takeaway from this scattered, broken, jumpy, and even peppy take on the song, it comes from the nihilistic Lou No. 5: “Nothing is in style, man. Haven’t you gotten into nothing yet?”
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