Permafrost: Drake's Glacial Excavation

If You're Reading This It's Too Late was released on February 13th. On the face of it the title of the album/mixtape is a challenge to the relevancy of the reader. Drake, it seems, will always be a step ahead of you, ahead of all of us, a part of the avant-garde. Taken in this flat way, the title is a prelude to the braggadocio of the content. The record picks up the blunt flow and minimal beats straight from Nothing Was The Same's "Worst Behavior" and sprints ahead full speed with them. It appears that Drake has taken his success to be a sign that he can take the structures that he explored with "5AM in Toronto" and accelerate them without limit. It's continuously too late for us because we have written Drake an artistic blank check, and now, along with his fellow luminaries, he defines relevancy, rather than operating within it.

 

On a second, vastly more interesting level, the title of the mixtape denotes a certain powerlessness of Drake as an artist. We commented on the same phenomenon at the time of his last major release. Understood with this inflection, the title becomes a commentary on the impossibility of a certain sort of relevance for the sort of mainstream mass-distributed act of which Drake is an exemplar. One need only listen to the contents of the record in order to find this ineffectiveness littered throughout. From the pre-released "6 God" to the catchiness of "Know Yourself", the record is full of music that Drake has been listening to during his sabbatical. In much the same way that Kanye's latest effort was an attempt to inject a "quintessential" Kanye essence into a distillation of the state of groundbreaking hip-hop at the time, IYRTITL summons together all of the most dehumanized elements in rap music and then attempts to apply a thick layer of Aubrey Graham on top.

Atlanta and Chicago stand out as two scenes that have obviously been in rotation in the Drake household. There are few, if any, tracks on the record not inflected with the sociopathic lack of affect that has defined Chicago Drill since its inception. It is no coincidence that on "0 to 100", Drake said he was "on his Lil Mouse drill shit" On the Atlanta side, one need only look as far as OG Maco's breakout "U Guessed It" to see the latest in a line of thoroughly dark tracks that pioneered the minimalist beats and shouting flow that litter Drake's latest effort. And far be it from us to forget that one of the most crucial experiments to Drake's evolution into his current state was his flow-biting of the Migos when he "graced" them with a remix of "Versace" lo those many years ago.

If anything, IYRTITL demonstrates how Drake's real talent lies not in music but in a particular brand of pop anthropology. In the wake of previous projects, this meant infinite thinkpieces on how he was the voice of a generation of alienated, insecure, perennially self-medicated, and deeply sheltered Americans. The latest effort, on the other hand, reflexively turns on the genre to which he pledges allegiance. Drake and 40 have found the deep reservoirs of what is happening across various local scenes, re-rooted that sound in Torontonian mythos, and then re-universalized it by virtue of Drake's accessibility and distributive reach. The overall effect, as it was with Yeezus, was to gather together geographically disparate but stylistically similar strains of beatmaking and flows in such a way that the record created its own canon of precursors. Like the true Bloomean that he is, Drake has given a strong reading of rap in the moment. The attempt at relevance, here, relies on both muddying and purifying the water out of which it grew.

 With this overarching structure in mind, we can discuss the way the record fills itself out. "Legend" sets the blustering tenor of the record and is immediately followed up by a slew of tracks that hammer home the stylistic tone of the rest of the record. From the menace and swagger of "Energy" to the bro-upping of "Know Yourself", the beginning of the album is a testosterone multipack. Most of these early tracks slither and slink around in the shadows, setting up their seriousness through beat selection and counting on Drake to carry the aggression. This trend is violently interrupted by "6 God", which, as @SquidDad observes (via a RT by @passionweiss) "[...]makes me feel like I'm going to battle my ex girlfriend in final fantasy". Released before the record, "6 God" matches Drake's energy with what sounds like a MIDI string section in utter panic.



When Drake does revert to his confessional mood and his classic flow, it begins under the auspices of PARTYNEXTDOOR. This helps us to understand an interesting broader trend within Drake's OVO brand, which is that old versions of Drake's style are passed down to the less famous musicians. By way of example, if you can't hear Thank Me Later-era Drake in IYRTITL's "Wednesday Night Interlude" you should reacquaint yourself with "Cece's Interlude" from the former record.

