WELCOME TO THE OTHER SIDE
YOU'RE LOST
BABY STEP OUTSIDE YOUR MIND
- Life of the Party, The Weeknd
This is first of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.
Art is not the first concern of pop music. That said, what is artistic in pop music is the articulation of a certain way of being. This may sound heady, but I mean that no matter its puerility, pop music expresses a certain set of experiences and a perspective on those experiences. It may simply express bald melodrama (teenage angst) or bland escapism (nonstop parties); the perspective taken may be reductive and irresponsible, but still, a life and a mood are conveyed. Much of the music on Billboard expresses something familiar to our own lives (with either this or that accented) or something familiar to our collective fantasy life (money, sex, success). For Abel Tesfaye, The Weeknd, pop music is not an expression of the familiar, but an opportunity for exploration of a set of our cultural limits.
I wrote about Drake and Young Money last year on this blog. I said that Drake (and 40) brought a wistfulness and haunting sense of loss to the now-banal "rapper lifestyle". In their music, there is a sense of trying to stay grounded while at the same time enjoying one's success. It is this tension that makes Drake more interesting and complex than say, his comrade Wayne (though both Wayne and Nicki Minaj have attempted forays into this mood, I find their attempts token and fairly adolescent). Though both the Weeknd and Drake occupy a part of the same OVOXO clique and occupy parts of a constellation of similar artists (also including the oddball Kendrick Lamar and the young romantic Frank Ocean) The Weeknd takes his music beyond the relatable themes of regret and loneliness. While his neighboring artists have developed chilly mutant strains of their R&B and left-field hip-hop genetics, Tesfaye has attempted to breed a predator.
A consideration of the music itself. In many of his songs, Tesfaye is directly addressing a young woman. Often confused, uncomfortable, displaced, depressed, or vulnerable, these girls are wandering the party circuit where Tesfaye makes his home. He seduces them into drugs, sex, or other hinted depravities. This formula can create the disturbing sensation that one is listening to an act of predation, as in the truly disconcerting "Initiation". With its murky lyrical references to coercive group sex and hard drugs, and a musical backdrop including a distorted, alien bass thump, echoed guitar, and Tesfaye's inhuman voice, it makes a distinctly sinister impression:
The braggadacio of someone like Trey Songz is here unconstrained by the need to be MTV marketable. Where artists like Flo Rida or the Black Eyed Peas attempt an Epicurean mood (it's the weekend!), the lifestyle that Tesfaye introduces us to is wholly unsustainable. He makes no pretensions to the faith or social duress that define the other side of gangster masculinity. Tesfaye's music is excessive and makes no apologies.
This makes Tesfaye's music fairly one dimensional. At times he allows suggestions of woe or regret to creep into his lyrics, but they ring hollow. Any attempt to portray him as a "dynamic" personality is missing the interesting aspect of his music. As gestured at above, The Weeknd is a profoundly Modern reflection on our cultural fantasies. Listening to one of his mixtapes is a long look into our musical id.
Despite its flatness, the project has a special nuance; it is compelling because it doesn't rely on shock for its transgression (compare and contrast with the adolescent fuck-you attitude of early Eminem). Tesfaye takes pop narratives and soundscapes that we are by now familiar with (club life, R&B seduction, casual intoxication) a long way towards their logical conclusion without stepping into caricature.
The twist of The Weeknd is that in Tesfaye's world the "avant-garde" spirit is pop. He may not approach the explorations of someone like de Sade, but a version of the libertine spirit is present in his music, asking the same chain of questions that it has for centuries. With the excesses of art today, have we exhausted its potential? What does it mean to "transgress" in today's pop culture? In a world without God, is morality an aesthetic phenomenon? These questions are important to the Modern cultural conversation, and The Weeknd articulates them in a contemporary popular context where they are becoming increasingly insistent.
