Today, mere bad vibes amount to a dangerous misstep, and an unwillingness to staightforwardly communicate (post-Nietzschean buzzing, white noising, talking “maths”) is the paramount crime. Criminalized bad karma, then, as a break from a mandated sensus communis, as the police are decoupled from a limited Law. But, in the coda, singer associates the Big Brother-style turning in of cultural refuseniks with a “lost” “self,” suggesting that if we find our true being, singularity might be freed. Actually, this is all backwards: the lost need not be found, nor become founders of some (always retro) polity; rather, one might begin from original foundering (communications breakdown: it’s not always the same).
Afrofuturism derives, in part, from a nineteenth-century discourse of Ethiopianism that, according to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, situates the West as in decline and Africa (and “Ethiopia” in particular) as in the ascendant. Let’s note, however, the distance between the actually existing Ethiopia (Selassie, who had died the year before this trax, and such) and the far country described in this song. For the Abyssinians, Ethiopia is both utopian and deeply distant or “critical” (an opti-pessimistic “far far away”). On the other hand, the use of the Amharic language at the end of the song (“Satta massagana Ahamlack ulaghize,” meaning, “to give thanks to God continually”) is a recognizable marker of coloniality, as is the disturbingly heliocentric vision of the future: “there’s no night, there’s only day.” In this way, the promised land remains embedded in what Derrida calls “white mythology.”
With(holding). Ominous, wide vibrato reinforces singer’s ability to control the appearance/timing of chance. The doubled governance (and omission)—”chances are your chances are awfully good”—holds the lover at bay. Suggestive hypnosis and (tepid) confirmation lyrical structure re-routes desire across smoothed out, gendered landscape: laying down some serious pavement.
Produced by Roger Waters, Animals (1977) sounds like dry ice. There’s no place or space in this mix for a psychedelic communion of instruments. Instead, voices are constantly modulating toward machines, and the guitar delivers its message in biting, often atonal shards. This revolution is serious business. Translating capitalism into the terms of the animal fable, Roger Waters discovers three relevant categories: pigs (the one percent), dogs (aspirants, or those aggressively playing the “game”), and sheep (perfect victims). Religion, invented by the system in order to produce quiescent meat, is skewered; Waters rewrites Psalm 23 as preparation for the abattoir, and proposes, in its place, a rather unlikely but decidedly low-tech alternative: karate training. Karate, however, is deeply intertwined with the history of buddhisms. It is in no sense a secular practice, and its spiritual dimensions have provided platforms for both state rule and capitalist accumulation. (Indeed, Žižek says that if Max Weber were alive today, he’d likely write a book on the “buddhist ethic and the spirit of global capitalism”). Meanwhile, the sheep, who have become martial arts masters, achieve a Pyrrhic victory: “the dogs are dead,” but the pigs are still overhead, ready to carpet bomb. Even if your kicks are fast as lightning, you can’t defeat aerial bombardment by those who preside over the garrison state, with their cloven hooves on the triggers. So how do we read the sign “karate”? As hope from the East? As a weapon of the weak? As always already defeated and coopted? Whatever karate brings to the table, it still cannot execute a pork chop.
The only organization going on here is to break through the “battery” of “flattery” which promotes rap for affect-ive community building. This is “straight coffee” that can make everyone act like an “army brigade” because it only takes an “ounce” for “you to bounce.” Much too powerful for anyone, track revels in its ability to both “lynch” the listener and “jack off wack MC’s”; the less pity, the better. Theory of organizing: the bigger the game, the less we have to “toke” for our minds.
Dismissal of Beatle-politics as bound up in progressivist striving. The drive for transcendence versus the “alreadyness” of plagiarism and minor-key, amateurist miniaturism.
Eight-minute repetition of same chord progression, but it’s the embellishments that count: chorused-out church bell chimes at end, notes picked behind the guitar’s bridge or nut, weak crescendos that never remain erect. Tornadic phased feedback at middle and end refute all of these sonic gimmicks by noting the effected-ness of the fundamental—the limit of the “What would Jesus do?” question. Quadruple-mediation (voice-text-reading-incorporation) outmoded; the fundamental becomes that which we can know through a profession of incomplete knowing, when the “no” is central to “know.”
Something amiss in otherwise groovy, organ-driven kosmiche musik: imposition of various alarms, breakages, garglings, and rantings which finally demand that you, the listener, get lost and “go.” Constant foreclosure of pure flight: interruption of the metaphysical self from the start, as ambulances arrive. Liner note “Advice”: “After listening to this record your friends won’t know you anymore.” Consequences of mortal being in a world governed by figures of undetermined presence.
Peristaltic vocals note the gurgling, rapacious nature of human being, which should never question the “inevitable being.” Problem: the being that is inevitable (plants) also embodied by Prime Mover—given that “discoveries” are to be had: holiness demands epiphanies that produce worship. Finiteness not possible in this equation, and our affliction is that we never realize that we are subject to the cosmic powers of Nature. “Doubt” inadmissable: tree hugging at its limit.
Robert Smith says: a condensed moment from Camus. It works this way: singer is the political “stranger,” and the man at his feet is “Arab.” Singer “alive” and “dead” at same time, at a moment of decision which turns the whole world and decisionism itself into “absolutely nothing.” Eliminating the other decimates the self because, in the realm of identities, there are two (at least), or there are none at all.