This signals the fundamental divide in the record. In "Now & Forever", where Drake breaks out some of the trance-like crooning that made Take Care compelling in the way that it was. A similar mood is interrupted midway in "Company" by a truly vicious musical flip by Travi$ Scott. And, almost by way of apology, "You & the 6" sounds as though it would fit snugly alongside the tracklist on the ancient mixtape Comeback Season. In fact, much of the end of the record sounds like a series of hedging ploys to help old fans ease, ass-backwards, into the mixtape. By the time we reach the omni-directional flexing of "6PM in New York" amends have already been made and the thrumming dehumanization of the first half has been thoroughly diluted.

The strongest moments of IYRTITL are flat, purposefully flat, like a survey of a polar expanse, and attempt to be threatening in the same manner as that landscape. Drake lays his cold eyes on the bracing hostility of contemporary rap and attempts to become equal to it and claim it for his own. It's a mostly failed attempt, dragged down by Drake's historical work, but the excavation he does to get there is enough to hold interest. The weakest moments of the record consist in Drake's archival revival of his own catalog. This ends up in a series of songs that sound like poor rehashes of some sort of retrospective record, reworked covers asked to fit into an alien venue. Again, our faith in our old claim is renewed: Drake's work is best when he does not try to be himself.

- @johnnyhonest

When A Carrot Is Just A Carrot: The Copyrights and the Redundancy of Hope

"Everything is over." - Teenage Bottlerocket, "Another Way"

At the beginning of "Grown Folks Business," on The Copyrights' split 7" with the Dopamines Songs About Fucking Up, Adam Fletcher sings:

"How many times can I write the same song / About my sick life and my shit job / I'm getting old and burned out / Putting the same words to the same sounds / You've gotta pick up the slack here / Cause I'm all out of ideas "



In pop punk circles, there's a common saying: "Pop Punk Is Dead". The days of Green Day and Blink on the radio are over. But the buck does not stop at pop punk. The Copyrights understand that in the 21st century you will never not sound like someone else. It's easy to sing about the oncoming apocalypse over the sound of thrash guitars or fucking authority with a double kick behind you; it's easy to sell records when you're singing about a fantasy and transporting somewhere else, saying that everything is going to shit or one day it's going to be better. The world-weariness of The Copyrights' lyrics is a perfect match for their heard-it-before pop punk guitars; both of them suggest that things might stay just the way that they are, and, further than that, that it's a mistake to think that things haven't always been this way. They play music you've heard before, not because they are not smart enough to be "avant-garde", but because they recognize the dishonesty and the redundancy of doing anything else. Music has ceased being "world-disclosing" in Habermasian terms, in no small part because we have disclosed the world plenty enough already. The problem is that, after every story has already been told, so many people are still trying to find a way out. Today, the extreme of utopianism on both the left and the right is just to hope or fear at all.

Fletcher echoes exactly this sentiment on "Holidays" when he sings:

"We all know much too well/There's no heaven, there's no hell/But we can dream/We can dream/That the calendar is full of holidays instead of numbers/Instead of work weeks/Instead of deadlines"



The Copyrights recognize that there's no transcendence on this world or the next. The utopia that they dream up isn't even the Marxist utopia of an unrealized freedom in solidarity. It's a negative statement; they just don't want to work. When everything speculative has been stripped away, the best we can do is celebrate every birthday at the bar. The holiday utopia is the best we can hope for exactly because it's a negative utopia. Things will be the same as they are now, just without all of the boring parts. We've exhausted every other hope that we had. It's all tied up and accounted for.

This isn't just about politics, it's also about personal aspiration. On "The World Is Such a Drag" Fletcher sings:

"Running after carrots on a stick / One day you'll finally catch up to it / And it tastes just like a carrot/Supposedly they help you see/But you don't wanna see that clearly/Better off in a world blurred slightly"



It's a familiar cycle. Whenever you get what you want, it's exactly what it was all along, and the thing that you wanted reveals itself as just a dream. Providing a twist on the beloved Louis CK bit "Everything is amazing, but no one is happy", "The World Is Such A Drag" suggests that nobody is happy because everything is amazing. If you get everything you ever wanted, you don't live happily ever after. You get miserable. You taste the carrot and realize that it's just a carrot. The rest of it is a pack of lies, and while you might need a lie to get you through the day, a lie won't save you.