Showing posts with label Lil Wayne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lil Wayne. Show all posts
Friday, September 28, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Chet Baker and the Ghost of Jazz
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
- Peter Allen
We were talking about music recently and my favorite interlocutor offhandedly brought up free jazz. I took the opportunity to consider my relationship with the style and realized I don't particularly care for it. Not because I think it's in any way inherently bad; I simply have no way to connect to its world. Admittedly I haven't tried horribly hard to access said world, but it made me think more about what jazz I did connect with and why I felt that connection was possible.
I realized in the process that the jazz artist I have listened to most consistently is Chet Baker. As per usual, I immediately tried to figure out if my taste for Mr. Baker was a product of a theoretical commitment. And, as per usual, it was.
I recently posted on Young Money as post-modern troupe. In that post, I talked about 40's beats and how ghostly they were; much of his work is made from half remembered, echoing melodies and muted bass thumps. His music, at its best, is devoid of bombast and conveys a sense of unplaceable loss.
I feel the same way about Chet Baker. Androgynous, high beyond belief, and totally alienated, Baker's take on jazz standards sound like they've been slowed down and played back through an android. Just as Wayne's unique style comes in large part from the effects of the syrup that he constantly consumes, you can hear the heroin dripping off Baker's voice into the microphone.
Imagery aside, I think that Baker resonates with me because in large part I think the time of jazz is long past. The Western musical event of the early 20th century, jazz has long been marginalized by pop music. As the latter style dominated the mainstream in the second part of the last century, jazz worked in (relative) obscurity to push all the way to the extremes available to it, including fusing with other genres. Jazz became dispersed into the bloodstream of music as improvisation and fusion became rote. As a result, I'd argue that playing jazz today is always retro, always an act of nostalgia. What used to be controversial, alternative, and sexual is now tame and routine. Jazz in the 21st century is the persistent echo of jazz in the 20th.
Baker's music acknowledges and embraces this fact. His inverted return to the pop-jazz standards that epitomized the genre at the height of its popularity brings the place of the genre today into stark relief. The fall of the billboard pop machine due to pirating, the demise of physical music, and the corresponding rise of the internet as distribution medium has allowed for unprecendented experimentation. I would argue there are two dominant paradigms in music production today, both of which often overlap with the other. The first paradigm is the modern one, a brutal new approach to experimentation where music goes to places it simply has not before and the bounds of genre (and the category of music itself) are stretched and twisted, at times to the point of nihilism. See here Death Grips, Wolf Eyes, and/or The Dillinger Escape Plan. Many of these new experiments incorporate elements of jazz to help them get that much closer to musical oblivion. The second paradigm is the post-modern, the self-conscious remixing, reuse, cross-breeding, appropriation, or detournement of old styles and decades (at times, centuries) of music. See Lady Gaga, Bloc Party, Pac Div, and/or The Gaslight Anthem, each of which revives a set of nostalgic tricks to new effect. For an example of the fusion of this radical experimentation and self-conscious callback, I can think of no band better than Animal Collective. Anything that diverges from these agendas risks being accused of being unoriginal or worse, being boring.
In my mind, Baker performs the same revitalizing inversion for jazz, post-hoc. His versions of standards, like 40's beats, have the numbness of something long lost. And what is lost here is the entire style and history of which he is a part. In a lot of ways, Chet Baker was playing jazz's eulogy before it died.
- Peter Allen
We were talking about music recently and my favorite interlocutor offhandedly brought up free jazz. I took the opportunity to consider my relationship with the style and realized I don't particularly care for it. Not because I think it's in any way inherently bad; I simply have no way to connect to its world. Admittedly I haven't tried horribly hard to access said world, but it made me think more about what jazz I did connect with and why I felt that connection was possible.
I realized in the process that the jazz artist I have listened to most consistently is Chet Baker. As per usual, I immediately tried to figure out if my taste for Mr. Baker was a product of a theoretical commitment. And, as per usual, it was.
I recently posted on Young Money as post-modern troupe. In that post, I talked about 40's beats and how ghostly they were; much of his work is made from half remembered, echoing melodies and muted bass thumps. His music, at its best, is devoid of bombast and conveys a sense of unplaceable loss.
