“I, Will Wait” (Pere Ubu)

Sky and sun are our brutish limits. But training your gaze toward the ground may be more rewarding, if only for the lack of some pay(off). Imagine a city—any city—with both the apotheosis of civilization and its requisite nadir simultaneously on display for all to see. In its “cracks” and “in the seams of the world,” there are “secret scenes” or stagings that produce no “doubt.” Orient yourself toward “practicalities,” which are “possibilities” for those that live close to the earth. Commit to imagining perfectibility and “wait,” resisting the labor of literal realization. Set your “I” to “idle,” and will yourself to live downward. Transformative orientation.

 

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“With Arms Wide Open” (Creed)

Grammy-winning natal futurism. Hopeful father on birth day envisions the difference that will come, in time, alongside subjectivity unfettered by hate. Title’s prelude to a hug also foreshadows enclosure: education through smothering. The singer’s “one wish”: the son doesn’t turn out “like me.” In love with (tortured) creation.

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“Old Age Pension Check” (Roy Acuff)

The invention of social security “turned this country upside down.” All forms of needless striving dissolve: “drug stores will go bankrupt,” because people will feel well, and women will no longer need “cosmetics” to lure a husband. The attempt, today, to privatize the system is premised on our interest to “own” our own future; concerning this, Bush Redux says: “we’ve got to understand the power of compounding interest, the importance of savings, and the beauty of ownership in the American society” (3/1/02). But Acuff had hoped for a “second childhood” in which responsibility wasn’t premised on possession.  Otherwise, we’re all just going back to work (on our leisure).

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“Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” (Doris Day)

Corporate pop music’s 21st century message to young women is easy to parse: (1) you are great just the way you are (you are beautiful, no matter what they say!); and (2) you can achieve anything you desire (you are a firework!). You are an amazing being of unlimited potential–a perfect, undetermined sort capable of perfect choice. This is called “empowerment.” But only three score ago, in the mid-1950s, Doris Day was singing to her young daughter: I don’t know if you’ll be “pretty” or “rich.” Indeed, I know nothing about your future, which is absolutely sealed (both opaque and certain). You may wind up in the gutter, or you may die young. It’s possible that there won’t be a “rainbow” in the sky tomorrow, which tinges the trax with Cold War anxieties (the Soviets had tested their first H-bomb in 1953). The phrase, “que sera sera,” is polyglot, and finds first use in English as a sixteenth century heraldic motto, forecasting, at least, a certain shielded defensiveness.  In short, and “tenderly,” “what will be will be,” and you can’t fight the future. The (tauta)logic is unimpeachable: tomorrow, one can always claim that “what will be” was. At the joining of such faulty realism and our own fantasies of empowerment, however, there must remain fate and chance, entwined, each the condition of the other’s possibility.

 

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“Litany (Life Goes On)” (Guadalcanal Diary)

Life, for sure, goes on. And not necessarily in a set of repetitive devotions. In one way, think Whitman’s “uncut hair of graves” that eventually become “mother’s laps” for us all. And born into a life, it’s understandable to wish for an alternate, infinite identity projected into past and future. This claim to/of the past, small as it is here, voids itself as mortality serves to fertilize now and for the (unforeseeable) future. “Surprise” grows, “voices” contribute, we will be “all together,” and the song we sing is “ever-growing.” Pulsating and throbbing, the track still conserves its energy and maintains a managed growth investment strategy. Escape hatch: an “ever-changing song” with no particular place to go.

 

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“Verlier Nicht Den Kopf” (Deutsch Amerikanishe Freundschaft)

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).

 

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“Magic” (Olivia Newton-John)

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.

 

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“The Seventh Son” (Willie Dixon)

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.”

 

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“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.

 

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“The Awakening (Pt. 1)” (The Reddings)

In some ways, The Reddings continue The Brothers Johnson’s investment in funk as inborn, released/expended, and premised on dance floor experiences. Not so with this trax, as we move toward an advent of sorts. Who/what arrives? From the album cover, it’s the revelation of lonesomeness conveyed by the single used pillow and the broken office clock lying on the bed (as probable frustration with a world devoid of funk). Moving between slapping and fingerstyle tendencies, the bass pyrotechnics are relentless. The difference appears in the accompanying overdubs that appear near the end; consisting of both harmonics and slaps/pops played backwards and layered within the forward momentum of the primary narrative, they emphasize causality in a distorted mirror. Reflected back to us, the other is different yet comparable, related but not an amplification. The layers, the bottom end, the sustained open E string throbbing throughout: arrival has happened and will have to happen, recursive in its movement forward, outward, and downward.

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