What happens when you stop chasing the carrot? The other possibility is spelled out quite explicitly. On the record Dream Homes by Dear Landlord, which shares multiple band members with The Copyrights, the lyrics read:

 "We're both sort of right / I don't have much to sell / I'll die penniless, alone / I'll do what I like, you'll do what you know / That's just the way of things I suppose"

You can spend your life hoping that things will be better, or worry your whole life that things are going to be worse. You can chase the carrot. But Fletcher and his friends will still be drinking in the basement when you've hit your highest heights and lowest lows. The transition is from Kant's "What can I hope?" to "How can I run out the clock?" Beyond the apparent cynicism of this sort of thinking is a hungover-and-dead-sober humanism. It's a humanism that holds that we'll all be better off if we stop mistaking the lies we tell ourselves and one another for reality.

The chorus to "I Live In Hell" from Dream Homes goes:

"What does your dream home look like?/It'll take you years to even tell/And I'll be sleeping well/Here in Hell."

Everything Stays the Same: Drake Alone in First Class

In his hour-long interview on Canadian interview show Q, the host Jian Ghomeshi asks Drake what he thinks about his status as a "social media" rapper and icon of the millennial generation. Drake responds: "I hate the gist of living your life on the internet and telling everybody personal details about yourself on social media." The irony, of course, is that if you drop the internet references this is a perfect description of how he has made eight or nine digits in the past three years.  His distaste for the characterization and insistence throughout the interview that the stories on his records are all him, all Aubrey Graham autobiography, and not rap fairy tales are telling. Drake thinks that his success lies in his successful navigation between the Scylla of total naked confession and the Charybdis of bland genre convention.

This is exactly what is questioned in the article "Is Drake the Voice of the Millenial Generation" by David Drake (hereafter referred to as David). The author attempts to provide a survey of the "Millennial Drake" arguments and a bit of pleasant commentary. He muses that rather than representing self-obsession as the characteristic of a specific generation, Drake evokes a universal moment in the process of growing up. In this light, it's unsurprising when he writes:

"The most evocative moments are ones when reality intrudes upon the interior narrative, when Drake's abstracted ideas are replaced by concrete details [...] Oddly, these moments imply considerably more about Drake's internal world than the narration of his thought processes, and give oxygen to the world outside of his head. The confessional "Too Much," a rare moment of personal honesty about his family, is not unprecedented in Drake's catalog, but it explores a part of his life with a sincerity that is absent elsewhere. These are moments when he is least like a caricature of Drake, and most like a human being."

David thinks that Drake is making a move toward a fully realized adulthood on NWTS by demonstrating that he is becoming "emotionally responsible," with an implied wise wink suggesting that the millenials as a whole are reaching the same stage of their collective maturity. His laudation of Drake's patently relatable frustrations with his family on "Too Much" is helpfully understood as analogous to "Family Business" on Kanye's breakout The College Dropout or even 2pac's classic "Dear Mama".  These songs have to do with the artist-as-human-being, with the details of their families and therefore their histories. They try to get back to origin of the struggle, the emotional world from which the superheroes of rap extremity emerge. It's no surprise that the modesty and frankness of these tracks are striking to critics like David who think they articulate the "sincere" humanist undercurrent of the genre.  It's comforting to many to know that even the most talented and successful are damaged and vulnerable. At the heart of this rather dull aesthetic outlook is the thesis that nothing makes us more earnestly human than our family, which here represent the bedrock of our social responsibilities to one another.

Against this sort of pallid interpretation of his catalog, I want to say that the strongest moments of Drake's work are the moments of dehumanization.  These moments come in part out of his itinerancy. The boy that spent summers in Texas and winters in Ontario insistently raps about his home, but because he has never really belonged to only one city and travels constantly he often finds himself rapping about his homes.  His attachment to Toronto is more of an adoption than he commonly lets on. Remember that on "Club Paradise" one of his countless exes accuses him of "not knowing this city anymore" to which he gives a dismissive shrug. Even in his love letter to the city in the music video of "Started From the Bottom", he can't help but fly away and end the song with a vacation.