I feel the same way about Chet Baker. Androgynous, high beyond belief, and totally alienated, Baker's take on jazz standards sound like they've been slowed down and played back through an android. Just as Wayne's unique style comes in large part from the effects of the syrup that he constantly consumes, you can hear the heroin dripping off Baker's voice into the microphone.
Imagery aside, I think that Baker resonates with me because in large part I think the time of jazz is long past. The Western musical event of the early 20th century, jazz has long been marginalized by pop music. As the latter style dominated the mainstream in the second part of the last century, jazz worked in (relative) obscurity to push all the way to the extremes available to it, including fusing with other genres. Jazz became dispersed into the bloodstream of music as improvisation and fusion became rote. As a result, I'd argue that playing jazz today is always retro, always an act of nostalgia. What used to be controversial, alternative, and sexual is now tame and routine. Jazz in the 21st century is the persistent echo of jazz in the 20th.
Baker's music acknowledges and embraces this fact. His inverted return to the pop-jazz standards that epitomized the genre at the height of its popularity brings the place of the genre today into stark relief. The fall of the billboard pop machine due to pirating, the demise of physical music, and the corresponding rise of the internet as distribution medium has allowed for unprecendented experimentation. I would argue there are two dominant paradigms in music production today, both of which often overlap with the other. The first paradigm is the modern one, a brutal new approach to experimentation where music goes to places it simply has not before and the bounds of genre (and the category of music itself) are stretched and twisted, at times to the point of nihilism. See here Death Grips, Wolf Eyes, and/or The Dillinger Escape Plan. Many of these new experiments incorporate elements of jazz to help them get that much closer to musical oblivion. The second paradigm is the post-modern, the self-conscious remixing, reuse, cross-breeding, appropriation, or detournement of old styles and decades (at times, centuries) of music. See Lady Gaga, Bloc Party, Pac Div, and/or The Gaslight Anthem, each of which revives a set of nostalgic tricks to new effect. For an example of the fusion of this radical experimentation and self-conscious callback, I can think of no band better than Animal Collective. Anything that diverges from these agendas risks being accused of being unoriginal or worse, being boring.
In my mind, Baker performs the same revitalizing inversion for jazz, post-hoc. His versions of standards, like 40's beats, have the numbness of something long lost. And what is lost here is the entire style and history of which he is a part. In a lot of ways, Chet Baker was playing jazz's eulogy before it died.
Friday, March 9, 2012
I'm On One: Young Money as Postmodern Prototypes
I WISH THAT I COULD HAVE THIS MOMENT 4 LIFE
AND IN THIS MOMENT I JUST FEEL SO ALIVE
- Nicki Minaj, "Moment 4 Life"
Hip-hop has always been fairly amenable to the themes of post-modernity. Repetition, artificial modification, endless reference, and an affirmation of alternative cultural possibilities have been a part of its canon since it began. Within this inherently timely genre, I would argue that the rappers of Young Money are the most forthrightly post-modern group of rappers performing today.
It is easy to assert that someone like the (formerly) Pitchfork-approved Das Racist or their similarly liberal arts-educated compatriots hold this dubious crown. I think that reading Heems, Victor, and Dap as post-modern is to have a overly simple grasp of the concept at hand. Their self-conscious, hyper-referential statements, while utterly fantastic in their own right, are too ironic and winking to be the kind of pluralist case study that embodies the condition that I'm trying to get at. As anyone who has read Heems' Tumblr can attest, there is a very real political and personal (dare I say ideological?) coherence to both his and Victor's musical approach.
