“Immigrant” (Sade)

In a couple of ways, we’re asked here to think about issues of translation. For the trax, the key is a simple—but not simplified—ethics defined as the relation between the least of us (immigrants) and the “toughest among us” (“natives”); the previous phrase is sung in an extreme monotone despite the general lushness of the orchestration. What is the price of being included? What lies beyond—“too much”—the threshold of tolerance when understood in relation to pain? (And perhaps tolerance is predominantly about the experience of pain as much as it is being a pain.) At this level of discourse, things count because of the imposing odds. From an immigrant child’s first lesson in “the fact of blackness” to his “dignified” manner in the face of it to our relative ease in a world where it’s “hard enough/Just to make it through a day,” we’re asked to sympathize while our privilege is idealistically negated by our squeamishness of self-suffering. In a geopolitical vein, things are counted similarly by the United Nations; it’s the vantage point that differs. Noting the “complex interrelationship between migration and development” in their “Declaration of the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development,” the General Assembly says it’s about “synergies,” though. Things must be square between the rights to movement/livelihood and “development.” (In other words, let there be remittances!) Sade’s allusion to the story of Joseph yokes the two contexts together, with the body and blood of the immigrant wed to the center.

“Something for Nothing” (The O’Jays)

Both Rush and Joni Mitchell are worried that others, who have done nothing, desire to have “something” or “everything.” These are the takers, and they aspire to grab it from the song makers. Dire Straights wrote about these folks, too, but with a hint of masculinist satire: laboring men want “money for nothing,” just like the “little faggot” on MTV. But let’s step back a moment and remember that once upon a time all property came from nothing. One day everything was held in common, and the next–poof!–there was stuff. “Something from nothing,” as the Foo Fighters say. And once there was stuff, property became “theft” as Proudhon’s famous, “perfect” maxim reminds. Anyone who had anything was now a robber. Yet the O’Jays remind us that the capitalists still dream of “something for nothing” like Twain’s Tom Sawyer at the whitewashed fence, producing pure surplus value. We might say of this stack of trax that they finally have little in common. But they do have “nothing” in common, which in all these cases stands in for the communal–both missing and forgotten.

“Bird Seed” (Whitehouse)

Peter Sotos collage of voices of prostitutes, abused children, parents of kidnapped and murdered children, and the ubiquitous, soothing voices of social workers and media interviewers. Sexual abuse has been “hidden in the closet too long,” says one voice. While this taped testimony is “out,” perhaps, it is being disseminated within something else: a legal buyer’s market for the pornographic, under cover of a media-induced “therapy” of expression and positive thinking. In an abuser’s pecking order, the State and the media come first.

“ISDN” (Console and Hanayo)

Back in the day, an ISDN connection was surely cause for joy, especially with increased download speeds. But it’s also a problem of being open toward the world (despite firewalls, worms, viruses, and the like). Strict numerological data interpretation, describing possible outcomes of wired relationships, argues that the kiss consists of a secret which recapitulates the sorrow of more traditional, courtship-based relations: a rationality of parsed-out character possibilities. One possible way to avoid iteration is to recognize that the incommensurable happens and is a condition of a still manifest world despite hyper-connectedness (and transparency). Such would be the doubled woman/computer vocals, where electronic speech’s clipped approximations still fail at approximating tonality. This poverty (of articulation) allows for a temporalization of openness and a warning: the divinity of a faster, sharing community supposes (through a calculus) pre- established harmony.

“You I’ll Be Following” (Love)

If this trax concerns “real” human beings, then it’s a story about the singer’s shift from chasing drug dealers all over the globe to a new place where another person has replaced drugs in his affection. But Arthur Lee’s vocal emphasis on “I” and “you” makes one wonder whether the deeper topic is strictly pronominal. Émile Benveniste, in “Relationships of Persons in the Verb” (1946) teaches us that first, second and third persons are born together and in hierarchical, force relations: “‘I’ is always transcendent with respect to ‘you’,” for instance, and both “I” and “you” lord it over the third person (or what Benveniste pointedly calls “the non-person”). So what does it mean to suggest that, at some time in the future, “You I’ll be following”? It would be too much to ask Lee to figure out a way to alter the entire structure of language. But at least this trax suggests an extended holiday from primacy.