But Drake's predicament doesn't end with rootlessness. In the final calculus, it doesn't really matter where he is in the world. In the Pitchfork review of NWTS, reviewer Jayson Greene writes: "There is no uncomplicated forward motion in Drake songs; usually one small element worms forward while everything sits around it, a haze of rhythmic and harmonic indecision. " He's hit upon a critical insight; the thing that makes Drake's music work is that it's frozen in-between. As he says in "Furthest Thing", he's "Somewhere between psychotic and iconic/Somewhere between I want it and I got it/Somewhere between I'm sober and I'm lifted/Somewhere between a mistress and commitment." This sort of equivocality is often used to comfort by suggesting moderation or normalcy, but when it becomes a lifestyle things become much more problematic. On NWTS Drake flies between Miami (Hold On, We're Going Home), Memphis (Worst Behavior), and Toronto (Started from the Bottom), and everywhere he feels the same, and what he feels is very little.  But this isn't unique to Drake; the reason that it resonates with the rest of us is that his life exaggerates a contemporary world that we're all familiar with in the wealthiest countries. Money has bought us security, and with security has come insulation, and with insulation has come abstraction.  But after the complicated police-action wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, the more recent and hesitating pseudo-operations in Syria and Libya, and the realization of our collective impotence in the face of the world market in the recent financial crisis, it's hard to ignore the feeling that our comfortable position has very little to do with us.

Similarly, Drake's perpetually glamorous lifestyle has an element of inexplicable election; he's as bewildered by the spectacle of his success as the rest of us. Everywhere the citizens of the richest countries go, we're given the license and right to be unproblematically "what we are" and, similarly, wherever Drake goes he's accommodated as Drake. When we're protected that way, when we're shielded by money and cultural capital, the only thing that we can talk about are the times when we weren't so safe, our formative struggle. Drake raps about the girls that he was with, the women that pushed back against him when he was Aubrey Graham, and not the women that he told us about in Take Care when he said: "I got some women that's living off me/Paid for their flights and hotels, I'm ashamed/Bet that you know them, I won't say no names/After a while, girl, they all seem the same." This helps us to understand Drake's obsession with his emotional history and his crew; it's lonely at the top, and the only thing that you can see up there is everything that you passed up below you.  The people that he keeps around him are souvenirs and reminders of what he was beyond the fame, but they're not much more than that.  After all, how can they relate to him when he spends so much time struggling to relate to himself?  His reflective speech after receiving his Grammy is revealing (starting about 4:02):


   
On NWTS, Drake thinks that he's strong enough, famous enough to continue to push himself as a person into the limelight, rather than lapse into his identity as Drake the artist. The aggressive presence of Drake the man on this record is a reaction to the monstrosity of Drake the icon, and thus it's not surprising that NWTS comes off as Drake's most desperate record. No matter how much Drake might want to pose as relatable and aspirational, as an individual with personality and charm, with a claim to stake and name to defend, and no matter how much he insists on his authorship and authenticity in every verse, what draws us to him is his continual awe at his own lack of agency over his success. He's obsessed with his fame because he doesn't understand it and he desperately wants it to last, but at the same time he's not content with things staying the way that they are. When he proclaims "Came up, that's all me/Stayed true that's all me/No help that's all me/All me for real," the irony is so thick that it's hard not to cringe.

Working for The Weeknd: Kiss Land and Loss

The new Weeknd record, Kiss Land, brings out a lot about the earlier material that I hadn't seen before.  I wrote about Abel Tesfaye 's earlier work at about this time last year, and I had nothing but good things to say.  The Weeknd, I said, explored the limits of modern morality, a space that usually remains unconscious in pop music.  It had the rush of transgression coded in the terms of modern pop.  Murky, smug, and ruthless, the mixtape Trilogy was a rare naked gesture in pop.