It's put best when it's put simply: Das Racist can often just be too clever for their own good. While shouting out Spivak seems like everyday conversation coming from Heems, a lot of Victor's material can at times sound forced, like he wants to make the most of his Wesleyan education. His inter-song echoes are at times a little too deliberate, a little too name-droppy. Similarly, after a few mixtapes Heems' constant references to food start to sound gimmicky and lazy rather than apathetic and charming. Das Racist is too held together, too aesthetically, culturally, and musically neurotic, to be the hodge-podge, transgressive group that they are sometimes thought to be. Their message is post-modern, but their self-consciousness is not.
By contrast, Young Money is a collective of outré misfits. They include a free-associating drug addict from New Orleans, a Canadian of mixed race who grew up on television and takes one of his major stylistic conventions from Twitter, a multiple-personality rapper who identifies with a mass produced, hypersexualized plastic toy, and a skinny Comptonite of Vietnamese and Jamaican descent who started on a pop-punk record label. This is already a pretty promising genealogy.
Cosmopolitanism aside, what is really exceptional about Young Money is that they're a case study for the ability of modern pop music to make statements unlike anything before it. Certainly, they've been vetted by a number of faceless bureaucracies who made sure that they're marketed correctly, as any artist that makes it onto Billboard must be. But what's interesting is what perseveres through this filtering process.
The first thing to notice here is the production. The beat on a typical Khaled track is often a straightahead, club-minded affair ("All I Do Is Win") or tries for a pseudo-menacing cell-phone thug swagger ("I'm So Hood"), but that's compromised here as he plays to his co-stars. This is in large part because Drake's favorite producer Noah "40" Shebib and frequent collaborator T-Minus both contribute here. This is the only song on We The Best Forever that diverges noticeably from the Khaled formula (to be fair, the Boi-1da produced Future has a sort of similar sobriety to it). The ghostly, brooding mood on display here is a direct pull from the feel of much of Drake's recent material. Many of 40's songs make you feel as though he heard the Top 40 when he was smashed at the club last night and he's spent all day trying to rewrite them with a hangover. This atmosphere is a key part of why I find Drake's music so interesting; the conventional boom-bap excesses of his contemporaries are present, but with an accompanying nagging, alienated, and cynical feeling that this is a ride that has been ridden many times before and will be again.
This wary, distant musical perspective is mirrored in Drake's lyrics. He is obsessed with his own fame, but he has a perpetual consciousness of its finitude. Whenever he makes any claim to timelessness, it rings false. He's at his best when he seems totally overwhelmed with his condition and puts himself at the mercy of the forces that pushed him there. This quietist self-consciousness is what many find unappealing (or "soft") about Drake, but it's the very real awareness of the narrative of which he is a part that makes him a fascinating figure. Unlike Das Racist's carefully obfuscated earnesty and self-consciousness, Drake's faux-struggle with his fame has all the pomp and insistence of a mission statement. Here he admits, "All I care about is money and the city that i'm from/ ima sip until I feel it ima smoke until it's done/ I don't really give a fuck and my excuse is that I'm young/and I'm only getting older". None of this sounds particular triumphant; it's the sound of a person realizing his predicament, his inability to act in the face of his realization, and the inevitable end that is on its way. When he says "get it while you're here boy/ cause all that hype don't seem the same next year boy" we have a feeling that even though this is directed to a faceless up-and-comer, Drake is intimately familiar with the emotions on hand.
Let's skip Rick Ross for now. His relationship with Young Money is interesting in its own right and in some ways he is the perfect marketable, post-Tupac "gangsta" rapper, but he's not important to our thesis at the moment.
This is a fairly conventional (read: lazy) verse for Wayne. The brags and posturing of his generation of artists are here, but, as ever, his free associations set him clearly back in his own territory. "Put an end to your world like the mayans" is a particularly relevant line here (as was his "and honestly i'm down like the economy" line when it was written for Jay Sean's "Down" at the depth of the recession) because it captures Wayne's appeal perfectly. His prolificacy and his willingness to collaborate with whoever's hot at the moment is a key part of his domination of the charts. In a sense, Wayne is the perfect "social networking" rapper; each song allows him to post a new status that keeps him up to date (fellow "Lil" individual and follower Lil B stretches this format to its obvious conclusion). The benefits of this connectedness to pop culture (though at times he's a bit late to the party; see the Inception-style video for Six Foot, Seven Foot made half a year too late) and chameleonlike ability to change with his climate should be familiar to anyone that has read Foucault's analysis of biopower in his lectures at the College de France. Adapting to the trends of the market allows you to tap its power and it's in (mostly) simple, populist mediums like rap and folk that this headline-reading approach is best embodied. In both genres, there is more emphasis on what is said (or how it is said) than on the melodic content of any particular phrase. This comparison isn't particularly novel, but I think it's apt.
