Literally “do not lose the head” and, in racier terms, don’t stay buried. Of course, “closeted” comes to mind, related to the inverse: the convincing conniving of staying “forever young” and unblemished. The figure behind/below this twink-ish character (who’s pocked by longings of ornateness produced amid a (arrested) futurism) demands a controlled willfulness. Stay young for this future’s/relationship’s burial and emerge willing (never ready).
“You” already exist in speed–alternately, in the moving-towards another–yet bi-partite structuring of the social (1st/3rd, white/non-white, etc.) slows everything down. Initial pulsing drones speed up and travel left-right via tape manipulation; then: power trio alternate major minor sustained riffs, only to be violently accelerated with all directions and sonic anchoring points confused. Final staccato section offers up an everyday, banal version of the “you” (which can only be constituted in by traveling through the spacing toward the other) that refuses the third parties that insure “justice.”
Ah, the eternal questions: what is “truth,” “and where do I look for proof?” More specifically, do the phenomena of time and color exist in the world, or only inside of me? It is my “whereabouts” that are at stake as I sail along on this strange voyage called life. It appears that I cannot find my bearings without another: “who do I ask and what do I say?” But there’s no great guru waiting on a hilltop. Instead, there’s the problem of her truth and his truth and my truth. Listen closely: each time the trax scales up toward “truth” the tape is slowed down, torn, and cut off. We’re on the far side of knowing, it seems, which leaves us in a seesawing, group jam that hints at both a unified cosmos and chaos. But, importantly, neither here nor there.
This trax fits well with Newton-John’s tradition of disarming. Elsewhere, it’s in confessions of love: “I’m not trying to make you anything at all.” Calls for action: “I wanna get animal, let’s get into animal.” Analyses of the other: “Now, you’re not hard to understand.” And in tacit condemnations of the head/heart divide—after each speaks in “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” listen for the vocal acting-out/mockery of affect. Here, with ELO’s minor-key undulations, we have an interlocking four-part argument concerning the future. With a properly imagined—hence provision(al)—future in mind, there must be a commitment to work. There’s no time to waste; “dreams” begin to exist with the thinking. The other is always “guiding you” and not the other way around. Finally, you are “home free” already, save for the traps and follies of manifest life. “You,” eventually, will be evacuated on nobody’s authority.
According to W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” By invoking the tradition of the “seventh son,” a figure of creative power aligned with werewolves, witches, and sorcerers, Du Bois makes clear that double-consciousness is more than alienation and deficit; and, in Willie Dixon’s case, he can heal the sick (i.e., grasp doubleness as a double-edged sword), raise the dead (produce a history of and for Africans and African Americans, for example), and even predict the future. And all of these powers have something to do with the experience of being racialized and the special knowledge of language that it provides: “Now I can talk these words that sound so sweet/I can make your little heart even skip a beat.”
Not to bypass the obvious—this review eventually ends up there, volitionally—but what if this trax isn’t about booty pluralism? It’s about a confidence in the reality of things (no Photoshop, please). And a kind of self-assertion premised on excessively gratifying your lover just through sheer embodiment. (The politics of the self and active debasement are fascinating here, though too mutualistic to serve any political purpose.) It’s also concerned with how to voice the lower end from those with lower ends. In a way, Trainor inverts the “lower frequencies” of Ralph Ellison by removing the dread implications (for the listener) of really letting (it) go. With 50s homage, things may be too clean here (or to hear). Q-Tip, on The Low-End Theory, would say that successful communication needs “floss” to get to “the grit and the dirt.” Maybe that’s the difference between transformation and (white or self-?)adulation: the desire to get shitty about it. A thong through it all, then, splitting the muck of the center.
Easily overlooked that the singer barks, like Melville’s Ahab, a version of “Who’s over me?” Is it the MPLA, UDA, IRA, UK? Finally, singing downscale, toward a theoretical point which gathers the particularities: “or just another country”? The details are irrelevant. Whether already existing or sought, by reactionary or insurgent forces, it’s (merely, emptily) the state-form. A repeating, structured sovereignty.
Nihilism has strange contents: assertion of material, spatial self and desire to dominate. Can be read as misogynist joke (candy land as sexual bait) and as warning (sex as desert that promotes solipsism.) Dirge-like swooning suggests the world stuck in this circuit.
In 1965, Fisher-Price created See ‘n Say, a pie-shaped toy divided into twelve wedges, and each with an image of an animal. Using the center pointer, you chose your animal, and pulled the string. You then heard the sound, such as: “The cow says, ‘Moo’.” Choices included sheep, dog, duck, frog, horse, coyote, rooster, pig, cow, bird, cat, and turkey. But no fox. Add just one more pie wedge and Fisher-Price might have included the fox. But if the fox had been included, then we’d all be wondering about the hedgehog, the tapir, and the orangutan. OK, no problem: let’s add three more wedges. Yet the best estimates today are that there are over 1,500,000 animal species on this planet, and no toy company could make the pie big enough or the wedges small enough to account for such diversity. But perhaps we could throw it all onto a computer, giving the child access to every sound of every creature. Now, though, we’ve made it completely useless to a two-year old. Thus, in order for the child to learn to remember a certain number of animal sounds, it has to begin by “forgetting” the rest. We might say that there must always be a “fox,” operating as a black hole and aiding memory. Ylvis isn’t trying to overcome an oversight or omission in the multicultural woods; and that’s why, when the singers claim to speak for this “fox,” they sound just like a Skrillex break.
As Newcleus enters the world in 1984, it seems as if they’re hostile to technology while depending on it for the production of their music. From a galaxy where “music and dancing are against all cosmic and computer law,” they discover a “place where they could be themselves: a place like Earth.” The simile is where it’s at: to be one’s self is to inhabit a not-Earth which is apprehended through a (receding) earthly experience. Against dominative “programmed” rationality, then, is the trax’s primary position. (Secondarily, there’s a concern that computers are taking the place of the “Lord” in our lives; this probably should be bracketed for now, since such “programs” are virtually indistinguishable.) Losing the ability to “program my machine” is the first step in losing a form of control over one’s life. And it’s this point that reveals one of the trax’s most promising aims. Much like Detroit Techno’s repurposing of pre-configured hardware and software, we’re at the precipice of an alternate practice: deprogramming traditional notions of programming by a continuing commitment to reprogramming. In contemporary parlance: jailbreaking the “walled garden” brick by strategic brick.