Listening to Kiss Land reminded me that you can't write a story about decay, The Weeknd's story, without a sigh.  In the Trilogy, a slightly younger Tesfaye wrote about MDMA and thuggish sexual encounters with the leer of a villain.  There was a sense of loss, but the loss was hers; Tesfaye's stories were about a devilish character leading women into the pit where he stayed.  This is why you had to wipe the slime off of you at the end of the tape.  The Weeknd told an urban horror story set in skyscrapers and tucked away nightclubs.  Pain and pills were passed around equally.



But Kiss Land reminded me that the core of this sort of predation was a sense of innocence. The self-awareness and sensitivity that it took to pen the emptiness on his earlier works came from a sense of ruination.  The fact that Tesfaye had been hurt snuck through in places in the Trilogy, but nowhere did Tesfaye make it as explicit as he does on Kiss Land.



Tesfaye is still 23, and it's impossible to fathom his motives but I suspect that it's hard on a young kid making music like he does.  In that light, it's unsurprising that Kiss Land veers into relatability consistently across its tracks. His insistence that "This ain't nothin' to relate to/Even if you tried" comes off as posturing at the end of a record full of human biography.  An important element of this is ambience; rather than the thudding, nasty statements on the best parts of the Trilogy, the beats on Kiss Land sprawl for miles and shudder with dissonances that sound cribbed after the advent of Yeezus.  This enhanced cinema lends Tesfaye some interesting widescreen spaces to play in at certain points during the record, but when you hear the eighties' guitar and the strumming straight out of Bad on "Wanderlust" one can't help but think that he got the wrong idea from the Miguel record.

Tesfaye tries for the debasement of his earlier work several times throughout Kiss Land.  The result is thoroughly unpleasant, and not in an interesting way.  Unmasked by its context, songs like the title track spin a dull story of seducing women using your fame and status.  This breed of status-mongering "sexuality" looked boring and moronic on Mick Jagger and it is profoundly disappointing here.  On the strongest moments of the Trilogy, Tesfaye wrote like a libertine.  Here, he writes like the drummer from Poison.



It's appropriate that the only guest appearance on the record is by Drake.  This is Tesfaye's play for mainstream acceptance, and it shows.  He meets his OVOXO teammate halfway throughout the record; when Tesfaye tells a Marvin's Room-like story we're disappointed in a way that we're not when it comes from Drake. We know that Aubrey Graham is playing at his limits when he makes himself vulnerable for the microphone, but we thought that Abel had a much stronger range.  When we hear him blabbing about the vicissitudes of success and wealth,  it's like remembering that all of Tyler Durden's shirts were from Tommy Bahama.  Kiss Land, as a weak moment, is a critical moment.  It reminds us that for all of pop music's posturing, the glitter and gold of "success" make motherfuckers get cautious.  Back in Toronto, Abel might still be a demon.  In the limelight, he looks dressed up for Halloween.

Our Father, Who Art Irrelevant: The Pitiful Political Tragedy of Yeezus

With the first notes of Yeezus, Kanye West's production team makes sure you know you're not listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

A quick wikipedia search brings up this quote from The Guardian: "With this album, we ain't drop no single to radio. We ain't got no NBA campaign, nothing like that. Shit, we ain't even got no cover. We just made some real music."

This is the central gesture of Yeezus. Kanye fits into a common pattern of mind-boggling success; after ascendance, divergence.  When Cobain saw what he and his friends had wrought with Nevermind, he crafted In Utero in order to try and shake it off.  This is a simplistic interpretation of that record, and a correspondingly fairly childish interpretation of his reaction to fame.  But in its simplicity, and in its childishness, it's a proper analog to Kanye West's move on Yeezus.

After, Kanye assures us with the quote above, he's moved beyond all of the unthinking duplicity of the "mainstream".  When he says "Fuck y'all corporations/ you can't control me" and "Move my family out the country so you can't see where I stay" he sounds about as rebellious as your wealthy, tax-evading uncle when he's had a few too many drinks. The idea that a record released on Def Jam that leaps up to #1 on the charts could in any way be subversive demonstrates what can only be called stupidity.  On The College Dropout, Kanye's political interests sounded intimate and coarsened with a good-humored experience.  What little that does sound interesting on this song comes in the first verse.  This sort of could fit in right alongside the sentiments of his earlier work; for example, "That's that broke nigga racism/That's that don't touch anything in the store/That's that rich nigga racism/Come in, please buy more" could fit perfectly right next to "They take me to the back and pat me/ Askin' me about some khakis/But let some black people walk in/I bet they show off their token blackie." Compared to confrontational honesty of this personal narrative of racism, the inane rhetoric of the second verse sounds even more delirious and paranoid.