In the final calculus, Young Money keep my attention because they capture the moment. This is also why I think they so embody post-modernism; their catholicity and marketability make them look like they were magiked up on a corporate hard drive somewhere like some kind of fucking Rei Toei rap crew. They will not hold up in twenty years. It's only because of their ability to adapt and willingness to inject themselves with new cultural DNA that they've lasted this long. Sure, I can imagine Drake's rap-noir or Nicki's schizophrenic cast of characters retaining some merit or influence in that scene-to-come, but the songs simply will not have the late 200X bite that they do now. The Young Money collective is deathly aware of the fact that pop music, now more than ever, isn't so much about works as it is about processes. All they can do is try to hold on to the cutting edge.
AND IN THIS MOMENT I JUST FEEL SO ALIVE
- Nicki Minaj, "Moment 4 Life"
Hip-hop has always been fairly amenable to the themes of post-modernity. Repetition, artificial modification, endless reference, and an affirmation of alternative cultural possibilities have been a part of its canon since it began. Within this inherently timely genre, I would argue that the rappers of Young Money are the most forthrightly post-modern group of rappers performing today.
It is easy to assert that someone like the (formerly) Pitchfork-approved Das Racist or their similarly liberal arts-educated compatriots hold this dubious crown. I think that reading Heems, Victor, and Dap as post-modern is to have a overly simple grasp of the concept at hand. Their self-conscious, hyper-referential statements, while utterly fantastic in their own right, are too ironic and winking to be the kind of pluralist case study that embodies the condition that I'm trying to get at. As anyone who has read Heems' Tumblr can attest, there is a very real political and personal (dare I say ideological?) coherence to both his and Victor's musical approach.
It's put best when it's put simply: Das Racist can often just be too clever for their own good. While shouting out Spivak seems like everyday conversation coming from Heems, a lot of Victor's material can at times sound forced, like he wants to make the most of his Wesleyan education. His inter-song echoes are at times a little too deliberate, a little too name-droppy. Similarly, after a few mixtapes Heems' constant references to food start to sound gimmicky and lazy rather than apathetic and charming. Das Racist is too held together, too aesthetically, culturally, and musically neurotic, to be the hodge-podge, transgressive group that they are sometimes thought to be. Their message is post-modern, but their self-consciousness is not.
By contrast, Young Money is a collective of outré misfits. They include a free-associating drug addict from New Orleans, a Canadian of mixed race who grew up on television and takes one of his major stylistic conventions from Twitter, a multiple-personality rapper who identifies with a mass produced, hypersexualized plastic toy, and a skinny Comptonite of Vietnamese and Jamaican descent who started on a pop-punk record label. This is already a pretty promising genealogy.
Cosmopolitanism aside, what is really exceptional about Young Money is that they're a case study for the ability of modern pop music to make statements unlike anything before it. Certainly, they've been vetted by a number of faceless bureaucracies who made sure that they're marketed correctly, as any artist that makes it onto Billboard must be. But what's interesting is what perseveres through this filtering process.