“Bastard” (Tyler, The Creator)

Following Tyler, The Creator and his critics feels a bit like watching high-schoolers and parents fighting, with both parties alternating roles. (See, for instance, the fairly ham-handed critique in “Bitch Suck Dick” with the patented shock of both mainstream and aspiring lefties.) Premised as a confessional but continuing the offense, narrator impresses/confounds his counselor, Mr. TC. As listeners, though, we hear below this—where “demons” dwell. Form isn’t a strong preoccupation here (see minor nods to horrorcore minimalism), but conservatism is. The psychological subject emerges, abandoned (yet maternally protected); self-mutilating (and outwardly violent); and apathetic in general. The latter is the most confounding, since apathy is an “inherit[ance]” without end—an embodiment literalized and formed through paternal worship. Speaking out, but not acting up.

“Diptheria” (Nation of Ulysses)

The teenage masses as troubled swallowing machine(s): quasi revolutionary (sub)urban teenagers ingest both corporate and counterhegemonic sweetness that possess similar “wrappers.” An “extinct” esophageal disease resurfaces at moment when revolution can be digested.

“Man-Size” (PJ Harvey)

“Man” and “lady” as unresolvable concepts, at war. To find one’s inner man would be to set fire to a girl-self “douse[d]” with “gasoline.” Man-ness calculates woman-ness out of existence, temporally and spatially. Extreme loud/soft dynamics mimic sheer masculine voluminousness. One size omits all (others).

“Nonpareil” (Scott Joplin)

It can be difficult to figure ragtime. On the one hand, it’s considered a gesture to classical music—especially marches—due to its fairly orthodox approach to form and rules of harmony. (Some, like Ann Charters, have even recorded the trax in question in a more “classical” style.) Another: it’s a more “refined,” hence more respectable, version of cakewalk and coon songs. It’s also positioned as a bridge music, conduit to jazz (or “African American classical music” in more aspirational nomenclature). The same problem surrounds this trax’s title. Does it mean unequaled? Not in a genealogical narrative. Unparalleled? Perhaps, though that would completely minimize how syncretic musics are. Incomparable may be the best translation, even though we can always hone a developmental narrative of Joplin’s works and American music more generally. Things may work best this way: racialized and admired, from the gutter and the opera house, out of a respectable tradition and emanating from brothels. African American expression as both a historical index of an unequaled and evolving white supremacy while also a singular sonic node that bleeds into others.

“Dolores” (Eddie Noack)

Country music has turned up its fair share of specialists in criminal psychology, such as Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck, and Porter Wagoner. No matter how vile the material, what unites such trax in an overarching economy of life involving God and guns, sinning and supplicating. Even prospective prisoners are full of sorrow, or at least polite (see “Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill”). Perpetrators of violence narrate their fall with respect to the seven deadly sins, admit their guilt, and accept the logic of the death penalty. Perhaps some of these criminal singers already have been subjected to a social worker or a minister, shaping their narratives toward identity coherence and narrative closure. Then comes Eddie Noack, a no-chancer who forever altered such stories of closure via a pair of nearly forgotten trax: “Psycho” (1968) and “Dolores” (1969). In the latter, the singer tells his girl that a “berserk” serial slayer is on the loose, and she needs to stay home tonight. She doesn’t, of course, and soon he’s at the morgue, identifying her body. But wait! It turns out the singer is also the killer, and the police don’t have a clue. The singer therefore finds himself split between two identities, and the trax broadly belongs to the tradition of the recursive detective (Oedipus, for instance, or Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me [1952], or Philip K. Dick’s The Man Who Japed [1956]). “How could I know that it was you?” he asks, shuttling between the man who knew her well, and the one to whom she was a stranger. He’s broken into pieces that never were and never can be knit together, and all signs point back toward his original monstrosity.