West has clearly not taken Drake's latest axiom to heart on this record; The G.O.O.D. Music clique is conspicuously absent on Yeezus, an album replete with new friends.  Pusha T has no verse on this record. Nor does Big Sean. Kid Cudi's bland vocals could have been performed by anyone.  And the rappers that are included are Chicago locals that have little recognition or appeal outside of the city.  This is a piece in Kanye's "rebellious" puzzle; he has rejected the universalist approach of corporate radio and replaced it with a "defiant" provincialism.  This move, like so many of the human gestures on Yeezus, falls flat on its face.  The performances of King L and Chief Keef, while still incongruent, manage enough of a cold, estranged affect that they make Kanye's earnest vitriol sound even more out of place than it already did.

 The production team on Yeezus is staffed by a caste of current indie darlings, including trap hero Hudson Mohawke, Daft Punk (who we've dealt with elsewhere), and Evian Christ from the experimental label Tri Angle. Among them is Justin Vernon, one of a few stalwarts from MBDTF.  When Vernon talks about Kanye in interviews he's depressingly laudatory, sounding more like an excited frat boy than the same man who demonstrated the lyrical sensitivity of the careful and intimate Bon Iver records.

Despite all my venom for Kanye's presence on his own record, I think that the musical environment of Yeezus is truly beautiful and startlingly composed.  From the simplest and least daring choices on the record to the most thunderous noise arpeggio, Yeezus is full of brilliant stylistic decisions.  Alongside MBDTF, Yeezus demonstrates the profound range and depth of Kanye's aesthetic taste.  Highlights include a revitalization of the spirit of 808s and Heartbreak and his work before it in the beautiful "Blood On The Leaves".  The thunderous contribution of Hudson Mohawke's TNGHT "horn section" is balanced perfectly on the edge of discordant.  It's one of many tracks on this record that sounds like Kanye's vocal track has been stolen from some incompetent single and put over a much more elegant standalone instrumental.



Just as on MBDTF, Kanye has crafted a landscape that outpaces him.  On MBDTF, that environment was at least still on the horizon.  On Yeezus, Mr. West sounds like he found himself on an alien planet and desperately tried to make music there.

Nowhere is that more obvious than on "I Am a God."  This beat is as viciously hostile as it gets on this record and Kanye is as bland as he has ever been.   If I had to imagine what sort of a thing God was, I'd suggest that the sounds behind Kanye on this track were a pretty good pop approximation; monolithically alien, thuddingly repetitive, and wholly impenetrable. Next to this sonic monstrosity going on behind him, Kanye's pronouncement "I am a god" sounds vitiated and weak.  The lyrics and this delivery on this track make him sound a lot more like a coked-up douchebag on his cellphone in an LA parking lot than a pop god. His demands ("Hurry up with my damn croissants" etc.) sound cartoonish and whiny where I can only imagine he is attempting to sound charismatic and dominating.  If this was an attempt at laughing self-parody, it would be a startling success.  But Kanye's monotone "aggressive" earnestness suggests that the truth is far more tragic.



The story of Yeezus is ironically more politically telling than its overt "message."  While Kanye spends a good amount of this album "raging" against corporations, the album itself is an unabashed corporate success. Kanye the artist sounds tiny next to the crushing indifference of his own music, and Kanye the man is made irrelevant by Kanye the brand. This is the operation of abstracting market forces at work; the market thrives on what is new, innovative, and "subversive".  "Innovation" and "paradigm-shifts" have been at the core of corporate practice for decades and an "outlaw" spirit is at the heart of every successful boardroom.  Capitalism thrives on breakdown, revolt, and iconoclasm; its strength comes from its ability to assimilate reactive "challenges" to a status quo into an even stronger and more comprehensive network.