I'll use DJ Khaled's "I'm On One" featuring Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne as a grounding example:
The first thing to notice here is the production. The beat on a typical Khaled track is often a straightahead, club-minded affair ("All I Do Is Win") or tries for a pseudo-menacing cell-phone thug swagger ("I'm So Hood"), but that's compromised here as he plays to his co-stars. This is in large part because Drake's favorite producer Noah "40" Shebib and frequent collaborator T-Minus both contribute here. This is the only song on We The Best Forever that diverges noticeably from the Khaled formula (to be fair, the Boi-1da produced Future has a sort of similar sobriety to it). The ghostly, brooding mood on display here is a direct pull from the feel of much of Drake's recent material. Many of 40's songs make you feel as though he heard the Top 40 when he was smashed at the club last night and he's spent all day trying to rewrite them with a hangover. This atmosphere is a key part of why I find Drake's music so interesting; the conventional boom-bap excesses of his contemporaries are present, but with an accompanying nagging, alienated, and cynical feeling that this is a ride that has been ridden many times before and will be again.
This wary, distant musical perspective is mirrored in Drake's lyrics. He is obsessed with his own fame, but he has a perpetual consciousness of its finitude. Whenever he makes any claim to timelessness, it rings false. He's at his best when he seems totally overwhelmed with his condition and puts himself at the mercy of the forces that pushed him there. This quietist self-consciousness is what many find unappealing (or "soft") about Drake, but it's the very real awareness of the narrative of which he is a part that makes him a fascinating figure. Unlike Das Racist's carefully obfuscated earnesty and self-consciousness, Drake's faux-struggle with his fame has all the pomp and insistence of a mission statement. Here he admits, "All I care about is money and the city that i'm from/ ima sip until I feel it ima smoke until it's done/ I don't really give a fuck and my excuse is that I'm young/and I'm only getting older". None of this sounds particular triumphant; it's the sound of a person realizing his predicament, his inability to act in the face of his realization, and the inevitable end that is on its way. When he says "get it while you're here boy/ cause all that hype don't seem the same next year boy" we have a feeling that even though this is directed to a faceless up-and-comer, Drake is intimately familiar with the emotions on hand.
Let's skip Rick Ross for now. His relationship with Young Money is interesting in its own right and in some ways he is the perfect marketable, post-Tupac "gangsta" rapper, but he's not important to our thesis at the moment.
This is a fairly conventional (read: lazy) verse for Wayne. The brags and posturing of his generation of artists are here, but, as ever, his free associations set him clearly back in his own territory. "Put an end to your world like the mayans" is a particularly relevant line here (as was his "and honestly i'm down like the economy" line when it was written for Jay Sean's "Down" at the depth of the recession) because it captures Wayne's appeal perfectly. His prolificacy and his willingness to collaborate with whoever's hot at the moment is a key part of his domination of the charts. In a sense, Wayne is the perfect "social networking" rapper; each song allows him to post a new status that keeps him up to date (fellow "Lil" individual and follower Lil B stretches this format to its obvious conclusion). The benefits of this connectedness to pop culture (though at times he's a bit late to the party; see the Inception-style video for Six Foot, Seven Foot made half a year too late) and chameleonlike ability to change with his climate should be familiar to anyone that has read Foucault's analysis of biopower in his lectures at the College de France. Adapting to the trends of the market allows you to tap its power and it's in (mostly) simple, populist mediums like rap and folk that this headline-reading approach is best embodied. In both genres, there is more emphasis on what is said (or how it is said) than on the melodic content of any particular phrase. This comparison isn't particularly novel, but I think it's apt.
In the final calculus, Young Money keep my attention because they capture the moment. This is also why I think they so embody post-modernism; their catholicity and marketability make them look like they were magiked up on a corporate hard drive somewhere like some kind of fucking Rei Toei rap crew. They will not hold up in twenty years. It's only because of their ability to adapt and willingness to inject themselves with new cultural DNA that they've lasted this long. Sure, I can imagine Drake's rap-noir or Nicki's schizophrenic cast of characters retaining some merit or influence in that scene-to-come, but the songs simply will not have the late 200X bite that they do now. The Young Money collective is deathly aware of the fact that pop music, now more than ever, isn't so much about works as it is about processes. All they can do is try to hold on to the cutting edge.
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