In this spirit, Kanye's impotence to produce something "rebellious" has some instructive societal analogs. His ambiguously adversarial attitude is a mirror of the spirit of Occupy Wall Street; because modern international capitalism is a diffuse system that admits of very few obvious targets, it's often hard to know who one should be decrying.  Just as Kanye's railing against corporations has to be framed by his massive corporate success, Occupy's fiery sloganeering  ("people over profits") has to be framed by the infinitely complex intertwinement of  international banks and modern "democratic" states with their individual freedoms (including, obviously, the right to free speech.) Mr. West has unwittingly held up a crystal clear mirror to our current situation; his personality-driven claims to power and "rebel" screed smash to pieces against the cold walls of his beats just as our "human" political agency is stifled in the swarming indifference of the modern economic situation.

Modernism and Pop Music: The Wrap-Up

This is my fourth and final post on modernism and pop music. Check out the other posts in the series here, here, and here.

Pop music is a probabilistic phenomenon.  For many media corporations, selling music comes down to a careful management of resources: gather up the most promising "talent", maximize their marketing, and then hammer the target audience.  But there's a final element that needs to be considered before these corporations restart the process: see what sticks.

Marketing dollars fail, scandals arise, and tastes change.  Corporations are forced to take a diversified approach because even with advanced metrics you can't always control taste.  So while what makes it to us from our friends at Universal and Sony has been selected and filtered, it still retains a modicum of differentiation.

The three acts that I've discussed in this series have each had different experiences with major labels.  The Weeknd is currently on the way up with a Universal contract.  Death Grips were thrown out of their deal with Sony for conduct not befitting of employees.  DEP has remained ardently independent.  All three remain nebulous figures to the people making decisions because while they are producing something that doesn't appeal to large swathes of a popular audience, each also has a direct relationship to an ardent fanbase. This fanbase has been established largely because of the internet.  This fanbase doesn't care what label they're on or how the music is being made.  This fanbase only cares how they can get their hands on it.

This situation of pop music is emblematic of the crisis of the newest breed of modernism that pervades our lives.  As anyone on the street can tell you, the first world is replete with choices, especially when it comes to media.  And this is especially true of music.  As recording technology becomes continuously cheaper and more mobile, the barrier for entry into the aural marketplace becomes nearly negligible.  Your "distributor" is Bandcamp and your "marketing" is Twitter.  The music industry has been forced into a conservative position; in order to hold on to the market, Viacom and friends have to resist or channel this decentralization.  Holding "competitions" and insisting that their artists have made it to the big leagues are familiar tactics from this playbook.  This strategy works, for the most part.  Ms. Minaj and Mr. Bieber have safe careers.  The industry may be dwindling, but it isn't going away.  Nobody is holding their breath for musical anarchy.

But the issue that I am highlighting here isn't really about the success of the music industry in this conflict.  It's about what this conflict represents.  Distributive technologies, the latest being 3D printers, lead to decentralization, for better or for worse. And industries that depend on the control of ideas are forced to adapt.

One way of thinking about epochs is as ways of defining limits.  Each era has a set of limitations that present it with a set of questions that it can answer. One aspect of Modernism is that it is an experimental epoch; instead of setting a limitation that allows us to ask a question, Modernism makes its limitation into a question. Just how much decentralization can we stand before we hit the hard limit of nonsense?

It's easy to dismiss this as blandly theoretical, but consider the full context.  Each of the artists that I've written about here are themselves decentralized.  The Weeknd tries to express the Jungian shadow of modern R&B.  Death Grips gets their energy from the nihilist void at the center of mainstream hip-hop.  DEP pushes the virtuosity of metal and then find themselves in jazz.  They all reproduce the larger movement of the industry within their own expressions.  And the industry has to confront the question of decentralization every day.

And so the industry at times acts uncomfortable because it recognizes that as an aggregate entity it's having to stretch into something it doesn't recognize.  It's having to embrace things that it can't deal with in order to keep up. When Death Grips gets corporate money in order to waste it in self-sabotage, they have found a real limit, for better or worse. After all, one of the problems of modern markets (and modern institutions) in today's context is that they have problems protecting themselves from things (and people) that are willing to destroy themselves.

We're fated to live in interesting times, and the music industry is an expression of that.  If you keep your eye on them, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of where the rest of us are going, and how we're going to get there.

PCP and Late Capitalism: The Death Grips Demolition Machine (Modernism and Pop Music 2)

OUT OF THE SHADOWS BARRAGE OF WITCH TONGUE COBRA SPIT OVER APOCALYPTIC CULT KILLER CAULDRON SMOKE STOMP MUSIC SERIOUSLY YAH
- Death Grips, "Guillotine"

This is the second of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.  You can read my first post on The Weeknd here.

It's hard for me to be anything other than intensely enthusiastic about Death Grips. I mentioned them in the first post on this blog as part of pop avant-garde that is attempting to push the nihilistic elements in pop music as far as possible.  They manage this by combining hip-hop and noise into a lean, hard, and nasty statement:



Death Grips takes the masculine, violent posturing of hip-hop and pushes it to the point where it nears unintelligible noise, no longer easily gendered or understood. They have a real affinity with the subject of my last post, The Weeknd.  Where the Weeknd (at his best) takes the sex and drugs out of hip-hop and distills them into a hedonistic final statement, Death Grips takes the violence out of hip-hop and uses it to brew up a clanking mess.  At times we'll recognize a sentiment or a turn of phrase from mainstream music, but it is contextualized by a frantic psychosis.  We've seen this sort of move before, the most eminent examples being Scarface's work ("Mind Playing Tricks On Me") and Gravediggaz' "horrorcore" efforts.  Death Grips even has a musical relative in early Insane Clown Posse.  While the juggalos take the violence of hip-hop to the point of cartoonishness, Death Grips takes it beyond serious.  And it's easier to take Death Grips at their word than, say, the frustrated kids in Odd Future.

 In an interview earlier this year with Pitchfork, Zach Hill (the Hella-alum drummer behind the project) talked about extensively about the band's inspiration. He talks extensively about having conversations with other, unseen forces that pervade our day-to-day life. This sort of New Age spiritualism typically has an ineffective monist sheen to it, but coming from Death Grips it takes on a sort of terrifying, Lovecraftian hue. In this aspect of their image, Death Grips is participating in a movement in 21st century culture that includes Erowid and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void. This line of thinking takes a cue from Castaneda rather than from Patrick Bateman or  the hippie movement; it has moved beyond the holistic humanism and pragmatic hedonism of 20th century experiences to the nihilist experiments of drugs like DMT.  

It is, in some ways, all too appropriate that the members of Death Grips stayed in the iconic Chateau Marmont while recording their major label record, since they inhabit and express the structural underside of violence that allows the cultural superstructure of Hollywood to emerge.  In a world where Billboard feeds us partial and incomplete cultural narratives about how life is, Death Grips attempts to show us the cultural conflict at the point of application.  The warm fuzz of late capitalist pop music is presented here with a sense of real perspective: half-quotes twisted in a conflicted mess of noise.  And through the clamor, the human voice that can be heard is alienated and furious.

Insofar as they have a positive political agenda, it comes through in songs like Klink.



Here, Death Grips has taken the political concerns of hip-hop and, in the footsteps of Dead Prez and Public Enemy, push the message out to the political fringe.  Picking up the banner from the violent anti-police rhetoric in classics like Fuck tha Police, Death Grips uncovers the political undertones of this sort of anti-authoritarian violence with lines like "Six feet deep beneath the streets so they can't never say shit again/Fuck the man with a thick broomstick and put a black flag on the end". Here again, there is no pretense of a macro-political agenda. Insofar as Death Grips has a political stance, it is a strictly tactical one; they are concerned with political conflicts, not with political narratives. They have a profound interest in the "Deep Web", a supposedly uncensored and unpoliceable network that, alongside other groups like The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, is part of the rising constellation of tactical anti-authoritarianism on the web.  In this light, it is unsurprising that the band has been dropped by Epic Records after leaking their own album.

For all of their hallucinatory imagery, Death Grips has their bloodshot eyes locked on the brutality of the modern situation. I can't resist leaving you with a few words from the perpetrators:

End of the Weeknd: Experiment at the Limits of Hedonism (Modernism and Pop Music 1)

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.

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.